unmanlyfesto for teaching writing next time, part 2

• Make it a practicum. Write and workshop in class more often.
• Work on several different “types” of writing simultaneously.
• Make students write short things more often.
• Have more one-on-one conferences with me.
• Make workshops/peer reviews shorter and involve less commitment.
• Call it a “creative thinking” course, but say that you can’t create just by thinking. You have to do something, and what you’ll do in this class is create writing. You’ll create creative thoughts by making texts (i.e. writing). There are plenty of other ways to make creative thoughts and in an important sense, writing is old fashioned. But people still think it’s so important, so we’re going to stick with it for now. Say: “Thinking is worthless without writing.”
• Read Wayne Booth’s “The Rheotircal Situation” on days one and two. Have students read it aloud in class and talk through confusing things and have them read it at home in between the first two classes so they can really engage it. Splice this reading in with brief intros and getting-to-know-you type stuff. This will be a struggle we can all endure together, in order to form a community… like the people in that movie Alive.
• Begin the semester with a simple, easily accessible and easily get-mad-about-able essay that makes a serious (that is, not ironic/too tongue-in-cheek) argument about a non-serious issue (that is, not directly political or with obviously grave consequences), e.g. Amy Gross’s article offering dating advice. Have students summarize and rebut this argument. Then have students read these two arguments (the original essay and one classmate’s rebuttal) “across” each other, compare-contrasting them to gain some insight into one or both. Also have them write a more “free” response to their classmate’s paper, giving it a “critique” from their own perspective. Part of the point of this is to, with any luck, show them that a critique based on the framework of another text is more easily kept controlled, balanced, organized, and coherent than a critique based on their own vague, unarticulated position. The latter type of critique also, oddly or not, tends to seem like a critique “in general” or from an “objective” perspective….
• Not focus on what my students do wrong… I mean wrong. I sometimes tend to focus on things that I can easily say are just wrong because these things are easier to deal with.
• More emphatically emphasize that the point of critique is to say something non-obvious, “come to a deeper understanding,” as Behrens and Rosen say, about a text. Add that the non-obvious thing is a construction. It’s something they, as authors, invent.
• Emphasize that I’m not going to chase them down about stuff. I don’t want to have to worry excessively about who handed in what….