Dialogue Journals: Biting Off More Than One Can Chew

Ah, the beginning of a new academic year, and a chance not to repeat the mistakes of yesteryear. This one was not a bad mistake, as it was beneficial for all of my students, but it was devastating to an already-exhausted writing teacher swamped with papers to mark and lessons to plan.

My wise idea last year was to include dialogue journals as part of my assessment for freshmen. Each student had two small notebooks that they would use to write each week. They would exchange them with me once a week, after which I would read and make comments.

Now, at first I clearly instructed my students to focus on writing about writing. (Some pedagogues call this metacognition, though my high school critical thinking teacher has convinced me that’s a silly term as that would suggest the end of cognition.). But these were freshers, with new university experiences every day that they just had to share with their new teacher. Keeping these young students focused in their writing turned out to be impossible.

To make matters worse, my students had to show off their individualism by buying notebooks of every concievable size, color, and binding. Some even chose heavy leather covers! So once a week, I got to roll 98 journals around in my airplane luggage, just to go to class.

In the end, I’m glad this batch of nearly 100 students got to have dialogues with me. But I would never, ever, implement dialogue journals again. Never, ever! Too much work is bad for teacher.