20151006.0628

The papers I am having my students write this term are, in large measure, prescribed by program dictates. That is, there is a required sequence of major assignments in the class I am assigned, one established in the interests of normalization. The idea is that all sections of the class will be largely equivalent to one another, demanding much the same tasks of the students within them, so that those who teach them afterwards can make stable, reasonably reliable assumptions about what skills and training the students have had. The idea is not a bad one, overall, in part because there should be some consistency among iterations of a single course within a single semester, and in part because the normalization allows for some structured guidance for the novice teachers who most frequently teach the course. (That the course is largely ascribed to novice teachers is a problem in itself, I admit; I am convinced by several CCC and College English pieces that argue the point. And I am suddenly reminded that I need to read more from those journals.)

The paper my students are currently assigned is a textual analysis. They are set to pick apart a piece of writing (something recent from the Opinion section of the New York Times), looking at it in terms of its overall effectiveness at fulfilling its evident purpose for its presumed audience. I have to wonder what would result from such attention to my own writing--which is not something I can reasonably provide, being too close to the composition of it to be able to assume the necessary perspective. (Also, I am minded of the...issues attendant on self-critiquing work. Poe's "Philosophy of Composition" comes to mind as an easy example of how such endeavors can go wrong.) That does not mean I am not aware of certain things in my writing, to be sure. My prose entries to this webspace, for example, are usually 500 to 550 words or thereabouts, and they tend to include both a single link and the statement that "work continues." The word count is something I set out to do, as I believe the length is useful as a sort of warm-up for a day of reading and writing, as well as teaching of the same. The others, as well as other features I have seen and do not note here, are largely organic, authentic products of my writing process and development. What they suggest about the audience I explicitly and implicitly try to address, about my expected primary and imagined secondary readership, about what I am trying to do for each, I am not certain--although I know that they are revelatory of things of which I am normally unaware. Whether I succeed in any of it for any of them, I am also unsure. It is to uncover such things that my students are set on the current paper. I have no small hope that they will succeed, even if the pieces they read ultimately do not.