Not Sure Yet:

The Shared Anthology of Modular 84

Heather Burchell

Locating

Sumara writes, “The classroom is the site of complex,

interwoven relationships: between teacher and students, students

and each other, teachers and texts, students and texts. Moreover,

these relationships overlap and intertwine; we are entangled in

them” (p. 6). So, then, what the heck am I doing here? If I was

entangled – no, if I am entangled in these complex

relationships, how could I propose to present an uncomplicated,

disentangled glimpse back into my – our- classroom?

I can’t, of course.

This is, instead, what some of my students and I are seeing

as we go back – this time, for surely the next time we’d see

something different – to our class blog from the spring semester.

With me, I bring the following questions (and others, really, but

these most explicitly): What effect did it have upon our

community for the customarily private – that is, students’ own

1

writing – to be so consistently public? While there is often

space to hide in a classroom, what did it mean for my students to

be “seen” so regularly? How were they positioning themselves in

their writing knowing that their peers – as well as their teacher

– would be their readers? How did they encourage and challenge

one another? What texts were created?

Sumara also writes, “The relationship, then, between the

reader and the literary fiction as the commonplace is something

that must be examined in greater detail. What is the significance

of this relationship? How do these reading relationships become

positioned among interpersonal relationships? What effect does

one seem to have on the other?” (p. 50). What if that literary

“fiction” isn’t exactly a fiction, necessarily, but is instead

the writings of another reader from within the community? Through

this blog the roles of reader and writer were constantly being

negotiated; a student who was a reader of another student’s blog

could be (and usually was) a writer a minute later as he typed a

comment to a post.

I’d always thought about this as a writing exercise, and I

read the blogs mostly as they were posted, going back at the end

2

of the week to look at the comments. I’ve never read it this way

– straight through, with leisure, as a complete text. And I’ve

never thought about this as something that established a reading

community, a commonplace of its own.

The Inception

I first used blogging with a class with my first tenth grade

Advanced Placement class in the spring semester of 2006. I had

just taken a master’s class entitled Teaching of Writing, which

was really my first experience with progressive pedagogy – my

first encounter with the Writing Project, the English Journal,

the idea of the teacher sharing her own writing with students, of

using writing as a thinking process. I had started my own blog in

August of 2005 in the early stages of my divorce. My Teaching of

Writing professor had taught us about the idea of publishing

student writing, which sparked the idea of a class blog. (This

was right as teachers were beginning to publish about using

blogging in classrooms.) I wanted my students to write more, to

write on topics of their choosing, and to write for a real

audience. I found that when my students wrote just for me, they’d

trip over themselves trying to come up with what they thought I

3

wanted, which inevitably meant that it wasn’t what I wanted.

Additionally, I had always struggled with the thought that I

should be “grading” everything students wrote. This relieved some

of that pressure. I intended it to be purely a writing exercise,

although I did require that the students comment on at least two

other blogs each week. I agreed with current research on writing

with technology: “Using Internet resources such as… blogs… as

venues for publication not only broadens students' audience, but

they also make students more accountable for their writing and

help them to understand the vital nature of clarity, voice, and

tone, especially when many Internet publication sites give the

opportunity for readers to directly respond to the writer” (Irwin

& Knodle, 2008).

At the beginning of the next semester, however, I discovered

that my district had blocked Blogger. Because I was teaching

college prep classes that year, fewer of my students had access

to technology outside of school. Booking time in a computer lab

was nearly impossible, so I stopped having my classes blog.

At the end of 2007, a few things shifted. My department

needed a semi-complicated Excel spreadsheet, and I was the

4

resident technogeek. Through working on that, I became acquainted

with the technology director for the district, who was in her

final couple of weeks with the district. I had been recruited to

do an in-service presentation on Web 2.0: Forums, Chats, Blogs

and Wikis, so I asked her to unlock at least the old blog for my

presentation, which she immediately granted. A new technology

release had been distributed to all of the parents, and this one

included permission for blogging. I had also been given a

classroom set of laptops through the Classrooms for the Future

grant, so I began to campaign for full Blogger access. The timing

was perfect; the technology director’s last move was to unblock

Blogger.

Things Change

In the spring of 2008, I had my second AP 10 English class.

