Blau pg. 151: “…the Deweyan notion that the only knowledge you truly possess is knowledge you have somehow made.”

(Perhaps also known as, roughly: You don’t know it until you can teach it.)

The connections Blau made in Chapter 7 between reading and writing really stuck out for me. I took 615 just last semester, so maybe that is coloring my experience here in 610, but I think the connections between reading and writing are so important, and each benefits the other equally. I love the idea of understanding what you read by writing about it. My first experience with reading logs (since high school anyway) was in 615, and I was surprised by how much I valued them — as tedious as it was, I certainly wouldn’t have gotten all I did out of the readings without being “forced” to write about them simultaneously. And I agree that logs can be a great place to store ideas, ideas that maybe the student will be able to come back to when asked to write a paper about the text with no prompt or direction.

I also like the idea of working through confusion by writing, something that students are usually not willing to do in “formal academic essays” for fear of bad grades, but that is possible, and even expected, in a more casual reading log or journal, which is often described as a place for questions and “but what abouts.” Blau says, “there is value in writing about and sharing confusion” (155). And as we have read elsewhere this semester, confusion = learning, questions = learning, and as Blau says on page 12, difficulty = success.

What I’ve been taking away from this class these first few weeks is how important it is to show students that difficulty, questions, misunderstandings, and disagreements are not the enemy when reading literature. The challenge is to make the English literature classroom a space where students feel confident expressing these reactions, where those things are welcomed, discussed, and built upon.