I think one of the most difficult tasks about designing a literature course is selecting effective writing assignments. By effective writing assignments, I mean writing assignments that not only fulfill the learning requirements of the course, but writing assignments that students actually care about. As a student I can remember rolling my eyes every time I was asked to write in a journal, or do free writing at the beginning of class. I didn’t take the writing tasks seriously because it always seemed like busy work, so now I can sympathize with students when I think about the attitude I had about journal writing. I think Blau outlines good ways to introduce journal writing to students, in ways that are practical and meaningful.

First, it is important that students understand that a journal or reading log is not just a place for them to summarize what they read, but they should use the journal to document questions that they have about the text, as well as possible answers. It is also a good idea for students to use their journals to explore writing ideas for their future papers. When I was assigned a reading log for my English class as a student the writing that I did was outside of the classroom, and I was not required to bring the journal to class. After reading this book, I think that it should be a requirement for students to not only bring their journals to class, but to routinely share their writings to their classmates. I think if you clearly show students how their journal writing can assist them in future assignments, and help them work through questions they have about the reading that they are doing, they will embrace this type of assignment more readily.

One of the things that I appreciated about Blau’s book was that while he discussed the writing assignments he uses in his classes, he also described the problems teachers can face implementing such writing assignments, and evaluating them. I have always liked the idea of using reading logs, but have struggled with determining how to evaluate them. I like the idea of having students write a reading log audit as a way of monitoring their progress, because it makes them accountable not only for their reading but it also forces them to be reflective about the choices that they are making while reading and writing. I also think that students will take reading logs/journals seriously if they know up front that their journals may be read in front of the class.

It is easy to feel defeated in the classroom when a new teaching technique or writing assignment is not received well. Given this, I was also glad to see Blau acknowledge that, “many of the most interesting problems we face as teachers never go away” (151). I think that teaching will always involve some form of experimentation.  A tasks that works well for one class, may fail miserably with another group of students, so you are constantly testing new things out in the classroom to see what fits.

I read with particular interest Sheridan Blau’s description of some of his students and their practice of handing in papers composed of pompous, overly complex wording and a lack of true understanding. I was especially struck with his line, “For such students, an assignment to write a formal academic paper is an assignment to make themselves stupid” (157). He notes how these intelligent learners abandon their own voice (and often their own understanding) in an effort to sound erudite and professor-like. This isn’t an affliction merely for the young. Before I started my master’s program in the fall of 2011, it had been 27 years since I’d seen the inside of a college classroom. While I had ample confidence in my ability to write, I had much less assurance about my ability to write like an academic. I loved reading the books, poems and short stories in the lit classes, but wavered a bit on the academic treatises on theory and deep literary interpretation. I was a fish out of water, in too deep, wet behind the ears, and any other aquatic cliché you can think of.

It became a habit to read things two or three times just to make some sense of them, which admittedly, made me feel a bit dense. The language seemed unnecessarily wordy and obfuscatory (in itself, a big-ass word, but very apt). This aspect was especially frustrating for me. My undergrad degree is in journalism, where verbosity, redundancy, lack of clarity and overwrought syntax and word choices are constant enemies. You shouldn’t write like that, but even if you do, any editor worth his/her salt will rework it or make you do it over. For his part, Blau points out that “such language use is perverse in the sense that it violates most of the tacit rules or conversational maxims (Grice 1975) that have been found to govern conversations in most ordinary human transactions where people are exchanging information – maxims like try to be as clear as possible, avoid obscurity in expression, avoid excessive wordiness, say what you mean, say what needs to be said …” (157-58). But in my first couple of grad classes, writing sometimes felt like an “out-of-body” experience, using someone else’s vocabulary to make what points I could. In any event, I hoped they sounded good.

I’ve since learned to swim in the grad school pond. Subsequent classes (including ENGH 610) have helped me realize that multiple readings of texts (while a bit more time-consuming) are a good thing, both for reinforcing what I read and for enhanced understanding. I’ve come to accept that reading and learning can be very messy propositions (I already knew writing was messy). I’m more comfortable now with the discourse in the realms of writing and literary theory and instruction.

