Planning My Spring Class

I need to finalize my syllabus for the Spring Rhetoric and Writing Class. Couple of lessons from the Fall Semester:

a. Instead of asking my students to turn in actual journals (that wasn't a very intelligent move on my part), I am requiring them to have a semester-long blog of their own. I will probably make it mandatory for them to have 12 entries, as I did the last time. That should be enough for a 15 week class, and I hope it will help them to learn the art of free-writing a little bit. For me, it's also a way to just make them feel that writing is not something that they should be afraid of. So many of my students come to the class with these mystified ideas of writing.

b. I realized, that the only assignment where my students felt actually excited was the auto-ethnography assignment. And I think, if I have to really think about it, they wrote amazing stories. Stories that dealt with race, class, religion, gender, national borders and in couple of instances, even US Empire. Had it not been for this class assignment, I am sure, most of these would have gotten lost within the routinized structures of their everyday lives. I almost cried when I read through my students' auto-ethnographies. They trusted me enough to tell these stories! But then, I also cannot help thinking, did they at all think about trust in the way I think about it? Or was it just another assignment for them? I mean, I would have assigned a zero if someone failed to turn in their auto-ethnography essay. So, this question of trust is dicey within a classroom situation. Precisely because a classroom is inherently a powered space, and there is no way that one can begin to think about it in a different way within a corporate university. But just to see some of my students so excited to be able to tell their stories, I learnt that this needs to be a more central element of the class I teach in spring. So, right now I am trying to think of ways to do that, without necessarily compromising with the idea of "academic rigor."

Now, so much of what I do is so totally not-glamorous...reading, writing, editing, hunched over on the desk, reading student papers, talking to students, editing their work...but isn't that the idea?