Thoughts on Student Logs

I've been wanting to address the topic of students logs for some time now. The logs are an important part of this class and why that is and what purpose they can serve may need unpacking. I hope these comments will help you break through whatever block you may be having with writing weekly logs. So far, the resistance to using that space has been so  unprecedented (at least in my experience of using class blogs over the last five years or so) that I am tempted to analyze this resistance psychoanalytically. At the very least, though, I would like to get a handle on the source of this resistance.

So far, there have been some interesting individual posts, but not much commenting or discussion on the posts beyond my own remarks. Also, not everyone has been keeping up (some--many?-- have yet to post at all), so I want to not just reiterate the importance and function of the student logs but also point out that they are a significant part of the work your final grade based on. I don't know how one can learn in a class without ever having participated in it. That said, no one can pass this class without ever having posted a single log or made a single in-class comment. I hope it is clear that this class, like many literature classes, is not about memorizing facts to reproduce perfectly on a test or paper. It is about interacting with texts, reflecting on one's reading practices and in the process learning something not just about the novels or theories under discussion but about how one views the world, why one has come to view it that way, and what the consequences of such 'views' may be. That is why I'm interested in seeing what you can do with the ideas we engage with in reading and discussion. I am not looking for a "perfect" paper or "perfect" reproduction of what I've said in class; I am instead looking for a thoughtful response to the ideas under discussion and an attempt to use them to talk about narrative in different ways than you may have yet talked and thought about "narrative" and its role in human life---including yours.

I think that the most important writing, and maybe the most important part of the class itself, are the logs. I know this will seem strange to students who are used to attaching importance only to those items they are graded on. And the logs are ungraded. Furthermore, they are an "informal" space---a space of notes, quick thoughts, first ideas, fragments, comments, trial runs. I don't expect fully fleshed out, developed and polished arguments to appear there; those things are the proper matter of formal essays. So why do I put so much value on them? Because I value them pedagogically: they are a necessary prior step before any completely realized ideas can be set down in essay form. In other words, they are one of the spaces were actual learning happens. Graded papers are the final product of learning: examples of what you know. Before you can express ideas, you have to produce them, you have to work things through by reading, by talking and also by writing. Writing can be an important creative medium, the actual tool you use to learn with and not just a fancy display case for the finished results.

The logs are also an autodidactic space, a space for self learning. The end goal of education in general should be to teach people how to teach themselves. In a successful class the teacher would be no longer necessary, or the relation between "teacher" and "student" would entirely re-conceptualized. It is therefore the student's responsibility to make the logs useful to them. It is really up to you whether the learning logs will be a significant moment in your education---an opportunity to learn new things in new ways---or just some assigned task to be done as quickly and negligently as possible.

Of course that doesn't mean I won't help you or make suggestions about what you can write about (I'm already doing that, by the way, in my individual comments). For example, I suggested  that you could begin by using the log as a space to discuss that week's reading and class discussion. But that's just a starting point. You can also ask questions about the class, pose questions or describe examples of other narratives you've read and seen, bring in points from posts you've read on the main class blog or pertinent topics you've read about elsewhere.

Most importantly, I've asked you to use the logs as a "self-reflective" space: somewhere not only to state opinions, but to also begin asking questions about them and becoming more thoughtful about why you have the responses to texts that you do. That's an important part of education. To end a class without ever having questioned any of your prior ideas, opinions and assumptions is an intellectual failure.

So what you do in the learning logs is in large part up to you. But the effect of what you do or don't do is not just restricted to you alone. Don't forget that the logs are situated in a public space. By posting them online, students have an opportunity to break out of the individuated and one-way discussions that usually characterize learning. Although every class consists of a group of people, rarely does any truly collective production of knowledge take place. Students, and many teachers, usually respond to classes as simply a group of unconnected individuals. Learning to think about class as something non-individual can be difficult.

The online student logs though, can be an opportunity for truly collective learning. Which is how, of course, knowledge is actually produced---no one creates ideas in a vacuum. Knowledge is built out of, is built on, the work of others. When Isaac Newton remarked, "If I have seen farther it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," he wasn't being humble but giving voice to how knowledge is created: no one's insights are ever truly individual. (And Newton's remark is itself an illustration of this since he borrowed the phrase about past writers, philosophers and scientists as "giant's shoulders" from earlier writers, notably the 12th Century monk John of Salisbury, who in turn probably borrowed it from an earlier source, Bernard of Chartres.)

So not producing logs is not just detrimental to your own learning, it is detrimental to the class as a whole. The course can not progress unless people are actively making it progress. And the teacher is only one person in the room.

Here are some links to a past version of this course, one taught in 2010/2011. Though you can access the entire archive of student logs from this class, I'm going to point out a few logs where students talk about the material we've covered so far in this course.  Some work on Freud's essay 'On Dreams' can be found here.   Some discussion of the Freudian Uncanny can be found here, here (with The Sandman and Coraline in the discussion thread),  here (with the sexual dimension brought out), and here (again in relation to The Sandman). The Turn of the Screw is discussed  here (don't miss discussion in the thread) here and here (with "Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly").  Some other interesting posts may be these: Boardwalk Empire and the Uncanny, an Uncanny picture, a discussion of a Chuck Palahniuk short story that came out of earlier log discussion, a discussion of another story/film (the Prestige) and its relation to the Uncanny as well as H. As you look through these you'll notice that the length and quality of individual posts vary. But when you read such entries as a series, and read them as they are being produced, you can see both individuals in the class and the class as a whole deepening and developing ideas in the process. That is why there is always a clear correlation between solid papers and ongoing log work: students have developed ideas on their own, and of their own, to write about.