What's next?

With one semester finished, I'm thinking about the next semester, when I'm teaching a course that I haven't taught in about five years. I'm looking forward to it because it's such an important course: Engl 90, our "Introduction to Writing" course that helps not-quite-ready writers become college-writing ready. Years ago, I taught it using the Utne Reader magazine as a text, crafting all the assignments as responses to the short current articles there. I'd end the course with a Letter to the Editor assignment that I actually sent to the mag. That method was fun for me because I never knew what topics we'd be writing about.

But the magazine's editorial vision seems to have changed, and it's become increasingly less fun/ky, so I've switched to a textbook this year. I'm rueing the choice, though, thinking it's more than the students can handle. We'll have to see what happens -- or how I can make something happen.

Portfolios Finished!

Whew - reading such good (huge) portfolios takes a LOT of focused time. Why do I do this method, I ask myself every semester, but ultimately the work seems to be worth it: I read good work. Most students seem to learn quite a bit, for the most part.

Funny sentences, do emerge, however. For example, these:

• "Preparing for the portfolio was the most changeling thing I had to do in our English class."
• "Writing has always been my weakest strength but I know this class has helped improved me to become a better writer."
• "Many call the gays bad, evil and other crazy names, but how many of us actually know an evil lesbian or a bad gay man."

Second and Third Final

Second was FYC with the M/W group: not as strong, let me tell you. The level of cliche and vague generalization hasn't diminished far enough over the past 16 weeks, even though we've practiced and practiced and practiced. Some students even resorted to the "5-paragraph theme" with its "three points," a genre we've repeatedly discussed as inadequate for college-level thinking. I guess a pressure-situation like an inclass final essay brings out the worst in us: stress is like that.

Third was the Intro to GLBT Studies students: I asked too much of them, relying on their input when they said they wanted to write about how they connected this course to their lives. They wanted to reflect rather than memorize: I get that, but the exam took too long. Some of them will just skip the second part and double the point values of the first part.

Okay, now to do more grading: 15 portfolios left (with 8 essays in each!), 15 final exams (all online), and 21 final essays/projects to read.

The end is in sight.

First Final

This afternoon, my T/Th FYC students took their in-class final, an essay exam. I had three options for them, and 16 out of 18 took one of the options, 2 chose another (the option no one chose at midterm), and none chose an option that I thought might be fun (discuss the relationship between words and images -- we've been Wordle-ing this semester, and I've given them a few talks about visual design).

Exams weren't terrible (I've graded them already). I wonder how the M/W class will do tomorrow. They've struggled all semester. We'll see.

So far, I've graded 13 of 36 portfolios (eight essays in each!), 18 of 52 final exams, and none of the 21 final projects I have left for this semester. This week is grading week, can you tell?

After grading comes grades calculation: I've begun that, too, with the accumulation almost accumulated. Only a couple of Fs for plagiarism -- not bad, I suppose, out of 64 students -- and some really lovely work, essays that I want to copy and distribute to future students. It's wonderful to read heart-felt expressions of indignation, pride, enlightenment. It really does happen.

Kill your babies

I've been telling my students that as they revise, they must get rid of some of the things they love (because they have written them) so that their essays are more focused, unified, organized. Now I find myself in a similar situation:

Going through files to organize before final portfolios come in, I'm clearing out all the old assignments and extra paper that accumulates during the semester. I'm finding essays/assignment that I've graded, commented on, and that weren't returned to students because those students disappeared. I have a hard time recycling these papers with all my carefully crafted penciled comments, all my conversation with the student.

All my hard work down the drain! I think to myself. Why do I *do* so much commenting? Why do I write so much on their essays? How can I possibly throw away all the evidence of my hard work?

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) coined the phrase "murder your darlings" in 1914, which came down to us as "kill your babies." I suppose he's right. Here's the full quotation:

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetuate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – wholeheartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” In 12th and final lecture “On Style (given at Cambridge on 28 January 1914 in a series published as On the Art of Writing).

So I have to take my own advice already! Dang.

Worst Meeting Ever

On Friday afternoon, I attended a planning meeting for the upcoming MnSCU English Discipline Workshop (April 3-4, 2009). Although we had a detailed agenda and superb attendance, we didn't get even a third of the way through the agenda before people started leaving: mainly because we'd reached the scheduled ending point of the meeting, 90 minutes after it'd begun.

Oddly, the person in charge of this workshop, who'd created the agenda, doesn't seem to have *any* grasp of time, of prioritization, of audience. S/he spent an unnecessary amount of time on minutiae, which gave random others the opportunity to chime in with additional unnecessary minutiae.

By 5:00, a full two hours after the beginning of the meeting, we were getting to the agenda items that needed committee member input (real decisions, real consequences). Only six of the original eighteen attendees were still present, and most of us had to leave. So we still don't know if the workshop's topics are still the same (how *does* "Assessment" differ from "Accountability" as one member so wisely asked).

Even my best students . . .

. . . can't work with sources. I've just read the most *horrendous* source-based essays that I've ever read in my life. Seriously, in my twenty-plus-year teaching life. Not even my own elementary school children wrote essays this terrible: disjointed, inaccurate, pointless, rambling, copied, unclear. Now I'm curious about where my previous students bought their essays.

I'm stumped: I stepped them through the process, with tour of the library and its databases, required annotated bibliography, conference with me, pre-research-paper essay persuading me that they had a reasonable research question and some idea of where to go to find their answer(s), rhetorical analysis of a sample student essay, three in-class workshops on drafts (for content [a variation of Elbow's Believer/Doubter exercises], for structure, and for citations).

I don't know what else to do. Are students that stretched that they can't do any work outside of class? We spent almost five weeks on this "unit," five weeks to produce a "researched essay" based on a question that they had related to our college common book.

The saddest thing is that I won't be teaching FYC again for at least a year. So what do I do with my terrible job this semester?