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January 25, 2006
My Anticipated Reading List
Despite missing a day at work due to a hateful stomach bug, I'm almost through with my first round of conferences with Freshmen Composition students. While I do enjoy lecturing, the opportunity to discuss ideas on an individual basis is especially fun for me. It's exciting to sit down with a scribbled freewrite and then pull out some valuable idea that can be expanded into an engaging piece of academic prose; I feel like we're pulling rabbits out of hats.
A digression-filled draft about a community peanut festival has now been redirected to an exploration of being both an "insider" and an "outsider" in a small southern town. Sprawling musings on soccer, cooking, and art have are now contributing to a thoughtful piece on perfectionism and quitting. I'll be reading essays on performance anxiety, meeting a spouse on the internet, running as an emotional vent, the juxtapositions of brokenness and prosperity in a Nebraskan town, the unexpected difficulties of being a first semester freshmen, slowly growing apart from a longtime roommate, developing a character as an actress, wrestling with the effects of living cross-culturally... and more. One student told me, "I didn't think I was smart enough to write about something like that." "It was your idea to start with," I replied. And it was true. She had just needed help recognizing the value of something already embedded in her own experience.
In my weakened state, I'm tempted to slide off into trite-but-raputurous exclamations like, "It will all be worth it if even one student learns to be a little more self-reflective." We'll hold off the party until I have twenty-two writing portfolios in my possession. But, right now, I want these ideas to become coherent, engaging, confident writing that appeals to varied audiences. I'm excited to show students how they can set their own ideas and stories into broader, more meaningful contexts. And I am very glad, indeed, that I (still) have this job.
Professorial Masquerade | By elissa | 02:21 PM
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Comments
Care to moonlight as a writing coach/guide/thingy in any spare time? Even one insight or two to my non-intrinsically-writery brain will really help me.
Posted by: Krista at January 25, 2006 10:44 PM
Let me guess, the community peanut festival?
Dothan, Alabama.
Posted by: Luther at January 28, 2006 04:40 PM
