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Clay Burell's Article

Original link:
  -[Clay Burell's Article]-  2008.05.01
   
For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging

Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new 
Pew study on the effects of technology on 
teen writing.
                    Link:  http://futura.edublogs.org/2008/04/28/of-communication-design-writing-and-many-other-things/
                           (accessed 2008.06.22 at 18:22 PCT +10GMT)
 An article about the study 
in eSchool News (free subscription - well 
worth it - required) pulls out a few details 
that for me, at least, suggest some weird 
thinking. The “news” that

   [t]eens who communicate frequently 
   with their friends, and those who 
   own more technology tools such as 
   computers or cell phones, do not 
   write more often for school or for 
   themselves than less communicative 
   and less gadget-rich teens

seems hardly news at all, doesn’t it? Is it me, 
or does it imply that some people think that 
The Vast Percentage of Teens Who, Like the 
Vast Percentage of Adults, Do Not Enjoy Writing 
will suddenly, because somebody plops a laptop, 
tablet, or cellphone in their hands, have some 
Road to Damascus experience that magically 
converts them to the Cult of Writing?

That implication seems embedded in the “finding” 
above, and it’s about as silly as expecting people 
to all become economists when they’re given their 
first checkbook.

If you go into a 1:1 program with fantasies that 
all students are going to become writers because 
of it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. 
Nothing makes a writer but the self-compelled 
need to write. And that’s a limited commodity 
now as always.

The eSchool news article continues with this 
further bit of non-”news,” which this time, 
though still making me chuckle, also quickens 
my pulse and gets my dander up a bit:

   Teen bloggers, however, write more 
   frequently both online and offline, 
   the study says.

–check that language out, that loopy logic: 
“Teen bloggers,” we’re told, are teens who 
write frequently “both online and offline.” 
I’m no expert, now, but why are we calling 
teens who write a lot, with and without 
blogs, “bloggers”?

Any of you adult bloggers out there, are you 
with me in wanting to correct people who call 
you a “blogger” - some person who “makes blogs,” 
apparently, like a designer makes designs and 
a reporter makes reports - by telling them: 
“Actually, I’m a freaking writer. I just publish 
my own writing online on a blog. I don’t buy 
those daily word-counts on my blog at Wal-Mart. 
I write them.” Such sloppy language!

(Note that I didn’t say “good writer.” Mediocre 
and bad writers fill the ranks of bloggers as 
much as they do of newpapers, magazines, and 
books.)

It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, 
this word “blogging.” The label cheapens the 
practice. Writing bloggers are writers, 
photo-bloggers are photographers, podcast-bloggers 
are audio producers, vloggers are video artists, 
etc, in teenhood as it is in adulthood.

So let’s revise that last excerpt for clarity:

     Teen writers, however, write more 
     frequently both online and offline.

Talk about a report from Captain Obvious. 
Give any writer a journal and pen, s/he’ll 
scribble away. Give him or her a blog, s/he’ll 
type away. There’s no mystery here.

Things get weirder here:

    Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers 
    write outside of school for personal 
    reasons several times a week or more, 
    compared with 33 percent of teens 
    without blogs. 

What, exactly, does that unidentified fifty-three 
percent of “teen bloggers” who do not “write outside 
of school for personal reasons” actually write on 
their blogs, then? Wait — hold it – I think I’m 
getting a whiff of something. Do you smell it?

Bad air! 
Bad air! 

It’s a homework blog! Another moronic oxymoron brought 
to you by Schooliness, Inc. Let’s cross this 53% off 
the Book of Writing, and focus on that lovely, 
remaining 47% who blog write on blogs, not because 
schools make them, but because they’re writers. 
Breathe in the perfume, folks - we’re in the 
rose-garden now of flowering young writers.

They’re the ones I want to teach - because they’re 
the ones who probably want to be taught about ways 
to improve their writing.

There. I said it: I’m an elitist as an English teacher.

I’m not a democrat when it comes to teaching writing. 
Just as Thomas Jefferson believed that all people are 
born equal, but natural differences create a 
“natural aristocracy” - one having nothing to do with 
money and everything to do with spirit (and I mean that 
naturally) - I believe the same is true in the classroom. 
A rich kid can’t pay me to want to help him become a 
better writer if he doesn’t show me, through the evidence 
of steady, self-impelled production, he has a writer in 
him. A working-class kid who does have a writer in her 
- who can point to hundreds of blog posts or journal 
pages having nothing to do with homework - will find 
not only my door open during lunch and after school, 
but also my Skype and Twitter at home. As I said in a 
comment on Carolyn’s blog, it’s

the bloggers mentioned in the survey above . . . 
who interest me, . . those who have the will to 
write, the seed of a writer, in them.

Those “kids” aren’t mere students. They’re writers.

Let’s keep looking at that Pew Garden, and try to 
find the prize roses. I think I see them hidden 
in this statistic:

Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe 
that writing is essential to later success 
in life.

Pop Quiz: Who are the “teen bloggers” 
          who are the true writers?

a. the 65% of “teen bloggers” who “believe 
   writing is essential to later success in life”

b. the 35% of “teen bloggers” who do not 
   believe this.

If you answered “a,” I give you a zero.

To me, the answer is “b.” Because it implies that 
these young writers are writing not, as most of 
the consumerism-drugged “school is for money” 
customers in our classrooms do (and as the students 
in answer “a” seem to do), “to get a better GPA, 
go to a better college, get a better job, so I 
can buy a better house, car, and handbag.” This 
35% in “b” wins my vote. They’re the prize roses. 
They write for the pleasure in the present, not 
the payoff in the future. [Update: Freshman Arthus 
trumps me in his comment. He gets an A+, I get a B.]

They’re writers.

A Revised Position Statement on Classroom Blogging, 

Two Years into the Fray:

And this brings me to the latest position-statement 
in my evolving views, after two years of experimenting 
with it in the classroom, of the value and place of 
blogging to teach writing in schools:

It should only be required in an elective 
“advanced blogging” class. But we need a better 
word than that tuneless aural trainwreck of a 
word, “blah - geeng.”

“Advanced writing,” though I’ve restricted this article 
to writers because the Pew study does the same, is no 
better a title, because “blogging” invites the natural 
talkers and interviewers, singers and raconteurs through 
podcasting; the natural symbolic and visual 

You tell me. But I think you see what I mean, don’t you? 
Simply a workshop of the thirsty, the hungry to improve 
- the natural aristocracy of self-expression and communication.

Over the door I would post a big sign: 

ROSES ONLY. NO STUDENTS ALLOWED.

Then we’d set to working - making perfume.

This entry was written by Clay Burell, 
posted on May 1, 2008 at 5:29 am




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