Beyond School

I use the term blog-writer advisedly.

I’m catching up on responding to all my learners’ blogs, using Diigo to leave “teacher-y” comments on sticky-notes that only they can see–which also makes for a great collection of sentence-correction examples on my teacher Diigo bookmarks page–and I come across this post from Lynn:

Quiet Souls: the Living Dead

All Quiet on the Western Front, otherwise known as “the greatest war novel of all time,” is a notably bitter book. I found [myself] making sour smiles as I read–the book had hit the bull’s eye. All Quiet on the Western Front demonstrates the war from the soldiers’ point of view. The book shows how war can take out the souls of human beings and leave them only with their “animal instincts.”

“By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it….It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our knowing how. If it were no so, there would not be one man alive from Flandres to the Vosges” (56, Remarque).

This second instinct seems to be a key element for survival, but it is also destroying them as well. Men step away from their emotions and rely on their immediate needs, just as Muller does.

“They would fit me perfectly. In these boots I get blister after blister. Do you think he will last till tomorrow after drill? If he passes out in the night, we know where the boots–” (18, Remarque)

Muller, in this passage, sounds very cold hearted: he asks his friends when his comrade would probably die. But it is understandable, because civility is not a major concern in war. It is blind killing, without any reasons whatsoever, that matters; it is the soldiers’ paramount responsibility to simply kill the enemies. Thus, the soldiers becoming the living dead–a soul without a soul. They become completely senseless to what civilization has taught them. Instead, they listen to the inner primitive instincts: the strive for dominance, the strive for power, the strive to survive, and mostly, the strive to kill.

Ironically, the authorities glorify this tragedy into what is known as “essprit de corps (26, Remarque)”.

“We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough–and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training, most of us would certainly have gone mad….But by far the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war–comradeship” (26,27, Remarque)

As these soldiers become empty shells with no souls, the war goes on. The post-war trauma, the in-war trauma is maybe just enough to take the life out of someone.

Image from Flickr

The quality of Lynn’s writing is obvious, but what isn’t obvious is how she has applied so much of the sentence styling that I’ve been urging my learners to experiment with–with predictably mixed results. (To see the also-mixed student-produced mini-lessons on the sentence patterns I’m trying to make them use, see this link on the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki.)

I’m sharing this as an example of how student blogging can be used as a way to teach writing skills, a la the 6 Traits of Effective Writing and The Art of Styling Sentences, while still avoiding the “blogging as homework” pitfall that comes with assigning the content of the blog-posts. It’s part of the on-going quest to find that magical combination that transforms homework into authentic writing, while at the same time prevents that freedom from being sloppy, non-developmental free-writing.

Earlier in the year, I think I erred in giving students too much freedom to choose their topic. I’d hoped they would rise to my exhortations for them to find one idea from a week’s worth of schooling–in any subject area classroom–to write about and make meaningful. Most of them didn’t, which is a sad reflection on the relevance they find in the ideas at school–and on the students’ intellectual maturity level as well. But I don’t want to let this preference to “write about [the pop culture equivalent of] their cat, Fluffy” (to quote one of Chris Watson’s students in Honolulu) push me into assigning teacher-directed “answer my question” homework.

Starting the whole-class blog for my history class’ World War I to World War II unit, in which they were assigned to write about whatever topic from the week’s student lectures on a reflective, reader-response level, showed me the light. Their posts on this blog were instantly of a higher order of thought than my English classes’, in general, after four months of blogging.

So for the rest of the year (we end in about four weeks), I’m having my English students write about whatever scenes, passages, or lines from our novels that they want (though sometimes within thematic limits that I set). And I’m having them apply new skills–quotation integration and close reading commentary–in these posts.

Actually, come to think of it, Lynn’s post was in response to one of those more teacher-directed assignments. But still, she chose her passage, and she applied those skills.

Go to her blog, and judge for yourself whether her writing was better before I changed the rules and made her write about literature-related topics, or whether this post marks a leap in the general quality of her blog-writing. I’d be curious to hear what you think: could she handle freedom, or did the teacher limits help her grow?

And to “think-aloud” a bit more, I’ll add one more thing I’ve noticed as I’ve read my students’ blogs tonight: though they weren’t, as a rule, choosing to write about Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, or All Quiet on the Western Front, the few students who did write about these works unanimously found them enjoyable, and their sentiments were echoed in other students’ comments to these posts.

Which means two things to me: first, if they like what they’re reading in the English class, then assigning them to write about these works could be enjoyable for them–as long as I don’t kill that joy with stultifying requirements to write the dreaded 5-paragraph essay; and second, it’s really important to select readings that they will enjoy. I know this latter point sounds obvious, but I’ve seen too many teachers assign novels and plays that I can’t stand to teach any more than students can stand reading. But that’s a different topic. For what it’s worth, in any case, 15-year-olds in Korea–many of them fluent but first-generation English speakers–not only could handle Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, and All Quiet on the Western Front; they also enjoyed handling them.

Which strengthens my opinion that we deprive kids the experience of great literature because we insist they can’t handle it (or, if we’re moralists of the Puritanical stamp, shouldn’t handle it). And we teach them kiddie-literature instead.

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