Getting Personal

This is the assignment that my students are currently working on -- they had rough drafts due last Thursday, which I just checked off, and we peer- and group-edited in class, and they have final drafts due tomorrow.  So I can't say, with any conclusiveness, to what extent it "worked".  But Robin said I should post about it anyway.  So here we are.

In many ways it follows my normal protocol for first assignments:  it is short, relatively simple, directly linked to the stuff we've been reading and talking about (requiring no outside research), and private -- in Michael Warner's sense of not written to strangers (as in "public" (or "published") writing).  My logic behind this is, we can tell our students "write for your audience!" till we're blue in the face, but if they don't have a clear idea who their audience is, they will often fall back into the vague idea of their audience as half-my-teacher-half-a-poorly-defined-general-reading-public-that-will-never-actually-read-this-but-I'm-supposed-to-pretend-they-will.  So I ask them to write to someone specific -- and then, to actually send it to this person or people.

In this case, it's their m/others.  I took this mostly from Robin, with his recurring heuristic, "Can you explain this to your mother?"  But from there it grew.  I decided -- rightly or wrongly -- that they shouldn't just EXPLAIN it to their m/others; they should also work to CONVINCE their m/others that it matters, that it's relevant. 

Some people are getting very, very personal.  One student (admittedly an advanced Comp Lit major) who chose to share her work in class last week wrote a beautiful letter to her mother, linking her discovery of letters between her mother and her father from their divorce to Leopold von Ranke's conception of source-based scientific history.  Others, whose work I have seen, remain more superficial and predictably "school-like" in tone and focus -- but their writing is still more direct and personal than in comparable "paper"-writing I've seen.

But I want, as a final thought, to discuss the work of one particular student, a first-year whom I knew from the class Robin and I taught last semester, and who came into office hours last week to discuss her writing.  It was a good but basic explanation of Hegel and how it might relate to the current situation in Egypt.  Good, but unremarkable -- and impersonal.  I called her on it.  I asked her more about her older sister, whom she was writing about, and how she could communicate these ideas more specifically and relevantly to her.  She started telling me about her, including about the death of her mother, and her sister's ensuing attempts to take over the role of mother, and her pain at the rupturing of sisterly bonds.  She started to cry, and didn't stop for several minutes.  I asked her if she was all right, and wanted to keep talking; she was, and she did.

By the end of the conversation, we had established two things:  one, a foundation for her to start over and rethink her writing on much more personal grounds; two, the decision that she would NOT send this letter to her sister.  I explained to her my reasons for wanting students to actually send out their writings (she had been absent when we discussed them in class), and that in her case, it seemed like the opposite prescription would be most effective:  she could write more personally and more honestly if she knew that she would NOT have to send this letter to her sister, that she and I would be the only people to ever read it.  She agreed.  Yet another reminder, I told myself, that no method is inherently good (or bad) in and of itself; context is so very important. 

A postscript:  we met again yesterday to flesh out some of the details of her writing.  By the end of the conversation, I was encouraging her -- but very clearly not requiring her -- to send this to her sister.  I may have encouraged her too eagerly.  I am hoping we have built a trusting relationship strong enough to handle that.  I think so.