In my writing classes, students write one page of English every week. This page is their journal. Every week, one journal, from each student.
Of course there are other assignments: Homework, class work, participation, tests, all the usual challenges of an English class. But the journal is written every week. Every week, one page.
In the first weeks, students are a little nervous about what to write. They introduce themselves. "I am from Shiga," one writes. Another, "I was born in Hokkaido." Students come from all over Japan. "I live with my father and mother and my twin sister," writes one student. "I have a cat named Lily. I like to play badminton."
In journals, students write about themselves, about their lives and their ideas. Some weeks it is more difficult than others.
Sometimes students will write: "I can't think of what to write!" But then, they do. They tell me their favorite food. They tell me about their classes. They write about their English grammar questions, about their club activities, about the friends they are making at Kansai Gaidai. Some write about their worries, about being nervous to speak English in front of other students. They tell me they are excited, or happy, or lonely, or interested in study abroad, or interested in working in the hotel industry, or interested in manga. They tell me who they are, and who they want to be.
Of course these days many students are skilled at keeping online blogs or personal webpages. Our journals, however, are written on paper, in English, and are written for a much smaller audience: Me.
The journals, then, are not just for students. Students write the journals, and I read them. And then I write a response. Sometimes my response is longer than the student's journal page.
Whatever the student has written, I think about it carefully and consider what I can say as a reply. In this way the journal is like a written conversation. It is a discussion in document form. In a journal, it doesn't matter if a student is shy. He can still express his ideas, and I read them.
"I think about wasting food, too," I might write, if a student has written about her concerns regarding conservation. I might then tell her a story about my own life, about my grandparents, how I remember eating dinner in the countryside in Alabama thirty years ago as a child, and being told by my grandmother to always finish the food on my plate.
At the end of the first month, the student has four pages, and four comments from me. At the end of the first semester, there are fourteen pages.
When the year is over, a student will have a book of about thirty pages of their own journal writing, and thirty comments that I have written in response. It is at this time, at the last class, that I return the journal to the student, the words all there safely stored, the thoughts of a year at Kansai Gaidai University preserved like a time capsule, with my final comments for the year.
Do students ever save the journals? Do they keep them to read years later and remember? I'm not sure. For me, that is not so important. What I do know is that I keep for myself the memory of each student, each person, discovered through his or her words--written one page at a time, every week.
(Phillip Clark)