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One of the things I do to build rapport with my students is talk with them.  In the idle moments before class begins, I ask after their doings and their families and friends, and I do not seldom get similar questions from them.  In answering one such yesterday, I noted the piece I wrote in this space; while it was written as an early reaction to the bit of fiction linked in it, the piece is an example of the kind of piece my current program has me require of my students at this point in the term.  (Whether I will bring it in as an example for them to follow or not, I am not yet sure.  I had considered using this one, though.  Thoughts on the matter are welcome.)

It is also the kind of thing I am accustomed to doing, not only in the mornings in this space, but in my professional life (and the blending of the personal and the professional is one of the problems of the work I and other scholars do).  I therefore thought nothing of it, and when I answered the idle student question, I did so without the intention of showing off, but only as a matter of fact; I wrote an essay before leaving my house for work.  But the reaction my students had was...interesting.  That I would spend any time writing for something not an assignment, that I would write for pleasure, and that I would do the reading that underpins that writing, astounded them.

I suppose I ought not to be surprised.  Given the socialization I understand many of my students having, I can easily understand their reluctance to write.  Essay exams often are abusive both of writers and their writing, and, owing to educational policies that have been in place since, oh, 2000 (about the time most of my students started school), essay exams have been frequent intrusions into my students' lives.  Too, intellectual activity such as essay writing is not exactly prized anymore (if it ever really was); the focus it requires and the inevitability of being wrong it entails are hardly vaunted as desirable, whether for people of my students' age or their seniors.  (Geek chic is relatively recent, after all; for far longer than it has been vaunted, the nerd has been an object of scorn and derision, and even in the now-waning social cachet of the character, there is more of ridicule than of veneration.)  Accordingly, students' removal from engagement with writing makes sense--but I was still taken aback by it as it applied to me yesterday.  It is not easy to be open about an activity, even one that really ought to be expected of a person based on that person's profession (in several senses of the word), and to find censure.  Nor yet is it easy to realize that the rapport that is built may well be lopsided.  I think my students know far more of me than I of them--and I think they do not like much of what they know.

Strangely, that bothers me.