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A thread in which I admittedly crow a bit about something I figured out this semester but am mostly grateful to those who helped me along the way:
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been teaching the literary studies intro class this semester, working with students on their close reading and other literary analysis skills across four different genres. +
The class has been an utter delight, and my students were all super engaged before the world fell apart. And they’ve been total troupers since, hanging in with me through the more cringy moments on Zoom. +
But the essays they wrote for me during the first half of the semester… they were fine, but it sometimes felt to me like they were missing something. Missing some life. Some purpose. +
It suddenly hit me, in grading their second essays several weeks back, that the problem was that I’d given them an assignment and a rubric and in response they were Writing An Essay. +
Almost all of them fell into a kind of formal mechanics that drained their writing of passion and instead focused them on fulfilling a set of what felt to them like artificial requirements. +
As it turns out, the third unit of the class focused on the genre of the essay, for which we read @tressiemcphd’s Thick and @jiatolentino’s Trick Mirror. And over spring break, I read @biblioracle’s Why They Can’t Write. +
Somewhere in there, the penny finally dropped. +
We spent our time in class talking about how the essays we were reading worked, and why they worked that way. And I threw out my assignment and my rubric and I asked my students to write an essay, instead of An Essay. +
The requirements were a little more amorphous than what most of them are used to. I asked them to open up a question that derives from their reading of one of the texts we’ve read together so far. +
I asked them to engage with a range of kinds of evidence in their exploration of that question: textual evidence, empirical evidence, personal history. I asked them not to make an argument per se, but to think, and to let me see them in the act of thinking. +
I’m grading that batch of essays right now, and though I’m only a few into the pile, I am already blown away by their loveliness. By their inquisitiveness. By their braveness. +
So huge thanks to @tressiemcphd, and to @jiatolentino, and especially to @biblioracle for making this part of the semester such a joy, everything else notwithstanding. I’m hugely grateful.
