#lessonfail

The image above has been snapped from a word doc that appeared on a transparency (overheads: my technology of choice) for a writing exercise I led last year in tutorial. The course was English 104: Introduction to Prose Genres and we were working, broadly, on life writing studied through Lacanian theory (I know, right). The required reading for this session was Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

I chose this lesson for our current discussion because of two features: first, I've never created a formal writing assignment, ie. one that was submitted as part of the students' final grade, and second, I think that we should pay some attention to "informal" or "low stakes" or whatever euphemism is cool, in-class writing activities. In my experience as a high school and undergraduate student, I thought these were a total bore. In some of my earliest English classes in university, we were still dwelling on "what happened in the summer"!! And they thought they could make it more literary by getting us to talk about "the last book we read"!!! When I started TAing, I quickly learned that the buzz on these chores is that they are "diagnostic", and thus have reevaluated their import.

In this case, the students were asked to write The Autobiography of Clint Burnham, who was the course's professor. Here's the catch ...actually not really a catch, I'm just using that for effect. Everybody knew about it. The course outline vehemently stated that "students [were] required to follow me [Clint] on twitter". This was intended to emphasize the role of social media in identity construction and to valorize Facebook and Twitter as new forms of life writing.

Stein's Autobiography, summarized really reductively ..I love that book... is written from the point of view of her partner Alice, but oscillates back and forth between the two women's stories. I wanted the students to think about voice, tone and narration and thought there was surely no better way to complicate these than by putting them to work. At the same time, I realized there was no better fodder than "Dr. Burnham" (which they called him in spite of his online Prof_Clinty monicker) and his voice, tone, narration, and life.

We reviewed four pages of his most recent tweets on the projector, because I was unconvinced that student's were following him regularly, listened to the Beach House album he references, and then wrote for about ten minutes. I thought it was really hilarious that most of my aims for the review (again, voice, tone, narration) were derailed as I was forced to give a virtual "Author's Tour" in the style of Hemingway's favourite bars in Havana of Clint's East Vancouver neighbourhood. I assume he thought that his young students would know about the coffee houses, used bookstores, and hipster nightclub (I wish there was a more precise word to describe Vancouver's Biltmore, but really, it's just a hipster nightclub) that he tweeted n' hashtagged. Even in a class where half the students were from within the city limits, as opposed to the suburbs, these hotspots for cultural capital were totally lost by them. One girl was able to locate the Biltmore on the basis of its location "across the street from a Honda dealership".

So the success of the assignment was that it was really funny, producing some hilarious associations between a prof and his students...and his TA, also his student. It was mid-semester, so I wasn't worried so much about diagnostics, but the subtle goals I had in mind about really enacting Stein's methods, etc. were largely lost. But it was really damn funny.