When English teachers ask students to write personal journals and then turn them in for the teacher to read, the teachers have a chance to learn about the students’ hopes, wishes, dreams, fantasies, family life, anxieties, ambitions, fears, and so on.
There are several problems with this practice. The first is, of course, that none of this information is any of the teachers’ business. It is personal. The second problem is that asking students to spend time thinking about and writing about themselves for schoolwork is essentially anti-academic.
Teachers and students have real academic tasks. Teachers of literature should bring students to an understanding and appreciation of great writing that is not about the students themselves. Teachers of history have an obligation to introduce their students to historical events and persons well beyond the lives and experiences of the students. Math, science, foreign languages and other disciplines have little interest in the personal lives of the students. Teachers of those subjects have academic material they want students to learn as soon as they can.
However, in the English departments, there seems to be an irresistible attraction to probing the personal lives of the students. For some, the excuse is relevance. It seems hard to get students interested in anything besides themselves, they complain, so why not have students write, if they write about anything, about their own lives. This is seen as reaching out to where the students are, when what they should be doing is encouraging students to reach outside themselves to the grand and wide worlds of knowledge to be found in academic tasks and pursuits.
For some teachers, the excuse is perhaps curiosity. It can be amusing and diverting to read what students reveal about their personal lives, and some teachers may tell themselves that they will be better teachers if they can invade students’ privacy in this way, and perhaps tailor their instruction and counsel to each student’s personal fears and concerns. But this is not their job, nor is it a job for which they have been trained, educational psychology classes notwithstanding.
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