Community College English

Two-Year College English Association (TYCA): Attending regional conferences

2007-10-28T09:35:00.000-04:00

Two-Year College English Association (TYCA): Attending regional conferences

I'm also back from attending two TYCA regionals: TYCA Midwest in Chicago at the beginning of the month and TYCA Northeast in Philadelphia a week ago. They were both exciting and stimulating conferences with lots of energetic and interesting presentations.

But I attend all conferences now differently than I did in the past: as editor of TETYC I'm there in a role I can only describe as "talent scout." I arrive with a bunch of sample issues and a ton of my business cards, and then I try to "sign up" presenters to convert their presentations into article submissions to the journal.

And here's what I'm interested in hearing more about: I sense a reluctance to take the plunge and submit an article. Why? I know how busy two-year campus English faculty are, but these are folks who have carved out the spare hour before the sun comes up (or after the kids go down in the evening) and have created a conference presentation. One more step, and it's an article. So I don't think it's the time element.

At both conferences, I chaired panels called "How to Publish in TETYC (Or at least enhance your chances)." I borrowed a great panel idea that Sharon Mitchler created for last year's 4Cs when she, I, Greg Shafer (Michigan), and Alexis Nelson (Washington) spoke on the same subject. Not to bore you with the details, but Martine Courant Rife, in Chicago, and Barbara Morris, in Philadelphia, both on the panels as recent first-time authors in the journal, made the same point: they had submitted manuscripts in order to put themselves on the line, to experience the evaluation process just as their composition students were doing in their own writing classes. Both Martine and Barbara received feedback, revised, and ultimately published, but their message was that the experience paid off in their teaching. They could empathize anew with anxious students, and, better yet, they could share their own ups and downs as writers with their students.

That's what initially got me into submitting my own work --the desire to gain legitimacy in discussing writing with my classes. Sort of a "been there, done that" which I could share with them. And students do listen to those stories of anxiety and success and, yes, rejection. Martine and Barbara urged the participants at our sessions to give it a try. Sounds about right to me.

Jeff Sommers

The New CCE Site

2006-02-05T01:18:00.000-05:00

Join us at the new space!

Okay, So The Dog Ate The New Blog, and My Grandfather Died Repeatedly

2006-01-29T20:07:00.000-05:00

Can I have an extension until next Saturday? I promise that the new CCE will be up and running. Honest.

ON THE MOVE: CCE

2006-01-10T12:33:00.000-05:00

Happy New Semester!

As the semester begins, CCE will be moving to a new platform--Typepad, to be exact--where contributors will still be able to contribute freely and at whim, and where readers will be able to browse comments left by other readers. New link categories include technology and intellectual property. We hope that past and current contributors will join us there, and that, perhaps, new contributors will post. As always, we're grateful to our readers for their continuing participation.

The new version will go up on January 28th. If you have any suggestions for links or blogs to be linked, why not post a reply below?

Happy Holidays

2005-12-22T13:24:00.000-05:00

Fun Finals Activity

2005-12-14T21:35:00.000-05:00

Today, I tried out a new finals activity that may not be so new for some of you: we had a reading similar to what writers have when they are about to publish a book. I called it the "Winter Reading" for the class, and it included having students choose a short writing or a small part of a longer writing to read to the class. To make the mood more like a real writer reading, I brought some snacks, and I introduced each student with anecdotes from the semester and what not. This last part was my favorite as I have been thinking for some time about ways to say something personal and individual to students at the end of the semester, a practice that comes from a teaching mentor of mine who used to recite "nuggets" about our class during the final period. Students seemed to enjoy the activity, and the realistic treatment made it meaningful yet enjoyable, I think.

I only did the activity in developmental and first-level comp classes, though. For my second-level comp students, who have to write all source-supported papers, I'm thinking about having a mini-conference in lieu of a final in future semesters. That is another topic for another day, though--back to the papers.

The Season of Old Saint Paint

2005-12-11T00:23:00.000-05:00

So, How'd It Go? PowerPoint Update

2005-12-05T11:46:00.000-05:00

It went very well. Just about every group did a much better job of organizing and presenting the information this time: people had defined roles; speakers spoke to the class instead of the screen; everyone grasped the idea of ppt. as a outlining tool and not a sheet of paper waiting to be filled with words; and they were all relaxed and content.

Yes, it went well. Why?

It was the second presentation.

It was a much more structured activity than the first.

They had plenty of prewriting assignments to pull from.

They were writing from experience.

I was pleased to see that they pulled together as teams: working together on the ppt.; discussing which items to use in each category; sending each other drafts via email outside of class; and arranging to meet each other outside of class.

The grades were largely C's, with a few B's and even fewer A's. In the few cases where a person was left in the lurch by a partner who didn't even bother to contact her, I gave separate grades so as not to penalize the one who did do the job, alone.

So, if the grades were C's, then why am I so happy? Remember that this is the first level of Basic Writing, and that for many of the students, adjusting to being a responsible student has been the biggest accomplishment that they've made this semester. In order to earn the C, each student has had to focus, write, collaborate, edit and finalize a project as well as make sure that it was presented in a lively and instructive way. Again, doing all of this and not frittering away the time allocated to group work is a big maturing point for many of my students, who begin the semester wanting to be told exactly what to write and think every step of the way.

I'm proud of them.

Field Trip Photos: The Smithsonian, November 19

2005-11-20T15:10:00.000-05:00

It was a beautiful day yesterday, and a few of my Developmental Writing students and I went downtown to the Smithsonian to view the Retratos (portraits) exhibit at the Ripley Center.

I'll write more about the actual assignment that goes with the trip, but for now, enjoy the pictures of the castle, the Ripley, the mall and the metro.

Ppt. and Developmental Writers

2005-11-20T12:26:00.000-05:00

11/15: This week: a project in which the class develops a presentation for high school seniors and their parents. Although the situation is hypothetical, a college open house, the work isn't, and by next Monday, each duo will present its project to the class. I've been pretty strict about format, insisting that it be coherent rather than varied, and that the students remember that they are presenting on behalf of the college. They'll have ten minutes to present about eight slides' worth of information; moreover, the students may not read off of the slides (as was the case with the last round of group work), but must use them as, well, PowerPoint slides. I'll be taking points away from those who turn their backs to the audience and read the slides out loud.

Here's a summary version of the plans:

Weekend Homework: Brainstorm ideas in each of these categories: What Every Student Should Know About College; What I Wish I'd Known About College; and, What I Like About College. Picking two ideas from each category, draft a speech of no more than two pages.

Monday: Discuss ppt. as the outline, or key points, of their presentation. Students work with a partner and merge ideas: start ppt. draft.

Wednesday: Discuss parallel structure and how it helps structure ppt. information. Students continue to work on presentation, dowloading graphic.

Friday: Prof. H goes over ppt. structure, groups rehearse presentation in order to embellish ppt. with detail and to present to a group rather than read off of the slide.

Tomorrow:Show time.

It's a good exercise in both extracting information and outlining along with drafting a fuller presentation. Moreover, there's practice in categorizing and parallel structure and in using ppt. (as a tool and not as an electronic sheet of paper). Lastly, the presentation must include a works cited page for their graphics: a thumbnail and a URL.

Why am I being conservative about content? Well, two reasons: not every student knows how to use ppt. and would be overwhelmed with the choices; and two, the students are acting as college representatives speaking to prospective students and their parents, so I wanted them to create something intelligible for both generations. In freshman comp or a higher level lit class, I would be far more liberal about creativity, but frankly, I wanted something that was doable within the week.

A final note: this assignment came about after I'd been thinking about the attrition rate in this course, and I wanted to hear from the class what they saw as impediments to adjusting to college. Moreover, I wanted them to begin to reflect on their changes over the semester--on the student level with this assignment, and on the writer level with the next.

Extreme Apathy

2005-11-14T21:29:00.000-05:00

Last week, my frustration level reached a boiling point in my two pre-credit (developmental/basic) composition classes. Though I've taught such classes before, I had not taught at this particular school, and I have been discouraged by how difficult it has been to engage the students. Even with tried and true assignments and activities, I felt myself digging a hole of apathy on the part of the students and righteous anger on my part. I talked to other instructors, who echoed my sentiments about the students in this particular class, but none had any suggestions for change.

Finally, after having two students complain (independently and unprovoked by me or the assignment) about their classmates' apathy and having an unusually unproductive workshop, I opted to go to an extreme and change the schedule for the rest of the semester to incorporate a new paper into the class.

This final paper was where I felt like I needed to do something different. I thought about all of the writing assignments I have ever given and knew none would work: I have already given these students opportunities to write about various personally significant aspects of their lives, I've done the "you and your world" assignments to get them thinking about their place in the world, I did some traditional modes assignments, and I did fun, creative assignments. Students did them. Whatever.

Instead, I wanted to light a little fire. Be a little controversial. See what would happen if I called them on my perception of their attitude.

I printed out a copy of an article called "My Experience Teaching Apathetic Students at a School with Open Admissions" by a history professor named Thomas Reeves. I don't agree with every point the man makes, but complete agreement isn't my goal. Because he describes behaviors I have come to associate with many of my students, I wanted to see how students would react to seeing these behaviors described--and condemned--in print. Then, for their final essay assignment, I would ask them to write a paper where they discuss the degree to which they agree with Reeves using a couple of sources and anecdotal evidence. Part of the paper would also entail discussing whether perceptions of student apathy matter and why.

Today, I introduced the new schedule and assignment. I then read most of Reeves' article out loud and asked students to respond in writing to the article. It was an amazing day in class: both classes took off into discussions that went completely different directions. One class agreed completely with Reeves and heatedly discussed how they noticed such apathy in themselves. In fact, they had long recognized the problematic nature of what they felt were low expectations from others but did not want to say or do anything to change those situations--"Who wants to do more work?" one student said. My second class ran far and wide with their discussion, condemning Reeves, the education system, policy-makers, and American culture on many counts. When pressed with conflicting views and questions, these same students had difficulty seeing themselves as agents within these systems who could act in addition to being acted upon.

I feel guilty saying that I feel overjoyed about the results; after all, this tactic is tantamount to passive-aggressive name-calling on my part. However, the students seemed to realize this. They knew I was unhappy with class last week, my unhappiness created tension, this article brought this tension and conflict into open discussion, and students reacted. Now, I'm hoping they'll be at least a little more engaged in the writing, as they seem to have something to gain, something to critique: how others interpret them. As much as I know I took liberties with my power over students by reading this article in class, I feel like it may be worth it in the end because perhaps, they will feel motivated to empower themselves through their writing . . . I don't know, though. In a way, I feel like I had to call students' identify into question--even label them negatively--to engage them, and I don't feel completely comfortable with that. I would very be interested in feedback of all kinds.

Tonin'

2005-11-09T12:46:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow we discuss tone in my developmental reading class. Voice, authorial choice, purpose and audience also figure in to the mix. So how to teach it without losing my voice while I imitate different tones (and pitches)?

How about reading Peter Rabbit (the unabridged version, no less)in small groups, and ask each group to identify and discuss voice, choice and so on?

But that's too easy. And how many of your students will be engaged in a discussion of a pastel bunny?

Okay, it may be a stretch, but it ain't over yet. Let's move to step 2: listen to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross singing "Cottontail." We'll read the lyrics and do some C/C about the differences, of which there are many.

And we all know how much you love C/C, Prof H.

Yeah, I know. I just don't like looking at the "similarities and differences of two things that are essentially the same--something everybody throughout history has pondered before realizing how much better we all are for having learned this valuable lesson in life."

Not tracking with that.

I'm saying that I don't like easy answers and pat comparisons (even of bunnies). So we'll round out the hour with another tune, "The Book Report," from "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," in which a carnival (or team) of discordant voices engage in the metacognitive and meta-emotional dynamics of writing a book report on Peter Rabbit, which, to quote Lucy Van Pelt, is "a stupid book about a stupid rabbit who steals vegetables from other people's gardens." It won a Tony.

The Tale of The Half-Remembered Rules, or, What My High School Teacher Always Told Me

2005-10-31T13:31:00.000-05:00

Gather round kids, and I'll tell you stories that will raise the hackles of the hairs on your neck. All of what I am about to relate is true and told to me by writers of papers past.

1. Never begin a sentence with the word "because." Never. Ever. Don't do it. Because.

2. Always put a comma before the word ",and." ,And don't you ever up ,and forget, pal. Because.

3. Thar be Dragons! Don't write too much. Not even if your prof suggests that you develop an idea by adding more information ,and details. Don't do it. Because.

Now, these rules are half remembered, right? That means that the high school teacher no doubt explained why she said what she did. Or that somewhere, perhaps in a musty volume of Warriner's Grammar, bricked up ,and sealed in an old, forgotten supply closet in a high school somewhere, are the rest of the rules. . . .

You Know it's Midterm When. . .

2005-10-20T11:43:00.000-04:00

You announce to the class that a large part of next week's exam will based on an essay that they are to take home and highlight, annotate and study. . . .

And then you get back to your office and discover said essay tucked neatly in your canvas bag. All 24 copies.

Salutations!

