Out with the Old

As the semester comes to a close, I’ve began looking back trying to compare/contrast what I did last semester with the way I have taught ENG 110 this semester. My big change has been in the amount of time I spend conferencing and working one-on-one with the students.

Last semester, I had plenty of workshop days for the students to utilize to improve their papers, but only a few, small conferences where I let the students discuss with me, personally, the direction of their paper. This semester, I’ve changed things completely around with the amount of time devoted to workshop as compared to conferencing. This semester I still had at least one workshop per paper, but I also had at least one conference per paper. And I think that has made a lot of difference in a couple of ways: 1) it cuts down on the time out of class that I have to spend writing comments on papers and not knowing if they will understand the comments and know how to implement my suggestions, and 2) gives them immediate personal feedback on their work and gives them a chance to ask me directly if they have a problem or don’t understand what I’m asking of them.

I feel that this one-on-one contact keeps me more informed on each student’s process as well as their progress on each paper. It also keeps them more honest on actually doing their rough drafts. I noticed last semester that even though there was a second workshop on a paper, some students would bring in the exact same draft from the first workshop. Now, knowing they will be sitting down with me, their instructor, they always bring more to the table and will talk and share their frustrations as well as their satisfactions with the work they are doing.

I know that conferencing isn’t for every teacher, some may loathe it even, but for me, I’ve found that it really helps me connect with each student in a more personal way than lecture does and gets the student to be more open about their work. I believe it’s something I will continue to do as long as I am behind the desk.

Time Time Time for Finals

What is everyone doing for their Final Exams in ENG 110 this semester? I'm curious to what each instructor does to conclude their coursework.

The inclass essay seems too obvious. Other than a chance for reflection on the semester, what else is this paper offering to them or us?

I've thought of using the class debate. If you can find the right subject, you can really get a class fueled up...that is, as long as you don't teach an 8:00 a.m. class.

Just turn in their final paper and leave? That sounds too much like what you would do in an upper-leverl course.

I think I'm going to take Dr. Cadle's advice from class this morning and go with the oral presentation. We've spent quite a bit of time on this last paper. They've had 2 workshops and a one-on-one conference with me, so I know that most of them have put a lot of time and thought into this paper, so a chance to show the rest of the class what they've done, to showcase themselves so to speak, sounds like something they've come to deserve.

Has anyone done the oral presentaion during the semester or as a final project? I'm wondering how most Freshmen will react to being told they have to talk about their papers for 5 minutes. Even if they don't want to do it, I still think it will be a good experience for them. God knows how many times you have to present your findings to the class as you advance through your college years.

What is considered "Fair" in grading?

We are all getting to that point in the semester where we have to start thinking about the grades we are going to give to each student, which means that we have to also start dealing with the stress of rationalizing to ourselves each student's grade.

I've been contemplating in my head over and over again, the concept of "fair grading." If every student attended every class meeting, had their workshop drafts done on time, and generally participated, then "fair" would be a much easier concept to grasp. But, alas, it never happens that way. We sometimes find ourselves pulling for certain students that display high levels of effort and at other times feeling somewhat ambivalent towards those students who do not attend class regularly or do all their work in a timely manner.

And I believe it's fine and palpable that effort and particpation should play a part in our grading. But to what extent should it be taken into consideration? Where do we draw the line that this student's grade should be raised and another student's lowerd based on factors outside of the work they have turned in? Do these somewhat external forces come into play only if a student is on the cusp, where a grade could easily go either way? Or are there circumstances to where a whole letter grade (a strong B to an A or a strong B to a C) can be changed outside of the grade the student got on each paper?

I have a student who has consistently turned in quality papers which appear well thought out, have a clear voice, and very few grammatical problems, but this student also has missed a substantial amount of class. When this student does show up, it is usually about 15-20 minutes after class has started and he just plops down in a chair and does nothing.