Several things had changed in the two years since I’d last taught

it. First, we’d rewritten the curriculum and made the AP program

a three-year track instead of four. My last AP class had come in

after a full semester together and was already a tight-knit; I

was something of an interloper to that established community.

They wrote deep, introspective blogs from the start.

5

The eleven individuals who walked into my classroom in

January 2008, however, knew – or knew of – each other, but the

dynamic was very different. They were tentative around each other

and me. It was apparent that they were nervous to be in an AP

class.

And then again, this wasn’t any AP class. Since I knew I

would be getting a class set of laptops, I had started thinking

about how to use them. It seemed something of a waste to use them

just for the traditional English-class-in-a-computer-lab

activities: research on an assigned topic, writing a report, or

editing. I felt like the laptops opened up endless possibilities,

and I was ready to experiment. What if I let the kids work

through the “curriculum” of American literature, choosing the

pieces that they wanted to read and creating their own

assignments? What would that look like? Quite honestly, I didn’t

have the answer to that.

I came in on the first day of the semester, looked back at

eleven unfamiliar faces, and used a line that would become quite

familiar to the class: “So, I had this idea.” I described the

6

concept and asked if they were interested. I knew that if we were

going to shake things up like this, they’d need to be on board.

They were.

And that night, I had to figure out how, exactly, we were

going to do this.

Ours

I really had no idea how important the blog would be to this

particular class when I set it up that night. To get started, I

picked a template and posted a temporary title: “Not Sure Yet.”

The students’ only whole-class homework assignment of the

semester was to go home that night and to set up a Google log-in,

since this step was blocked on the school’s computers. I wrote an

introduction to blogging, saying, “As the mood strikes you, you

can start a new post in the blog.” (I did, however, expect the

mood to strike each student at least once a week for ten points.)

“The purpose is to reflect on what you're learning in class.

Maybe you weren't given enough time to make a point. Maybe you

were riding the bus home (or walking... or driving... whatever),

and you had a most brilliant idea that you simply must share with

us. Maybe you found some sort of real-life or cross-curricular

7

connection to something we've discussed. Maybe you were doing

some research and came across the most fascinating information….

Or maybe you've just got something weighing on your heart that

you need to write about. Spill it.”

Aleda1 wrote back: “Hmmm so I've created my blogger account

and I have no clue where to start. We haven't really learned much

in class so far...any ideas??”

This uncertainty was a common theme in those early days:

“Okay, so, now what?” As Sumara (1996) says, “There is comfort in

the right answer” (p. 5). In a Facebook IM chat this week, Emily

and I talked about the beginning of the course. She wrote, “i

mean, there weren't any answers for me, but there weren't any for

you either.2”

I wrote back, “were there ever? concrete answers?”

1 I decided not to use pseudonyms for this paper. These are my students’ words, and the work that we did in this classroom was always our work, not mine. To take away their given names would, I feel, devalue their authorship and mutual ownership of this larger project we have begun together.2 In IM chats, participants usually do not follow the traditional conventions of language. For this paper, I’ve decided not to “polish” any IM chats, with the exception of correcting typos (like “owuld” to “would”). A lot of teachersseem to think that technology has “ruined” students’ writing. Instead, with this class, I found that they were able to do a sort of technological code-shifting. Even though posting to Blogger was online writing, their blogs (and their comments!) were rather polished. When we’d use chat or IM to communicate, however, both they and I would drop some conventions, like capitalization, and add others, like abbreviations and acronyms.

8

She responded bluntly, “nope.”

The trick for these AP kids was learning to be okay with

that.

But who am I kidding? That was the trick for me, too. How

was I going to handle something like grading on this blog? I need

to add – or, rather, confess – something. I can’t say that this

is my style of teaching. Maybe it is now, but it certainly

didn’t come naturally to me. I am (was?) an anal-retentive

teacher. As Emily pointed out in our chat, “you had so many

binders it was scary. you seemed really organized at first

impressions.” In a lot of ways, I was like these kids. I was good

at “doing school” – but as a teacher. I had enormous unit plans

and calendars of what to teach on each day, from January through

June. Don’t teachers have to be flexible? Heh. Sure. I was. I

built in one flex day each month to accommodate for snow days,

the random pep rally or – gasp – a class discussion that wasn’t

neatly wrapped up at the end of a particular lesson.

