Today I introduced Kelly Gallagher's Real World Writing Purposes by, as Gallagher suggests, having my students look for examples of these in magazines (actually, Gallagher recommends newspapers, but what I had access to was a motley collection of magazines and journals including San Diego magazine, the New Yorker, N+1, and Lucky Peach, among others).
As is often the case, I'm fairly confident that I learned more than anybody else. Specifically, I learned how far I am from being conversant in the "Real World Writing Purposes." I started one class by grandly declaring "Whatever you write will fall within one of these purposes." It took about three minutes for a student to point to a humor piece in the New Yorker and say "I can't figure out where this one fits."
"Hmm," I replied. "It doesn't, really. I take back what I just said."
Soon afterwards, I realized that I really didn't know how to explain what an example of an article with the purpose "inquire and explore" would look like.
Having taken a look at my students' "scavenger hunt" sheets, it's clear to me that for the most part, they have a tenuous grip on what the writing purposes refer to. Doing this again, I will need to provide more of a structured lead-in to the scavenger hunt, so that students are more clear about these. I might provide extracts from examples of each "writing purpose", and ask students to identify characteristics that identify it as part of this category.
Here's the thing. I wouldn't understand any of this if I hadn't taught this class. It had all seemed so straightforward when I read Gallagher's book. And what this means is that the first time I introduce anything like this is going to be pretty rough. And, continuing this thought, I think I could make more of a concerted effort to have fewer "first times", by keeping a closer eye on what concepts and ideas I've introduced already that are now available to be revisited.
Two things are keeping me from coming back to structures and concepts that I've already introduced: first, every teaching issue feels new when it looms in front of me, so my instinct is always to find a new solution for this issue, rather than going back through things I've already introduced. The second thing is that I'm inclined to think "Man, I don't want to revisit that, that was a total mess when I introduced it before." What I need to remind myself is that everything is a bit of a mess the first time I try to introduce it, because it's through introducing it that I learn about it.