The road ahead

The discussion we might have had on Wednesday (and which really didn't occur on line) seems to have been pre-empted by events. It is clear, looking at the postings on the Reporting Defoe readings forum, that we are going to spend some time with A Journal of the Plague Year.

We'll be reading some of the other texts people have read and recommended, as well, but right now it seems pretty clear that we have a consensus, and that many, maybe most, of the people who have read the opening of the Journal are eager to keep on. So that's what we're going to do; if you read something else, you'll start a few pages back, but as most people have said, Defoe is a lot easier to read than Swift.

So, obviously, the job right now is to read the rest of H.F.'s book. Since we'll all be reading it, we don't at this point need more descriptions; what we need are responses -- and, especially, questions and issues to be raised for discussion. So here's an assignment:

Read the Journal, with a pad and pen (or keyboard) at hand, and keep track of reflections, questions, observations, and problems that you run into as you read. (If you've already read part of it, reread, with this in mind.) As you write them down, connect them to the text by placing them in their context (the best way is to quote a bit of the text, so your readers know whereof you speak). When you've gone as far as you can in the two or three hours I'd advise you to budget for this, post your notes & queries on the new Defoe forum I've set up, called Animadversions upon the Journal of one Henry Foe, Esq.

Print out your page (either by sending the forum page to the printer or, better, by copying the text into a word processor file and printing that) and bring it to class on Wednesday afternoon.

A note on learning

As I was reading this week's learning reflections, I noticed -- as I have before -- a number of people saying that really what they learned would be reported in the writing posted on the forum. I'd like to suggest that a much more powerful concept of what learning is (or can be) would push people to reflect on what they've actually learned while doing the readings or research and while writing about them. Yes, people have learned (in this case) what the work they're reporting on is like, but that seems to me only a tiny proportion of what there is to be learned, by connecting that with what else you know and inviting that new information to alter and rearrange what you already understand.