It's been interesting seeing which entries from my blog my students mark as 'interesting'. What
is interesting, anyway? I've always found it interesting that Flickr ranks photos that way, by 'interestingness' -- rather than 'goodness' or 'beauty' or something else. We'll talk about that question in class tomorrow, but in the meantime, here are some examples of what my students found interesting. I left out some of the posts
I didn't find interesting. :-)
- January 15, 1999: Random but Detailed Survey Meme
- August 1, 1999: Cemetery in the Avenues, Salt Lake City
- July 9, 2000: Privacy and Transparency
- September 11, 2001: The 9/11 Attack (and the two entries that follow this one)
- December 28, 2003: Conflict Avoidance and Sex Writing
- March 19, 2003: The Day Before We Invaded Iraq (and the three entries that follow this one)
- February 21, 2005: Ten Things I've Done You Probably Haven't
- August 31, 2005: Katrina and 'Looting'
- March 17, 2007: Authenticity, Appropriation, and Shipping Charges
- April 7, 2007: Notes on the Mary Anne (babies, money, fretting)
- May 20, 2007: Kavi's C-Section, the Gory Details
- January 28, 2010: UIC and Furlough Days
- July 4, 2010: Dear Kavya (tears at pre-school drop-off)
- April 18, 2010: Basic Life Skills
- December 28, 2010: Holiday Traditions
I find it interesting that they like my political writing. I rarely write about politics (though I care about it more and more each day, it seems), because doing so scares me. It seems like writing about politics requires so much time and thought to not write something stupid and possible damaging, especially in crisis situations when tempers and emotions are flying high. And there are a lot of experts talking then, of course, so it also feels like my voice isn't so important. But they liked the 9/11 posts in part just because for them, it happened when they were kids, and they know it as 'history' -- it brought it to life to see an average person's response, in the moment.
So perhaps it's worth the effort to try to say something coherent regardless.
Here’s what boggles my mind: you write SO MUCH. Did your students seriously read your entire journal, it being one of the longest-running (THE longest-running?) out there?
Or did I miss the part where you gave them just 10,000 words of it to pick from?
I tease, I tease. 🙂
Heh. I’m not that cruel — last week, I gave them 20 or so specific entries to read. For tomorrow, I just told them to browse and look for what seemed interesting. It’ll be interesting to find out how much they actually chose to read, since it was left so open-ended.
Of course, they had other reading for tomorrow too (the “Being Poor” piece at Whatever, and its hundreds of associated comments).