Apathy abounds in our students. I am not qualified nor do I possess the intellectual patience it would require to explore the question of why this is. I could probably rattle off a few lightly informed reasons for this, but they would do nothing more than exhaust you and have little to no solid theory to back them up. Fear not, dear reader, I will spare you my pseudo-academic social critique of the larger cultural forces at play here. If hearing a rant of this sort is something that, against all odds, does intrigue you, have a few drinks with me some night and they will most likely stumble their way out of my mouth around midnight.
However, here I am, in the sober light of day, and the question I wish to explore is “how?” More specifically, how can we create care in our students? As my last post posits, care is the prerequisite to good writing. I do not think that The Sequence is the answer (which is why I urge all of my colleagues to deviate from it wherever possible). I, of course, would never do such a thing…but, in theory, there are better ways to foster inspired writing in our freshmen.
One way that I think could work (and would still satisfy the text requirement of The Sequence), would be to let each student pick an essay from Emerging to write about. Encourage them to choose a piece that somehow speaks to them. Did it give them chills? Good. Did it blow their freakin’ minds? Sweet, dude. Did it piss them off? Even better. This is the Affect Effect. After about the third class of Restak talk, my classes had little to offer other than groans and boos every time I brought him up. Their brains shut off in unison at any mention of the R-word. The didn’t care. Not even a little bit. And, what’s worse, the content made them feel condescended to–like they were the problem and this doctor guy was preaching to them about the evils of their ways and how they were the ones destroying the sanctity of Human Interaction every time they glanced at their phones.
This is not how writing should be taught. A good essay can’t be produced on a text the essayist couldn’t give a damn about with a gun to his head. Call me soft, a hippie-dippie expressivist in a sweater vest, but I believe in the Affect Effect and I look forward to giving it a shot in ENC 1102.