Feb. 11, 2016 Today's Good Ideas

I'm writing down these activities before I forget them:

• In FYC, I had students DRAW the evidence that they will submit to me at the end of the ICO Project.
• Today was a workshop on finalizing the ICO Proposal Memo. Students had drafted on Tuesday and given that draft to me. In my reading of and commenting on the drafts, I noticed that many were not thinking in terms of concrete evidence for the successful completion of their project, so I came up with this idea:
• Visualize what your evidence (worth 50 points!) will look like on May 3
• Draw that visualization
• The best ones were detailed: 10 worksheets, 5 poems, 15 punctuation tests
• The not-best ones were metaphorical (a colorful bee to represent spelling) or process-oriented (stick figure going to the Writing Center)
•  
• In EXPRESS, after the usual "paragraph buster" and "color-coding hamburger" exercise, I had students text the folks who were not in class to say we missed them.
• Prentia - Abdul, Jacorey, Blong
• Katie - Abbey, Payton, Vanessa
• Lorena - Jen, Diedre, Ben

Thinking ahead

The new semester starts much sooner than I'd like to contemplate (Jan. 10!).  I am teaching familiar courses, so I don't feel much pressure - yet - to finalize my syllabi.  I do wish the new edition of my American Lit texts would arrive . . . I'm going to have to make a few changes to the reading list.

Mostly, I am thinking ahead to Fall 2011, when I've agreed to teach a night Shakespeare course.  Shakespeare!  I've only ever taken a course in college, although I have some vague memory of grad school Shakespeare . . . perhaps just the sonnets.

My pal Ray just sent his annual invitation to a Shakespeare play - the Guthrie has The Winter's Tale this year.  (If you click on the play-title link, you'll go to SparkNotes, which I am going to use as a main text for my course next fall - why not use the resources that my students would turn to, anyway?  And SparkNotes has "No Fear Shakespeare," which has side-by-side translation into "modern" English.  Yay.)

Stretch

What *real* active learning space might look like - not what we have at Century.

"What I learned"

One of my pedagogical commitments is to ask students to reflect on their own learning -- and to articulate that reflection in writing.

One thing I ask sometimes is for them to write, anonymously, on two sides of an index card:

• 3 things I think everyone in class has learned/achieved this semester
• 3 things that only I learned/saw/achieved

Here's a list of "Only I have learned" from my American lit course:

1. I learned how to perform scansion when reading poetry.
2. I enjoyed doing the facilitation more than I anticipated -- especially the PowerPoint and video [this from a student who researched The Crucible's links to McCarthyism (I recognize his handwriting)]
3. Poetry can take on the most peculiar of forms.

1. how to notice nuances in writing to "see more"
2. the value/need to contextualize a text to really understand it
3. contextualizing research teaches you history and more . . .

1. Poetry is 50% interpretation and 50% research.
2. It is best to facilitate a discussion in an area you love.
3. Reflection after reading is pertinant in order to understand what you've read.

1. how to analyze works based on historical events happening at the time
2. how a short story can actually be a longer story when looked at through different eyes
3. allotting sufficient time to read is important to be able to focus on a piece and truly analyze it
   

1. I learned to stick with it, even when I don't understand the class completely.
2. I learned how to more respectfully disagree or keep quiet.
3. I learned a great deal about minority viewpoints in Am. Lit that were previously foreign to me.

1. American writers are very depressed writing. [this is a Pakistani student]
2. A lot of problems in the author's life forced them to become extraordinary writers.
3. I had lots of fun learning more about American lit.

1. Independent bookstores were a brand new experience for me [they need to visit one in a "field trip" experience]
2. Two lit courses in one semester is a lot of writing & reading.
3. Need to be more proficient Analyzing poetry!

1. To find symbolism & metaphor in writing such as the snake in "Sweat" & "Chrysanthemums" & "The Eyes".
2. That the cannon (sic) of literature will always evolve because of individual talents & new writers.
3. American Literature is unique because it reflects the many cultures that have come together and an endless search for identity & belonging vs. retention of individualism.

1. co-operation
2. tollerance (sic)
3. research skills [this fellow's "everyone learned" list was "co-operation, research skills, speaking skills"]

1. I earned more about the various interpretations of the pieces.
2. I learned more about the work of "The Awakening" through preparing our facilitation.
3. When our guest speaker, Kelvin [Monroe], came in and the facilitation on Jazz I saw the connection of the music of Jazz to Morrison's style of writing

1. Presentations go much better without games.
2. A writing journal really helps put thoughts/ideas in perspective.
3. The same exact piece of literature can be many things to many people.

