Making the Grade

This blog was begun for a course on blogging that I took as part of a graduate program in which I'm enrolled. The end of the course fell just before Christmas--ergo, the month-and-a half-long silence while I waited for my grades. Their arrival has insured that my employer will reimburse the cost of the class. So I will continue using this blog to share some thoughts that someone somewhere may find helpful, funny, or even annoying. I will continue even though my initial experience in the blogging class was less than auspicious.

I had set out early for the first one, and I sat down in the empty classroom, smug in the knowledge that I was the first to arrive. Other students trickled in and began chatting. Suddenly, I realized that they were talking about whether or not they would be expected to actually speak Arabic throughout the whole course.

I looked at my neighbor: "This isn't the blogging course, is it."

"No--sorry! This is Arabic."

"This isn't even _______Hall, is it."

"No--it's _____________."

I gathered my laptop, computer, and my pride, and scuttled out of the room.

When I arrived at the correct place, the room was almost full. I squeezed in around a table too small for the number of students surrounding it. The instructor, a perky woman young enough to be my daughter, was already talking. She has a rather successful blog that focuses on her family, though it also touches on politics, travel, cooking (she has some great recipes!), and in general, how life happens.

Many of the students subsequently dropped the course. We were left with fourteen. As the trees in the quad lost their leaves, and snow began to cover the paths, we wrote--about our lives, about narcissism, about what makes writing funny, understandable, readable, significant. We practiced the craft of blogging—a more journalistic discipline than blogging's more formal antecedent, the personal essay. We also read deeply—Borges, E. B. White, Woolf, Dillard, and Vidal. We listened to technology gurus and legal experts. And we began to glimpse each others' hearts—the lovely Chinese woman whose childhood as a "lost girl" broke my heart, and whose artistry is exquisite; the military wife with edgy comments and a Texas drawl; the young man, the only one in the class, whose wry comments and slow grin made me smile.

My classmates were all younger than I, all at different life points and experience. However, as we wrote and tentatively began to allow the others to read our words, we began to relax, to laugh. Our instructor's warmth and wit shaped our discussions, and as a result, our writing was sharpened.

The class ended with a series of workshops where we read and reviewed each others’ blogs. Since I am a grammar Nazi, I knew that the structure of what I wrote would not be questioned, but the critique of the length and vocabulary was a humbling reminder of both my age and my profession (when I tell people that I am an English teacher, they tell me their horrific “English teacher stories").

So perhaps no one else will read what I write—or perhaps many will. Let me know if I have “made the grade” for you!