So when other teachers told me, “I could never do this with

a class. I’m just not global enough.” I’d snicker. Not outwardly.

(Well, sometimes.)

9

But there was a negotiation that needed to occur. I wanted

these kids to learn to love learning again, to stop doing things

just for a grade. Elbow (1993) writes, “For I find that the

greatest and most powerful breakthroughs in learning occur when I

can get myself and others to put aside this nagging, self-doubting

question (‘How am I doing? How am I doing?’)—and instead to take

some chances, trust our instincts or hungers” (p.197). Yup. I buy

that. But grading is still an institutional practice, and these

kids had been taught certain things about it: longer work will

get you a better grade, even if you don’t have anything more to

say. If it’s not graded, you don’t have to do it.

So, I made the blogs worth ten points. And I couldn’t bring

myself to just give every blogging student a full score. I went

with my gut. If a kid blew me away, they got a ten. Mostly, they

all got nines. If I felt that she had done a rush job, it was a

seven. Eights were borderline. I still don’t know that it was the

right way to handle it. I asked Emily this week what she thought

about the grading. She typed back, “you grading it just made it

awesome, because we knew we HAD to do it. if you didn't grade it,

10

i don't think that we would have done it. grading it just made it

mandatory.”

I pressed for more. “what if i'd just given you 10/10 each

week? was it fair for me to grade subjectively like that?”

She wrote, “if you gave us a 10/10 each week, we wouldn't

try to improve our writing and it would become was too informal.

it was a perfect balance. it was formal enough for us to try, but

not formal enough for it to be stuffy. If that makes sense. i

think that is why it took us a while to get what was going on,

because we had to find the balance.”

The Early Blogs

I can’t say that I was thrilled with the students’ initial

blog entries. To be honest, I’d expected a lot more from them.

Like Isabella said in the documentary the class made as their

final project, each one was impersonal, something that “anyone

could have written.” The first post is titled “Snow!!!!!” and

begins “Just that one word can bring a smile to every teenagers

face, a hope to their hearts and a rumor to their lips. But snow

rumors don’t just affect kids hopes and wishes. They tend to also

affect their teachers and parents.” It received three comments,

11

mostly along the lines of “I like snow days too!” Another ended

with “…the time will fly by like the seconds. Or it might go by

very slowly. I don’t know, so I guess I’ll have to play it by ear

and hope for the best” – which is a bunch of words that don’t

really say much at all.

Hmm. Not exactly the intellectual discourse over the great

mysteries of life I’d been hoping for.

There were four other posts about the weather/seasons,

several about sickness (it was January, after all), one about

mothers, another with no discernable topic, and then mine about

the meaning of life. I wasn’t very present (or at least visibly

so) in the blog in those early days. I wanted it, I think, to be

their thing, but I’d heard that teachers should share their

writing. My post was about someone I’d met the previous weekend

whose sole goal in life (or so it seemed) was to collect as much

Simpsons’ memorabilia as possible. “Maybe I’m the one that’s

wrong,” I said in my conclusion. “Maybe I’m looking for too much

significance and meaning in life, but isn’t it all that we have?

What else is there? I feel so desperate about living a full life.

I’m scared of wasting time!” In the comments responding to my

12

post, we get the first glimmers of something personal in the

blog. Mike left the last comment: “I expect a lot of myself,

because others expect me to be like my brothers…” He is the

fourth child in an Eastburg family known for its overachieving

boys, athlete-scholar extraordinaires.

In the quote cited earlier, Elbow says that students need to

stop worrying about how they’re doing in order to begin taking

risks in the writing. For AP students, “How am I doing?” usually

means, “What is my grade?” However, in the design of this

particular course, playing it safe usually meant that students

couldn’t get a ten out of ten. In the beginning of the semester,

students and I conferenced often about their blog entries. My

notes from February 19th say that Jasmine and I talked about “how

to write significant blog entries.” (Her next post several days

later is about insecurities.) That same day, Nicole and I “talked

about the need to move past ‘full credit’ and right/wrong with

schoolwork. Discussed what I’m evaluating them on w/ blogging.”

And Mike and I “discussed potential topics for blogging and how

to find them.”

