If my blog sucks, I want you to tell me.

Before you read this, please note: I am a hypocrite. I have yet to make the responses I’d like to make to my classmates’ blog posts this week. I understand we have jobs and families and other responsibilities and that we’re all not perfect. I get that. I guess what I’m trying to do, here, is to stir the pot a little, to be a cheerleader of sorts, and to point out above anything, that I need to be a better classmate. Maybe my lapse in performance will inspire others? I hope.

I’m frustrated. Why? Because I always feel like I have no clue what I’m talking about in my blogs. While I enjoy reading about teaching writing, ways to offer student writing guidance, syllabus recommendations, and teaching style suggestions, etc., I am at a loss to apply these recommendations in a real-time setting. In other words, I am not managing a class where I can apply the “oh yeah, I do this and this doesn’t work for me but this will” frame of mind. All I can do is take up the spectator’s point of view and try to make some out-of-the-box connection between what I’ve just read and what I can say about my own experiences. Usually I make up some wacky connection because it’s a way for me to make sense of what I’m reading. Also to entertain myself. But at the same time, I wonder if my connection is a disconnect for others. I DON’T KNOW unless someone responds to me and either asks a poignant question or says something like “I see what you’re saying here, but I would like some clarification.” If I write something that no one responds to, then what the heck am I writing for? If you write something that no one responds to, what the heck are you writing for? All I can think is, then: apparently whatever I’m saying is crap. As a student, I do not feel validated when no one responds because I am hungry for comments, for feedback, for controversy, for any kind of communication that suggests that someone is simply listening. Before I make anyone angry, I really don’t want to come off as all “woe-is-me” to anyone. Instead of speaking for myself, I’d like to think I am speaking for everyone when I say that it is an important part of the learning process (especially learning about writing, for goodness sakes!) if we all try to do a better job at acknowledging what others have said in our blogs whether we agree or disagree or agree to disagree. I’m guilty of being lazy and waiting until the last minute to read a blog. Or forget to read your blog entirely. This is crap. I’m owning up to my inadequacies, here, to say that even I need to do a better job at consuming your writing. Talk about applying textual lessons, here, huh? Maybe I am able to do some “real time” application after all. But either way, I’m still going to vent that:

I’m frustrated.

I feel like sometimes I come off as preachy in my blog posts. I never want to appear as a person who simply says “we should be doing this,” or “this is wrong, and this is why something else is so much better” when I truly have no authority to say so. Or do I? Is this what we’re supposed to question—how much authority we have, as students, to question the learning process about the writing process? In a very real sense, Julie is teaching us how to produce text for a specific audience (our class—and the world wide web, even!) so that we can not only use blogs to broaden our understanding of each reading assignment, but so that we can see each other as resources. Our blogs validate us as students. Our blogs belong to us, not the class, not the teacher, to US! Our blogs allow us to develop our own teacher and student identity at the same time. How cool is that?! So why do I feel so freaking

Frustrated.

I feel like I “get it,” but at times I feel I’m forced to take a back seat point of view and watch and listen to the experts. This is incredibly helpful, don’t get me wrong. I feel as though I have learned just as much from my teacher/practitioner classmates than I learn from the reading. I’m frustrated because I lack the ability to come at each point from a similar perspective; I really am an observer. And that’s frustrating. True life, but still frustrating. Maybe a way to solve this particular frustration is to understand, for myself, ways in which I have the agency to apply lessons learned on teaching writing—in scholarship workshop sessions or in helping the student ethics committee write letters of counseling, for example. Maybe my own frustration stems from failure to see where I already do apply the principles of discovery through writing. Still,

I’m frustrated.

I want you to help me know what I don’t know. I want you to be just as much a part of my own discovery as I am excited to be a part of yours. If we’re talking about writing and audiences and content and purpose and style and grammar, what are we getting from these assignments if no one says anything about my (or your!) content and style and thoughts and ideas and personal discoveries? Aren’t we learning how to give feedback? Aren’t we learning how to validate students’ perspectives as diverse texts from varied points of view? Aren’t we all the same team despite our advantages or disadvantages of having classroom experience?

I want to get as much out of this classroom experience as I possibly can. I bet, too, that I’m supposed to feel frustrated—isn’t that a part of the learning process? Right now, I’m negotiating my own understanding of the writing process, wrestling with topics that I’ve never considered before. This is certainly no easy task! I need to try to be more helpful to my classmates, to offer feedback and to post blogs that don’t suck. But if they do suck, I want you to tell me…

because I don’t want to be frustrated anymore.