How's It Going: Reactions to the Afterword + Final Thoughts

p.189-191 Anderson goes back through his stored away boxes of past writing class portfolios, and remembers how his students affected him with their writing about affairs in their lives. Then he writes: "To teach writing well--to confer with student writers well--we must be affected by our students and the details of their lives. That is, we need to fall in love with our students for the first time."

"They (the students) too need to be affected by the details of our lives. Conferences go well when students come to see us as people with whom they genuinely want to talk."

"We should know at least five details about the lives and interests of each of our students."

I pondered these quotes. Fall in love? As a college instructor in a program focused on developing my students "academic essay" writing skills, I very rarely have a chance to be "affected" by the writing of my students. I am often impressed by the thoughts they have, and I love working with my students, but I never considered myself as falling in love with them. I also feel like I know so little about the lives of my students after working with them for 10 week terms.

I learned many things from How's It Going: How to structure conferences, How to prepare students and myself to be ready for conferences, How to use Mentor Texts to get students learning good style, and How to create Mini-Lessons that meet the needs of my class.

But can I learn to design college writing classes so that I am affected and in love with my student writers?? To do that, I would need to allow students to be WRITERS in the truest sense--to write about topics that mean the most to them no matter how "unacademic" they may be. To allow them to write genres other than the thesis-driven argumentative research essay.

In my current program, I don't have much of a choice about this. But I feel a change is needed. Anderson has turned me on to this. I want to try a conference-based workshop style writing class, even on a small scale.