It makes such a difference

I teach both required courses and elective courses. Last night was one of the electives, Intro to GLBT Studies. Students who take this course are actually interested in the topic unlike the students who take my other courses, Composition 1 or Tech Writing. Those students are compelled to take these because the courses are required for their degrees.

Last night, students engaged right away, had things to say, offered answers/solutions/insights to me and to *each other* in a way I infrequently get in my required courses. Last night students felt free to ask questions for which they *really* wanted to know answers:

For example, as we began our course with a discussion of vocabulary and definitions: "My husband's coworker used to be a man and had the surgery and now is a woman. Is she a transsexual or transgender?"

My answer (a paraphrase from memory): "You've brought up a really good issue that has to do with the meanings of words, categories, definitions. Things we think we all know -- like what 'woman' is or means -- aren't really so simple when we're talking about human beings who don't quite fit into our preconceived notions about a binary system. Some folks might call this person a transgender person because she's moved from the gender of 'man' to the gender of 'woman.' Some people might call her 'transsexual' because she's altered her body's sexual parts to be in line with 'woman.' But this person herself might not want either category or label; she might just want to be known as a 'woman,' plain and simple, because she's worked hard to achieve that status!"

I went on to talk more about the premises that undergird our understandings of words, concepts, ideas, and how these premises need to be revealed in order to understand what we're talking about. The mere fact that I brought up the word "premises" made two of my students think that their Logic course would be related to this GLBT course: how great is that! Students making connections across disciplines!

What a good night of conversation and learning with interesting, interested people.

It'll overwhelm me

I've got my students writing, that's for sure, in many spaces and places. Why? It's only the first week, and I already feel behind with responding to them.

I guess the thing to remember is that they learn to write by writing, don't need me to respond to everything they say, will teach each other some important things.

Right?

Good first day

A couple of innovations worked well:

1) With introductions, for years I have asked students to "interview" each other and then introduce that interviewee to the whole class. Typically, I ask a question about the student's course goals/objectives, but I get tired of hearing, "My goal is to get an A in this class." So this year, I asked, "What do you hope to get out of *and give to* this class?"

The second part of the question solicited answers like, "I hope to give time and determination to this class." Yep, much better.

2) For a first-day writing exercise, I handed out a couple of cartoons about writing: next to each cartoon was blank space, and I asked students to think about the cartoons and put something in the space.

I deliberately used the word "put" to see who would write, who would draw, etc. One student drew an excellent extension of the first cartoon, and almost all students wrote something of interest. All were completely absorbed with the assignment. I'll definitely do it again.

Almost

Materials done (enough) for the first day of class for three of my four classes. Whew. Details to follow, of course, especially because I know the online course has glitches.

Now for the Wednesday night course: it's going to get shorted I fear!

Why . . .

. . .can I not see / open any of the documents in my online course? Something has changed since I last used D2L? Something changed with the switch to the upgraded D2L? Overall, I like the upgrade, but I can't understand why every document is blank.

One/Two Down

So I figured out the structure of my Comp 1 courses: it took MUCH longer than it should have. The wonderful/terrible thing about sabbatical is that it's caused me to change/realign/revise the books/assignments/timeline I use in my courses. All my courses!

The tricky thing with Comp 1 is that I have two different kinds of time frames: even though they're each twice-a-week classes (which I prefer because then the course doesn't feel like high school), one meets for 75 minutes twice a week and the other for 110 minutes twice a week.

The 110-minute meetings are easy to fit with my "lecture/discussion plus writing workshop" pedagogy: Tuesdays are whole-class meetings with lecture/discussion about the homework; Thursdays are Writers' Workshops with half the class meeting 4:00-4:50 to "workshop" two writers' drafts, the other half the class meeting for 5:00-5:50 to workshop.

The 75-minute session is harder: workshops will only be 30 minutes long, with some wiggle-room for transitions between groups. And with two writers for each workshop, 15 minutes is really not enough time to fully workshop a draft, so I'll have to be quick about keeping us on track!

This year I've also added a blogging component for the students: the idea is to get them to write, write, write in various forums for various purposes. The blogging won't be "graded" as such; it'll just be counted, sort of how I work with reading journals in non-comp classes.

(Hey, the use of the semicolon above makes me think about this Boston Globe article called "Sex and the Semicolon": interesting! I'm an over-user of colons [and hyphens], so we'll see if anyone writes an article about them.)

Thinking Ahead

Wow, this new school year is going to be action-packed. Today's sessions filled me in on lots of new, cool stuff going on -- I can't say I was exactly "inspired," but I was eager to get in on projects.

One initiative is the Common Book Project, of course, and we're reading Field Notes From a Catastrophe this year. Author Elizabeth Kolbert is even coming to campus on March 10, 2009!

This video, from The New York Times blog "By the Numbers" by Charles M. Blow, will be of use, I think: it's called "Vampire Energy."

We begin

Today's the start of the fall semester: faculty and staff gather for our three-day "in-service" sessions where we learn about the new light bulbs purchased by the college, the special ink used to print the reams-and-reams of marketing materials because we don't have enough students.

My first year at the college, these "duty days" (awfully perfect name almost all faculty persist in calling them) included a wonderful and inspirational talk about teaching: Chet Meyers reminded me why I teach, why I love it, and why it's important to remember these things. We haven't had such a motivating beginning since. *Sigh*.