1. Learned the importance of good exposition & good filler [did this student bullshit on her/his essay??]
2. I've found different reading strategies.
3. The importance of transitioning sentences

1. How to begin to decode poetry.
2. MLA referencing
3. How to tread lightly on fragile egos in group projects.

1. interpret an author's message within their story
2. enjoy an author's story that I normally didn't like
3. to read faster

1. about the author I wrote my paper on
2. feel more confident about future classes

1. more about the beat generation
2. about F. Scott [Fitzgerald]
3. how to better deal w/passive aggressive people [this student incited some heated discussion in class because she had a hard time listening to others]

1. The difference between an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet and a Shakespearean sonnet
2. How to make a formal presentation
   

1. I never knew anything about Henry Adams
2. I absolutely fell in love with "The Awakening" (and found it inspirational)
3. Appreciate the connection b/t Art, lit., and music.

1. The significance of Black American writers and their contributions to Literature.
2. How/why creative writing is necessary [I don't understand this point as related to our class]

1. Becoming more well read
2. Survived my first college course toward my major!!
3. I've read things I never thought I would

1. That paper grading is very arbitrary [this woman "has gotten As on all my class papers" -- she's really mad at me]
   
2. That Amrican (sic) Lit. is depressing all about abused women.
3. There is a lot of reading

1. To control my fear of failure. [this from a 70-year-old woman]
2. To control or work through anger so I could finish assignments on time.
3. To [she didn't complete her card]
   

Isn't this list amazing? A mixture of heart, heat, and reason; a mishmash of personal attack and personal revelation; a lively data set that reflects relatively accurately the personalities in this class of 27 (not everyone turned in their card). Mostly, this group of students was terrific.

Real Writing

As a teacher of writing, I strive to give all of my students -- in writing courses AND in other courses -- opportunities to improve their writing. I provide extensive feedback on drafts in literature courses and in my WGST courses. But how do I deal with writing like this (the first paragraph of an essay, copied exactly as it was submitted, about how the de Beauvoir phrase "One is not born a woman, one becomes one" plays out in our WGST readings this semester):

• According to the famous book: The Second Sex that was written by Simone de Beauvoir. This famous line was used "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." This quote from my view might be interpret as someone who might be born as a female, but later on in their life. They might change their sexuality to being a male because of the things that they learn and experience in life that maybe being a female does not fit their life style, and they like to fix cars, build houses and carry heavy loads like a man. In other cases in which it is classified as norms in society, a female should stay as a female throughout their whole life from the beginning of their birth throughout their learning in life. They should being happy to represent their sexuality as a female and being the sex as they were born with is the way how it should be. In addition to the quote by Beauvoir, there is many discussion about the process of becoming a woman as reflecting back to the quote once again that "One is not born a woman, one becomes one."

Okay, friends, what do I do with five double-spaced pages that read like this?

This student may or may not have had a composition course. This student may or may not understand the material. This student may or may not have achieved a level of literacy (either in English or his home language) to be able to understand or convey complex ideas in writing.

How can I respond in a way that will teach something about the material (that de Beauvoir is talking about the social processes of culture on the individual) and about how to express one's thoughts in writing?

It seems to me that many, many people think "teaching writing" is easy because it just means "checking grammar." But this student's sentences convey many more issues/problems/challenges than just "bad grammar" (of course that's a problem, too). But that "bad grammar" (or more accurately, "bad syntax") is more like "unclear thinking," perhaps.

If we understand the sentence to be the unit of thought, then this writer's thoughts are scrambled, incomplete, preliminary, immature -- or most precisely "inchoate": "from the Latin inchoatus, the past participle of inchoare to start work on, perhaps from in- + cohum part of a yoke to which the beam of a plow is fitted." I love that idea of the yoke: can I help a student yoke his thoughts to words?

More of the definition: "being only partly in existence or operation: . . . especially : imperfectly formed or formulated." This imprefection certainly comes through, although since writing is "endlessly prefectable," we can't expect perfection.

My point, I guess, is to convey the profound challenges in front of me -- and many of my colleagues -- who "teach writing." We are really heroic and underappreciated: our work is misunderstood. I'd call it "sisyphean" if I were in a bad mood, although I'm not sure what crime we've committed that angered the gods (or even who those gods might be in this all-too-mortally-flawed education system).