So what is "fair" in this situation? Give him an A because his papers were good? Give him a B because he is never in class? What about the other students that have rarely, if ever, missed class? If I grade this other student strictly on his papers, does that mean I have to do that with all the other students? If I take effort and participation into account, do I have to do it across the board, to every student? What's fair? Does it have to be fair? Can we/Should we grade each student on a completely individual basis?

I wonder.

Blog Prompt

Dr. Cadle's blog prompt definitely sets up quite an interesting situation for any teacher to have to deal with. How does one respond to having practically the 'whole' class screw up at least one part of a major assignment? I think if this exact situation described in the prompt happen to fall into my lap, I believe that I would immediately return the papers that did not meet the full criteria for the assignment and only grade the ones that did. I would like to think that by returning the papers ungraded to a student each time they didn't do a certain part of the assignment would let them know that I would do the exact same thing if they failed to fufill all requirements on the next paper as well. I guess my way of dealing with the situation would be to not deal with it. At least not directly. Just give their papers back to them, explain that, as of right now, their papers do not warrant a grade of any kind. A little passive-aggressive, but that's okay.
But in my real-life classroom, I try to keep this type of thing from happening by constantly having conferences with students and workshopping each paper at least once, if not twice, in class before the final due date. Perhaps I spend too much time trying to get them to revise rather than doing random assigmnments during the semester, but I feel it's worth it. I think meeting with each student one-on-one during the writing of each paper and actually have them tell me exactly where they are, show me exactly where they are on their paper, keeps them somewhat honest with me. And I feel like I'm a little bit informed on their writing processes as well.

Bringing Superman Into the Classroom

I just had what felt like a very productive 110 class this morning. Maybe productive isn't the right word, how about participatory. Although is was productive as well. I am on of the few GAs, it seems, that still does the Critical Analysis paper early on in the semester, and so I was not able to share the "Writing What We Teach" paper that we did for 603 with my students while they were in the midst of writing their own critical analysis papers. Now that my own paper is completed, while my students are getting close to a Final Draft of their Research papers, I decided to bring my paper in and use it as a jumping off piece to talk a little bit about the position paper.


I should tell you now that my paper was about Superman. I had come across this article by Lawrence Watt-Evans that suggested Superman has many deep personal issues, mostly based on the fact that he wears his baby-blanket as his suit and that he must be lonely because he has to keep his real identity a secret to everyone that he knows and loves. I found it an interesting read and a fun article to analyze. I brought my paper into class and asked them to take a few minutes to read it and then write at least 1 page on whether they agreed or disagreed with the issues and points made in the paper, using quotations when necessary. I was only going to give them 10-15 minutes to write, but every student was still heads down, pencils flying at the 15 minute mark, so I let them contine for another 15 minutes. Even after 30 minutes had passed, I had to ask at least 3 students to go ahead and find a stopping point, so that we could have some class discussion.


Usually when I start asking questions to the class as a whole, I get blank, staring faces and eyes that say "Are you freaking serious? Do you really expect me to give you an answer?" But today, (whether it was because Spring Break was upon us or they just wanted to appease me, I don't know) they all had an opinion about Superman. Most decided that they felt sorry for the guy having to keep such a big secrect, having to keep all his friends at a distance, and not being able to go have a beer and slap a good friend on the back like everyone else does. Some even brought up instances that probably should have been added into Watt-Evans' original article to help make the argument a little stronger, like how Clark Kent must feel watching Lois Lane swoon all over Superman while treating him like a nobody. Two students even went back and forth adding facts from the Justice League Unlimited Animated Series that proves Superman is a lonely creature and that he can be broken emotionally.

As time wound down, and I tried to wrap things up all nice and pretty, I told the class that they had just verbally written their next paper. And I explained that my plan was to bring in a few more articles for them to read and that the paper would be arguing for, or against, a stance taken in the article, using a little bit of research as support of course. And it was nice to see the light go on, and maybe even a cloud of knowing that they already Know how to write their next paper. At least that's the story I'm telling myself.

