‹Once more from the top. This time with feeling›. Love, hate, and the self-story today

Get high-school students these days to write about themselves, their lives, or their views, say for an in-class creative or persuasive task or for the personal statement in a university application. Make the questions general and open-ended, choose interesting prompts, and promote their reflection. What the students then tend to write about is feelings and their own strong feelings in particular. Among them, love (and less so, hate) is common, be it about own experiences and desires or about own beliefs and ideas. In the following essay, I consider more closely the students’ engagement with the feeling of love in their texts. I first try to characterize, and then to deconstruct and critique compositions of this sort. Both as a process as well as an output, the exercise typically falls far short of its pedagogical and personal potential. By the essay’s end, I offer some support to students in finding and conveying greater meaning from their feelings in their writings.