I had my students do an assignment in which they had to characterize blogs. One student offered these nuggets:
Fourth, the blog that is the most idiotic tends to win. This is just like high school. The weird blog is the ugly girl, who when stripped of her ponytail and glasses, is beautiful. The weird blog tends to have the most readers and the most responses, so the more stupid you think your idea is the more you are swimming in gold.
Fifth, and by far the biggest tip, nice blogs always finish last. Nobody wants to read why your life is awesome. We do not care about your big green powered house (unless it was built out of rubber bands), your pink Barbie convertible (unless it flipped and left you with a harry potter esque scar), or your 2.5 perfect kids (unless one really is only .5 and he is the most normal of the three). It is wired into our DNA to love a good train wreck, and then to drive by it at 7 miles an hour staring on the high way because we were trying to ‘safely pass it’.
Sweet.
1 comment:
I'm confused by the first (or rather, fourth) point, as I believe are some of my own students. Because there's idiotic - which is just that, idiotic. And there's weird, which can be interesting and even poignant, but in the hands of students often just becomes uncomfortable.
This confusion links to the second (or fifth) point here: nice is boring. Okay, sure. But evidently so is civil or even class-appropriate.
After all, where does writing about drug use or attending the local shooting of Girls Gone Wild (both real topics of real students in my classes this year) fit into these categories?
And what, as a teacher, am I supposed to do with them? As a citizen, I can stop visiting the site or even spout off in a comment. But as a teacher trying to protect free speech while being introduced to the idiotic and weird - or just plain self-destructive - I find that these rules may not yield the best results.
Any pointers?
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