(Image from WriteThinking)

Memorizing

So I'm working on memorizing an Emily Dickinson poem for my American Women Writers class tomorrow. I've assigned the task to students, so of course I have to do it myself. We're going to sit in a circle, with everyone reciting their poem. Some students have already emailed me about "alternate assignments" because they're so nervous.

I get it: it's tough! I memorized one poem a few years ago, the last time I taught this course, but I can't even remember which poem I chose! Just goes to show how weak my memorization powers are . . . as if this is news.

Takes me back to the first time I had to recite a memorized poem to a professor: it was Toni McNaron at the U of M who required this assignment. We would meet in her office and recite to her *personally*, which was scary. I chose Adrienne Rich's "Power," which begins something like this: "Buried, in the earth deposits of our history" but then I lose it: I know a bottle was buried: one bottle? brown I think?

The poem ends with "She died, not knowing her wounds came from the same source as her power" or something like that. It's about Marie Curie.

So of course now I've had to google the poem, to find out what it really says. Here it is:

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

It's interesting that I lost the "crumbling flank of earth" and the backhoe -- and that my memory changed the ending from Curie's denial to her lack of knowledge. None of the middle details remained, either -- the damaged body so concretely described.

The Dickinson poem I've chosen is also about death (but of course so many of her poems are!). I've known the first line of "1773" for a long while, but now I have the whole thing. I'll try type it here as an exercise:

"My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality reveal
A third event to me
As hard and hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell."

Okay, I got a couple of parts wrong: Immortality unveils, it doesn't reveal -- an important, Dickinsonian distinction; the events are "so huge" not "as hard" -- another important Dickinson metaphor. But overall, not that bad!

I'll have to work on getting another poem, since I have some opening lines in my head: "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant / Success in circuit lies" and "I felt a funeral in my Brain" and "Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me" and "I dwell in possibility / A fairer house than prose / [Something] for windows, / Superior for doors" (that first line the title of McNaron's memoir).

I should send Toni a "thank you" email. She started this.

"This game is well known."

This weekend at an antique mall, I bought a book from 1923 called Four Hundred Games for School, Home, and Playground (Ethel F. Acker, F.A. Owen Publishing Company, Dansville, N.Y.).

I bought it because 1) it was $3.00 and 2) I opened it to page 159 to find a language game called "Composition Relay" that began like this:

"This game is well known. Besides furnishing an exercise in grammatical construction, capitals, and punctuation, it is a good drill in spelling and penmanship."

Hmm, I thought, to whom would this game be well known? What would teaching be like if this game was still well known? Here it is:

"Each row of players forms a team. The last player in each row at a given signal runs forward, writes the first word of a sentence on the blackboard, runs to his seat, and hands the chalk to the next player, who writes the next word. The last player writes a word to complete the sentence and adds the necessary punctuation. The points are usually scored as follows: Speed 25 points, grammatical construction 25, spelling 25, and writing 25. If played during the grammar drill period the score should be: Speed 50, analysis 50. No badly written sentences should be considered."

So I love almost everything about this paragraph:

• the second sentence's parallel structure, which mitigates the overload of prepositional phrases
• the way points are "usually" awarded (imagine having to write legibly in chalk when you're rushing, your teammates are hurrying you)
• the assumption that a "grammar drill period" is usual, well known, common
• the last sentence! It's passive verb is so great
• the fact that students are *moving* in the classroom while they're learning language skills (can you say "kinetic learners"? Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences didn't appear until 60 years later!)
  

How I wish we could reintroduce these physical movements in our classrooms -- at all levels. I like my students to move . . . rearranging them to create sentences ("you're an independent clause, you're a dependent clause, you're a comma -- rearrange yourselves!")

But moving requires space. With federal constraints on education professionals, we end up dropping out these kinds of activities . . . phy ed classes get cut! That's simply unjust, not to mention unwise. Students find a way to move -- often inappropriately.

It should be "well known" that physical activity is essential for learning. Ethel F. Acker says it this way:

"Probably no other single theory in the field of education has made greater progress in the minds of educators and laymen in the past few years than that of the importance of organized play" (11 emphasis added).

Still teaching

I started this morning at 9:30 a.m. with online Chat, a way to meet my tech writing students (who have a "blended" class, with on-campus meetings on Mondays and online meetings on Wednesdays).

After 10:30 a.m. (when the chat ended), I answered emails from four students (two who have the flu; one who scheduled an afternoon appointment), read and responded to online discussion posts from students in tech writing, WGST, and Nature Writers, checked the Engl 90 blog to see who'd written lately, and commented on a blog post from the tech writers.

