I have a lot of comments and questions, so I thought it best to bullet everything in order to stay within the word count.

• I love the idea of the “Constructing Reading in a Literary Community” Workshop from chapter 6. Pointing would be an awesome low-risk activity to get all students involved in the reading, but my question for the whole workshop is how you’d go about doing this when discussing a major novel? Have students pick a line from a chapter every few classes? That’s a hefty amount of text to sift through, but I guess it could be done. Choosing a passage for students to pull a line from seems like a very un-Blau thing to do.

• I’m impressed at how quickly Blau takes student “one-lines” and helps word them into perspective “camps” or “lenses” for students. I am sure I’d be able to prescribe responses too, depending on the quality of student response, but it would take some time for me to get comfortable.

• His efferent vs. aesthetic reading and testing problems really struck a chord with me. I’d never heard of efferent vs. aesthetic reading, but reading for pleasure and reading for scholarly reasons was touched upon in an earlier article we read. I agree that efferent testing is not the most useful in the English classroom when it comes to literature, but there does need to be some kind of reading check to encourage students to keep up. I used to pull quotes from chapters and have multiple-choice quizzes asking students to match the line with the character who said it. I’d also ask the significance of the line and have them match it. I don’t think Blau would agree with this method of quizzing.

• Grading in general was an area that Blau didn’t spend much time on. Meghan touched upon it in her entry this week, but I felt dissatisfied with the portfolio approach. I like it, but not putting a grade on a paper is not acceptable in the public school system.

• The thesis-argument essay was a paper I was guilty of assigning and I don’t think it was necessarily a bad one. Like Meaghan, I was also guilty of saying no “I” or “you” in papers, but that was in part because I got “I think” and “I believe” 24 times in 150 papers.

• Plagiarism- I caught students every quarter plagiarizing. It got to the point where I started requiring some papers be handwritten and even that didn’t help. I assigned reading logs, and I caught students plagiarizing those! Programs like turnitin.com have helped take the detective work out of grading, but it by no means deters all students from cutting and pasting ideas.

There is so much more I want to write and cover, but suffice it to say that this half of the book didn’t sit as nicely with me as the first half, especially with, as Christy touched upon in her post, the idea that we get the papers we deserve. Um… good thing I’m over my word count limit. Looking forward to our class discussion of this.