Day 3: First day with Wideman

Started a bit sternly this day: I noticed one student who didn't have the reading in any form and announced to the class that they had to keep up with the reading for this class. That not keeping up had real consequences, not arbitrarily but because if they hadn't done the reading they were already falling behind and we had our first essay due in one week. I said that they shouldn't assume they would be able to get by this class through bs-ing their way through the writing about the texts -- that it wouldn't work for this class even if it had worked in previous English classes. In retrospect, I realize I came on a bit strong, but I am not convinced it wasn't useful to take this serious tone at this point: still early enough to build good practices in the class and to let them know I am noticing the level of their engagement.

I segued by saying, "On that cheery note, let's turn to the quickwrite." I built the qw to reinforce the work we had done at the end of the previous class talking about marking in the text. Here's the qw prompt:

QW (15 min): Take a minute to review the marks you made on the pages we have read for today. What moments struck you as interesting, puzzling, or important? Pick 2 and write about what it was about these moments that interested or puzzled you. What caught your attention here? Or, what was difficult about this moment?

After the 15 minutes I asked them what they wrote about and they pointed to all of the things I wanted to talk about today -- the moves Wideman makes as a writer concerning voice, description, metaphor, multiple perspectives. It was a really great discussion. 3/4 of the students participated in one way or another -- offering ideas or reading aloud from the text. I was really impressed that they introduced the topic about metaphors.

In our discussion we first read the italicized prefatory remarks and talked about whose voice it was and why Wideman who start this essay in this way. The students discussed how the way the piece began humanized Robby, forcing the reader to see him as a person first before seeing him as a criminal -- much like how a brother or mother would look at him. We also spent some time with the paragraph that tells the story about John French and the scared man and talked about how the voice changes to be a community telling its stories kind of voice.

Towards the end of class I said we would be working in developing a vocabulary for talking about writing together through the class. I asked them what language we had to discuss writing so far. The students offered "voice," "tone," "perspective." We came up with shared definitions for these terms and discussed how they often manifest in academic writing.

It was a good class, but in typical teacher way I was worried afterward that we had spent so much time on the writerly moves and not on broader interpretations of Wideman's project -- had to remind myself that this was perfectly good and that you can't do everything at once!