By 1:00 I was driving to school to arrive for office hours, an honors student conference, and class prep for my 2:15 class. That Engl 90 class always surprises me: even seven weeks into the semester, some students don't yet know how to access our course D2L website, and others can't remember to bring their written homework in a form they can manipulate in class -- EVERY DAY we use our computer classroom to workshop on writing. Every day. Two students had to completely retype things today, which put them behind on the day's writing objective, which was to understand the function of a topic sentence and supporting sentences (i.e., paragraph structure).

Class ended at 3:30, but students kept talking with me until 3:45, which is an enjoyable thing most of the time. My 4:00 class got started on time, with a slight technology glitch as I used the document camera. The student facilitation ended up being very emotional -- from the "Women's Health and Reproductive Rights" chapter, these students chose to focus on abortion methods -- and I had to intervene three times, asking presenters NOT to use incendiary, inappropriate language that could cause their classmates pain. Three times. I came away shaken by the experience because I had difficulty being respectful to students who were not being so -- I'm never a fan of raised voices or students who're merely mouthpieces for propagandists.

By 5:30 I was in the Writing Center, where I proctored an exam, read some Leslie Marmon Silko and Barry Lopez's "The American Geographies," and helped a couple of students find an online research resource. At 7:00, the writing center assistant left me alone with my books, and I prepped a bit more for Thursday night's class before going back to my own office at 7:30. There I composed/recomposed, and finally posted a news message about the emotionally draining WGST course, read the first two tech writing reports on our class blog and posted a "Reminder" message based on the omissions of those first two reports, and updated online quizzes for tech writing and WGST.

I left the office at 8:45 so that I could get home to attend the 9:30 p.m. online Chat with the tech writers. By 10:30, I was back to my email, responding to a student's question about a room request for next week's "National Coming Out Day" film. Then I started writing this chronology.

So I'm about done teaching for the day, 13+ hours after I began. Sometimes people ask how many hours a week I "work." The answer is either something like 100 (all my non-sleeping, non-eating waking hours) or 0 because it's not work: it's my life.

Really Great Workshop

I'd been nervous about giving a three-hour workshop on our college's Common Book (The Latehomecomer) to my colleagues: what if I bomb? What if they've just signed up to criticize? But all went well.

My partner was easy to work with: professional and approachable, sincere in her willingness to share what she's done with the Common Book. My colleagues were colleagial, sharing what had worked for them and inventing new ideas right on the spot.

We received compliments all around: one person even said she admired the way I demonstrated the techniques I was teaching about. All in all, a nice afternoon.

Good News

Here's a Google News site that just posts good news! It's a great resource for students . . . for showing how a fake news site can look legit.

Wouldn't the world be good if this site was NOT a fake?

Rhetorical sophistication?

This semester, I have had to apologize to my students about getting behind with grading: it seems to me that honesty is a good policy, and I wanted them to know I was working on their writing, but I wasn't finished with assessing/evaluating/grading everyone's work at the same time.

Now I have two students who are using my apology as a weapon by telling the dean that they "didn't know how to improve" because I "didn't give them any feedback." *Sigh*.

Aristotle defines rhetoric as "finding the available means of persuasion." I guess I've made a means available to these students. This morning the dean called to tell me what arguments my students are going to have "against me" when we meet later this afternoon. The dean counsels me not to say something like this again . . . maybe she's right?

I'm struggling

My Engl 90 classes flummox me: I don't quite know what to expect of the students, and I have a HUGE range of abilities in these classes. A couple of students seem not to have much command of the English language at ALL, yet they've both passed our Engl 80 course.

A couple of other students seem to have no command of their giggles, and they constantly nudge and bump each other, wiggly as puppies.

A couple of other students smell -- really.

A couple of other students walk in and out of class, impatient with repetition and classmates who need the assignment explained twice and thrice.

A couple of students shouldn't be in this class because they're already fluent writers, thoughtful thinkers, bad test takers (evidently, since "the test" is what put them in Engl 90).

A couple of students have revealed their pasts in essays that haunt me: abuse, pain, terror, deprivation. How do I grade these stories?

A couple of students can't read. Or at least when their eyes go over each word, they recognize the words but can't figure out how to put them together into a thought.

A couple of students need to visit me in my office for clarification instead of listening to assignments and advice in class.

A couple of students are embarrassed to be in this class, but eager at the same time to get "good grades" and "move on" to another college-level course.

A couple of students go missing every class period.

A couple of students haven't turned in a damn thing all semester.

