Blogging: Pros and Cons

Mrs. LaClair and I spoke before vacation about the pros and cons of this blog assignment. Having read a book and blogged about it over the course of the last five weeks, I feel like something of an expert on the subject.

There are many advantages to blogging about an AP Lit. book, beginning with the inherent factor of creativity. The style of a traditional high school literature class—reading an assigned book as a class, discussing it, then righting an essay about it—is tried and true, but it's also tired and trite. That's why mixing it up by allowing students to choose a book of their choice and respond to it in a much more individualized way is beneficial; it refreshes our ideas about how to analyze literature and awakens us from our February slump.

It's true that the group discussion factor, which is important for many students, is mostly lost in the blogging assignment. I always walk away from seminars with new ideas and fresh insights thanks to my exposure to twenty other students' opinions. But a con of that method of reading a book is that it sometimes allows students to fall back and allow others to do the grunt work. When one has to come up with one's own original ideas every week and express them in written form, there is little to no room for slacking—the pressure's on.

That's why blogging is intense. It feels like journalism—there's a finite subject and a deadline by which the writer must address it. This requires the blogger to manage his time wisely, think critically about the work he is doing while he is doing it, and produce a finished product that is creative and original. If AP classes are meant to prepare us for college, then this assignment addresses the intensely individual aspect of many students' higher education experience; there's no handholding.

That's not to say that there isn't room for conversation. Each week, my blog posts improved—or at least changed—because I was exposed to others' blogs. Studying my fellow All the Light We Cannot See readers' posts helped me to consider other viewpoints of the meaning of the subject at hand, while reading posts by those who tackled other books helped me to evaluate the content of my blog from a more objective perspective. By commenting and responding to comments, bloggers are able to foster an intellectually stimulating environment in which ideas are challenged, thus strengthening everyone's arguments in the future. The blog assignment, then, strikes a rare and special balance; it allows—in fact, requires—originality, but it also leaves room for healthy and constructive collaboration.

Reading All the Light We Cannot See helped me to understand some of the potential shortcomings of this assignment. For self-evident starters, length matters here more than ever: 500+ pages is just too much. I wanted to take time with my reading, but, unfortunately, I was often forced to rush to get the required amount of reading done by the deadline. This is nobody's fault but mine; I opted to read the book and suffered the consequences. I would urge future readers to carefully consider what they're getting into when they pick a lengthy book, even if it isn't dense (All the Light is certainly a page-turner—not just because of its gripping plot, but also because each chapter consists of roughly half a page of text, so, by necessity, one must turn the pages frequently.)

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but there was only so much to analyze in this book. I needed to read a book like Americanah—accessible to someone blogging alone, but not so easy that he runs out of material. In other words, I needed to find the happy medium between All the Light and, say, Song of Solomon, which would have been a disaster—an utter waste of time and energy—to read for this assignment.

Is the blog assignment worth keeping? Absolutely. Should it dominate a yearlong curriculum? Absolutely not. If you want that, try VLACS—which, in my experience, lacks the most fundamental aspect of education: communication. Blogging about one or two books is a great idea, because it gives students the chance to approach analyzing literature in new ways. The assignment challenges them to think outside the box, taking others' varying approaches into consideration all the while. Students should heed my warning about book selection, though; just because you've always wanted to read it doesn't mean that now is the time.

Thanks for reading.