Learning a New Language = Academic Writing

I've been intrigued this semester with Alice Horning's theory of Standard Written English as a Second Language. And although I feel that her theory has some major holes in it, I've found that it has really helped me in relating to my student's writing as we moved from the Memoir to the Critical Analysis and now on to the Research paper. A lot of GAs have mentioned that they have moved the Memoir later in the semester because they feel it takes a stronger grasp on writing to be able to sucessfully complete the Memoir with a significant amount of reflection built in, and I agree that that may be the case, but I still like to do the Memoir first, and get those frist drafts right off the bat, so that I can get a sense of the student's storytelling voice, first and foremost, before jumping into a further academic sort of writing. The first draft on this paper, for me, could truly be called a 'rough draft' in that I ask that they do not make any corrections or edits on thist first draft until after it has been workshopped by me and the other students. This would ideally let me see the most raw form of each student's writings and kind of get an idea of where they are. And it works up to an extent. There are always students that surprise you going both ways, either they take to the critical analysis very well or find it to be almost intrusive to their lives. This latter is where Horning's theory usually can come in to play. By allowing these students to do the Memoir first, I can show it to them when they are having difficultly on the Critical Analysis and tell them, 'yes, you do know how to write, it's just a different kind of writng now.' I try to get them to see the authority with which they wrote their Memoir and try to rediscover that when they are writing the Critical Analysis. It's hard, and most of them never believe that they should have the authority to say whether a text is achieving it's goal or not, but usually they will come around. Even if it means writing the Critical Analysis as an 'I' paper ('I' paper being "in my opinion" or "i think") first and then going back through and removing all of those I's. And perhaps, even in my teaching I haven't fully conveyed Horning's theory to my students, it helps me to remember a little bit about taking that first step into academic writing, gives me a little more sympathy.

Pedagogy

I thought that the exercise in 603 to draw our teaching pedagogy was really very interesting. It was nice to see and hear that most people are still in the middle of trying to find their own specific pedagogy to adhear to, and that I'm not the only one "peeking" into different pedagogical stances and stealing little bits of morsels here and there, wherever I find them to be useful. As simple as most people assumed their drawing were (mainly because almost none of us consider ourselves artist in the literal sense of drawing/painting), everyone had a very succinct reason, it seemed, for every little detail included on their picture.

And, as was pointed out in class, I found it funny that most of the drawings were theorists-centered (myself included) rather than student-centered. But I have a theory on that as well: I figure that with most of us GA's being first-year teachers at any level, let alone at the level of a State University, we are put in a position where we feel that we have to 'know' everything about the subject, as well as the act of teaching, before we feel that we can effectively teach our students. And one way of attaining this information is to really look at and apply some of the things were hear from theorists and the approaches that they tend to profess at us. So, at the earliest stage of becoming a teacher/professor, we are trying to gather as much information as possible from all different angles so we can, hopefully, be ready to handle, or have an answer for, any given situation. And until we utilize this approach enough in our classrooms to become comfortable with our own teaching, we will continue to run through theorist after theorist, asking "Am I critical or progressive? Do I believe in error reduction or error elimination?" and so on and so forth. It seems like a logical, healthy way of discovering who we are as teachers by imitating and learning from the teachings of those that came before us.

In Apposition of English

In my ENG 621 class the other day, we (the graduate students) were presented with some of the exercises that ENG 100 students are sometimes made to do, just so, I suppose, we can get a feel not only for what kind of exericises work for the basic writing student, but to also put us in their shoes. During one of the exercises where we were to construct a paragraph using popsicle sticks instead of words, we were told to include such things as introductory phrases, complete sentences, exclamatory phrases, prepositions, commas, periods, and a couple of appositives. That last one brought about what could only be described as a cloud of confusion for some of the graduate students. Listening closely, one could hear many murmuring voices asking each other, back and forth, "What's an appositive?" Myself included.