2005-10-18T07:44:00.000-04:00

Good morning! I'm new to the blog and excited to be here; for the last year or so, I've been looking for ways to communicate with community college folk, and this blog seems like a great way to participate. I'm getting ready for the International Writing Centers Association 2005 conference in Minneapolis, so I won't have much time to write this week. If you're in the Minneapolis area, though, I'd love to connect with you: I'm very interested in writing center work in the community college setting. I'll be presenting Saturday at 3:00 about the Greater Kansas City Writing Center Project, a city-wide group of writing center people in the KC metropolitan area. Even if you aren't overtly involved in writing center/learning center work at your institution, I'd like to connect because I'm very interested in how different schools handle writing tutoring. In the mean time, have a great week.

New Link

2005-10-17T19:26:00.000-04:00

A future contributor suggested that the following link be added to our sidebar: Friends of Writing Center Journal. Done!

The NOTBOOK: Brainstorming

2005-10-15T14:10:00.000-04:00

CCC Online: Fabulo.us!

2005-10-13T13:03:00.000-04:00

I'm very remiss not to have posted anything about the new CCC Online site created this summer by Collin Brooke, Derek Mueller and Madeline Yonker, all of Syracuse University. This new site doesn't replace the NCTE/CCC site, where journal articles are password protected, but instead, provides a site where the "metadata" (bibliographical information, from works cited to keywords and more)of the articles is available. What CCC Online does do is to function as a reader-researcher's companion, inviting us to locate and network ideas via tags and feeds and so on.

Frankly, I'm still at that Gomer Pyle level of technolearning, where I tend to stand back from the thing, big -eyed and exclaiming "Gawwwleee." Not particularly critical or professorial,so I'd appreciate hearing from readers who are far more advanced and, therefore, articulate, and can give this site its due. What I can say is that this undertaking no doubt involved a great deal of painstaking work and thought, and though the creators write modestly of CCC Online's being one journal's worth of work, the site is no less impressive because of it.

About Rebuilding Louisiana: Calling All Creatives

2005-10-10T14:44:00.000-04:00

This post has little to do with community college English, except as an example of the path that ideas now traverse across the disciplines.

A blog friend of mine, Kimberly McKittrick, an architect on the West Coast, has been blogging about efforts to rebuild NOLA. Yesterday, she happened to read an editorial written by her father, a Houston-based architect, on specific things happening and needing to happen in order to rebuild. Specifically, Mr. McKittrick discusses charettes , or community groups convened to give input on the rebuilding efforts. It appears that the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Louisiana has expanded the notion of the charetteto include anyone with any ideas expressed in any form. "A Call for Odes and Ideas, Proposals and Strategies, and Everything in Between," is exactly that: a chance for anyone to offer suggestions in any any medium she wishes.

According to the official blogsite Rebuild@Louisiana:

The goal of this competition is to project strategies and ideas to ease the distress of the evacuees, aid the rescuers and relief workers and preserve, rebuild, redesign and re-imagine and protect the post-Katrina/Rita environment of the Gulf Coast.

So the charette moves beyond a local sphere and embraces input from people outside the usual groups associated with urban planning and relief. And in rebuilding the city, these architects and designers hope to rebuild the hearts as well as the homes of the people who live there.

I'm passing the link on to my colleagues in graphic design and am thinking about turning it into an assignment for my developmental reading students as we move towards starting to blog. Who know what will come of the Call? Let's see.

Outsourcing: A Spirited View , a Sunday Meander

2005-09-29T13:49:00.000-04:00

Clancy asked us to respond to this article on outsourcing paper-grading, which concerns the pilot project at a Kentucky CC. There, papers written by DL students will be graded by SmartThinking graders rather than the instructor of record.

What do I think about such a service? I've not yet shaped my reaction into something easier on the brain, so stroll with me down this winding path of an answer.

Well, I used to be a paper grader/classroom assistant in the public schools, but I was always assigned to a particular class with whom I worked for the semester, so my comments, though different from the teacher's at times, came from something more than a disembodied voice marking up the page. The students knew me, the teacher knew me and vice-versa. Equally important, I knew how the instructor taught and where she or he was heading with a particular assignment. So, as an in-class composition assistant, I was part of the process, not off in seclusion somewhere, grading all day. (Unfortunately, given curricular changes and whatnot, the CA position has reverted to the seclusion model, from what I hear).

Now that I'm teaching, I can understand the appeal such a service offers. It appeals to my practical spirit, which is always wondering when I'll have time to grade all the many assignments that I create. It appeals to my compassionate spirit, which sees how overwhelming grading can be and wants to balm our fatigue with the finest unguent, in this case, having fewer papers to grade-- especially in a DL situation, where so much more writing seems to take place since there are no face-to-face discussions to rely on.

But darn my pedagogical spirit--it strides womanfully through the unguent- balmed field of papers and to-do lists, and in a sharp, no -nonsense voice much like Caroline Myss's, says "Now,wait a minute. This outsourcing sounds like teachers are being given all of the responsibility and none of the authority. Or very little. "

Well, as long as the teacher of record gets the last say on the grade, then is it really so bad? Are we helping writing teachers or is the next step or two to develop writing courses that are graded by committee? And who exactly, is grading the papers? Just because someone is qualified on paper does not mean that she or he will be any good at it, will the teachers have a choice or will they be assigned a grader? What if you're stuck with someone who creates more problems than solutions during the semester?

What bothers me the most is the idea of the outsider in the class. ( True, grad assistants have graded papers for years, but they are, if not part of the actual class, then part of the college at least!) It just strikes me as ludicrous that one would design and implement a lesson/paper/webproject and then send out for it to be graded. Part of the pleasure of grading is that one can see how the student has made choices and how those choices have worked with the assignment. That's part of the pleasure of teaching. I enjoy the dialogue I have with my students which extends to what I write on their papers and say in emails or in class. Very often, through working on a set of papers, I discover trends that I want to address with the whole class. The work becomes a grind when one has too many papers to grade, but in and of itself, paper grading is not the enemy.

It seems to me that a better idea is to hire more teachers. There, I've said it. Keep the numbers of comp students low. Hire more comp teachers. Give us time to grade student papers in a meaningful way. We don't need the intrusion of another party in the classroom, whether it be paper-graders or Turnitin (don't get me started on that!).

And what about the DL classes, which the original pilot in Kentucky is all about? Unless the community college wants to pay the grader more money to become more of a presence in the classroom, like an assistant, then I think that two problems will occur. One is that having a grader will reinforce the fragmentation of the class--perhaps "depersonalization," is a better word for it. If DL classes have to work harder at developing a community of scholars, then having to send one's papers out to be graded will undercut the effort.

The second problem is that I see a gradual move towards some universal rubric of writing that will be a spectacular flop though it appeals mightily to those who watch the dollar signs. I see the complexity of thought reduced to a national check-off sheet that forces conformity and unoriginal thinking. I see the teacher's role becoming like that of a factory worker, doing a piece and then moving it down the line, with no sense of what it will look like in the end, and no desire to find out, since his or her authority has been removed.

But you know, what I also see is that if we are arguing about paper grading and are defining papers as the linear construct of the twentieth century and not the web-based dynamic creation that the new century brings, then maybe we should be asking "What paper?"

The Image of the English Teacher

2005-09-24T15:58:00.000-04:00

"Robert Frost. Asshole!"

This, or something close to this, is what AJ, the son of New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano says in a well-earned moment of exasperation in season three of The Sopranos. In the scene, poor AJ is laboring over an essay due the next day on, what else, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." Soon, AJ's older sister Meadow walks in and offers her help. Meadow is in her first year at Columbia. (In a later episode, in response to her mother's complaint that she's getting a C average, she quips, "You try taking Intro to Semiotics.") Armed with a ready hermeneutic, Meadow quickly explains that the snow equals death. It's a death poem, she explains. With answer in hand, AJ goes on to write his essay.

I read the scene as a pretty accurate representation of what the public thinks about English courses. There is the idea that the poem can't simply be literal. Along with this assumption is the idea that it is then the critic's (or poor student's) job to unearth what the poem is "really" about, to fill in the other side of the equation. Snow=death. Most importantly, though, the scene dramatizes the student's subservience to the text. English courses are about the reading and interpretation of texts rather than getting students to produce writing.

Meadow is a sophisticated reader and writer, but she isn't really interested in thinking about the questions the poem invites readers to ask--questions that can't be met by plugging answers into some preset scheme. Nor is she interested in understanding how a poem (perhaps unlike any other genre) can embody a problem in language. Finally, she doesn't want to help AJ join a dialogue about Robert Frost, where there is something at stake beyond a narrow reading of the poem. But, hey, Meadow has got other stuff on her plate. I don't know that I could concentrate on Robert Frost if I had Tony Soprano for a father.

I'm not interested in offering an extended explication of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." Rather, I want to think about how the public thinks about English. How do we do a better job of explaining what we do--both as scholars and teachers? The Sopranos scene led me to think about other popular representations of English instructors in film or television. I think they can be boiled down to two basic types: the anti-institutional Romantic (think Robin Williams in The Dead Poets Society) or the severe, rule-governed teacher who stands as an obstacle to the student's true love of literature and writing. As English teachers we are hopelessly outmatched. How can we compete against film and television?

I am reminded of Kathleen Blake Yancey's argument in her book Teaching Literature as Reflective Practice. She draws a distinction between the delivered curriculum and the lived curriculum. A mistake instructors often make is to think that what they deliver corresponds with what students are hearing. I wonder to what degree popular images of the English teacher that circulate in our culture serve to obstruct our efforts. A colleague recently had a student drop her course because she claimed it ruined her love of literature. This fits perfectly with the second image of the English teacher I described: the teacher as institutional obstacle to the student's love of language.

So how do we do a better job of explaining what we do? How do we compete with The Sopranos and The Dead Poets Society? Do we need our own television show? (Math has one, the show Numbers.) Because the public often fails to understand what we do, it makes it very easy to misrepresent our efforts to move beyond a current-traditional paradigm of teaching literature and writing. The public can cry, "We need to get back to basics, back to standards" without any sense of what we've been talking about for the last thirty years.

The Thing About Blogging Is. . .

2005-09-22T09:59:00.000-04:00

I get lazy. I don't put links in. I don't engage in a discussion so much as I participate in a digital version of call and response. I'm still wondering why Blogger and Typepad don't have the word blogin their spellcheck programs.

Here's what I'd like to be able to do--

have an instalink to places that I link to often.

Here's where my ignorance comes into play: is that what permalink is for?

At any rate, I'd like to be able to type in the site name or the writer, say, Timna or Mike, highlight it, click an icon and be done with it.

If there is a way to do this already, let me know.

In the meantime, I'll work on being more of a blogversational participant and respond to more than what's listed in the post.

That's a promise.

Joanna

Welcome!

2005-09-21T21:49:00.000-04:00

We have two new contributors here at CCE, Jason and Timna. Can't wait to hear what they have to say!

I'm Writing A Text-Not- book

2005-09-16T18:24:00.000-04:00

This summer I hemmed and hawed and wondered about this textbook project I had been announcing to everyone. I knew what I didn't want: when I circled the book displays at the 4 C's, I saw nothing but the same old, same old, even when it was accompanied by a disk of exercises. BW textbooks tend to be of two major ilk:
the first ilk being the Evergreen model, which is divided into two sections, writing and grammar. The other ilk is made up of books that combine grammar and writing into each chapter.

But it's still grammar and it's still a textbook, and I teach in a networked lab. I have a great deal to say about all of this, and I'll be posting my thoughts throughout the year.

Right now, though, I want to discuss what my project isn't. It isn't a textbook and it shouldn't cost much. I haven't talked with the college yet about publishing and copyrights in this technological age, but I will and soon.

Instead of a textbook, I want to create an interactive CD (memory stick, whatever) that would be connected to an online site. Or maybe I simply want a site which I can pack with things specific to my course and be interactive rather than static.

When I say that I want it to be specific to my course, I mean that I don't want to publish with the big boys. I don't care if I'm not the next big name in the Basic Writing publishing world. What I do want is to be able to create a space where all of my assignments, explanations, links, exercises and outside readings can exist, be revised and change all the time. I want these spaces to be far more interactive than I've seen (cursorily, I'll admit). I want it to be cheap. I want my students not to have to spend too much on a book-- especially since I've yet to ever teach an entire book in any class and subsequently feel there's a lot of wasted paper being lugged around. So I want to be efficiently economical, too.

One of my first steps is to really look at the platforms out there as they exist now and see if any don't already do what I want, or if a combination of things would work.

In the hazy land of brainstorming, I can start to see what I mean when I say that I want to use some of Elbow's ideas but bring them down to a BW level--that is, instead of taking BW student through a 5-paragraph template or a single process model, I want something that will help the students arrive at what their best writing processes are--something that would work intuitively with them or for them, and I can see concept mapping being of some use here ("here" as in right now, here, and "here" as in the kind of thing I want the students to use.)--and I want there to be links say, on that concept mapping page, so that the student who is finding mapping frustrating, can use a different kind of invention process.

So, another first step is to begin to outline (or map) what I want to see in terms of writing online--inventing online--moving through possibilities online--getting away from any lockstep procedure that dictates how a student must write.

As I do that, I think that what I want will be come clearer to me. But I suspect that I'm going to be taking a year to figure out what I want and how I want to express it or provide it, and then, I'll knock out a far more coherent plan than I am capable of articulating right now.

