I was one of those kids Blau mentions who always hated the “reading journal” or “reading log” assignment.  In fact, I had to do one just last semester, and I totally filled it in the night before it was due with a bunch of rambling thoughts just to get it done.  I admit it: I thought I was “above” the assignment.  I thought so in middle school, and I think it now.

So, I propose meeting Blau in the middle on this one.  I’m not willing to surrender my distaste for the reading journal assignment, but I am willing to throw him a bone by conceding that I do get the “point” of the exercise.  My compromise is to suggest that Blau’s reading log idea is simply outdated:  Throw a “b” in front of that “log” and you’ve got something that I not only enjoy doing, but that I think this class provides a successful example of.

My problem with a reading log is it always felt pointless.  Yeah, yeah, spot check all you want, I know you’re not really reading it.  I used to bartend and I know when you’re in the weeds and the guy is clearly 40, you’re not bothering to actually read the birthdate on the ID, the numerals just sort of scroll by in a haze.  And the idea of any teacher curled up on the couch with a glass of wine and my reading log – which, get real, is a diary by any other name – is fundamentally kind of creepy.

But blogging solves all these problems and more.  First of all, it expands the range of your audience widely enough that it’s not creepy anymore.  You’re not just sharing your thoughts/experiences/observations with one authority figure, but now you’re sharing them with your peers, too.  We write for instructors out of concern for our grades; the incentive to write thoughtfully and entertainingly for our peers can match or even exceed our concern for our grades.

Blogging, because it is internet-based, makes it easier to hold students accountable for their work.  On a blog, it’s easy to track a post that’s missing or late.  It’s also a genre of writing that students are probably exposed to regularly—Blau advises providing good examples of what we want students to model, and you  could easily link to well-done blog posts on a course page for student reference.  And blog posts don’t have to be physically collected, so no need for Blau to pack a bunch of papers in his suitcase—just put the laptop on airplane mode and voila. (And go for that cocktail, too – because blogging eschews the creepy factor, you’re in the clear!)

And now, because I’m feeling really generous, here’s a point I’ll leave in Blau’s column: There’s something to be said, I think, for writing by hand, and blogging does not afford that opportunity.  As a composition instructor here at GMU, I can see why the whole point of comp is to emphasize writing as process.  Students who learned to write on a laptop have no sense of the physical experience of crossing out one word in search of a better one, re-drafting, re-writing, revising.  Maybe they are doing some revising as they go, but they’re not conscious of it, because the Word document doesn’t keep a record of the changes they’ve made and the evolutions their writing has undergone.  Seeing and understanding those (r)evolutions, I believe, is a huge turning point in a student’s writing education.

Now, as an unrelated post-script, I’d like to steal Jacque’s method of bullet-pointing the other things that struck me but which I don’t have the word count to fully address here:

• In his “we generally get the papers we deserve” comment (p. 153), Blau says it’s on us if we get a bunch of Engfish writing.  Okay, but…I WOULD LOVE SOME ENGFISH WRITING.  Some of my students write sentences that 8-year-olds could write.  Raise the bar, y’all!  Words with more than one syllable are FUN!
• I’d like to meet the student who, given the choice, would write about “The Flea” instead of “Harrison Bergeron.”  If the whole idea of teaching poetry is to show students they shouldn’t be afraid of it, why give them an out?  It seems to me that writing assignments should be separated by genre if you really want students to have to grapple with poetry.
• Blau’s point about avoiding page length requirements (p. 180) gave me pause.  If I say I want 4-6 pages, I’m happy with the 3.75 I often get.  I issue a grading rubric for my assignments, and I think of it as a contract I’m making with the students.  I feel I can’t accuse a student of failing to earn high marks if I haven’t made my expectations clear.  Not that page length is everything, but it probably means something to the kid who actually wrote 6 good, high-quality pages.  In general, I agree with other posters that Blau’s treatment of grading was more like a hit-and-run.  I’d love to hear more of everyone’s, anyone’s, thoughts on grading in lit classes.
• I like Blau’s point about misinterpreting texts as something that just happens sometimes.  But I think he could have chosen a better example to illustrate this point than “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (p. 191).  If the poem were untitled, fine.  But we tell students part of reading is to look up words they don’t understand…and that titles matter.  So I think if I asked a student how the poem’s title reconciles with his (mis)understanding of the poem, it would clear things up pretty straightforwardly.  Or do others disagree?