Beyond School

I’m about to go out to a Friday night teacher social, but feel compelled to share this dialog I’m having in a comment thread on a new student blog at my school.

I don’t know this student - don’t even know the gender - but he/she is in an English classroom on my floor, taught by another teacher (we just started high-school-wide blogging about 4 weeks ago). So this is novel for me.

It started with the student closing a post with this:

But from experimenting with this website and reading the blogs of my peers, I’m so far failing to see blogging’s potential as a teacher. I fancy myself to be quite a fan of the internet, and I definitely prefer this over writing a diary, but I don’t think blogging offers anything new to an extremely well-wired student body (especially not in the field of American Literature), at least none that I have found yet.

But I am definitely open to being proven wrong.

“Open.” I like that. I commented, he/she replied, then I replied, as follows:

1. Clay Burell

   You won’t be surprised to hear me say I love blogging. It’s opened all sorts of doors for me and hooked me up with people all over the world who I talk to professionally and may one day work with or for (or may work for me, if the dream school I’m planning ever happens).

   But this might surprise you: I don’t think blogging will help a large percentage of students (if that’s what you meant by “blogging’s potential as a teacher,” which was a bit unclear).

   Nothing will help a large percentage of students learn _or_ develop skills, because really, that’s pretty much up to the student.

   But my god, if you were writing about literature on this thing because it was homework? I wouldn’t read it.

   And I’m a literature teacher.

   I don’t want to read homework - do you? And do you think that’s what writing is? Doing homework?

   Writing is a very different thing.

   And a large percentage of students, to circle back around, will never understand just how different.

   But maybe a few will - especially when readers notice that they can write. And subscribe to them. And comment on what they wrote.

2. on 21 Feb 2008 at 11:09 pm 3eehoc09

   Mr. Burell-
   After having written a couple of blogs, I’ve become pretty fond of them myself.
   It’s refreshing to be able write without being given a topic or a rubric to use as a cookie-cutter.
   I feel like I have never felt before in school; I feel like I’m writing for fun.

   But I’m still a little bit skeptical on it’s relevance in literature classes. AP Literature, for example, is a class with a syllabus specifically outlined by the Collegeboard and in preparation for a generic standardized test. Blogging seems to be a little out of place there, and I think that internet communications deserves a separate course altogether.

   But whatever class it belongs to, I’m glad we’re blogging.

3. on 22 Feb 2008 at 6:51 pm 4Clay Burell

   Ahh, but if you do a bit of research, you’ll see that it’s “AP Literature and Composition.” If I weren’t feeling lazy, I’d add html to italicize that latter phrase.

   And don’t be fooled by the AP label. AP teachers laugh at the pretense of the whole thing: students taking it for all the wrong reasons, with no true love of literature or writing, with a few rare exceptions. They’d be writing mediocre paper journals if they weren’t blogging.

   An AP teacher in Virginia whose blog I read joked that AP should be called “All-Purpose” - I’d add, primarily for the purpose of college application bullets

   Any writer knows the best way to improve your composition is to write frequently, about something you care about communicating well. I can assign the frequency easily enough. But the passion and care? That’s a spiritual pre-requisite I can’t supply.

   I don’t blame the students too much, either. They’re too busy with hagwons and other thought-stoppers to find ideas to care about. And life requires a few years of freedom in order to become interesting - for the lucky, anyway. Which is another reason teaching deep literature in high school is a fundamentally flawed idea.

   In any case, you seem to be cluing in to a couple of things that only time can bring: first, that being a writer (as opposed to scribbling homework drivel) is something that evolves over time; second, that blogging is such a new form of writing that your impressions of it, too, will evolve over time. When you come back to your space in a year, you’ll see more, if you keep writing.

   I’ll add this one: blogging is not a silver bullet to create writers. I see it, at best, as a seed to plant in each writer. Whether it grows depends on the fertility of each writer’s soul. Some blogs will wither and die, some will be weed-patches. But some will flower - and gain more notice than that of their teacher only. In the best cases, they’ll gain readers from around the world. Readers who return for more, mind you.

   And comment, and start conversations that extend the writers ideas–like this comment thread (another word for conversation, really) should be doing?

   I’ve been writing on my blog for a little over a year. Since January, I’ve been getting emails offering to pay me for advertising space on my blog, and invitations to be flown places to speak at conferences. All because I make my ideas transparent, and write with frequency and care about things others find interesting (it helps to have a focus and not be random). I never dreamed any of this would happen when I started my own journey.

   Now I dream that, this time next year, I’m getting emails asking students at KIS to speak at conferences, be interviewed, etc. I expect that will happen with only a handful, though - you know, the fertile ones, with focus, and with passion, and care.

   I’m enjoying this. I’ll subscribe to you in my Bloglines.

I share this with you simply because I find it interesting. Making blogging work as writing instruction is, as anybody who’s done it knows, no easy thing. The launch is the easy part.

Feel free to join the conversation on the student’s blog. And give us both food for thought, because I don’t deny being a bit at sea about how to make this all work.