One of the places I'm heading to is, via Kairosnews, the Next\Text Project where I can investigate similar projects. here's how they explain it:

In this networked age, the printed textbook has likely reached the end of its useful life cycle, but a robust digital competitor has yet to emerge. The next\text project seeks to encourage the creation of born-digital learning materials that enhance, expand, and ultimately replace the printed textbook.

A New Year at CCE

2005-09-13T17:47:00.000-04:00

CCE begins its second year around now, and I'm making my usual appeal to all of you to think about submitting something to this blog.

It's so easy. All you have to do is contact clc, and she'll set you up so that you can post your work here.

If you don't want to submit posts, perhaps you'd like to volunteer for our first annual "Clean The Links" event, in which you send me, via a response here, either new links to new sites or new links to sites that just aren't working from here.

And include yourself if we haven't linked to you. When Jocalo, Styles, clc and I began this blog last year, we weren't aware of the many community college blogs out there. Now it seems like a full and growing fuller collection. Please send us your links.

Finally, if you use a site that has pedagogical, technological, or theoretical use, and you think it should be displayed here, please let me know.

Howdy!

Katrina

2005-09-11T12:57:00.000-04:00

I've just read a blog entry by Sharon Gerald, a fellow blogger at Composition Southeast who lives in the Katrina-affected part of Mississippi. Her college reopens tomorrow, and I've asked her to send me a list of anything that she, her colleagues and students need in order to teach and learn. I'll post the list here, along with an address, so that anyone interested in sending a care package can.

Essaying CCCC--A Chair's Blog

2005-09-03T13:15:00.000-04:00

Right now is a good time to begin thinking about what we can do as a profession to help our colleagues in the NOLA area. In the months to come, will they need books, supplies, computers, lesson plans or a "buddy" to vent to or go to for concrete assistance?

Whether we develop a buddy list for individual instructors, create an "adopt a. . . (class? course? group)" approach, or donate money to a fund for college redevelopment, we need to start brainstorming.

Doug Hesse, 4C's Chair, has written a post over at the Chair's Blog, which I encourage you to read and respond to.

How do we repond to Katrina?

2005-09-01T13:40:00.000-04:00

Has anyone heard from folks in Mississippi, Lousiana and Alabama? I've seen a post from Sharon Gerald over at Composition Southeast, but that's all. I understand that there has been no communication at all from the schools along the gulf....no big surprise, but has anyone heard from further north in Mississippi and Louisiana?

Just Came By To Drop a Few Things Off

2005-08-14T16:30:00.000-04:00

before school starts.

Here's a new blog that deserves our attention and participation:

The Practical Muse: Teaching English Composition: Assignments, Activities and Ideas

And some sites to investigate: a visual thesaurus for visual thinkers;

Plus, a wiki, Ecotone: Writing About Place

Dean Dad is asking for ideas about Honors Programs at community colleges, so hie on over thither if you'd like to advise.

Gotta run. I'm going to check these exhibits out during my last week of freedom: Visual Music at the Hirshhorn (check out the interactive exhibit);

and, Women & Blues, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

A Midsummer's Day Post

2005-07-14T15:35:00.000-04:00

I hope that you all are having a great summer, relaxing, reading, writing, doing whatever makes this time fruitful and happy.

I'm doing half of what I thought I'd do (isn't that always the case?), and my personal blog, 2 Board Alley has been my place for first draft jottings: mostly personal, sometimes sad, and sometimes silly (I'm learning Photo Show and Photo Shop via the story of Arnie, my elder cat, who is looking to remodel his home.)

Here are some very interesting links to blogs in education (take THAT, Professor Tribble!)that you might want to check out:

1. Dennis Jerz noticed that I'm reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, and suggested that I visit this link , created and run by his student. I've already been there once, and the visit pushed my reading of CI up to my Wyoming vacation read. What I found quite interesting were the guides for people who have Asperger's Syndrome. Over the years, I've taught students who had the syndrome, and these guides gave me a better sense of what their reality can be like.

2. If you want to read about blogging and teaching English, you ought to go to Random Thoughts,written by Nancy McKeand, who teaches in Louisiana. It's readable, thoughtful and useful for those of us who are still in the ankle deep section of the blog pool.

3. Confessions of a Community College Deanis another part of my daily blogread this summer, and what I appreciate most about it is that Suburban Dad, in writing about the administrative side of things, gives us a perspective that sometimes we may lack (I know I do).

4. Liz Kleinfeld of Revision Spiralhas done us all a great favor by posting her annotated bibliography of comp/rhet articles and books. It's extensive and the kind of list in which you can lose yourself.

5. If you teach Women's Studies, go here. Now. I've already gotten some ideas for my BW class from "Picturing Women." If only I could remember where I saw the link!

6. The Academic Self Discussion Group was created by Mel of In Favor of Thinking The blog discussion is centered around Donald Hall's book of the same name. If you are wondering about the day-to-day life of a college professor, this is the book and blog to read.

7. Blogging and Professor Tribble: Well, just about EVERYONE else had weighed in on this Chronicle article of a week or so ago, and I just want to say, regarding blogging and academic writing and job searches: Doesn't he realize that colleges and businesses use blogs internally as communication sites? Not to mention in the classroom. . . .And if we have personal blogs that we do on our own time, so what? The university doesn't own us. But that's all I want to say EXCEPT that his argument is SO defeated from the start by that ridiculous pseudonym. Note to Ph.D job seekers: if, at the MLA, you find yourself with a search committee that looks like this, run, run, run away.

Well friends, I'm off to Wyoming next week, so I'll post when I return.

John Lovas

2005-06-22T11:38:00.000-04:00

John Lovas, known here as jocalo, passed away yesterday of cancer.

Doug Hesse,Chair of CCCC, wrote the letter below to the WPA-list. Note that he gives the web address for the tribute blog. I would encourage you to post there rather than here, so that the Lovas family can be comforted, in some small way, by our words.

As did many others, I received the sad news this morning that John Lovas, recent
chair of CCCC, passed away June 21, 2005. He was 65. It was cancer. Only within
the past month had John learned his diagnosis, and he wanted no wide stir made.
For the hundreds of us who knew him personally, it's scarcely comprehensible that
this tall, energetic man, his white shock of hair beaconing his gregarious
personality, could have fallen so swiftly. He was a champion of two year colleges
and, more importantly, their students--and writers everywhere. He worked for the
rights of students to express even unpopular ideas, part of his larger concerns
for free expression in a democratic society, especially one that would
patriotically limit individual freedoms. His chair's address, in Chicago, in
2002, was a deft weaving of autobiography, image, and idea, demonstrating both
pride in his personal past and visions of a multimedia-ed future for composition.
As newly-elected assistant chair, I benefited from his caring and wisdom. His
colleagues at DeAnza college are building a festschrift in John's honor. Written
tributes are welcome at http://faculty.deanza.edu/johnlovasfestschrift/ and the
site contains instructions for posting. There are already many eloquent postings
there, and those of you who didn't know John well can glimmer some sense of the
man.

Reflectively,
Doug Hesse
CCCC Chair

Peace,

Joanna Howard

How Do YOU Read?

2005-06-02T11:42:00.000-04:00

The following is a post I wrote at 2 Board Alley this week:

I've found a new blog: McCarty Musings. Here's what one of the McCarty's mused the other day:

Hello, my name is McCarty Muser, and I am a serial book monogamist.

I only read one book at a time, all the way through to the end. (Although I like Kathleen Norris’ Vocabulary of Faith so much that I decided to read Cloister Walk much slower, just a little bit at a time, like a piece of cake you try to just eat one bite of, and walk away, but you keep taking little bites of every time you walk by because it is just so good.)

I never, ever cheat and read the last page first.

(there's more to this essay and it's worth the click)

This confession lead me to muse about how I read, which is usually to have five books going at a time--different levels, different intensities. Books on writing and educational theory are usually slow, painstaking reads, as are poetry volumes. Novels, biographies and so on usually depend on how easy they are to get through, and with blogs, I skim and go back (and back and back--I'm hyperactive with the mouse, I'm afraid!).

Given that I'm an English professor, though, it makes sense that I have several books going at once--the professional texts and the texts for pleasure. And I do "cheat" when it comes to texts for pleasure. I usually read the beginning, the end and then the middle, so that I can spend my time trying to figure out how the author is going to get us from point A to point Z. It turns every novel into a mystery and keeps me involved in the work.

I saw an ad for a book called How to Read Literature Like a Professor recently, and scratched my noggin. Was this one more thing I'd forgotten to learn in grad school? Or is the jig up? Has the wizard been revealed behind the drapes? Am I a "kindly yet erudite literature professor" ? Nope, nope, nope, and nope.

When I read literature as a professor, I stuff the margins with notes, too-large sticky papers and fold over pages. I write inside the cover and on the back. Sometimes the books can look pretty ragged before I've even used them in class. If they're paperback, their covers are curled into a roll. Within the book, words are underlined and commented on. Within my mind, I'm following every level of symbol that I can find, thinking critically all the way: " Oh boy, another obvious river of life symbol!" or, "Fascinating stuff--plot seems octagonal--let's see how it plays out," or, "how is reading simultaneously in two languages affecting how I interpret this poem?" Inside the book, on the covers, I jot down the main ideas in the book --a sloppy precis that I can look at to refresh my forgetful mind.

When I read literature as a laywoman, I may notice symbols, allusions and so forth, but rarely do I do more than underline a passage or fold the page. Folding and underlining assume that I'll return to the book at some time, and that's not always the case, so I like to think of them as a kind of affirmation for a book enjoyed. Also, I'm not running another track of thought--a continuous loop asking "How will I teach this to a class," or "How does this idea fit in with my ideas?"

With both kinds of reading, I can get so excited that I have to tell someone about it and read from it. Depending on the situation, the other can be my students, a colleague, my husband and, in extreme circumstances (like 2 in the morning), my cats.

This electric excitement for reading is something that I've always had since before I could read. The words "hunger" and "absorb" are often used to describe a reader's enthusiasm, and, as much as I hate leaning on nearly trite expressions, I have to admit that they describe the visceral feeling I get when I read and am satisfied.

I'm sure that many of you reading this post can relate to what I'm saying. Reading was real magic (no wizard of Oz) to me. Still is.

So, that's how this professor reads.

Summer Break

2005-05-29T03:44:00.000-04:00

I can't speak for any of my fellow posters here at CCE, but I'm going to put the "Gone Fishin'" sign up on my door and take some time away from writing about community college writing and teaching.

I have plenty that I want to write about, believe me, and after some time off, I am going to do things differently here. Instead of feeling obligated to write daily and weekly, I'm going to write more thoughtfully and less frequently about the CC issues that I'm dealing with right now, from blogging to basic writing to web page development and women's studies.

This summer, I'll be writing my first-draft pieces at 2 Board Alley. Some will grow into larger pieces of work, others will be no more than a fun exercise. Drop by and join in, okay?

Joanna

Emotional Roller Coasters: Poet in Search of New Metaphor

2005-05-07T12:02:00.000-04:00

Scott wrote a post about his students' use of what he calls a "random preposition generator" because the ones they use just don't make sense. Sharon commented that her students seemed to use "random verb generators." Over at Composition Southeast, she puzzles over her students' usage of "rather" and "whether" as synonyms.

I'm no linguist and can't tease out an answer for either Scott or Sharon, but I'd like to throw my poetic peeve into the discussion.

I hate the phrase: "Emotional Roller Coaster." Just plain hate it. It has gotten to be beyond trite in my ears (and yes, I know that I spew plenty of trite expressions when I blog).

It irritates me because it is used for any experience that carries emotion with it, like:

1.Having a hangnail
2. Having a nervous breakdown
3. Being frustrated because the universe doesn't revolve around you
4. Experiencing an ongoing succession of traumatic events

So what does it really, really mean anymore? Should we have a kiddy emotional roller coaster for hangnails and for feeling miffed? Save the big ones for trauma? And, tell me what kind of roller coaster constitutes an emotional one. A rickety old wooden coaster? A flashy loop de loop at Six Flags?

How do you feel on a coaster? Like throwing up, or like getting back on for a few more rides? If you bounce off exhilarated, then describing your emotional experiences as being a "roller coaster" suggests that you are happy, regardless of life's ups and downs. If, like me, you don't even get on the damn thing because you know that you'll throw up within two seconds of the first coast, your emotions aren't going up and down, they're flatlining.
Oh, so it's the experience itself that is like the roller coaster? meh.

Or maybe it's the sounds of the phrase bouncing off your tongue--the meter, the alliteration? mmmmmm. meh.

It's time to retire this one. It's time to walk into the fridge of fresh expressions and mix up something new.

The End of Poetry Month

2005-04-30T16:25:00.000-04:00

April began with the NAACP ACT-SO competition. It's held at MC and I've participated in it for years-- first, as a sponsor in the high schools, and then as a judge at the college. Generally, I wind up judging poetry. This year was no exception, and it was hard to choose a winner. Really. My only quibble is that there needs to be two categories for poetry: written and spoken. It's difficult to judge the best poem when one is written and shows a keen sense of the conventions of written poetry, and the other looks sloppy on the page, but when spoken comes to life in a burst of energy and meaning.