However, I still get frustrated at times with nebulous wording, and pages and pages of text that seem to run repeatedly over the same ground or veer greatly from the central point of the piece.  If instructors offer complex interpretive texts and lectures, it’s easy to see why students appropriate this tone and style to sound like they know what they’re talking about. This is not to say there isn’t a place for “$10 college words,” as we used to call them, but we must encourage students to fully understand them before they use them. Blau’s excellent suggestions of using first-person construction, reading logs and group work represent, I believe, important steps to keep students from floundering.

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?

I just finished grading 160 mid-term exams.  These were essay exams asking students to choose a thesis (out of four provided theses) and write an essay supporting that thesis.  The day before the exam, the students were provided with the short story and the thesis selection, and could prepare by writing a practice essay, or re-reading the story, etc., but could bring nothing into the test itself.

The beginning this ordeal happened to correspond to my reading of Blau’s discussion on testing (p.146), and on the thesis test in particular.  I graded few of the exams above a C – not because I am a particularly hard grader but because the students were unable to show applicable evidence for the thesis.  As I went through exam after exam, trying to figure out what the problem was, it occurred to me that because the thesis was provided, the students really couldn’t permit their own interpretation into their essays.  But they couldn’t deny their interpretation either (much like Robb in the think aloud of “Gretel”), and therefore their essays were often rambling, scattered and unfocused.  I concluded that the provided theses were not interesting to most of the students – in fact, they were irrelevant to their reading of the story.  If I had asked the students to identify possible themes in the story, it’s likely few would have seen “a challenge to gender stereotypes”, or “bridging gaps between cultures”.  Instead they likely would have found themes relevant to their own lives and their reading of the story.

What does Blau say about the thesis exam?  While recognizing that students are prepared throughout  in high school to write exams supporting a thesis, when it comes to literature exams, we need to do things differently.  Because we “experience” literature, and we encourage interpretations through the personal/cultural/ideological lens, it is necessary to leave it up to the students to arrive at their own meanings, to figure out how the story is meaningful to them.  To that end, modifying some of the workshop ideas might produce better essays than the ones I just finished.   For example, Blau suggests asking students to select what they think is the most important line (or event) in the meaning of the poem or story and explain why.  This approach would enable students the freedom to explore what is interesting and meaningful to them, rather then box them in with a pre-determined thesis.  The point is to identify the “high points of their experience” (146) and ask them to describe and interpret these points, in their own words.  Another approach might be to modify the “difficulty paper” idea – asking students to exploring the problems of a line or an event that they find difficult to interpret.

Obviously, grading these types of exams is far trickier than the thesis exam, but I think they would be a much more interesting read for me!  And would hopefully be a more satisfying and rewarding experience for the students.

Blau’s frank discussion of the reading “logs” (I’ll probably also call them “journals” throughout the post) was particularly useful for me as I have the same hesitations he does: I think some students see the logs as “busy work” or don’t do the reading and thus can’t do the logs (and then lose points twice over), plus I know that assigning logs means a lot more work for me come mid-semester and finals, etc. But Blau makes some convincing arguments for why they are still useful—mostly, that I should try it sometime.

It’s funny, though, because recently I was taking an MFA class that required me to use a reading log. The professor introduced the log as something to do in tandem with our reading, and he explained that he would collect the logs at some point in the semester. The accountability was there. Still, even though I knew we’d be held accountable, I half-assed it. I filled the log with random quotes, doodles, notes from class, etc. Why? Because, like Blau’s students, I saw the log as busy work. I do this in my head, I thought, why should I write it down? Furthermore, recording entries in the log interrupted my reading process—something I had very little patience for.

So with my own shortcomings in mind, I thought about how I could reframe this for my own students. If I were to introduce reading logs to my class in the way that he does (which, by the way, the examples/controlled practice he suggests seem particularly smart), I might also make some suggestions, or elicit some suggestions from students, about how to actually make the reading log fit relatively painlessly into a reading process. Logistically. I’m talking about when to stop and write (after each chapter? After a period of sustained reading? Before you begin reading and again afterwards? After a certain number of pages, etc?). For me, it’s the skill (or maybe the discipline) of interrupting the joy of reading to record my thoughts, that makes me wary of the reading log. And maybe, even though they can’t articulate it, that’s how our students feel. And maybe, with Blau’s introduction to the log and some logistical support about how to actually make a reading log work, they’d get a thing or two out of the exercise.

