Ah! This one felt very important. One of the things I do in the start of my poetry class is have my students critique notable poems and poets, before finally critiquing my own poem as a class. Only after they have become comfortable with the idea that criticism is critical to all poetry no matter the level, do we go into their workshops. I find this to be an important part of helping them divorce their own thoughts from mine and I have seen a stark difference in the class that I made crituqe my poem and the class I did not. The class that critiqued my poems are far more confident and comfortable sharing new perspectives on work or disagreeing with my POV of a work all together which I find to be a major success.

Perhaps this is because I am gen-z as well, but this advice presents an interesting delimma for this current batch of college students due to the digital era in which they have grown up in and in many ways are (literally) addicited to. With the advent of social media and the attention-economy-dash quicker, and shorter form content is the name of the game for Gen-Z . I wonder if truly snails pace speaking would be able to engage them, or if livelier, slightly faster speech would mimic the short of enjoyable content that their braids are already hardwired to find enjoyable.

One thing I have been reminded o during ENGL611, is that many of our college-level students get to university without have 'learned' to properly skim, and it is such a crucial part of surviving college. It makes me consider the importance of teaching my students the format of most academic papers (eg. topic sentence, conclusion sentence) and how to find that recreated in fiction as well.

This sort of real-world modeling not only leads by example, but also creates an closeness with the instructor that can be harder to foster online.

I'm wondering how metacognitive reading practices can factor into fiction reading and I find that perhaps many of my students are already doing so. In workshop, many of their first thoughts on their peers work has to do with other fiction they have read, and many of them come with kindles/iPads filled with notes on their peer's story.