And the month ended with poetry reading at school--part of a year-long series. I read with another colleague, and we were both introduced by a fellow teacher who did us the honor of writing limericks about us. I give him props for using "pirana" and "manna" to rhyme with "joanna," thereby avoiding the much -used "banana."

I read four poems that I'd been working on this past year, including "Song of a Nobody, or, Walt Imitates Emily," which got a quite a laugh.

Would love to write more, but I hear those essays calling me to be graded.

The Sounds of Silence

2005-04-27T18:20:00.000-04:00

Must be the end of the semester. It's awfully quiet around here.

Blogger?

2005-04-24T13:23:00.000-04:00

How come the spellcheck for Blogger catches the word "blogger" as misspelled? I mean . . .wouldn't ya think?

With the End in Sight, Thoughts on Next Semester

2005-04-21T13:13:00.000-04:00

I think one of my primary coping mechanisms for end-of-the-semester burnout and craziness is to start thinking about the next semester--what I'll do better, what I'll do new, what I'll undoubtedly end up doing the same (though Aunt Joanna's tonic sounds promising, too). Somehow, the paper grind at the end and its accompanying disappointment as I discover how many students just didn't get "there" is easier to deal with if i fantasize about the future. So, I've been thinking about the fall and some of things I'm looking forward to doing, like teaching Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Diana Son's Stop Kiss. But mostly I've been thinking about whether or not to blog in the classroom, and if so, in what manner--individual student blogs, group blogs, a community blog, etc.

There's been a lot of talk recently--much of which I haven't fully read yet from lack of time--about whether blogging is best for what we do here: connect as academics who teach in a particular discipline. As someone who started blogging because it looked like a great classroom tool but then became a blogger for its own sake, I have to admit that I'm leaning toward that philosophy--that blogging works best in spaces like these. But am I right?

I want you guys to help me decide whether to use blogs in the fall, so I'm asking. Who intends to blog in the classroom in their next semester and in what form? And why?

And Now a Word From Our Sponsor

2005-04-19T15:03:00.000-04:00

Friends:

You say you're feeling cranky? Anxious? ? Pressed for time? Is your pedagogy logy? Are your grades inflated?

Well, my friends, maybe it's time you tried Aunt Joanna's Sabbatackle, a pep tonic created especially for teachers who toil night and day, often without sincere appreciation or money in their pockets, bringing the loftiest of ideals to the tender young minds in their care. Sabbatackle won't grade papers for you or attend any meetings, but it will fill you with vim enough to grade a thousand (that's right!) a thousand papers in one sitting, respond to 100 emails, confer with your students and everyone else's, make a dental appointment and get a walker for your dog, BEFORE LUNCH. That's right. Just one teaspoon of Aunt Joanna's Sabbatackle, and you'll be a new person. For days, my friends, for days.

"Slippery salesperson," you ask," what is in Sabbatackle that makes it so darned effective? Well, Aunt Joanna refuses to say, but this much I can tell you: Made with only the finest snake oil, Sabbatackle cannot be gotten in any pharmacy here in the US. Not legally.

But I digress.

And so will you! So will you! All it takes is a bottle of Aunt Joanna's Sabbatackle Tonic to put some perk in your work and pep in your stride. It'll unclog your blog and light up your links.

[Hope that you all are having a calm end-of-semester, ; ) Joanna]

BlogHer Conference

2005-04-17T17:30:00.000-04:00

In its first year, this conference is for women bloggers from all walks of life. If you want more information, go here.

Blogging Thoughts, Week Two, Down From The Clouds

2005-04-09T21:45:00.000-04:00

I decided that instead of one main blog, I'd have the students use Blogger and create their own blogs. Already I can see that I don't want to use Blogger again because I want something that would hang together as a course platform and give us more options. I'm asking you all to let me know what you use with your classes.

The students, however, got into the spirit of blogging, and I think that for the four-week experiment that this will be, we'll be fine.

Lanette Cadle has created a website for a 4C's workshop that she participated in called "Promoting Student Success With Digital Tools: Remediating Access,"
and I'm parking myself there this summer. Now that I've figured out what I'm doing in a networked classroom and how to blog, my next step is to figure out what blogging is doing for my networked classroom. Lanette's website offers some concrete direction.

At Composition Southeast, Sharon Gerald responds to Will Hochman's article in IHE. She makes some sound points about how the lack of technology, funding, and training makes the issues raised by many of us seem moot. It shouldn't be that way--what can we do as a profession to address the issue and push for change?

Call for Materials Re: Visual Rhetoric

2005-04-05T13:35:00.000-04:00

Please note the following request from Kathleen Hardiman at Red Rocks Community College:

I'm currently working on a website project as part of a technology-related Fellowship and I'm in the process of collecting material related to visual rhetoric (aka visual literacy) exercises. This website will be a useful portal offering resources in writing, literature, and creative writing geared toward community college instructors.

If you have any exercises that bring visual or popular culture into your classroom, I'd love to add them to my growing archive. These can be handouts, worksheets, or just ideas that have proved successful.

Please email any exercises to hardiman@colorado.edu. Many thanks!!

Blog Observation

2005-04-04T01:23:00.000-04:00

This past week I've had too much of a good thing, writing for four different blogs, and while I'm sure that there's a paper waiting to be written about the experience, I'll hold off doing on it.

One thought that I've been gnawing on for the past month has been the idea of blogging bringing about something new by way of critical thought. I have gathered that most teachers using blogs in the classroom have not seen blogging move beyond being like a discussion list, and that we haven't had what I believe Jocalo termed the "AHA!" moment with blogging.

But I think we're getting there--Mike E. has been speculating about comments on blogs, and Steve Krause, responds by observing that the string of comments following Mike's post seem more like "letters to the editor" than conversations or discussions. Meanwhile, over at Yellow Dog, Jeff is "ragging" on an article about teaching with technology that appeared in Inside Higher Education for not going far enough in thinking beyond the computer as a tool. And to round things out, Jocalowrites today about distinguishing between information that should be kept to oneself or be part of public knowledge.

Here are my hazy thoughts:
In order to analyze how a blog functions, I think you have to analyze a blog community,or a series of blogs, not just one. It's not even enough to think of the multiple responses and responders on a single blog, or that they have left their blog address with their message. We have to look at the idea and see where it has been, what happens to it, how many blogs it has been picked up on, the kinds of blogs that pick it up, and so on. And then, the conclusions that you make, well, that's where I'm stumped. Do I ask my students to blog about Fathering Words as a prewriting or prereading tool or do I ask them to blog about it to blog? Do I use blogging as an end in itself even though I, a Sputnik baby, have no idea what that end is? And then do I teach another book in a more "traditional" way, sans blog, as a way of contrasting the experience of working out ideas about books? I just might.

I think, too, if we look at the conversations on blogs, we have to keep in mind that the discussion may start here, move on to another blog, garner some comments there and some mentions on other blogs and then return. For instance, during the faux hoax of Laura Krishna last week, I responded to some of Mike's ideas on his blog and then at Rhetoric and Democracy and finally back at Vitia. The tenor and tone of my comments varied, but I was aware that I was talking to him, and I can see how Steve K could view some of the comments at Vitia as being like a letter to the editor, as I wasn't connecting to comments from the others. (though I'd read them. Every one ; ) )

I can hear one of my grad school profs asking, "So what?" And right now I shrug and respond "I don't know. But I'll find out."

Always Thinking,

Joanna

The Research Paper

2005-04-02T23:21:00.000-05:00

In what course(s), if any, do you teach "the research paper," and how exactly do you define that term?

La De Done

2005-03-31T10:13:00.000-05:00

A blog that was one of my favorites has gone and left no trace of its writer. LaDeDa, where "Betty's gay with Midol," was pithy, witty, sharp, thought-provoking and . . .gone.

Hope that's not all she wrote.

Blogger?

2005-03-30T23:11:00.000-05:00

What's up? Messages are posted but not showing up--posts are taking forever to be posted--

Is Blogger having a meltdown?

Can we be multi-modal?

2005-03-26T22:07:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the schism between writing on paper and writing through a computer will fade as we move to truely multi-modal forms.

I've noticed that the division between the two, (which I think plays itself out at the Cs in panels that are either all technology or no technology) may be of our own making.

My students will happily combine oral and visual modes of composing. They will work with paper and pencil, word processor, and/or in HTML to "get to" various audiences. I've also seen students work across modes while they are drafting. Has anyone else noticed similar patterns?

The Last Word on the 4 C's; First Words About Next Year

2005-03-26T15:01:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty busy preparing for next week's conference workshop on blogging and don't know that I will have the time to do any posting here for awhile, unless it's to ask for help with the online handout. I did want to say a few things about the conference before I get back to the rush of being at school next week.

Jocalo, Mike, and Clancy have all done thoughtful jobs of transcribing notes, and if you haven't been to their sites, you really should go and read them. They link to others, and I think you can get a pretty good idea of what happened.

So let me segue (although I'd rather Segway)
into some thoughts about next year.

Thought #1: Technology. We have to have better systems for getting computers to work during presentations, etc. Yes, I'm speaking from experience, and though my talk was just that, a talk, read from notes that were the nth draft of ideas I'd been working on, both John and Styles had presentations that relied on using technology to show what they were talking about. Although we were able to find some help, the person didn't come in until the middle of Styles's presentation, and would have interrupted things and taken up more time before getting them fixed.
As it was, John became the techie, and Styles had to lean over and point out which file to put on the screen. He shouldn't have had to, though. The technical part of John's presentation was scrapped, and we missed his realtime blogging demonstration. That both men are experienced teachers who know how to gracefully shift course when things aren't working speaks to their professionalism. And yes, things happen. But my point is that at this point in time, we shouldn't have to treat technology like a "special" topic and arrange ahead of time for a room that would accomodate our laptops, powerpoints, blogs, etc. We should just assume that technology will be part of the process unless told otherwise.

Maybe I should be preaching to hotels and convention centers about this.

Related to this is Mike's comment about technology at the 4C's:

And now, as Collin points out, it’s time to start thinking about next year. I’ll share Collin’s sentiment that the “trend […] towards increasingly arbitrary and unclear categories” on the CCCC Call for Proposals is problematic, and I’ll add a question: do the proposal form’s “area clusters” perhaps actually hinder our disciplinary conversations? I noticed that a lot of bloggers went to a lot of the technology-focused panels, which of course is to be expected (it’s become axiomatic that the thing bloggers most like to blog about is blogging) — but I didn’t see any panels that had only one or two tech presenters; the tech panels were all tech, all the time (somebody, please, correct me if I’m wrong), which I think makes for a sort of echo chamber effect. It can also lead to attitudes like the one I (perhaps mistakenly) perceived in Anne Jones’s troubling “dark ages” comment; attitudes that pedagogies associated with digital technologies are somehow beyond rather than a part of composition’s body of knowledge. I wonder what might happen when composition reaches the disciplinary point that the New York Times reached on March 24, when it eliminated the Circuits section because of the way technology concerns had begun “migrating into the mainstream.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thought #2:Some Suggestions.

So, next year, in Chicago, why don't we mix things up a bit? Why don't we poll members to see what kinds of clusters/topics/panels/performances we'd like to attend?

Why don't we make certain that technology isn't always its own category, but is blended in with other presentations?

Why don't we create a "Wild Card" category that mixes up three presenters and gives them a year to figure out how their ideas do or don't intersect and then come to the conference with a presentation that continues the conversatiion?

Why don't we tape or podcast or broadcast some or all of the presentations so that members can go to the 4 C's website and play them?

Why don't we?

Oral History Project

2005-03-24T22:37:00.000-05:00

Stop whatever you're doing and go see Sharon's idea for an oral history project of retired two-year college educators in her state. I'm especially excited about it because one of the observations that jocalo has made about the 4 C's is that because of so many teachers retiring these days, there needs to be a way to collect their wisdom and experience;

That many two-year colleges face a challenge as a lot of senior faculty retire, taking decades of accumulated teaching wisdom with them. I suggested at the Preparing Future Faculty session that departments should develop mentoring plans that help retiring and retired faculty pass on ideas and insights to recently hired faculty.

While the two foci aren't identical, both encourage us to take advantage of the terrific resources we have in our senior faculty, who, having seen and heard it all, can help new faculty cut through the confusion that being new to a profession and institution brings.

MAWSA Blog Asks Women Bloggers

2005-03-23T17:39:00.000-05:00

Next Saturday, I'll be giving a workshop at the Mid-Atlantic Women's Studies Association Conference on how to create a blog. My collaborator, Samantha Veneruso, asks that I post the following two questions to women who blog:

1. Why do you read blogs?

2. Why do you write (on your own blog or as a comment on another)?

If you'd kindly go to the WORDbirthing blog and post your replies, we'd appreciate it. And we'll post you on our blogroll.

Thanks much,

Joanna

Blogcabulary

2005-03-22T01:23:00.000-05:00

For a workshop that I'll be conducting in a few weeks, I'd like to compile a list of blog terminology--with words like post,trackback, blog, moblog, ping, blogroll, and so forth. Are there any other words out there that need to be included?

Thanks.

