Writing Along with My Students

One of the best practices for writing teachers is to write with their students, to write on the topics they assign, and yet it's surprising how many do not. One of the assignments I regularly give is a journaling or notebook assignment--so many pages a week, or reflections on readings, or reflections on writing practices, etc. Last semester I kept a writer's notebook with one of my classes (not one for each of the three writing classes, which I couldn't possibly have made time for), and I found it relaxing and rewarding.
Similarly, I resumed this blog because I assigned blogging to a student who is taking a writing class with me by appointment. In addition to her blogging, she is conducting a campus survey to find out who reads blogs and who writes blogs on our campus. I am very interested to see what she finds out.
I have been reluctant to assign blogs because I sometimes feel discomfort myself about posting my opinions out here where anybody can find them. I know that my students' relation to the public realm of discourse is very different from my own. I am sometimes inhibited from writing in particular venues by a fear of sounding stupid. My students are more comfortable with risk-taking in a public discussion forum.
So one motive in my keeping a writer's log in a folder on the network so my students can read it, my keeping this blog, and my working on a revising assignment in front of my Teaching Writing class yesterday (projecting my efforts to the screen at the front of the room) is to take some of the risks I ask my students to take regularly in their writing, to move out of my comfort zone. I am also interested to see whether I can make a true commitment to the same kind of regular reflective writing that I ask of them--or will I make excuses for not keeping up? "I'm too busy" is my usual litany. Writing takes time, writing takes concentration. In addition to writing myself, I'm rereading the assignments I make (I do try to reread along with students each time I use a text, even if I've read it several times previously), and I'm commenting briefly on students' logs and writing exercises and commenting fully on formal papers, and I am involved in three time-consuming committees this semester. I also direct the Writing Center, and I work with individual students. I need to reread Brave New World so I can be a better help to an international student as he writes his paper on that book for a colleague's ENG 101 class. I need to write my paper for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. I'm on my church's Board of Directors, and I play the organ for almost every Sunday service. Etc., etc.
But then . . . I don't expect my students to tell me that they don't have time to do the reading and writing I assign them. I feel that I have more credibility with them if I can do the same work I'm asking them to do.
So . . . I guess it's time for me to start thinking about whom I'd cast as Jack and Babette Gladney, their children, their friend Murray, since the ENG 102 students are working on their White Noise: The Movie assignment.