The Anthology

13

I printed out the blog to write this paper. There had never

really been any need to do this before, but I wanted to be able

to make notes besides the entries and whatnot. Once I punched

holes in it and stuck it in a binder, I was struck by the bulk of

it. It truly is an anthology. It is four months of documentation

and reflection on the life of our country, our school, ourselves.

It’s 203 pages long, not counting recent posts or any of the

comments, which were often a page or more in response to a single

post.

It was a misreading of Sumara that led me to begin to

realize the weight of this document. He quotes Iser, and somehow

I remembered “literary anthropology” as “shared anthology” (p.

211). I suppose they sound similar, but as is often true, my

mistake led to an illumination of what this blog was for this

particular class. We read just two texts together as a class –

The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby – at opposite ends of the

semester. Beyond that, the eleven students operated independently

from each other, except for some occasional overlaps for a group

project here and there. For the most part, over the course of the

14

semester, the blog was the only thing that we were all reading at

the same time.

It was our “shared anthology.”

Our commonplace.

It was, in some ways, our only enduring opportunity to form

a community.

But before I can say that they weren’t a community

initially, I first need to pin down this nebulous concept of

community. Chayko (2008) says that is it “a set of people who

share a special kind of identity and culture and regular,

patterned social interaction” (p. 6). It seems that there must be

more than this, though. These eleven students certainly shared an

identity – out of the three hundred-odd students in their year,

they were the only eleven taking AP English; they were all

traditionally “good” students. The “regular, patterned social

interaction” occurred through daily sessions of class, but the

culture is harder to define and perhaps is the piece that must

develop.

Sumara clarifies the concept of community further. He

identifies the etymological link between community and

15

communication – to be a community necessitates communication

between people (p. 142). Last week, Amanda wrote in a reflection,

“Blogger is/was more than a website. It is a means of

communication for us. Now, some people would argue that

‘communicating through the computer is dehumanizing and killing

normal conversation.’ Blogger always made me feel connected in

class.” Sumara continues to build his description of community:

“Within these communal structures of communication, something is

held in common, something is shared” (p. 142). Within this

community, then, there must be collaboration. It is a “common

goal or good” that binds it together (p. 142). Again, this is not

something the class could have had initially. Each student was an

individual posting to the blog to receive an individual grade.

The collaborative work began, I believe, in the comments that

student left for one another – their “service to the community”

(p. 142). The “goal,” then, was good writing (p. 143). In comment

after comments, students praised one another’s writing. Once they

felt safe around one another, they also began to suggest areas

for improvement, responding to each other as genuine readers.

16

Elbow (1993) states that when students frequently read each

other, community is built (p. 202). So how were students reading

each other? How were they writing themselves? What was going on

in that blog, anyway?

Getting Used to It

When I think back to the first weeks of the blog, I always

think of Mike’s first entry. He wrote about a weekend away with

his youth group. And he included every. single. detail. It was

endless: we did this, and then this, and then this happened.

There weren’t any significant usage errors (which he even pointed

out to me at one point in a parenthetical note of his own: “I

didn’t misspell it, Ms. Burchell!”). It would be a nice document

for him to reread in the future to remember what had obviously

been a fun weekend for him, but as his reader, I could see

nothing that I could take away from this experience. I’d say this

often to one of the students in a conference about the blog:

“What do you want your reader to get from this?” Learning to

position themselves for an authentic audience didn’t come

naturally to these students. Some of them wrote for themselves in

personal journals, but beyond that, the only other person they

17

wrote for with any regularity was The Teacher. Each teacher

wanted something different each year. Now here I was, telling

them to write in their own voice, and they were so far removed

from that voice that they really had no idea what it might look

like in print.

When Mike reflected on blogging last week, he also brought

up his first blog. “I remember my first blog, from when I went on

the youth group trip. I'm gonna be completely honest, I thought

it was going to be great when I was writing it. And my comments

that I got on it were pretty much ‘Oh, sounds like fun’-type

things, because then we didn't know one another enough to

completely shoot people down yet (fortunately, now I can do that

whenever I want). Then a few weeks later someone mentioned how my

writing was getting better, and I thought ‘Wasn't it good enough

before?’”