Georgia on my mind

I've been to Tbilisi, Georgia, about 10 years ago on a research trip with the American International Health Alliance (a branch of USAID that is now defunct, from what I've heard). My research partner and I spent about four days in that city, interviewing doctors and other medical professionals (medical school professors, hospital "chiefs" and technology experts).

During our stay, I remember excellent food and a city that was pleasantly brownish, dusty streets competing with a few dusty trees leafing out to green, not much grass, and a few really stunning old buildings and cemeteries that reflected the long history of a people who'd lived in these mountains. (See some accurate photos here from an interesting blogger.) I remember a proud, intelligent people, professional and knowledgeable about the West, ready to jump into the 21st century.

Our hosts took us Americans on a picnic one afternoon, van-ride through the countryside to a lake surrounded by a thinned forest, no beach but a swimable lake where families were picnicking like us: blanket spread with the familiar flat bread, cheese, sausage, tomatoes, two kinds of pesto/mushroom spread made with wild greens, fruit, wine, coca cola and fanta. Many Georgian folks swam in their undergarments, but not our hosts, some of whom were wearing high heels in the woods. And I was the only American woman to swim, which made me popular with the fellows.

The Georgian people were my favorite of all the folks we met in our three-week, eight-country tour: I said to them that their country would be the only one I'd consider bringing my family to so we could hike to the castle/church/city buildings from the 9th century, eat the famous soup and bread-with-goat-cheese baked into it, shop along the tree-lined market street in Tbilisi. I wonder if I'll get the chance to do so? Maybe I'll make the khachapuri and kharcho myself.

Text Message Abbreviations in Irish

(Click here or above.)

Thanks, Omniglot - The Blog (not to be confused with its parent, Omniglot: Writing Systems & Languages of the World)

What's old is new

I found myself in an online article from the Wall Street Journal called "When Lit-Crit Mattered."

I'm not usually a reader of the WSJ, but this link was provided by "Arts & Letters Daily," a helpful, informative online "service of The Chronicle of Higher Education."

The article reviews the book Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, a collection of essays about New Criticism edited by Garrick Davis.

Reading the summary of New Critics' commitments and practices confirmed for me what I've always suspected but didn't quite know: I was trained in New Criticism. I've been a close reader of texts for most of my life, and those skills were honed by literature professors at St. Kate's and Penn State. At the U of M's rhetoric department, close reading became "discourse analysis" as a research method. I was also encouraged to read *everything* using such a method, including non-canonical authors thanks to my professors who practiced if didn't overtly teach feminist and critical theory. So my education didn't suffer from the narrowness-of-canon that New Critics are accused of perpetuating.

Because my grad school experiences were interrupted by child-raising, I missed the intense training in things like the cultural-studies-type of literary theory, structuralism, or deconstruction. Therefore, my classroom activities center around the ways-of-reading I found most effective. I've taught my own students critical reading practices that foreground the text even though students most often want to foreground the authors' lives as a way to understand the text. I've never encouraged that because it seems to take all the power out of an imaginative work, and the human imagination is what we praise in literature, if you ask me, not the life led by the author.

Another book for me to read in my spare time.

As we end

The summer session class meets for the last time tomorrow night. Despite the fact that the syllabus, the calendar, and the class website say our final will be ONLINE, not during the last class meeting, students were surprised last night to find out that the final class meeting would not be an exam.

Just goes to show the power of precedent: the midterm exam was in-class with a short-essay portion that could be taken home and returned online.

The way I set up my courses, students can take either the midterm or the final exam (or take both and the highest score will count). So students who did poorly on the midterm want to take the final; oddly enough, these students are the ones who didn't get that our last class meeting is an *actual class* not the exam.

Just goes to show that the weaker students are weaker in more areas than one: they're not great readers, writers, or planners.

I have one who was going to skip the last class because s/he's working at WE Fest. Another student missed last night and was hoping to miss tomorrow too, in effect taking a 15/16-week literature course in 5 weeks (and using it to substitute for another course at her/his home university where the course would have cost about $2800.00 instead of $450.00).

Hmmm . . . maybe I've got it wrong: maybe these students are very good planners . . . ! At any rate, I've answered four panicked emails today from students who need extensions or something because of their life situations and the grades they've earned this semester. I do wish I could encourage more responsible behavior on the part of students: how do others help students stay current with the course requirements, short of hand-holding and acting like the students' mother? I'm just not interested in that (mis)understanding of so-called "ethic of care" pedagogy.

What does this sentence mean?

Here's the opening sentence from a student's "field trip report," where s/he is supposed to analyze the experience of going to an independent bookstore, Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, and connect it to the course we've been in: Engl 2061 - Women's Literature: British and Colonial:

"There has been a long, withstanding tradition of preserving women through literature."

I have to say that I get images of orange marmalade in my head . . . :-) And what word should the "withstanding" in that sentence be? I can't figure that one out at all.

Just for More Fun

The Onion Radio News has radio podcasts. Here's the "Rules Grammar Change" from yesterday, Aug. 2, 2008. (Warning: the sound is loud!)

Just for Fun

From the techrhet list: sharing a goofy video from College Humor -- it's called Font Conference, but it's really a little super-hero story. Check out the font chosen for the hero -- and the font chosen for the villain -- not to mention the poor victim!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.