Last Week

2005-03-21T15:59:00.000-05:00

First of all, it wasn't a reaction to my new meds that had me sprawled on my hotel bed last Friday. Instead, it was a combination of overexerting my out-of-shape body up and down SF, the pollen count, and letdown from the presentation. It was stress. Today, the meds are fine, my sinuses are fine, and I'm not going to overdo it back home.
I think that later on this week I'll post more thoughtful reactions to the conference, but today, while my father sits in the living room worrying about his blood sugar levels out loud, I'll jot down one of my disorganized lists.

Impressions:
1. How many buildings does it take to make the Moscone Center? Many. Reading the directions from the 4 C's would have helped me avoid another convention taking place.

2. The All-Day BW Workshop. Impressive presentations from folks at U of Wyo and another from folks at SF State and a few of its local community colleges.

A. First impression: once again, I am clobbered with the reality that size, population and finances affect how many cc's exist in a state and what they are capable of doing.
B. One of the schools, can't remember which, created a one-year BW learning community which, if the student fails, sends the students back to the community college. That raises my hackles, but again, I suspect that regionalism and not academic snobbery has something to do with it.

C. The continuing cry: "How do we define the BW population," and it's response: "It depends on where you're teaching and whether you're at a university, college or community college." I first heard this cry back in 1992, when I was writing my master's thesis and teaching part time at MC (thanks, Barbara Stout). Here we are, thirteen years later, and we're still asking that question. Maybe we'll always be asking that question.

D. The obvious becomes more obvious. In all of the breakout discussions, we'd come back to the need to blend reading and writing in developmental studies and not have them be discrete courses. Some schools are doing that, others aren't. More later.

3. Meeting other bloggers in person. Well, it's kind of like meeting a pen pal--they're not strangers, but can we say that we've met?

I can say that I've met Clancy and Mike E. Each as brilliant in person as they are in print. I've met Styles and jocalo, and enjoyed their presentations as much as I hope they enjoyed mine (new calling: academic comedienne.). Scott introduced himself to me as did a few others. I regret not being able to get to the blogging "do" at jocalo's or the SIG meeting, but there will be time next year.

4. "The New Collegiality." I'll say more later this week, as both jocalo and Styles deserve more than a single phrase compliment for their work. I think that jocalo and I managed to situate blogging at two ends of the career spectrum, though being middle-aged and new to teaching, I have lost that sense of unlimited time that I had in my twenties and thirties. Styles not only showed his agility and magic with words and ideas, but also offered some thoughtful and practical observations about his blog, like his decision to not write every day, but to limit his posts.

5. This here blog. I've been wondering if we shouldn't try Typepad, which I will happily subsidize through my 2Board Alley blog. One of the best features of blogging is that the reader can go back and read old posts and conversations, and can also eyeball who is currently commenting. Blogger limits these opportunities somewhat.
Also, we need to revise some of the resources on our page--we being me, as Cindy has done a terrific job of keeping up with the new blogs and contributors.

6. And then there's my voice. Not wanting to dominate, I'd love to get more voices posting here. I would love to have posts from folks teaching lit, freshman comp and anything else. The more voices, the richer the mix and the deeper the possibilities.

7. I was thinking last week that I ought to post about a learning community that I work with, the Biomedical Scholars, and about the Writing Center web page that I've been involved with creating for the last year. Why not?

Grab Bag

2005-03-20T23:32:00.000-05:00

Came home last night--my suitcase took the long way and will be here by midnight, they tell me. The conference was great, and while I was out of it on Friday (thanks to a bug), I can say that I've gleaned quite a bit for the next year.

If last year was a time of thinking about what I do in the classroom, with or without technology, I think that the coming year is going to be one of guided introspection and experimentation as I start using blogs in the developmental classroom.

There's more to all of this, but as it nears midnight and my suitcase is nigh, I'm going to sign off now.

Joanna

San Francisco, Day Two

2005-03-15T16:43:00.000-05:00

Today is a beautiful day--sunny and warm. I went to the SF City College to look at the Diego Rivera mural, and it was well worth the trip. I'm going to use the mural as a backdrop for Bless Me, Ultima the next time I teach it. Walked down to the Moscone Center just to see it--I remember being at the SFMOMA during my last visit here, about eight years ago--don't know how old the MC is. Walked past the Museum of Cartoon Art--gotta get there before I leave.

Last night I worked on my presentation/talk/notes for Thursday. As usual, the closer I get to the deadline, the more shape it has taken. Plenty of narrative, Clancy. Being out here early, away from the madding campus, has contributed, I'm sure. Nothing to do but think. I'm not giving a paper because I don't want to. I want to talk face to face with people. Real time, real people, real speech.

I'm trying to land on a metaphor that will pull my handout together and am coming up trite. No links, no journeys, no diaries. Maybe a genealogy of my blogging. That's the ticket. I think. Now to avoid all those vomity cute genealogy names that I hate, like "roots 'n branches."

Back to reading and responding to student emails-- told them that I was going to SF, not another planet, and that they could send me an email (in fact, they are supposed to be sending me two.)instead of turning in journals or doing busy work with a substitute.

If you're coming to SF, be sure to wear a flower in your hair, okay? And take a Sudafed, too.

We're Famous!

2005-03-15T11:56:00.000-05:00

Well, sort of. At least in our circles.

San Francisco, the Cow Palace and the Pollen

2005-03-14T23:39:00.000-05:00

The flight from Philly was calm, and I managed to grade two sets of papers before I dropped three sets of papers in the aisle somewhere over Michigan. Retrieved them with no damage done to the papers or my seatmates. Read the in-flight magazine in English and Spanish, read ALL of the Georgetown Alumni magazine and was annoyed for the second time this week by Georgetown (not including basketball) or Georgetown-related topics. Okay, the magazine had an article about GU alumni who have gone into teaching because of the fantastic education they received at GU. I may be misreading things --may and better be about alums from the college and not people with grad degrees. If not, I want them to have an article about those of us who went into Community College teaching. My other peeve is really with the Washington Post for publishing an article on blogging in academe and not featuring any of the MANY community colleges in the area--just the universities, of which my alma mater was one. Emails will be sent.

Now, about SF. I hailed a cab driven by a cabdriver who must have trained in Boston and the Indy 500. We sped past the Cow Palace exit among others (and Jocalo, just what is a "Cow Palace" ?)and arrived 35 dollars later at the hotel, where Captain Nemo was nowhere to be found.

Spent the morning working on my presentation and then felt so headachy that I cancelled a visit with a friend who teaches at the City College (home of the Diego Rivera mural). Her husband mentioned that the pollen is very high right now, and I concur, so bring your allergy meds with you. Had breakfast with another lodger-instructor named April who will be presenting on Friday, and with a very kind woman who worked in Computer Science in Wisconsin and who taught me how to use a MAC laptop. Finally, met the elderly Captain N, gracious but more interested in napping, or so he said in a fine Siamese accent.

It was a beautiful day here, despite the pollen, and a perfect day for wandering around getting reacquainted with the city.

Joanna

What's the secret to doing it all?

2005-03-13T20:16:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm frantically trying to prepare final exams and grade last papers before I take off for CCCC in San Francisco, and I'm wondering whether everybody else is scrambling, too.

I teach on a quarter system, but I generally have three different preparations going each quarter. The mix changes constantly because I'm at a small school, but I usually have 2 composition courses, most often at two different levels (English 101 and English 102, for example) and a humanities course, or a literature course. I never have the same preparations from quarter to quarter. Usually, I teach 5 to 7 different courses each school year, and then I have a couple of other courses that rotate in every other year.

I guess I'm nuts because I love the constant change. However, I always feel like I'm running at full speed through deep mud. I don't know how you all manage to keep up with everything and read multiple blogs and respond to multiple blogs and read journals, books........ What's the secret to doing it all?

Sunday Blog

2005-03-13T08:12:00.000-05:00

There's much to write about and really no time to write if I am going to make my plane to SF. Jocalo has posted the NPR link on his site, so do go there and listen to his views on the new SAT. Clancy has been posting covers of girls' books from the 70's and 80's, and it brings up all kinds of great associations among her readers. Our new blog-siblings, Composition Mountain West and Composition Southeast both discuss the ramification of regionalization oon texts and teaching, particularly when the teacher is not from the same region as the student. Lots of good thoughts there. And John Goldfine writes about his plans for a new lit course: Dogs in Literature.

My BW students are waking up to words, flexing their brains and thinking about what goes on when we write.
The portfolio-keeping is going along less confusedly than last semester, largely because I am requiring that my students keep everything in a 1" ring binder with multiple divisions that we call "the portfolio." While they haven't been taking things out to revise on their own, they are in the habit of putting things in the right place and knowing where to find things, making them more independent of me. The time that we would have spent doing midterm portfolios is being eaten up by my trip, so I plan on doing individual conferences during the week after we return from break.
And grammar? Having tried the in-your-face style of grammar instruction last semester, I've gone in the other direction, and frankly, I like it. We have been looking at words in terms of stylistic and rhetorical choices first, and are now beginning to look at grammar as a way of figuring out what those words do to each other in the sentence. (When I say grammar, I don't mean a comprehensive review, but more of an overview with an emphasis on punctuation.)

I've two sets of papers to grade, but I think I can safely say that my students are calming down about writing and getting into the college swing of things.

Have a good week--I'm going to try to blog from the conference--we'll see how it goes.

Joanna

Falling Behind in my Work

2005-03-09T20:08:00.000-05:00

The weather in DC has been menopausal lately. On Monday, it was 60 + degrees outside, sunny, and beautiful. On Tuesday, it snowed. On Wednesday, I couldn't get my garage door open, and that's where this post begins.
It was 7:10, and I had to be at work at 8. The frozen door would not budge, so I went back inside and boiled water in some tea kettles to defrost the door. I went outside the front door to do the pouring, and when I came back inside, I saw that the other door, leading to the garage, was open. And I couldn't find one of my cats. So at 7:25, I tore around calling for him. Found the guy calmly eating his kibble. Turned to leave and fell down the steps into the living room. After screaming and yelling in pain for a few minutes, I hobbled to the car and got to class late--10 minutes late, but they were still waiting for me.
we were going to do some elaborating on skeleton sentences to reinforce the descriptive writing in their next paper, so I just wrote down a skeletal narrative about my morning and asked them to be creative and elaborate.(While I limped around the room trying to be helpful.)

It was great! Two students turned it into a Steven King kind of story, another wrote a hilarious paragraph and a third had me out clubbing the night before with the class . My cat was named Killer, Fuzzy, Old Yeller, and Felix, and my car, a filthy old Camry became a Mercedes, a Buick LeSabre, and a sports car. The details were sharp, and the class went beyond simply loading sentences with adjectives--they were using crisp, vivid nouns and verbs, phrases, synonyms and so on. The stories held together, whether my character was being pursued by a killer cat, scraping burned English muffins into the cat's bowl, dropping kettles of boiled water on myself or going upstairs to nap at 7:30 (but never forgetting that I had a classroom full of fantastic students, especially _______--insert writer's name here.).

I wish that I had copies of their freewrites so that I could post some of the sharp, distinct details here. I wish you could see how one student, a returning student who used write apologies after every assignment just sat down and wrote two full pages of a good story. We had fun listening to everyone read out loud, and I made certain to point out two positive, writerly things that each student had done, whether it be in details, word choice or structure. You can bet that I referred back to how these very same techniques could be used in their papers. No buts about it.

As I stand here drafting this post with one hand and swallowing more Advil, I can definitely state that I suffer for my art. Teaching is not for the faint of heart.

From Australia

2005-03-09T01:21:00.000-05:00

Hi!
It's truly fascinating reading CCE - Rosa, your fluency and regular postings awe me, but it was your post on being interviewed which prompted me to write. I felt an immediate sense of belonging then! I'm not sure why I became a teacher in the first place - and I think it had far more to do with being the main wage-earner in the family - but, once in, that was it. I think I've been lucky: I've taught in four different countries, and I'm currently teaching in a dual-sector university in Melbourne. That means we have students who are studying Technical and Further Education courses, and students who are enrolled in Higher Education (degree - and higher degree) courses. It's a fascinating cross-section - and I get to teach them all in our self-access and Open Access (yes, there's a difference!) facilities. I also teach classes: for the past two years, I've been teaching mainly English for Academic Purposes - academic and language skills for ESL students who come from a tremendous variety of countries.

My interest in (obsession with?) blogs started about three years ago: I was doing a course in Teaching and Learning Online - and scanning the net for ideas for a major project. Once hooked, I guess that was it. Blogs hadn't taken off then in the way that they have now, perhaps. Certainly I had to put up with an awful lot of teasing from the other staff here - but I survived! I immediately started using blogs with my classes - and I've done so ever since. I use them mainly as 'group blogs' - much friendlier than discussion boards. Last year, I actually started reflecting on what the various groups had accomplished, and writing up my research for the first time. I find that my ESL students gain so much: the classroom dialogue doesn't stop when the class ends - it continues over weekends, holidays - and long after a course has finished. I am fascinated by the oral influence on the student' writing styles - and by the way in which that improves their fluency in their second - or third or fourth - language.

I'm wondering whether anyone else has experience in this area. Blogging seems to be more common in the States than it is here. Obviously our education systems are very different - do you think the US sysem is more encouraging? I'm also dying to ask someone about intellectual copyright and ethics issues: I'm really strugggling to get advice on the ethics of using student blogs for research! I'm not sure why it is quite such a problem - but it seems to be!

