Reading through my blog posts, I came to a not-so-startling conclusion: I like to talk about myself. A lot. I’ll summarize it for you as succinctly as possible:

• In my first post, I wrote about the anxiety I felt as I confronted new terminology and theory. In a classroom full of experienced teachers, I found myself struggling with both the material and my relative lack of experience.
• In my second post, I recounted my childhood experience with summary cards in a post that could be subtitled “How one summer trained me to be a “good” student and taught me to dread reading.” In this post I also suggested that Linkon’s VKP research could help teachers break schoolish behavior and restore the fun and exploratory aspects of reading.
• By my third post, I was feeling comfortable enough with the material to make a critical argument re: Crosman’s interpretive theory (and haranguing of poor old E.D. Hirsch). The argument, however, was grounded in my personal outrage at Crosman’s tone and questionable logic.
• With my fourth post, I again returned to comfortable “me” territory in a discussion of Blau’s overarching point that literary study, at its best, can impart practical critical reasoning skills that will serve them well across academic subjects and in their future everyday and professional lives. I grounded the discussion in my own inability to answer the question that plagues many studiers of English: “Why don’t you study something useful?”

So what do these posts say about me (other than the possibility that I am some kind of narcissistic freak)? Three main things, I think.

First, I’ve gained confidence in my own ability to interpret and analyze the assigned readings. Most telling was the shift in tone that occurs gradually over the course of my posts. Post 1 is teeming with qualifiers (e.g. “I have limited knowledge of pedagogical theory.”) The second post contains fewer qualifying comments, as does the third. By the fourth post, I (by my own estimation) comment confidently on the perceived frou-frou nature of literary study. As asserted by Salvatori and Donahue, the very process of writing about the readings increased both my comprehension and analytical capacity.

Second (building on the first point), as my comfort level with the material has increased, I’ve been better able to grapple with the “meat” of the assigned readings. The first two posts were largely reflective of my own struggles, and only brush the surface of the readings. The last two posts more directly address the theoretical underpinnings of the two readings in question (Crosman and Blau).

Third, despite my apparent comfort in talking about myself, writing in the first-person is something that is new to me. In fact, the lion’s share of my academic first-person writing was composed this summer in a writing class organized around a mini-autobiography and personal essay. I am still learning how to interpret and analyze in the first person.

The “story” of my posts, therefore (by my interpretation), is a story of evolution and increased comfort with new material. It is also a story about navigating the process of first-person writing for non-autobiographical purposes. I am curious to see how both of these narratives unfold over the course of the semester.