The Day to Day Life of the Blog

Throughout the semester, the students did different things

within their blog entries. They played with the technological

aspects of text – changing colors to match different moods or

themes of an entry. They used their writing to discover things,

18

like Mishal when she wrote, “I just realized how ironic that is;

we both left the country.” They documented school events and

wrote about what it meant to have been a child of the nineties.

They reflected on things from their childhood and things that had

just happened.

They varied the types of writing they were doing, too,

although most students had a preferred style. Amanda loved to

pose questions to her readers at the end of each entry. Sean told

a different story from his life each week, often about a nail-

biting game in which he had played.

There were things I saw, going back and rereading, that I

hadn’t noticed, like Sean’s humor and ability to capture the

wonder of a child, like when he described his experience dressed

up like Woody from Toy Story at Disney World and interacting with

Buzz Lightyear. I noticed where I could begin to notice the

idiosyncrasies of their writing, and it became something of a

game for me, to look at the same typeface and try to determine

who had written the post (the blog author was listed at the end

of each entry).

19

Tentatively, they began to write about subjects closer to

their heart and revealed more of themselves. In mid-February

Heather (no, not me) wrote a post about maturity and then

revealed, “The reason I’ve brought this up is because I’ve

recently had to be the bigger person in a situation with one of

my friends.” She doesn’t use any specifics or elaborate on the

situation, but it is a foot testing the water. Sumara writes,

“The stories that we tell about ourselves and our experiences

reflect our history of interactions with others in the world. It

is the arrangement of language into narrative forms that gives us

a sense of self and allows others a point of access to that self.

Telling stories, listening to them, and reading them (to oneself

or others) opens a window to other worlds, other persons, and

other experiences” (p. 85).

Students began to play with each other on the blog, too.

Mike responds to one of Aleda’s posts: “You stole my blogging

subject.” He then references an inside joke that had happened in

class. This type of thing began to happen more and more

frequently. Students would begin by talking about a subject to

one another in class and then carry that conversation – or that

20

joke – to the blog. Or they’d be reading the blog in class, start

laughing, read a line or two aloud to the class – and then type a

written comment.

Self Work

The blog quickly became a place where students began to

figure out who they were. In the early blogs, their identity work

seemed to be more of a “placing” of self than a “locating.” For

instance, in Amanda’s second blog, she seems to be introducing

herself to her classmates in a way with sentences that start like

“I’m just your…” or “I am” or “I’ve always…”. She sees herself,

at this point in the semester, as something defined, and she is

unable to see the ways that she contradicts herself throughout

the post. For Amanda in this writing, identity is.

Sumara (1996), in reflecting on identity, claims that

“First, the self can never be imprisoned in the body. It exists

in the largely invisible relations among others, within the

culturally-made artifacts that emerge from the natural world, out

of our conditions of our ‘thrown-ness’ in the world, and from the

historically-effected conditions of all of these” (p. 60).

Students began to do this work through their comments to one

21

another. They sought places of “sameness”, telling the writer of

an entry about a similar experience or feeling that they’d once

had, and they used a writer’s observations or rhetorical

questions to think out loud. Isabella wrote a post about the

monotony of her daily routine. “Will every day be like this for

the rest of my life?” she wonders. Mike comments and uses her

post to do some wondering of his own: “How can I find something

I’m good at and I like when I only like the things I’m not very

good at?”

Sumara continues, “Second, it helps to explain the

phenomenon of intersubjective desire, for it is clear that

without relations with others, we cannot really have a sense of

self. The sense of self simply will not emerge on its own…. As

adults, we realize that the continual evolution of the self

requires intersubjective relations that facilitate these ongoing

re-reading and re-writing of the self” (p. 60-1). I don’t think

it is any small thing that the students were in this class while

they were high school sophomores, smack dab in the middle of

adolescence. They often used the blog for coming-of-age writings.

They’d wonder why holidays weren’t as exciting any more. They’d

22

wrestle with being given too much responsibility or not enough.

They worked through romantic relationships and fretted about the

change that college would bring. Often, they sought markers that

their childhood had ended. Allyson wrote, in a post about Easter,

“Stupid things like cooking an Easter dinner doesn’t exactly seem

that substantial to the average person, but to me, it signifies

my growing up.”

