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.)