Reduplication

I think I would like to try and get the students to write a little bit every day. It is a fine line between instilling a good habit and making a chore out of it, but I will be sure not to collect them often, never to grade them, and to encourage the students to include clippings, pictures, photos, and any other little objects that bear on what they are writing or that they just find interesting. Little scrapbooks are very appealing to me right now, they seem to be the antidote to all this vain blogging, and leafing through them later would be a great way to pass an afternoon. Didn’t they used to sit in the parlors looking through photo albums and scrapbooks back in the 19th century? That and writing letters by hand are two of the things I would revive from the past culture.

Have students write to pen pals, some abroad, some in one language, some in another, some nearby. It is an activity that persists as an exercise, writing letters, but I would breathe the life back into it. In their books students can keep the letters they receive, the notes they pass in class, stories, questions, drawings, quotes. The benefit of a paper book is that it is physical, and that it preserves things as they come; if they wanted, they could have computer scrapbooks too, whose benefit is that it may be rearranged easily, searched, linked, accessed from anywhere and never lost. It can also keep things like music and animated clips, voices, which paper cannot. So maybe both would be best, the computer not a straight transcription of the paper, but a companion. The students, after all, will have to learn computers, typing, security, and the best way to learn is not by drilling but by doing, doing something they are interested in—and life, especially one’s own, ought to be ‘infinitely interesting.’