The New Class, the First Week

I set out to use this blog as a place to record my thoughts about teaching the class "Advanced Composition: Writing in Electronic Environments." What I find, though, is that I am a bit reluctant to post my reactions to the first week because my students can access this public writing space.

I'll be brave, I guess . . .

Let me start by saying that I have given my students some big, unanswerable questions, and I am impressed by the fact that several students have stuck their necks out and used the class discussion board as a place to explore unfinished ideas, new thoughts. I know that I am apprehensive about posting my ideas here, so I identify with the students who have done that.

Some students, though, are still getting accustomed to taking a writing class - a class in which their own writing is at the center of the course (at my university, many English majors skip first-year composition and are automatically waived from sophomore composition). So, these bright students are only used to English classes in which they consume text and talk about their roles as readers rather than classes in which they produce texts and talk about their roles as producers.

Symptomatic of this pattern of studenthood, a few students gently resisted putting their own writing at the center of this class. For example, on the second day of class, I shared (without names) some excerpts from the first day's in-class writing. I meant to show the class how smart their thinking was, but one student commented that it was unfair that I shared their writing without warning and out of context. I was genuinely surprised. I made the assumption that they would expect their writing to always be shared in a writing class, but, again, they are still learning to trust the notion of a "writing" class. Also on that second day, I asked the students to post their emerging thoughts on the big question "What is 'text'"? One student quoted Ezra Pound as an answer. While I was certainly impressed with this student's recall of Pound's poetry, I was caught of guard by a student choosing to use the words of a literary figure instead of her/his own. This incident struck me as another example of the students not quite knowing what a writing class is -- not quite understanding that quoting poetry has no real cache in an advanced composition class, at least not nearly as much cache as trying out one's own writing as a heuristic.

I'm hoping to win them over since it is still early in the term. By "win them over," I mean that I hope to co-create an environment where they will want to put their own writing out there, as the object of study. I am hoping to get them to trust themselves as beings who can think through writing.