Sumara concludes this section by writing, “Finally, the

importance of historical ‘collecting’ places for the knowledge

which has emerged from the interaction of selves, can be more

clearly understood’ (p. 61). Our blog, of course, is the

collecting place. Its significance in the lives of these students

(and me) can perhaps be understood through an unexpected,

coincidental event. Over Thanksgiving, as I began to work on this

paper, a new post appeared on the blog. It was Isabella, and she

finished her post with, “P.S. I missed this.” And then, a few

days later? Another post, from another student. And then another.

Reading One Another

In the early days of the blog, the students’ comments to

each other were unfailingly positive. Their blog entries suggest

23

that they were fearful to take any kind of risk, either with

their form or their topic. Sumara (1996) writes that “Reading

requires moving, locating, and relocating one’s self in relation

to a co-emergent world. It is a continual bridging of newly

opened spaces – gaps – that make themselves present in the ever-

emerging intertextual fabric of lived experience” (p. 78). As

students read the blog and began to see others taking tiny risks,

they then began to feel safe enough to move closer to the kind of

intimacy that allows risks to be taken. Amanda began to relocate

her writing by what she was discovering as a reader of her

classmates’ texts: “Over time, by reading the others works, I

found that a short blog with a good meaning could be just as

inspiring as a long, drawn out blog. In fact, some of the blogs

that I remember the best aren't my own, but rather shorter blogs

written by the others with an amazing under tone of what was

really going on.”

Some of those risks are reflected in the comments they began

to leave one another by the end of March. In reflection, Mike

said, “After that people started saying a few bad things (not

necessarily bad, just corrections and things like that other than

24

the usual ‘PERFECT!’). That was a huge step from me, I had always

thought I could take criticism, but the criticism I was used to

wasn't criticism at all. There were a bunch of smart(-ish) people

who were comfortable enough with me to tell me what I was doing

wrong. And sometimes I would read a comment on someone else's

blog that would help my writing a lot... though I would never

actually admit it.”

Emily was the first student to take a major risk with her

public writing. During the course of the semester, Emily wrestled

with a serious bout of depression, and in the second half of the

semester, she spoke openly about this and the pain and

complication it brought to her everyday life. Part of her battle

was finding a medication to control the depression that left her

personality intact without any major physical side effects. In

this particular blog entry, she used her form to convey what she

was experiencing in her daily life:

Sleep, it’s supposed to be this amazing period of rest.But I woke up angry this

morning. Unrested another.

fieloelfhjfkfdkihdlo ffoidelodekswj goflodkjsw fkfovcldmsiclc fjfmeoldld sjdolc ickdow;ldksjd vifkdlssckoifdldmDREAMc fieloelfhjfkfdkihdlo

25

ffoidelodSNOREekswj goflodkjsw fkfovcldmsiclc fjfmeoldld sjdolc ickdow;ldksjd vifkdlss ckoifdldmc fieloelfhjfkfdkihdlo ffoidelodekswj goflodkjsw fkfovcldmsiclc fjfmeoldld sjdolc ickdow;ldksjd vifkdlssCOUGHckoifdldmc

The comments she received were resoundingly positive: “I love how

you…”; “I love this blog post!”; “I really like this… this is all

artsy, and I kind of like that, even though I’m not really an art

kind of guy.”

Shortly after this, Mike writes a risky entry of his own,

one that is intensely personal. He fleshes out the feeling of

being lost in his overachieving family that he had hinted at in

response to my first entry. At the end, he sought out the

community: “I can guess some responses to this will be: ‘Just

don’t compare yourself to them.’ But what do I do when I do

compare myself to them and I can’t stop?” Through this, there is

a shift in the comments. Five students responded to Mike’s post,

offering specific advice. Aleda told Mike that he shouldn’t stop

comparing himself to his family members – but that he should also

contrast. What does he bring that his family members do not?

The specificity in their comments does not end after this.

Instead of telling each other that the post was a great topic or

26

was good writing, they began to elaborate. For instance, after

Jasmine’s post that week, Mike responded with, “Wow! That was

really good. I could tell how determined you were through your

writing. Your second sentence was really good…” and Emily said,

“That is an amazing post. I loved how I could hear your voice,

almost like you yourself were reading it to me.”

