While I often drink the kool-aid that “our classrooms are communities in which a culture is constructed,” there are also days when try as you might, that culture degrades into civil war.  Depending on the citizens in your constructed community, the rules of discourse may be as likely to lead to anarchy as to any positive outcome you were all hoping to reach.  Differing interpretations may degrade into arguments, disrespectful commentary, or simply disconnected interjections, which you then must dutifully extinguish, redirect, or connect as their de facto leader.  Admittedly, my experience in this arena is not in an academic classroom as a teacher.  Instead, I work with compensated adults in the corporate workplace, training one on one, and with smaller classroom type groups.  We are not only brought together in attempts to accomplish company goals, but also to collaborate generally, and generate new ideas often concerning business processes.  Despite being paid healthy salaries to do all of the above, they may sit in a room and either pretend they’re mute or participate only towards the previously mentioned examples of anarchy.  If you’re lucky enough not to experience such rebellious downturns and you have a group of willing followers who take up tacit rules in an effort for the common good… let the work-shopping begin!   After all, even in the corporate workplace, the “Pointing” activity could be re-worked to elucidate parts of written texts that the group does not understand.

While I think many of us are probably taking the “You get the papers you deserve” quote out of context, I have to think that this attitude is a bit masochistic and glosses over the multitudes of constraints that students either face or willingly submit to prior to handing in their work to teachers.  I can’t help but be a bit disappointed that Blau didn’t at least somewhat try to confront apathy in the text and how we as teachers combat it.  Are we to pretend that those students don’t exist?  If they don’t want to try their hardest, are they not worth our effort?  Perhaps, the literature logs/journals are one way to crack a door on their consciousness, but I suppose the purpose of the book is the workshop, not “problem” students who can’t be reached (Where are those books?).

Like others have noted, I have to also disagree with Blau’s “make themselves stupid” accusation.  I happen to love vocabulary.  If I didn’t forcibly try my hand at “sounding smarter” in the past I would’ve never worked out appropriate renderings in my writing about literature (or anything else for that matter).  Similarly, Blau’s obviously feels that it would be abominable for a student to simply take up a “second-hand interpretation” from another reader or teacher of a text.  But again, I would argue, isn’t it sometimes necessary to imagine from another’s perspective in order to discover our own?  Surely, there is room for some “right answers” or “second-hand knowledge” in the arena of literary interpretation.  By the time a student gets to college or grad-school they will be taught to be skeptics and not only doubt the text, but all the second-hand knowledge they’ve been spoon fed for years.