This brought up an issue for me. How can we expect a basic writing student to understand and point out such things as an appositive in a sentence when it would seem some (or maybe most) graduate students could not do the same thing?

Yet, for myself as least, once I was able to get home and look up the definition for the word, I found out that, yes, I did know what an appositive was, I had just never heard of it being called an appositive before. In fact, I had never heard any technical word for it before.

Here's what www.dictionary.com has listed for "apposition" (since appositive only means the use of an apposition) - "a syntactic relation between expressions, usually consecutive, that have the same function and the same relation to other elements in the sentence, the second expression identifying or supplementing the first. In Washington, our first president, the phrase our first president is in apposition with Washington."

Since that class period, I've been wondering about the use of technical jargon that we sometimes feel we have to use to talk about these conecepts of grammar and language. Or, more precisely, should we be using this technical jargon at all? I can only imagine the frustration that a basic writer must feel when being told to find an appositive (or any other fancy technical mumbo-jumbo) in a sentence, when some graduate English students have trouble finding it too. But what can be done? Should we start teaching this technical grammatical jargon in early childhood so first graders can go home spouting about the proper use of a prepostional phrase or active versus passive voice in the book See Spot Run? Or should we be more apt as teachers to spell out what these words mean, to give the student a graphic representation of what these words stand for so that they can make the connection themselves between these fancy words and their real-life applications to the their writing?

Catering to the Interests of the Students...

I had a really good class period today. Well, maybe I should re-phrase that: I had what felt like a good class period today, whether it was or not. For some reason, whether it be this strange bout of flu that is taking over the campus or just sheer laziness, only a little over half of my class showed up today, the day before their first drafts of the Critical Analysis is due. And I know that the Critical Analysis (along with the articles from The Presence of Others that they are supposed to be analyzing) is the least favorite of all papers they are doing this semester, but come on. So, as kind of a reward to the students that did show up (and to myself), I gave these students the option of writing a different kind of Critical Analysis: they could analyze a movie instead. Any movie would be fine as long as they actually analyzed it and didn't write a paper that just told me why they like this movie so much. The students really seemed to come alive (which I've found to be VERY rare for an 8:00 am class), and had all kinds of questions about how they could tackle this, as well as suggestions on how to approach watching their movie without bias so they could get an accurate analysis of it. It felt great to not have to give direction to the class, but to rather take a position more akin to a springboard for their ideas. And their excitement about doing this project also excited me for them (if that makes sense). I really enjoyed the class and felt like I might get some papers with a little more personality in them now.

Presence of ..... What?

I initially thought I would post on here about being ambivalent to whether we kept The Presence of Others book for next semester or not. After all, the few stories that I have used out of that book I have made extensive notes on and feel like I wouldn't have to worry too much about making a new lesson plan or spending hours preparing for class because I already have done all the leg-work necessary on those stories and feel comfortable using them. But, really, I only use TPOO book for the Critical Analysis paper. I didn't find it too useful for any of the other papers, so I basically just made copies of stories, articles or essays that I found to be more conducive to the way I teach. Last semester I relied on TPOO book for the Memoir, but I have definitely found the Composing Ourselves book to be way more suited for the way I want to teach the Memoir, by letting them experience REAL student Memoirs.

Of course, like any person who hasn't done their homework before they post, I have no suggestions about using a different text for this coming Fall, but I would love to see more of what options there are out there.

Is it too much to ask that, finally, someone would publish a Freshman Composition text that would actually deal specifically with the types of writing we are asking these students to do for us, and also do a little entertaining as well??? There are plenty of articles/essays that might actually work for multiple purposes in TPOO, but they fail to keep my attention at even the most basic level, so why would I expect my students to have some real, in-depth, commentary on said articles/essays???

Test

Yowser! Yowser! Yowser!