Blogging

Damn. Those students of mine are showing me up.

Back in October, they were fresh-faced, straight from college, all swagger and smiles and up for a laugh. I taught them the art of automatic writing in the expectation of them dipping their toes in a freezing sea before running screaming from the waves that rushed to greet them and pull them out into the deep where they would sink or swim. I checked their early blogs occasionally, nodding to myself at the lack of punctuation and spelling errors in confirmation.

But after a week of marking their first semester assignments, I'm floored. Ok, so some of them - many of them - are what I expected, but others are really, really not. If I coached them to unleash the chaos of their dreams, moods, suspicions and fear back then, they have gone further to explore style and dialogue, even firing their inner demons into cyberspace in head to head combat. Poetic, original they play with language in a way that only generations raised on multi-culture can.

I'm excited about teaching again.