I am so lucky. Really. To be working with these people who are willing (for the most part) and engaged with the difficult task of learning to say what they think on paper (and to think of something to say on paper).

I'm struggling, and I'm so privileged to be doing so. How awesome is that -- to be taught by my students.

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.

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.

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?

The New Age

Associated Press writer Beth Fouhy has an excellent, thought-provoking news piece in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Obama to pioneer Web outreach as president."

The opening lines begin like this:

"Transition officials call it Obama 2.0 — an ambitious effort to transform the president-elect's vast Web operation and database of supporters into a modern new tool to accomplish his goals in the White House. If it works, the new president could have an unprecedented ability to appeal for help from millions of Americans who already favor his ideas, bypassing the news media to pressure Congress."

Despite its seeming cheesiness, I like the "Obama 2.0" catch-phrase for all it signifies: the soon-to-be-leader of the free world recognizes the age in which we live, the ways in which we are connected, the media within which we exist. It's about time.

Here are a couple more quotations, perhaps offering teachable moments for us rhetoric profs:

• Obama's team is determining how best to convert his army of online activists into a viral lobbying and communications machine. Staffers are reluctant to discuss specifics, but Obama clearly is poised to become the first truly "wired" president of the digital age.

• The transition operation has a new Web site, www.change.gov, designed for anyone who wants to post a message of congratulations, offer suggestions for the new administration or apply for a government job. People are invited to submit their names and e-mail addresses, with the goal of creating a new list for the president-elect to tap when he wants to communicate directly about a program he's promoting or seek help urging members of Congress to support legislation he's proposed.

• [D]irect online contact with voters could . . . present a challenge for reporters covering Obama, since the new president will in many ways be able to bypass traditional media while also taking advantage of it to reinforce his online messaging.

  "He can do a half-hour YouTube address every Saturday, addressing millions," [Joe] Trippi said. "The networks would never give the president that much television time each week, but the press is still going to have to cover what he says on YouTube."

  Aides say the Obama team will staff a robust "new media" operation out of the White House and plans a complete overhaul of the White House Web site to make it more interactive and user-friendly. On the campaign trail, Obama promised to use the Internet to make his administration more open, such as offering a detailed look at what's going on in the White House on a given day or asking people to post comments on his legislative proposals.

How about a writing assignment that asks students to analyze the changes to the White House website? Or to post a comment and track the responses it generates? Students could write to the *President* of the United States as a writing assignment! It's amazing.

Students don't realize

In all my courses, I give exams. But these exams must be tailored to every class because my pedagogy requires me to teach the students who appear in my classrooms, not to teach subject matter.

In the liberal arts, my students and I become a community of learners that focuses on something slightly different every semester. This variation is especially common in a composition course because it's a skill-building course, not so-much a "content specific" course.

So this week, I've asked students what they'd like to see on the Midterm Exam because my philosophy of exams is that they're opportunities for students to show me what they've learned. I really want them to do well, to show me their strengths, to tell me what they feel confident that they've understood to this point in the semester.

This conversation often seems like a role reversal for students because when they ask me "What's on the exam? Will you give us a review sheet?," I say, "What would you like me to ask you on the exam? What do you think you've learned so far?"

Eventually, we negotiate a reasonable exam that meets the criteria I have, the learning outcomes I want them to achieve, which include being able to support their own points, as they do in during this negotiation. :-)

But they do not realize how long it will now take me to create the exams: two sections of FYC are getting slightly different exams. The third course will get an exam I create out of whole cloth since we're using new books this semester. All told, I expect to take more than 10 hours to create these exams.

I doubt some of my students spend that much time producing the essays that are also due at midterm, do you?

Why it matters

Attending the Nobel Conference every year always stimulates my thinking, especially because my science background is sketchy.

This year, the question/topic is "Who Were the First Humans?" To begin answering this question, this year's scholars/researchers have come from around the world (Arizona, Leipzig, Stanford, Oxford, the Smithsonian) and from a range of disciplines (anthropology, paleogenetics, archaeology, cognitive biologists). Their talks are lucid, complex, profound, and their interaction with each other is polite, fraught, complicated.

Here's the message that becomes increasingly clear, a message I need to keep emphasizing with my students: Claims are asserted and supported (and perhaps persuasion happens) because people make inferences using logical reasoning.

Many of my students think that "evidence" is the only thing that can support a claim. But often, we don't have tangible evidence ("demonstration" Plato and Aristotle called it). Often we have to use our logical reasoning skills.

I need to give my students LOTS more practice with this important "first human" skill.