I really enjoy CCE - and I'm enjoying your other links, too. I loved the definition of plagiarism in Sharon's blog - a great analogy indeed!

Another New Blog

2005-03-08T21:06:00.000-05:00

Composition Mountain Westbegan this week, so let's raise our coffee mugs and toast the latest community college blog. Scott Rogers, the blog's founder, writes about the potential blogs have for "regionalizing" information for instructors. I hope that he posts here or at CMW about regionalizing and what it implies. I am very interested in finding out.

Cheers,
Joanna

The Blogging Difference

2005-03-06T12:53:00.000-05:00

As Rosa has been preparing for her 4C's presentation, there's been some talk here about what makes blogging different from other Internet communication forms we've had available to us as academics: listservs, bulletin boards, chatrooms, etc. An e-mail I received today from a two-year English teacher who--inspired by Community College English--has started a blog with some colleagues, I think, says it all:

I was inspired by your Community College English blog to try to start a similar one for people who are members of TYCA-SE...or at least start with those people.

It's just getting started, and I'm still trying to scratch up members and interest, but I have patience and determination, so I think I can make it work.

Take a look:

http://compsoutheast.blogspot.com/

That really made my day. Let's give Composition Southeast a warm welcome to the blogosphere. They've already got some great entries posted, and maybe we can get some cross-dialogue going.

Being Interviewed

2005-03-02T11:14:00.000-05:00

Last week, a former student interviewed me for a paper she was writing for her Intro to Education class. I was flattered and then flummoxed. At my age, I have had a good many years of teaching behind me--something I knew but didn't really appreciate until the interview. Two of her questions stood out the most: why did I become a teacher, and was there ever a time when I'd regretted the choices that I'd made?

I think that I was meant to teach. Coming from the "teach anything but middle school" Goins family, I admired teachers and always felt comfortable teaching. The only choice that I regret was in not getting my degrees sooner so that I could be working on a doctorate now (or finishing one).

By the time I was thirty, I realized that I'd be happiest teaching at a community college, and by the time I was forty, I was there. And I'm happy. My professional life has balance, which gives me time to crane my neck and look outward at higher education across the country and to develop a far wider perspective than I've had regarding politics, publication, funding and so forth.

What about the rest of you, readers? Why did you become teachers?

Interviews

2005-03-02T10:55:00.000-05:00

Okayyyyyyyy. I'm writing this two minutes after the class has left the room. I think that they've gotten the idea about the interview/profile, and, more importantly, have settled into writing. Just writing. Outlining, drafting, clustering, paragraphing--whatever helps them move beyond their interview notes and into the beginnings of a rough draft.
The last three weeks have been hard--in part because of the weather throwing off our schedules (yes, here in the DC area we panic at the sight of a snowflake. We know that all of you who live anywhere else north of here think we're nuts.), in part because their study habits are not strong, and in part because they have been so anxious that they've frozen every step of the way.

The other part is that three weeks ago marked the point in the semester when they realized that I was going to hold them to getting their assignments done and that they couldn't behave like children in class. This happens every semester in every section of BW that I've taught. It is the most challenging, exhausting and enervating part of teaching BW students and requires the most patience from me. Having to send people out of the room or move them to another seat is very elementary schoolish--and while I hate doing it, I hate even more when some students get in the way of other students' learning. Or my teaching.

But, may I say that today they settled down and either worked on their draft or did the peer review assignment, and did a good job of it? I was so impressed with their lead paragraphs that I stopped class and read several of them out loud, praising the good I was hearing. Both sections of students are starting to "defrost" and relax about just writing and taking chances on different kinds of writing beyond the five -paragraph theme. They're calming down enough to read an assignment sheet through before asking questions about it.
They're taking notes and asking questions when they don't understand things, and they are relying on each other for constructive help--meeting between classes to review things and so forth.

I think we're starting to turn the corner.

Friday update: I wrote the above on Wednesday. Today, Friday, both classes kept chugging along and students approached me for conferences--an important step because they are taking charge of the situation by asking me and then by having specific questions in mind when we sit down together. After classes, a student came up to me, holding several newpaper articles, in which he'd highlighted sentences whose grammar or punctuation confused him. He must have had about ten of them. We went over each one, and while I don't want to get into a discussion of grammar in the writing classroom, I was impressed that he was thinking about what he was reading and noticing how words were arranged into sentences. What a wonderful way to end the week!

Why I Can't Go to San Francisco

2005-02-28T22:55:00.000-05:00

. . .or anywhere else for Spring Break? I've got a union to reform.

Just a Thought

2005-02-22T06:51:00.000-05:00

As excited as I am to be meeting fellow bloggers at the 4C's, I am even more interested/curious about the anonymous bloggers. Will they reveal themselves at the conference? Will they move about the rest of us, anonymous and unnoticed? Will I be dragged into a dark alcove where "PinkSquid of Academia" reveals her identity, threatening all sorts of mayhem if I ever tell?

Just wondering. . .

The Bee

2005-02-21T12:11:00.000-05:00

We finally had the Spelling Bee this morning. Both classes were sparsely populated since it's Presidents' Day, and the buses are running on a Sunday schedule.

If you've never taught BW or another language, the old-fashioned Bee (from bene, meaning umm...to help out)may seem kind of juvenile. Here's why I do it: it gets the students together in teams, working towards a shared goal, and it makes reviewing spelling a bit more interesting. It engages them in a way that I wish all learning did. In the overall context of the course, it's a light, active, and fun thing to do to balance out the more serious assignments that they are working on.

They also had a reading quiz based on an handout on notetaking that I gave them on Friday. We'll be spending the next two weeks reading and writing about being in college. One of their assignments is to take notes in class every day and to take notes on any homework that they're assigned. The notetaking assignment has the weight of a paper, and while it is not the most exciting kind of writing in the world, it is an important kind of writing/skill for them to have. I must say that I haven't been seeing many people taking notes, so it will be interesting to see how the next two weeks go.

They will also be interviewing one of their other professors for a profile paragraph that they'll be writing next week. The reason for this assignment is to have practice taking notes, but more importantly, it is to get the students onto campus to learn about the ways of academe--such as the office hour and the visit to the professor's office. So far, it has been like pulling teeth, and I feel that once they get through the interview and first draft, they'll feel so much better about it.

Blogger's Block

2005-02-17T09:40:00.000-05:00

I've been working on my 4C's presentation and am turning and turning in a widening pit of frustration, which is my usual m.o. for such things. I seem to need to work through a series of questions before I can get started on what I need to do.
Questions: Why did I offer to do this?
What was I thinking?
Who would want to listen to what I have to say?
What could I possibly have to say that won't already have been said by my partners and blogging's own eminences grises, jocalo and Styles?

Well, that's why god created therapists.

The other block I bring to any writing activity is that once I've learned something to my satisfaction, I am incredibly impatient about explaining it to other people. Unless I'm teaching.

There.

Here's what I've been thinking, in a non-linear fashion:

1. Blogs are associational--with whom have I associated and why?
A. Keep up with theor(ies)
B. Be mentored
C. Mentor
D. Network all over academe-up ,down and sideways.

2. What's in it for other mid -career teachers who are not on the cutting edge but still on the blade?
A. Use another form of writing
B. That is not classroom dependent
C. Learn to blog and you too can have a blog of your own
D. Because it's so darn easy--unlike the bazillion web pages I have begun and abandoned over the years.

3. What I've done this year with blogs (here's where I get impatient--would it be like showing vacation slides at a dinner party?)
A. Can I create a powerpoint that would show everyone's banners?
B. Oh, okay. How would I do that?
C. Would it make a good and not boring ppt?

4. Theory. Ain't got one. Haven't got anything to problematize. Feel like an academic fraud. Is there room for a pragmatic academic?

5. What's in all this for me? What do I get out of blogging that I wouldn't get from visiting colleagues on campus?
A. Many of my colleagues have different schedules than I do--I'm not going to sit around for a few hours waiting to talk, nor would they--they've got family care and teaching loads to deal with. So do I.
B. So, blogs are a place where I can post an idea and get feedback (like right now, let's say).
C. Why don't I just pick up the phone and call my colleagues?
D. Ummm. good question. I'm in a rut.
E. Different quality of blogging discussion--time to think about posts, people's responses etc. In a f2f, we are always so busy that we don't get beyond the here and now (usually)
F. Widens network--blogging helps me see what goes on at other cc's and 4yr and universities. I've already said that. And why do I assume that my MC peers don't read the blog?

So, if you have questions, advice, patience or a good bottle of wine that you'd like to share, please do.

Thanks much for reading this long post.

Joanna

Where Have You Gone, Mister Jocalo?

2005-02-17T09:34:00.000-05:00

Your readers turn their lonely eyes to you, boo hoo hoo.

What's up with the blogs at DeAnza?

Some Thoughts on Plagiarism

2005-02-14T14:12:00.000-05:00

As a teacher, I lose a lot of sleep. Not because I'm up late grading papers or planning assignments necessarily, but because I'm worried. Am I doing a good job? Are they learning anything? Do I really know good writing when I see it? Am I too easy? Too hard?

But the one thing I don't lose sleep over is plagiarism. Now, I know many of you do. The studies are there that show us how many students plagiarize in their two or four years of college. The Internet papermills make it as easy as point-and-click. The writing handbooks contain increasingly longer sections on what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. Plagiarism detection software abounds. And at every gathering of writing instructors, the topic comes up: what do we do about plagiarism?

At my college, we used to have access to Turnitin.com,* and some instructors used it religiously, having students hand in their papers on disc and telling them that all their work would automatically be "turned in." I was opposed to the practice from the start simply based on the classroom ethos I believed it created: an ethos of distrust. Call me naive, but I refused to assume that any of my students intended to cheat; it was a bridge I refused to cross until--no, when--I came to it.

But rarely do I come to it, despite what some would call my lax approach to the issue. I make very little of plagiarism in my classes. Other than a brief talk about why we do MLA documentation when I go over how to do it, I don't talk to my students much about the issue. And yet, in the eight years I've been a full-time faculty member, I can count on one hand the number of students I've caught plagiarizing. How do I explain this? I think it comes down to two basic elements of responsible teaching: good assignment creation and relationship building. In other words, give assignments that are creative, specific, and not easily fulfilled by generic, downloadable material and get to know your students and their voices. I never allow students to choose their own topics, I never assign "the research paper" on a topic they are "interested in,"** and I read enough of their writing closely enough so if there is a change in voice, I'll hear it. Most of my assignments call for responses to texts we are all reading in class, and I change my texts regularly. I address unintentional plagiarism when it happens, by reviewing the concepts of summarizing, paraphrasing and effectively quoting and documenting. This usually solves the problem.

Does a plagiarizer ever get away with it in my class? I'm sure it has happened. But I still don't lose sleep. Someday, somewhere, either he will get caught or she will become a executive at an Enron-like company, but it will not change the way I teach. I will not adopt practices in my classroom that assume all are guilty from the start, nor will I create an atmosphere where students are terrified to incorporate other sources into their work for fear of improperly giving credit. We live and work in a world increasingly based on collaboration and the use of the Internet, and some of these issues of whose work is whose are becoming moot anyway.

No, I don't lose sleep over plagiarism.

*For more on the sinister side of Turnitin.com, read Nick Carbone's excellent piece here.

**I think the open topic research paper just begs to be plagiarized.

There's a New Blog Out There

2005-02-13T18:52:00.000-05:00

And it's mine. It's called 2 Board Alley, and it's where I'm going to be posting my creative/reflective writing. I'm still going to post here twice a week about school, teaching and theory, and I hope that others will post here as well. Hint, Hint.

Bee Here Wednesday

2005-02-13T11:07:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday, my basic writing students are going to experience that piece of schoolhouse Americana, the spelling bee. We've just spend two weeks reviewing spelling and homonyms (among other things--we've done a great deal of writing, too), and I thought it would be fun to have a spelling bee to cap things off. I've assigned the students to send me a list of the words that they know they have trouble with--those will be the words that I use for the bee, so by Wednesday, they will have had time to review. I am going to throw in some "wild card" words, too.

Just to make it more exciting (hang on to your hats!), I'm going to divide the class into four groups and have them competing against each other. How to score points? I think I may give each group a point for each correct word and then add five points to the winning group. There are probably more complicated ways to keep score, but since this is the first go round, I want to keep it simple.
Will it work? We'll see.

Cat B_ogging

2005-02-08T23:18:00.000-05:00

One of our cats broke the "L" key on my husband's laptop. Just the "L" key and nothing else. What could it mean?

"He was reaching for the rest of the keyboard," my husband explained, "and the 'l' was all he could get."

I believe him, but I can't help but wonder why the cat would need to be reaching for a laptop. Or a keyboard.

And I laughed when Mike's cat brought him a Post- it note.

Something's afoot.

You're Never Too Young. . .

2005-02-07T22:38:00.000-05:00

A six year-old told me that if I wanted to know more about lionfish, all I needed to do was to "google it." That's what she did. In the "liberry."

An Offer for Poets Attending the 4C's

2005-02-06T08:13:00.000-05:00

I planned on going to the poetry workshop on Saturday, but I have to fly home and take care of my father, so if anyone wants to use my ticket, let me know.

Friday Scat Blogging

2005-02-04T14:59:00.000-05:00

oh, doobie doo lalalaa, doodlieoo, dababbababababa dippydappydippywippy oootoobleowieo oh. wow.

