As a new teacher, I found Blau’s writing assignments in Chapter 8 to be really helpful and I’m drawn to comment mostly on this chapter in my posting. While I’ve encountered assignments like Blau’s in previous undergrad English or Composition classes I’ve taken, I was never given such in depth descriptions of these assignments that Blau provides his students. After reading through all the assignments, I noticed a commonality in how Blau presents them. When giving his students a particular assignment, he always makes sure to contextualize it. In other words, Blau doesn’t just give the reading log assignment or think-aloud assignment to his students without any further information. Rather, he also takes the time to explain to his students WHY the assignment is valuable and what the students can expect to get out doing it. Sometimes, this contextualizing happens in the actual descriptions of his assignments. For instance, in the description of the Reading Log assignment, Blau uses phrases like “The logs will be useful to you in several ways” and then lists the reasons why completing the assignment would be worthwhile for the student (164). Other times, this contextualizing is given through class discussion and modeling. After assigning the Reading Process Research Paper, Blau tries to “dignify the entire study” by providing in-class contextual information about theorists who were concerned with how readers make meaning (169). Seeing Blau’s approach to his assignments made me realize that as teachers, we can’t simply hand out assignments without justification. We must also remind our students that what they are working on for class is a valid use of their time.

I also want to touch on Blau’s argument that before students can be expected to complete certain assignments, they must first be given “a model and a language” with which to complete them (170). Too often, I think teachers forget that students who don’t possess a model for the kind of thinking that they are being asked to do, simply do not know how to complete the assignment. To help give his students “the language” for the Think-Aloud assignment, for example, Blau tries to “prepare students for their study” by first dividing them into small groups and asking them to go through the motions of the Think-Aloud in the controlled classroom environment (169). Blau makes a great point that I think is often overlooked; he writes “A student asked to write a paper in a literature [. . .] needs to what such a paper looks like” (173). Thus, for many of his assignments, Blau “reads aloud some sample papers from students from previous years” to give his students a model for their own assignment (170). A valid point in Chapter 8 is Blau’s argument that we can’t expect students to know how to complete an assignment without first giving them an understanding of both the form and the way of thinking the assignment demands. Rather as teachers, we must demystify our assignments by first giving our students justification, contextualization, and models to help them be successful.

Briefly, I did want to say something about Blau’s argument in Chapter 10 that students who learn how to think and interpret literary texts for themselves inside the classroom are better able to think critically about the world in which they live. With this view, the English teacher now seems to take on the dual responsibility of both teaching students how to read literature and also molding them into active participants of their society. I tend to agree with Blau here, but I also think this way of thinking is somewhat daunting (especially for a new teacher).