Mode of Address

The students and I occasionally conferenced about “mode of

address,” although I didn’t know the term at the time. In his

book on writing, Steven King spoke about how he kept his wife –

his ideal reader – in mind while he wrote. On my own blog, I had

often found myself writing to my “ideal reader” – a Canadian

friend of mine. Ellsworth says, “Mode of address in film, then is

about the necessity of addressing any communication, text,

action, ‘to’ someone” (p. 28). Initially, students seemed unsure

about who they were writing for, as indicated by their sterile

entries written in Schoolese: broad introduction (“Everyone had

that mother figure at home that is always on you to do your

homework…”), body where the problem is discussed, and catchy,

moralistic endings: (“She doesn’t know that I do it, but it keeps

27

me sane so what mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”) Barthes (1975)

says, though, that “The text you write must prove to me that it

desires me. This proof exists: it is writing” (p. 6). As students

get to know one another and me, their mode of address becomes

clearer, and we readers begin to feel desired by their texts.

Where Was I in All of This?

Jasmine told me over the summer that she realized she could

open up because I was opening up. My notes on this comment say

that it “makes me realize that teaching English is intensely

personal.” Perhaps that seems obvious to some, but it flies in

the face of the conventional “wisdom” I – and many other “good

teachers” – received in our teacher prep programs, right along

with the proverbial “Don’t smile before Christmas.” We were told

that we were professionals, and as such, we were to leave our

personal lives at the door. At one point, I believed that this

was possible, that “Heather” and “Ms. Burchell” were mutually

exclusive. In Sumara’s words, “We must learn how to see what we

had previously been unable to see. And if this is to be

accomplished through shared readings of literary fictions in

28

schools, we, as teachers, must stop hiding behind talk about

texts and start living through them with our students” (p. 232).

By mid-March, I found myself regularly posting comments of

my own on the blog. There are very few of these in the first six

weeks. I remember that the students and I were conferencing more

about the blog in that time. I think that I was struggling with

how to position myself on the blog. It was yet another piece in

the complicated picture of this class. Sumara (1996) writes, “The

pedagogical relation, understood in this way, does not merely

depend on what the teacher knows or what the teacher does, but

depends upon who the teacher is. The teacher's beliefs, her own

virtues, her character, her relationship with a world that

includes her students, must always be considered in any

discussion of pedagogy” (p. 223). With that idea in mind, I began

to respond not as I thought I should respond – but as a genuine

reader, with details about what their posts made me think and

feel – what was evoked for me, what combinations of words gave me

goosebumps.

In the End

29

By May, the blog was central to the class and its community.

The posts are all rich – so much so that it’s difficult to find

just a few examples. Nicole wrote from the perspective of her new

puppy, Amanda from her computer monitor, and Aleda from her

shoes. Isabella posted a photo blog. Mike told the story of a

pathetic man on Match.com who meets one Heather Burchell and has

his life changed for the better after she points out that “alot”

should actually be two words. More than half of the students post

poetry and praised each other for taking risks; Aleda responded

to two of Jasmine’s poems with “I’m happy you’re experimenting.”

They began to respond to comments on their own posts,

establishing dialogue. They took pieces of other’s people’s

style, form or content and played with it to create something of

their own. It became much, much harder for me to play my “guess

the writer” game, not because the students lost the element of

voice, but because their voices had grown together, creating a

common voice. Perhaps this is the nebulous “culture” piece of

Chayko’s definition of community.

They are raw with each other. “For the first time I don’t

know the lesson that will come when I finish this blog. I don’t

30

know the ending, and it scares me,” Isabella wrote. Jasmine is

the first to respond: “I’m looking at you right now, and you look

so sad. I love you.”

Amanda, the student who had been so certain about her

identity in March, wrote an entry called “Who I Am,” clearly

struggling with that, “…between hearing Jasmine saying ‘I thought

I knew you, but I don’t think I do anymore!’ once a week and

hearing my mom say, ‘What kind of person are you becoming and is

that the person that you want to be.’” As Sumara (1996) writes,

“...we can only understand ourselves in relation to others. These

formulations suggest that the sense of self-identity cannot be

contained within the body or the mind, but emerges rather from

our symbiotic relations with others” (p. 56). This time, Amanda

lists her “I” statements, but she acknowledges the ways that

she’s changed: “I used to be really okay with that. But now…”

A few days before prom, Jasmine entered the classroom in

true hysterics. I jumped out of my chair and rushed over to her,

grabbing her right before she doubled over. I held her as she

screamed. “Okay,” I said, rubbing her back. “I want you to

breathe in now. And out. Let’s do that again. Good, Jasmine.”

