What about Fun?

"...the writing classroom should be a workshop in which [the students] are encouraged through the supportive response of teachers and peers to use writing as a way to figure out what they think and feel and eventually 'publish' their work to be read and celebrated by the community of writers they have become" (Tobin 7).

"Process pedagogy has become so regimented that it has turned into the kind of rules-driven product that it originally critiqued" (Tobin 10).

---
This is scary.

What? Blogging? Nah. I love to type, and I've always felt rather confident in my ability to articulate myself in writing. I'd even go so far as to say I'm better on paper than I am verbally. In this place, an environment void of social neediness (well...is that true?), or at least, an environment where those social needs can be tended to with slow, methodical measures (the time I spend editing my writing to make it sound absolutely as I wish), I am at my best.

What's scary is writing academically publicly. If we perceive this blog space to be a little bit more important than a thoughtful journal, the fear creeps in and undercuts what I want to say. Instead of focusing on the kindly peers I want to know are out there, rendezvousing with my thoughts thanks to cyberspace; I imagine instead critics, doubters, and individuals for whom skepticism is often the easiest action--the easiest, and often, the one we are trained to consult with most often.

And I get that: I get that we need to be informed readers who do not take at face value everything that smacks us upside the eyeball. My students and I have already begun talking about angle of vision and how discerning what authors leave out can be as illuminating or important as deciphering what they leave in (what happens to this post if we practice that skill?).

But there's always the fear of creative deviance, the thoughts that sound much like these: Maybe I didn't do what the teacher wanted. I didn't really synthesize my sources very well. I failed to cite a significant passage, and if I did, I've perhaps unfairly juxtaposed two portions of text, and only as an epigraph to my post. I've left this whole business in the realm of the implicit point.

But, oh, what wouldn't we all give for a little fun?

Even in the process-based college classroom, there seems to be no time for experimenting with form, or audience, or word choice or any other rhetorical option. Even our freewrites are meant to funnel eventually into the work of writing a paper. Yeah, right, freewrite.

We need to learn how to play with words. It is in our very nature to do so, but our educational system runs counter to our inclinations. (Thanks, standardized testing.) In our obsession to calculate and quantify how we keep up with the world-wide Joneses, we've shot creativity in the foot.

---
Okay.

I know I haven't really said anything too profound (it's Sunday evening and I'm working with 5 hours of sleep--forgive me). I'm interpreting our blog as a place to play, as a place to try without too much pressure.

Here's to fun, and to thinking. *clink*