Friday. The End of a Busy Week

2005-02-04T13:03:00.000-05:00

What a week! Classes went well, meetings went well, and just about everything fell into place. I'm at home today, fighting off a SAD-related migraine, so this scant post will be a list of what has been on my mind this week.

1. Ward Churchill. An academic whom I'd never heard of until this week. As I wrote in an email to the TechRhet mail list, regardless of what he has written or said, the larger issue is academic freedom. His and ours. For other thoughts about WC, visit The Happy Academicand hear why even HA is worried.

2. Some new blogs. I was delighted to hear from timna and hope that she posts here in the future. All it takes is an email to clc, and you, too, can be posting here. While enjoying timna's blog, Timna: Contemplating Teaching, Writing and Driving Middle Schoolers, I found John Goldfine, another CC English prof, this time from Maine, and I enjoyed my time spent reading a Small Town Community College Writing Teacher Blog.

My colleague, VS, has put me on to Jeanne at Body and Soul, and a recent posting, "Turn Down Your Volume," smoothly braids topics like buying a gift for a little girl, the noise at Best Buys, talk radio, speaking up, finding your voice and a positive take on the voices of America. Did I say it was a satisfying read? It was. Jeanne writes clearly and profoundly about politics, war and "The Body Politic, the Human Soul, and Billie Holiday." VS and I will be giving the workshop on blogging at this April's conference of the Mid-Atlantic Women's Studies Association, and have been compiling a list of feminist bloggers. I'm still looking for feminists bloggers from other areas of academe (other than Lit/Comp/Rhet/Tech)and from other areas of life. Please pass along links to me if you know of anyone.

3. Jeff. This past weekend I made more headway through his text, and as usual, am wondering how to modify it to the very basic of Basic Writing levels. Over at EarthWideMoth, Jeff and Derek Mueller (and others) engage in a very useful discussion of technology and text production--in other words, should a blog ( or anything else) be used in the service of creating forms and patterns that we already know, or should we look to this new technology and see what forms and patterns come from it? "Retromediation and Novelty," has given me something to chew on as I begin to use blogging with my students.

4. Jocalo. Today Jocalo posts about a movement afoot in Colorado to remove Bless Me, Ultima from the schools because of, you guessed it, language. Having taught this novel last semester, I am saddened (okay, pissed, too)that anyone would want to remove that book from any student's grasp. Like other great books, you read not only about a young boy's passing from innocence into experience, but you learn about cultures, in this case, the pre- and post- colonial Mexican and the SW American, and about assimilation and resistance, religion, war and nature. Oh, and there are some of those, ummm, you know, "words" in it as well.

5. Mike. Mike is writing about class (economic) and class (academic)over at vitia. I've enjoyed following his thoughts along with those of others in discussing how economic class (background?) plays out in academics, and by that I mean us, not the field. Can you truly be said to be "working class" by the time you've gotten through two or three degrees and have a well paying job? And Rob points out that the terms we use to classify people with may not be relevant in these economic times.

6. San Francisco. I've found my hotel room. Have you? I won't be breaking the picket line, but will instead be staying at a B and B closer to the Moscone Center, Grace Cathedral (one of my favorite places in the world)and one of my oldest and dearest friends. And, it's cheaper than the Hilton.

The Collage Activity for Week 1, and a few words about Emails

2005-01-30T18:13:00.000-05:00

The second activity that we do is the collage--a means of representing in a nonverbal way, one's interests and personality. It's intentionally very different from the business card activity, both in purpose and in format. With no help from me except for an assignment sheet, the students create their collages for Friday's class.
In class, I blend this activity with learning how to get into MS Word as well as how to save files. This step is becoming almost unnecessary, but there are still enough students who need to learn how to operate a computer that it is worth doing.

So, we open a new file in MS Word and the first round of writing is to describe what the objects on their collages represent. What does each color, object, photograph tell the viewer about the creator? During this time, I walk around the room and make sure that each student has been able to open a file and get started.

At the end of fifteen minutes, I stop them, and ask them to give me their collages. There are two long tables up front, and I place all of the collages on there. I invite the class up to the front of the room to pick another collage to write about, specifying that they not choose a person whose collage they've already seen or talked about.

We spend another fifteen minutes writing, this time, analyzing the new collage. What does this collage say about the person who created it? This time, they have to imagine and guess at the answer.

When time's up, we go around the room, each student talking about what they've guessed about their collage artist. I hold the collage in question and walk around so that everyone can see it. When the speaker is finished, I ask the artist how close the speaker was to interpreting her (or him). My emphasis is less on correctness but on the act of interpretation.

In both sections, we ran out of time before we could finish.

But not before I could give them the next assignment, "Send Me An Email."

What I like about this particular activity is that once again, names and faces are reinforced; students are asked to take something created in one medium and translate it into another; and they are asked to stand up and talk to each other(good practice for project reports and a good antidote for fidgeting).

Right now, I'm reading and responding to the emails. By the deadline, half of them had come in,each describing their student self. I respond to each of them with a two- to three- line message that lets them know that I've paid attention to what they've said, and in some cases, I've posed a question to them.

The first obvious benefit is that the class gets to email me, thus breaking the ice for using that communication tool. Secondly, they are having to draft another kind of communication: not a paragraph, not a business card, not a collage, but an email, which has specific conventions to follow. Finally, they are, for the third time this week, having to reflect on some aspect of themselves, and bring it to the fore.

So far the emails have been fine. The only quibble I have is that students sometimes forget to sign them, so I'm left trying to figure out who Snugglypoo876 or BadBrunette are.

First Week Activities in BW

2005-01-29T16:41:00.000-05:00

Since we've moved to portfolios this year, I no longer have to spend the first two sessions giving diagnostic tests in writing and grammar. That has freed up quite a bit of time to pull together the first week activities into a coherent unit, rather than having to do only a part of the plan and then rush on to something else.

On the first day, we go over the syllabus, which runs to four pages since I've blended the college's with my own. I touch on the major points and will use the syllabus as a document for study in few weeks. Then, I do give them a writing diagnostic assignment, but I choose topics that are either timely or are geared towards seeing how they do with narration or exposition.

Homework consists of getting the school supplies on the syllabus.

On day two, I walk around the room and take roll. Then, we begin the activity of the day, which is to create business cards, something I do in all of my BW and DR classes. This activity does at least three things: it gets the students thinking about why they are in college at all; it gives them some play with word and image and drafting; and, because they exchange cards, they leave class knowing two other students that they can contact when they have questions.

I begin by giving each student one of my business cards. We look it over and analyze the elements, including the logo, and why each element is on the card. Then they freewrite for about ten minutes about their professional goals, as a warm up. Following the freewrite, I ask them to sketch a rough draft of their card on the same paper as the freewrite. They are to create a card that represents them in their future occupation, but which also has their real email and phone numbers on it. This activity takes another ten minutes, and when I sense that they are done, I hand out three 5x3" index cards to each student.

For 15 minutes, each student creates three copies of their index card. Some student whip right through this, others are very painstaking and need more time, which I can't give if I want to get through the assignment, but I do suggest that they finish the cards at home and bring them in for the next class.

Cards done, I request that they pass one up to me, so that I have my own set of cards. I put the students into groups of three, tell them to exchange cards and spend time getting to know each other, because in a few minutes, they will have to introduce their group to the class.

While they chat, I go through the cards and try to match names and faces.

When time's up, we go around the room, each group standing and having their "designated spokes-student" introduce them by name and career goal.

At this point, I have just enough time to give them the collage assignment for homework and class is over.

I'll write about the collage assignment in my next post since this is getting rather long. Essentially, the assignment is to create a collage from photos, found objects or whatnot, which depicts the personal interests of the student. By the end of the week, the student will have created three documents which depict three aspects of herself--her professional self through the cards; her personal self through the collage, and her academic self through an email sent to me.

Wonderful, Wonderful Cat Blogging

2005-01-27T20:44:00.000-05:00

I'm in a fix right now--feel like a cold is coming on, so I don't feel much like blogging as ambitiously as I had planned. So, fortunately, I reached into my bag of tricks and found this, which discusses a cat's participation in early 20th century technology. Don't laugh too hard (your sides will ache; your heart will go pitter-pat).

And I'll be back on Saturday. Honest.

Second Day of Classes

2005-01-25T22:19:00.000-05:00

Began at 8 a.m. in a room with an air blower so loud that it felt like I was teaching from inside an airplane engine. By the end of class, I was coughing from having had to boom my voice at students. Fortunately, I was able to get the room changed, so we'll have a quieter, gentler semester.

Today (and yesterday) I tried something new with my students. Since working on retention has been one of my goals this year, I've been looking for ways to make my students feel comfortable with me from the start. So, instead of taking roll by standing in the front of the room, I went from student to student and asked what her or his name was. In a class of 22-24 students, of course, this kind of thing is doable.
Another tact I tried was to talk about the rhythms of the semester and how missing class or not doing the work assigned can throw a person off course. I encouraged them to come to me if they were starting to miss classes and were afraid to come back because they were embarrassed or ashamed--I don't think I said it quite that way, but I did talk about not letting things snowball.

If these were credit-level courses, I wouldn't be doing this, but with developmental classes, the students' confidence and academic literacy is sometimes shaky, and I want them to get off to a good start. Having done a stunning turn of flunking out as a college student, I can, as they said in the 80's, "relate" to the nervous, the shy, the negative students in my class--the trick is to help them figure out a way out of the failure cycle without stepping over one's boundaries as an instructor.

If I have time tomorrow, I'll post about how I open up the writing course in week one.

First Day of Classes

2005-01-24T17:24:00.000-05:00

I met with my classes this morning. Back -to- back classes from 8-11. Good people, great lab. Went over my standards with them ; )

More tomorrow after I've recovered from the shock of having to get going early in the morning.

When is a Door Not a Door? When it's a Blog.

2005-01-23T04:48:00.000-05:00

This is the informal title of my 4C's presentation--which really has to do with using blogging as a professional development tool. But my working title really does spell out the number -one attraction that blogs have for me, and that is their asynchronicity and online(-icity?). Right now it's nearly 5 in the morning (a cold, cold, cold morning) and I am sitting here, plugging away--having visited all of the blogs on the blogroll and a few others.
I don't have to depend on you to be in your office and willing to talk with me--or, in this case, listen.
And of course, the you's I'm writing to, youse guys, are in offices all over the map, and it's pretty unlikely that I will ever pop my head in your door.

Which leads me to another attraction of blogging for this professional--I've been able to talk to other academics that I might never have met or known about had I not blogged. My professional perspective has certainly widened as a result of blogging.

Over the course of the next month, I'll work on my presentation here. Makes sense.

What Jeff Said

2005-01-22T18:21:00.000-05:00

Jeff Rice sent along these sites which show Cool in action. I'm giving them their own post so that more people can see them.

the Malcolm X assignment:

I'm posting this link in hopes that Jeff can send a correction--it doesn't seem to work.
Writing About Cool course

When Jeff gets the other assignments online, you can find them here.

Thanks, Jeff.

On Wednesday

2005-01-22T01:05:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday I went to a poetry reading given by my colleague, Kay Bosgraaf. She took a sabbatical a year ago and spent it writing and revising poems that became part of her book currently being published. (I've currently forgotten its title, but I promise that I'll have it, and a sample poem, soon).

Dr. Bosgraaf's poetry is autobiographical and her best poems that afternoon were her pantoums. I don't think I've ever heard someone use the pantoum as effectively or resonantly as she does. Don't get me started on her imagery--I can still see her great-grandfather in his chair, "rocking all the way back to the Netherlands."

Our college, through the Center for Teaching and Learning and through the Writing and Reading Center, does a good job of presenting the writers among our faculty, and I wish that I could do just as good a job as an audience. If I could, I'd go to every reading.

I mention all of this because I've been thinking about the ways our college does or should highlight/affirm the research and scholarship of the faculty. Two-Year Teacher-Scholar has motivated me to give it all a more critical look than I have in the past.

How am I being supported this year? Well, I'm being funded to attend the 4C's, for one. There is no way that I could go if I had to pay for it myself.

I'm using the $2,000 educational assistance fund money that we each get to fund:

1. Attending an online conference on using blogs in education
2. Pay for an online poetry course through webdelsol.com
3. Pay conferences fees for the 4C's, The Mid-Atlantic Women's Studies Conference, and a Skip Downing On Course workshop.

Like I said, there is no way that I could go to any of this if I had to pay for it myself. All of these activities add depth to my teaching as well as refresh my brain and remind me of why I love teaching in the first place.

2016

2005-01-21T13:15:00.000-05:00

Check it out.

2016

From the Tech-Rhet maillist at Interversity.

Catching Up on My Reading

2005-01-18T09:59:00.000-05:00

I spent last night reading "Two-Year College Teacher- Scholar." I'd encourage anyone entering the two-year college workplace to read it as it sets out the need for reflective practices (as in time for research)and institutional reinforcement of such practices. Makes sense, doesn't it? We teach our students to think about how they learn and what they've learned, and it behooves us, as professionals and as human beings, to have the time to reflect on what we do when we teach. Not to do so turns teaching into an assembly-line activity, where one uses the same old handouts and worksheets without even updating them.

