Own the Blog!

As promised, I just e-mailed everyone invitations to become authors on the blog. You should accept; it's a course requirement.

Since there are only nine of you, I'll go ahead and pull back the curtain: there's a pedagogical point to having you be authors on the blog. I find that classes work better and students learn more when I build in ways for them to wrestle independently with the course content. Figuring out what kinds of questions to ask, getting curious and following up on that curiosity, measuring ones own insights against the ways other people respond to a text: these are all important skills for reading and writing about literature. One can learn by watching the instructor do all these things, but it's more fun (and more effective) to learn by doing it oneself.

So: in addition to answering the questions I pose on the blog, you can now

• ask questions of your own for your classmates to respond to,
• muse and invite reactions,
• start a conversation about why certain critical frameworks seem troubling,
• expose your ignorance and give your classmates freedom to do the same,
• reveal your erudition and give your classmates helpful background,
• try to nail down answers to interpretive close-reading questions,
• invite discussion of big-picture issues,
• question authority,
• identify useful connections between present-day texts and these poems,
• say what you didn't get to say in class,
• clarify a thought that you fear you expressed poorly in class,
• and so on.

Generally, blog posts that contribute meaningfully to the ongoing semester-long conversation about women and C18 poetry will get blog credit. Recipes, pet photos, random YouTube clips, and the like will not (though we will no doubt find them amusing).

As Mr Garrison of South Park says, "There are no stupid questions, only stupid students." You guys have CLEARLY demonstrated in class discussion that you are not stupid students, so you need not fear the stupid questions. In fact, there's a lot to be said for stupid questions. One of my dissertation advisers was renowned for asking stupid questions that only revealed his abysmal ignorance of critical feminist theory and his complete cluelessness about race and class. I'd roll my eyes at the questions (which usually came in the form of comments on a chapter draft) and then set out to answer them...and a while later I'd still be thinking...and by the time I had actually formulated a response, I'd realize that the stupid questions had led me to some important insights.

If no one writes anything, I'll build some additional carrots and sticks into this course component--but for now I'll just see how it goes.