31

It was the most real moment of my teaching career.

Or maybe my life.

I got her into a chair. Listened. Cried along with her. Word

had just gotten out that we’d lost a student in a car accident, a

dear friend of Jasmine’s. “Why, Ms. Burchell?” she asked over and

over. “I don’t understand.”

“These things just aren’t right, Jas,” I told her. I didn’t

have the answers about how the class should work, and I certainly

didn’t have answers about this. “You’ll need to write about it.”

“I know,” she sobbed.

I left the rest of the class behind to walk Jasmine to the

grief counselors who were beginning to gather in the cafeteria. I

carried tissues. When I walked back to the my modular classroom,

I came across student after student who reached out their arms to

me, sobbing.

Jasmine did write about it. She took it to the blog a couple

of days later, her usually polished writing dissolving in her

grief:

dying was not part of my plan for him it shouldn’t havebeen in his life story

32

We shouldn’t be saying ‘in memory of’ and ‘he was’ or ‘I remember when he…’

NO!‘He is’ and Darae, ‘remember that time when we…’ He is,

he is, he is,Not ‘he was.’

We rallied around her on the blog. There are fourteen comments to

that post, more than any other post from the school year. I

watched her classmates take on pieces of her grief, choosing to

take on, to lessen her burden. It was beautiful, human, real.

When we had our AP Jamboree to screen our documentary and

talk about the class two weeks later to administrators, school

board members, parents and other teachers, the teachers all

questioned the value of the blog. “But what topics were they

writing about?” they pressed, clearly dissatisfied that I had let

the kids write about anything they’d wanted. “What work were they

doing here?” In other words, “How could they learn if you weren’t

deciding the what and when and how of that process? You’re the

teacher, after all.”

The students themselves are the ones that can answer that.

Even Sean, who had struggled the most with the format of the

post, said, in a comment to Jasmine, “But as for improving, I

33

feel that all of us have improved as writers, mainly because of

these blogs.” And Mishal wrote in her own final post: “This is a

blog. A blog! When did we ever get the privilege to write blogs

every week for school?”

The privilege.

For me, though, it is the love that is expressed in the

final blogs that was the true “work” that had been done here.

Their posts ring with details of our classroom culture:

Jasminisms, working nights over Chinese food, the Friday song. In

response to Aleda’s final post, Mike wrote:

Woah.

Woah... woahwoahwoahwoah. This is an AMAZING piece of writing. I have learned that you write best when you'revery emotional about what you're writing about. And this proves my point exactly.

I hope you don't mind me posting this: You said you teared when you read Ms. B's blog, and I guess you justthought you should thank her for everything she's done.I can tell you put everything you had into this as you were writing it, and it is... I don't know how to say it. It's not good, it's much better than that, it's like... AMAZING.

You have no idea how jealous I am.

And about what it was written about: Ms. Burchell I don't know how I can thank you enough, you have made me

34

a completely different person, not only through your teachings but through forcing us 11 kids to be as closeas we are now. Last year I wouldn't even think of writing what I do now, and I used to think I was the worst writer in the world.

And there it is. All of it. Mike as a reader, Mike as a writer,

Mike as a member of our community.

Work indeed.

35

Works Cited

Barthes, R. (1975). The pleasure of the text (R. Miller, Trans.). New

York: Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1973)

Chayko, M. (2008). Portable communities: The social dynamics of online and

mobile

connectedness. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Elbow, P. (1993, February). Ranking, evaluating, and liking:

Sorting out three forms of judgment. College English, 55(2), 189-

206.

Ellsworth, E. (1997). Teaching positions: Difference, pedagogy, and the power

of address. New York: Teachers College Press.

Irwin, S., & Knodle, C. (2008, May). Mandates and the writing

curriculum: Creating a place to dwell. English Journal, 27(5),

40-45.

Sumara, D. J. (1996). Private readings in public: Schooling the literary

imagination. New York: Peter Lang.

36