Textual Analysis

Apparently this whole teaching writing thing is really getting to me. Last night, my "nightmare" was that one of Joseph's professors told him in a conference that he was a very bad writer and that a paper he had written was horrible. As a result, my husband was quite distraught, and I started planning to go find this professor and take him down (by telling him that no good teacher would say that to a student).

So clearly the idea that it's wrong to tell a student that she's a bad writer is now part of my subconscious--and it enters the ethic of my dreams. But I think that so far this semester, none of my students are the "bad writers" they insisted they were when they wrote their first freewrites. To be honest, every student who has participated and come to class at least 75% of this semester has done a fantastic job on the writing we've done so far. They are proving my hypothesis that it takes work to write well, but it is nowhere close to impossible.

For instance, I've enjoyed grading most of the memoir final drafts. Every student that actually put effort into revision dramatically improved the memoir from the first draft. Perhaps I did a better job explaining and emphasizing revision? Also, the textual analysis seems to be clicking so far. Last year, so many of my students were sidetracked into talking about the topic of the article they were analyzing rather than the argument techniques used in the essay. This year, most of them seem to get the idea, partly because they have been doing the work and participating in class exercises.

So, all this to say . . . I'm happy. Let's keep going.