I agreed with about 95% of what Sheridan Blau said in The Literature Workshop, but it’s more helpful to think through the questions I had.   I find so much benefit in the portfolio assignment that he talked about in Chapter 8—I had never considered allow students to collect any and all relevant materials to the course, even unassigned papers or notes—and I certainly value the idea of basing the final assessment on the progress of the semester.  I think he can encourage risk taking, encourage students to rework their papers, and to really invest themselves in their writing through this method.  Especially since he doesn’t grade the papers throughout the semester.  But that’s the sticky part—not because I love grades and think that I need to stamp a score on everything a student does.  I would love to give a cumulative, holistic-like grade to my students.  I just want to know how to do it.

It was frustrating for me that Blau so often references how much secondary-school teachers can use his ideas, or that these workshops can apply to a high school and in this case, he just choose not to mention how to adapt this to secondary schools.  I can’t actually imagine in this culture of high stakes testing, data-driven remediation, and tracking of students that I could do anything close to this, which is probably why Blau doesn’t address it.  I wish there were suggestions for a way to get even close to this—a way to encourage students in risk taking and still prove to the department or school with data that growth is occurring in their writing.  Blau’s comment struck me (as it also did when Elbow discussed it) when he says, “I didn’t have to think about whether my commentary justified or failed to justify the grade I was awarding the paper” (182).  I so often feel that this is the starting point for my comments, and I can’t believe it’s just a reality of high school English, but I haven’t found anything yet that circumvents this problem.

The other, less major, question I had for Blau was about his frustration with students being taught in high school not to use “I” in their formal papers.  I confess, I’m one of those teachers, partly because I don’t want them to say “I think,” but also because I want to push them out of a comfort zone where their opinion is the only thing that matters.  Certainly I don’t want to strip them of all their personality in a piece, but I do want them to have to think what the evidence is within the text rather than just offering their knee-jerk reaction or undeveloped opinion.  I wonder if there is also a balance to be struck here—Blau has pretty well convinced me to teach students about figuring out when or if “I” is appropriate in certain situations and how to use it appropriately (even if I doubt I’ll ever bend on using “you” in a final draft).   It would be an interesting experiment—to see if students allowed to use “I” would use it in a way that strengthened their evidentiary claims rather than diminishing them.