The post title is my own (tongue-in-cheek) self-assessment after pulling a fast one on my English 101 students. Happily, I don’t think they hold it against me.

I assigned Jeffrey Ford’s story “The Honeyed Knot” for class two weeks ago. It’s a twisty, turny, convoluted, non-linear story with only the slightest bit of a speculative element. We didn’t discuss it at all beforehand, I just let them at it. As expected, the story bewildered most students. Some liked it, some didn’t.

Of course, I picked the story because it’s a difficult read and there are a million things to talk about. What genre is it, for instance? What’s with all of the seeming coincidences? How much of it is factual? What’s the point? As an in-class writing exercise, I asked my students to write Jeffrey Ford a short letter in which they could ask questions, make comments, criticize, compliment, whatever. As a writing exercise, experimenting with the role of the author and the intended reader, yada yada yada. Maybe you’re seeing where this is going…

Of course, I failed to mention the fact that I know Jeff very well, as he taught the last two weeks of Clarion back in 2004. I wrote him earlier in the semester and asked if he would be willing to respond to some student comments and he was game. So I stripped their names off their comments (can’t be too careful nowadays) and forwarded them along. Jeff went way above the call of duty and gave every student a thoughtful response to their comments (most were also hilarious).

Today was “reveal” day where I printed off the anonymous comments and Jeff’s reply, and we spent about 40 minutes reading them over and talking about what it meant to get comments back. As I had hoped, the students found it to be fascinating. Too often, we forget that there’s an actual human being making decisions behind everything we read—people with families, kids, jobs, and other mundane aspects of any life. They also were impressed with Jeff’s responses and how seriously he took their comments. It really seemed to break down the idea that the author is some godlike figure and the reader is inconsequential. In short, it worked very well as a lesson and more than one student thought it was “very cool,” including the fact that I was less than forthcoming in the whole process. And it sounds like a few people might have become Jeffrey Ford fans in the process, so I might have helped sell him a few books to boot.

To quote Hannibal from the A-Team, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Current Mood: Very Pleased With Myself (and Jeff) |