I want my creative writing students to understand how important reading is to the development of writing, and I want them to be aware of what’s going on in the literary world as well as the world in general. One way to do this, I think, is to have them discover and read blogs … particularly literary blogs.

I also think I need to somehow change how the reading responses work in our class. Currently, they read about five stories and write up responses once per quarter. I don’t think this encourages regular or reflective reading, though. I know too many of them cram in some stories a day or two before the deadline and write up something that resembles what I’m looking for but doesn’t carry the benefit the assignment intended. So instead, I think I’m going to ask for a weekly “what I’m reading this week” kind of report. Brief, but with some substance, addressing:

• What the work is
• Their brief assessment of its merits
• Its impact on or relation to their own writing

Ideally, this would just go online, in their online journals … because I really DON’T need any more papers to keep track of! But this kind of constant reflective reading is important. And that’s an over-riding problem in education: with the class sizes we’re given: it’s impossible to respond to the amount of work that students should be producing.

So the point: weekly reading reports/reflections–to include stories, poetry, blogs, periodicals, etc.–that respond to the three points above. I can hear them moaning already, but really … what kind of a writer doesn’t already do that to some extent?

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