The mixed feelings that I experienced while reading about the assignments and activities that Sheridan Blau discusses in The Literature Workshop largely result from the internal conflicts I face in attempting to determine the goal of liberal arts education. While I do value the emphasis that the author places on creativity and personal engagement, I am not convinced that an entirely student-centric learning environment is fair preparation for the type of demands that students will encounter in the ‘real world.’ The Interpretation Project outlined in chapter 8, for example, “reflects an ideal, healthy, and democratic academic community” (176); I remain unconvinced that such a description could be applied to most professional environments. In catering to the individual needs of each student, to his interests and abilities, I worry that Blau may be failing to exercise an arguably more important skill – their ability to “suck it up and get it done.”

Don’t let me be misunderstood: I love the assignments that are explained in this book. Despite the fact that I have reservations about whether the activities themselves can be applied to a greater context, I do believe that Blau has hit on a wonderful way to encourage critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. Perhaps his greatest success in this regard is the creation of a safe-fail (as opposed to a fail-safe) learning environment.

The disadvantages of failure-proof learning have been widely discussed lately, with a number of studies proving that students who always succeed are those least able to improvise or reconfigure a plan to address difficulties. In some ways, the approach that Blau takes to individualized assignments and minimal assessment reminds me of fail-proof learning. The major difference between his safe-fail classroom and the failure-proof learning that has proven so problematic, however, is the fact that his class seems predicated on students’ exposure to difficulty.

Sheridan’s (for some reason it feels more appropriate to use his first name) book continues to seem a thoughtful collection of prompts, ideas, and procedures that are saturated in theory, distinguished by results, and maintained by practicality.  I found the lines, “we have to reserve an equally prominent place in our syllabus for a serious effort at teaching and having student work on the formal academic literary paper,” especially relieving (p.157).  I found his method of giving only end-of-semester grades to be curious and thought-provoking.  For me, this is truly a quandary, a sort of mental battleground where the phalanxes of the progressive and standard push and shove to stalemate.  His use of the portfolio seems to be the only viable option in a response-laden and grade-absent assignment system, and I suspect the prospect of each paper supporting the other may indeed give students an even greater incentive than the individual grades themselves.  I think another problem with individual grades is there capacity to disenchant the student from the course.  This isn’t an exclusively English literature problem, but I think that when writing and literature are involved a poor grade can really influence a students’ participation in the class, both outside and in.  In my experience—which I admit comes more from my experience as a student than teacher—students that struggle with writing are especially vulnerable to surrender; throwing in the towel, saying, “this is stupid,” or “none of this actually matters,” is an easy way to reestablish their own self-worth and avoid the enormous task of learning to write.  Poor students—I feel like I should be politically correct here and say “students that receive poor marks”—are all fabulous mathematicians; if they get a good grade you can bet they’ll have figured out what grades they’ll need for the grade they want (or, in my case, what grade they need to pass).  If those grades seem impossible the student, who has already invested money into taking the course, is not likely to remain particularly engaged.  I think it is easy in our culture to harden our hearts against things we are not good at, things that lower our self-esteem: we’re taught that we need to have high self-esteem all the time, that we are all wonderful and equal in our wonderfulness—and in Academia I find a strange dichotomy between the traditional I / thou relationship of the student teacher, of the matriculated professional, and the mutant democratically neutered human that is bred in gradeschool.  Anyway, one thing that I’ll say about Sheridan’s portfolio method is that it demands a lot from the teacher.  Sheridan treats teaching writing / literature as his life’s calling, and I suspect he might agree, though in a more approachable language, that a teacher who is not so dedicated, who does not consider their job a thing of great personal and public importance to be something of a criminal.  The problem, I think, is not a lack of qualified, dedicated teachers, but a university’s willingness to pay them human salaries.  T.A.s are notoriously exploited individuals, and adjunct faculty is nothing more than companies hiring temps instead of employees so they don’t have to pay them benefits (which I get, I mean—fuck their health care).  The desire for me to speak on my own experience I this department is great, but it’ll have to wait until I get my degree and have the necessary credentials.  As it is, I wonder why there isn’t some massive movement in the composition world to have more God damn composition classes.  Writing across the curriculum sounds like a thing that was once a great idea and became compromised into Obamacare.  We have students that take one measly writing class and then must write essays in every class thereafter.  But do they practice writing in these classes?  Do they learn from their mistakes when their papers come back with grammar marks, the notation LEARN HOW TO USE A COMMA, and a grade?  Do professors who are tasked with writing across the curriculum know the pedagogy behind it—are they trained in teaching writing?  Do they give a shit about teaching writing?  I want someone to explain to me how writing across the curriculum is something more than the counterfeit currency of what almost every pedagogy we’ve covered wants to mint.

