Have you ever been in a grad school program reading about communicative competency and various pedagogies to employ when you realized you forgot an important part of this when giving out a massive writing project? No? Well, I just did.

This last chapter I was reading from a course on language and culture was focusing on communicative competency (in contrast to Chomsky’s idea of Linguistic Competency) and one of the pedagogical approaches discussed was Halliday’s Genre approach. As I was reading I had a huge “oh shit” moment. I have been telling my students to write these massive analytical journals for the stock market only to realize that I completely forgot the most important part of reading and writing in a new genre: analysis. No wonder so many students keep asking me the same questions over and over again.

Basically, this means that Monday (aka tomorrow) will need to be dedicated to finding a blog for the students to read through and analyze.

To be fair, I did tell the students that this assignment is the first time we are trying this in this class and that I will be grading it very loosely because they are my research animals. I just need some time to reexplain the purpose of the journal (aka objective) and give some resources and time to reading blogs and taking them apart.

I am really off my game this year. I think it’s time I retire.