Week 8: Comments and Feedback

So, this post is harder to write because I haven't been doing the usual blog commenting and feedback because I haven't found a really good way to do that. I do commenting on the projects all week, and I commented on all the Introductions back at the start of class, and I honestly feel a little weird participating in the blog comments since I've always thought about that more as a space for students to use. I'm being a student, but it's somehow not the same since I spend all that time every week sending people comments about their projects anyway.

One thing I've been thinking about doing, though, that could be useful is reading through the comments on the weekend and maybe coming up with cool examples of the writing-as-a-character comments and good examples of project feedback, so that I could add to the Gallery and build up a gallery of the let's-pretend comments. I've been encouraged noticing how people have remarked in these blog posts that they like getting those kinds of comments!

Feedback in. It is so cool getting comments from people about my stories! That is such a luxury! I publish tons of content online, and I know I have readers, but most people don't leave comments. Getting comments is so fun! I really like the idea of turning the mouse couple from the Mouse Bride story into a mouse couple in another story; maybe I will get a chance to do that -- if not this semester, the next semester when I am working on Indian stories, where there are definitely mice folktales!

Feedback out. I really enjoy giving comments on projects. I feel so connected to all the projects and stories, and watching the stories grow and change during the revision process gives me inspiration each week.

Of course I enjoy getting to know people through the blog posts; I've been teaching this way for so long that I cannot imagine being in classroom... it seems like it would be so hard to get to know every single student that way, whereas here, every semester, there are all these students who are just names at the start of the semester, but now they are people. Creative people! And I enjoy getting to interact with everybody every day all week!

I added the Pet Padlet to my Introduction, but so far I don't think anybody has put pets there except Erin... but that's okay: I'm going to leave it there in the Introduction and then next semester I will do a better job of promoting that as part of the Introduction process right from the first week. :-)

So far nobody has chosen the Brene Brown infographic, but I'm going to include it here. She is one of my heroes! I'm not always able to live up to all these goals... but I try. And this whole being-a-student-in-the-class experiment is a good example of the final item: 10. I can model the vulnerability and openness that I expect to see from you. :-)