Blog Fodder to Spare

Earlier this week, I stood in Dr. Miller’s office chatting about our blogs. Dr. Price and I had just recently posted our first entries, and Dr. Miller commented that he had been waiting for us to do that, so that he could go ahead and write another one—he had lots of things he’d been thinking of writing about. He was just finishing up his second entry.

It’s funny that we would be waiting on each other to take turns. I wonder if we’re playing by some unspoken rules of politeness or if it’s just that none of us wants to look too terribly nerdy. (Nerdily competitive: I had entertained hopes of being the first to post during this second round. Oh well.)

And we are nerdy, and in wonderfully fulfilling ways. How fun to have colleagues to write with, to have given ourselves occasion and audience to encourage our own writing.

We laughed a lot—at ourselves and our enthusiasm. I commented that several events had recently struck me as good “blog fodder.” I didn’t elaborate then, but on my mind were my only niece’s recently heading off to college for her first semester; preseason football, Deuce’s sideline cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and my hopes that he can stay healthy for one whole, good season; the way our English Department workshop reminded me how much like our students we faculty sometimes are. I wanted to write about all of those and more.

What I did say to Dr. Miller was this: “I should probably write up a bunch of these right now and save them for later in the semester. Then when crunch time comes, I’ll have something to post.”

We laughed some more at that—this time not nerdily, but rather the kind of knowing-and-empathizing laughter that accompanies confessions of weakness, admissions of understandable guilt.

We all know that as enamored as we are with the blogs right now, and probably with the sounds of our own voices, a semester’s worth of momentum is tricky to maintain. At some point each of us, I suspect, will be busy and distracted and will see the blog as an extra task that takes extra time.

That’s a good reminder for me, here at the beginning, as I shape each of my classes. It doesn’t mean that, come mid-term or Thanksgiving, I’ll be willing to “let up” on either myself or my students. Rather, it means that we will all have to keep our eyes open for those moments that inspire us, that give us something to say, that make us want to write.

Getting Started

Dr. Miller’s first blog entry explains the hows and whys of some of the MC English Faculty’s decision to blog in connection with our comp classes this semester. Rather than repeat him here, I’ll jump in with something else. First, though, I’ll remind myself and my readers of our plan to blog about specific events we see connected with goals of development included in MC’s Mission Statement: intellectual, spiritual, social, physical, and emotional development. This blog’s event connects with intellectual development, certainly—both mine and my students’. And with the emotional, I suppose, as well.

After our breakfast meeting on Friday, I headed to my office to plan for a composition workshop we’re giving for our department’s faculty and graduate teaching assistants. On my things-to-do list was choosing a student-written sample essay we could examine and discuss during the workshop.

In a corner of my office floor, I sat cross-legged in the Cemetery of Dead Student Papers. Or rather, in the Cemetery of Students’ Dead Papers. I like to assume that the students who wrote them are alive and well. But the papers themselves are most decidedly dead: long ago written, printed, turned in, graded, returned to the students, and then returned back to me for departmental records. Then forgotten. For the workshop, one paper would have a new life.

As I browsed, the essays and names reminded me of faces and personalities from semesters past: the talented-but-lazy student with the creative spin on the men’s dorm bathrooms (he could’ve done so much more with that); the weak writer who tried so hard that grading her papers always broke my heart; the weak one who didn’t seem to try at all, for reasons I would never learn; the motivated one who attacked assignments like my horse attacks hills: lots of willingness, energy, power—enjoying himself every stride, confident hooves hitting treacherous ground in all the right places.

I’m not sure what any of them “got” from my classes, whether they were really all that better at writing or thinking when they left me than when they first arrived.

What struck me overall, though, was how arbitrary my assignments seemed. Why did I want them to write about X, or Y, or Z?—Because composition students have been writing about X and Y and Z for years and years now. That’s what they do; what we ask them to do; how it is. I was reminded, too, of how much writing I did as a student—and sometimes for my job now—that didn’t seem very useful or important or interesting.

It’s the middle of August, and I’m excited about the coming semester. I’m excited about my colleagues’ willingness to experiment with me, to try something different with our composition classes, to try to make the course more useful and important and interesting for our students. Realistically, as a writing teacher, I will always have a Dead Paper Cemetery in my office. But hopefully, my students will have benefited substantially from writing those papers—and from our time together, in general. We’ll see.