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.

And the parallel tracks of my classes, graduate and otherwise, continue to thicken.  I’m currently grading students’ first paper; the timing is morbidly ironic really. After coming across this little gem, “…I believe…for us to assume that we generally get the papers we deserve” I started yelling at the book (153).

First—a step back.  One of his claims seems to address lofty, stylistic vocabulary concerns—I’m more a practical, concise E.B. White kind of girl anyways—so yes we’re in agreement there.  And if I may digress to point out a keen observation:  during several moments it seems he’s pulling high-minded literature instructors, or should I say the pre-American authors with healthcare, down a peg (re: unknowingly promoting sanctimonious, complex vocabulary; looking to hear themselves in students paper, etc.). (Silent cheer!)

Still, back to the chapter, I disagree we should turn our nose up at “papers made of prefabricated parts” or asking a student to write “a formal academic paper is an assignment to make themselves stupid” (153, 157).  Now, to be fair, no I don’t think every paper, every student writes should come in a nice five-paragraph package.  My outlook is more, to step out of the box, students must know a. the box exists and b. what’s exactly in it.  So with that, yes I do believe students should write their fair share of “conventional topos” (153).  And really, as a composition instructor, it would be nice to know our time and effort spent on the ‘blueprint basics,’ structure, organization, logical flow, etc. is being supported by our literature colleagues—not collapsed and reworked.

There are plenty of opportunities to write creatively in a compare and contrast paper—you don’t need to chuck the whole framework.  Put another way, structure does not inform content.  Just because I handed my students an outline to complete, does not make their prose any less restrictive.  How they develop, tease out, and choose the proper resources to support their points is entirely unique.  So, yes, by all means throw out the dull, prescriptive prompts, but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater (re: five-paragraph essay showing how Hamlet was indecisive p. 154).

Nevertheless, was the outline an organization and focus tool? You betcha! Do they need it? Absolutely!  As mentioned above, before students step out of the conventional box, I better make sure there is some sort of reliable floor beneath them—or they’ll drown in the creative, no-rules abyss.

Now, back to my deserving pile of ‘C’s’ and ‘D’s’.  Do I, personally, deserve them?  No!  Do I, as an instructor of first-year composition and stakeholder in the English pedagogy, past, present, and future deserve them? Yes.  That is to say, we are forever tied to our unknowing, ghost colleagues academic successes and failures—and our small, humanities niche needs every bit of reminder and representation of that.

I have to say I was thrilled to finally see Blau (or anybody) address this issue. I always balk at the idea “there is no such thing as a correct or incorrect reading of a text” (189), and not because I believe the “expert’s” interpretation (or my own, for that matter) is superior in any way, but because, like Blau points out, there simply are wrong answers.
Again, his examples drawn from a long career are helpful in illustrating the point: lacking the knowledge of WWII fighter planes makes “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” a much more difficult poem, and a failure to grasp metaphor can lead to a number of misreadings in nearly any piece of literature. As he says, these mistakes are not made because of stupidity or illiteracy, but are made “out of ignorance, inattention, lack of experience, or…the vagaries of a momentarily mistaken perspective.” (190) We’ve all been there; I myself evinced this during the Think Aloud exercise a few weeks ago, confusing “carbide” for “carbine”, leading to much confusion on my part and my fellow readers. Without the context of a date, a student may be forgiven for reading Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” as a metaphor for nuclear holocaust; I know it has happened before, and will happen again.
Relieved as I am to see somebody admit that yes, some readings are just plain wrong, I was slightly irked that he waited until his penultimate chapter to address it. It seems like an issue that, as a teacher, he’d want to get to sooner than that, but that may just be my own proclivities showing through. Such mistaken readings, if not swiftly corrected, can quickly derail an entire classroom of students, sending them down an unproductive path of inquiry, and discussing or arguing about something that has no useful bearings on the text itself. Such harmful tangents need to be avoided and correctly swiftly, especially in a class with a very limited amount of time for discussion in the first place.
That said, there is no need to be harsh about the corrections; the way one goes about correcting these misreadings is important for ensuring that students continue to feel comfortable making contributions to class, even if they are mistaken. Often, we learn more from making mistakes than from successes.