Another site worth a look is Community College Week. I've recently begun a subscription to it and have appreciated its focus on the CC as its own entity, not as something to be mentioned in paragraph 66 of an article centered on the "university." Because of the CC focus, one is able to read about other institutions and see the variety of campuses, student needs and so on that exist between and among CC's across the country.

Finally, I've begun reading Jeff Rice's book, Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom. Given that I've spent the past year wandering about in a fitful diva-daze trying to think about how I could enhance what I do in the networked classroom, this text is taking me to the next level, where I can begin to conceptualize the changes in writing (process and text)that technology is bringing to our lives. Jeff has agreed to post here about his ideas, and I look forward to his doing that.

Reading and Blogging

2005-01-17T16:59:00.000-05:00

This semester I'll be teaching the second level of developmental reading and have been casting about looking for ways to use blogging in the course. Unlike my writing classes, RD 099 will meet in a traditional classroom, so if I want to use the internet, I'll have to schedule time in the lab or assign blogging to be done outside of class.

I'm eager to use a blog with this course for several reasons--one being that RD 099 is a three-hour course that meets on Tuesday and Thursday. I want to have activities that can be done on that long stretch between Thursday and Tuesday. Also, the class meets for an hour and 15 minutes each time, so there is not as much time as I'd to have in class for activities that reinforce reading and writing. The informality of the medium is the last reason why I'm eager to get my class on board. I want them to be talking about what they've read and what their ideas are without worrying about grammar and mechanics to the point of getting nothing written.

The only concern I have is that they might be nervous about writing something that everyone on the internet could read. Maybe that will encourage them to think about how they phrase things before they write their ideas down. On the other hand, we can always delete entries and responses, so maybe I'm overworrying (won't be the first time!)

The first time we blog, we'll be together in the lab. There after, the blogging will be done out of class, but will be used in class discussions and referred to often enough that it doesn't seem like an entity in outer space.

Next week, I'll blog some more about the books we're reading and how I'll be blogging with this class. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please let me know.

Women's Studies Blogging and Blogging by Feminists

2005-01-12T19:15:00.000-05:00

A colleague and I will be doing a blogging workshop in April, and we'd like to compile a blogroll of feminist and WS-related blogs. I'm especially interested in finding out about bloggers in other areas of the Humanities and the Sciences. If you can suggest any blogs, let me know. Thanks.

The Play's the Thing

2005-01-12T13:33:00.000-05:00

We talk an awful lot about composition here, which is great, but I'd like to switch gears a bit. What are some of your favorite contemporary dramas to teach in a Composition and Literature or Introduction to Literature course?

Shelf Life

2005-01-12T02:27:00.000-05:00

So I went into Borders last week. I had time to kill and I needed to buy a copy of Ethelbert Miller's Fathering Words, an autobiographical work that I'll be teaching later on this semester. Couldn't find it. Rather, I couldn't find the Biography/Autobiography section. And I looked. And looked. Until a clerk asked, "hey, need some help?" "Hey, yeah," I answered. Turns out that Borders doesn't have a Biography section. "We put the biographies in the sections associated with the writer, like Hemingway's in non-fiction, next to his novels, and the others are wherever," he pointed to wherever as he explained this new system. So Miller's work should have been in the Black Studies or the Local Authors section, which it wasn't.

I left the store shaking my head. "Barnes and Noble and libraries have Biography sections, but not us," my helper had said. Why the hell not? Is Borders trying to imitate linking? Given the associational nature of linking, it might be better to leave it to the computers, at least for now. Can you imagine a shelf with Hemingway's biography, A movable Feast and other works, plus books about elephant hunting, mood disorders, Key West and all things related? Well, actually, I can imagine such a shelf, but the problem is that with organization by association, the consumer is left at the mercy of whomever opened up the carton of books that day. As it was, the Local Authors section was loaded with picture books about the Chesapeake Bay, research on the Civil War, and cookbooks showcasing the Delmarva region's famous crab cakes. No Ethelbert Miller to be found there, or in the Black Studies section (So we put everything about African Americans in one section? Hmmmm...).

Yet, as we blur genres and boundaries in composition, maybe blurring of categories in bookstores is to be expected. However, it felt like looking through the broken lens of a kaleidoscope--everything was fanning out in a pattern that I couldn't discern. If I'd had the time, browsing through the stacks might have been fun, but I really needed, in my time-pressed twenty-first century way, to get the book right then and not a moment later. Nor was I expecting that there not be biographies and autobiographies lined up, alphabetical by subject, as I was used to.

I had meant this post to be a cranky venting of steam, but now I wonder if it doesn't mirror what's going on in writing these days--reordering and disordering of what we're used to. And the reader (allegorical ole me) is pressed by the need to figure out the new order while simultaneously feeling time bear down on her ability to think.

Gratitude: A Personal Post

2004-12-29T13:06:00.000-05:00

We've just come back from having spent Christmas at the Yale-New Haven Hospital's Cardiac Care unit. My father unexpectedly wound up needing a pacemaker, so my husband, my siblings and I spent the 24th through the 27th grafted to the furniture and fixtures of the CCU.

Here's my thank- you note to the world:

Thank you to my husband, who, although hating driving at night, brewed a pot of coffee and drove us to Connecticut by 2 a.m., and who stayed with me while we waited;
Thank you to my brother and sister, who are able to remain logical in emergencies;
Thank you to my in-laws, who put us up in nearby Branford, who let us come and go as we needed, and who offered a great deal of emotional support;
Thank you to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, who gave us the gift of time during the holidays;
Thank you to the staff at the hospital, especially the nurses Theresa and Joan, who treated Dad with dignity and humor;
Thank you to my baby niece, whose very existence lights up my father's immune system and whose delighted smile got us through the weekend;
Thank you to my special nieces,K and S, who stayed at home to make sure that Santa knew where to park the sleigh;

And thank you to God and therapy for giving me the maturity to see what a wonderful person my father is and to value the time we have with him.

The best way that I can think of to act on this gratitude is to donate to Mercy Corps,to help in some small way with the relief work. I urge all CCE readers who haven't donated time, money, or blood to the effort to do so.

I won't be posting here for a week or so. Have a wonderful New Year, CCE-er's, okay?

Best,

Joanna

A guerilla grammar mini-lesson

2004-12-23T01:04:00.000-05:00

Okay, since Rosa asked, here is a mini-lesson I use in my classes. So far, it has worked with developmental writers and traditional freshman composition students. Please bear in mind that this is a plan only. I frequently have to adjust in mid-stream depending on how students react to the ideas they are working with.

So, the mini-lesson on complete sentences - alias independent clauses.

1- Have students identify at least two sentences from their work which they are especially proud of, or feel express their idea clearly. This needs to happen at least one class period before the mini-lesson. It builds a sense of the positive, often sorely needed by these students, and gives me a chance to prepare materials made of their work for the mini-lesson.

2- Next class, put students in small groups - really small - 3 to 4 works best, and give each group five different sentences. This gives them a specific number of sentences to look at and keeps them from becoming overwhelmed by looking at all the sentences their classmates provided.

I always include the writer's name with each sentence. This helps to reinforce their sense of ownership, it gives them a "real" audience for the next time they write, and it lets them show off their best work to each other.

While in their groups, they need to answer two questions. What makes these sentences good? What do these sentences have in common?

While they are working, I am circulating around the room, listening, asking, but never answering the questions. This is an important time for students to reinforce their own knowledge of language. For some, this is the first time they have been allowed and encouraged to show they they do know quite a bit about ideas that work well in written form.

I keep this activity to no more than 15 minutes. Part of the magic is that they aren't focused on discussing the structure of the sentences long enough to realize this is a [gasp] grammarish moment. I collect their work to read and return later.

3- Next class, have class discussion about their responses to the questions from the prior class. Again, this needs to be short - 15 minutes ish. Some groups want to go into parts of speech, some want to identify what the words do, some want to talk clauses. I know these are all different labels for similar ideas, but depending on the make-up of the class, I may or may not make that connection. Some classes are happy to say "oh.....that's a sentence when it has......." Other classes leap right to "oh....so a sentence is an independent clause......."

My goal is to help them see the patterns that are available to them. By taking this little bit by little bit, we can build on their prior knowledge and allow them time to incorporate ideas that are new.

My take on mini-lessons is that they are a part of numerous writing activities. They don't ever take a whole class period. I use them to help students notice patterns and options in the structure of the language they use. Oh.....and I'm never satisified with mini-lessons because they are the practical compromise that reflect trying to work with 28 students in a limited amount of time.

Happy Holidays!

2004-12-20T13:01:00.000-05:00

I want to wish a happy holiday to all who read this blog, all who have contributed to it and all who have been part of the effort to get the blog rolling. CCE, like Progressive Teachers or Crooked Timber, is a collective blog rather than an individual or a personal one. We're here to discuss pedagogy or practicality, literature and composition. And technology. And conferences. And writing Across and Beyond the curriculum. . . .

So,

Thanks, clc, jocalo and Styles. Welcome, Sharon!

Peace,

Joanna

BW Portfolios: What I'll do Differently Next Time

2004-12-20T11:53:00.000-05:00

Now that my students and I have made it through the first semester of portfolios-in- Basic Writing, I can relax and look back on what I'm going to change. This is stream-of-conscious thinking, so be forewarned:

1. Develop the notebook portion of the course. The notebook is the working tool of the course, while the portfolio is the place for putting the special documents for me to grade. Why do I do this? Well, it saves me from developing bursitis at midterm and finals, and that is no joke.

Specifically, the notebook has been a folder (with grommets), divided into several sections: class notes, affirmations, journal, writer's toolbox and "etc."--on the cover, students create collages that depict who they are, so the notebooks are very much personalized.

The portfolio is a college-printed folder (in need of revision, but that's a whole other blog post)in which the students place their midterm essays and their final essays. Even with rough drafts, the heft is not as weighty as the notebook.

2. I teach writing in a computer lab. Why are my students even printing out papers? Why don't they hand me a disk at midterm and finals? Oh, let's not go there, at least, not yet. Most of my students can word process, email and IM. Most can surf the web (for automobiles, clothes and music). Still, some of them prefer to hand write their papers and others prefer to print out drafts and revise by hand.

3. But I said that I wasn't going to go there just yet.

4. Grammar. This semester I taught sentences and how to punctuate them, as well as concepts like person and voice and so forth. By the semester's end, many, but not all, of the class were talking about writing as grammar correction, and seemed to be flogging themselves for their lack of skill. All I wanted was for them to know the terminology and be able to use it--and I am not, not, not talking about teaching a comprehensive course in grammar, honest.

Generally, the students who were too keen on correction were also the students who were leaning on canned, formulaic writing. Of course.

If I ruled the world: no mechanics or grammar for a semester, then introduce it once the writers are confident enough in their voices so that they stop viewing writing and grammar instruction as correcting a flawed self.

5. Notebooks as graded documents. I've used them as a form of writing to be graded for several semesters, and while I am happy with the results, I am also aware that every semester I promise that I'll collect them and grade them at intervals. Fat chance. I collect them before midterm and find that after midterm, too much is going on that needs to be graded, and the notebooks become a memory.

I'm changing notebook-keeping to a two-week assignment which will be graded. Here's why I even require them: BW students are not always the most organized students to begin with, and notebook -keeping is one way to get them in the groove, so to speak, of being in college. The assigned notebook has certain constraints: copy down the class plans for the day (because the agenda may change from the monthly plans.); take notes on what goes on in class and include any inclass writing activity. I'm flexible in that I encourage students to use tape recorders or the computer if either system works better for them.

There's more to say about the prepilot-pilot, and I will, in future posts. I'm deriving a great deal from reading clc'sand Style's experiences and would value hearing from others who have or are using portfolios in any course.

One Helpful Portfolio Cover

2004-12-18T23:28:00.002-05:00

Hearing faint echoes of complaint in clc's posts about portfolios, I'm writing on evaluation at quarter or term's end — particularly so since in noting "meta-cognitive" work on writing, clc seems to be seconding something I've long assigned. For my final, two-part writing assignment encourages a few wider, deeper thoughts, thoughts meant to induce reflection on larger concepts. Students often find my assignment helpful. Yours might, too.

Part one is a regular, out-of-class essay assigned with a common title form. It aims to promote understanding of writing as an "art." To that end, I ask students to add two other, self-chosen concepts framing suggestive ideas like "Punctuation, Rhythm, and the Art of Writing," "Concepts, Connections, and the Art of Writing," or — as in Jason Johnson's fine title — "False Rules, Conventional English Teaching, and the Art of Writing." Here is Jason's lead:

For me high school English was a bore and the writing was always a very arduous process; never did the teachers let us students write what we wanted, how we wanted to write it. Rather than teaching us how to use our language effectively, my English teachers were always too busy setting up rules and guidelines to follow for our papers. Book reports and story summaries were about the extent of it, work that could be easily checked to its source to make sure the information was correct, leaving little attention on the writing itself. A quick check is performed for contractions, sentence fragments and other errors that should "never" be in a paper; once the papers were not-so-thoroughly checked, a grade was slapped on. Little did I know that college English would take my definition of writing and change it from a chore-like task into a truly liberal art.

Though Jason's a star, he's representative, surely able to reflect on what he's himself stressed. And so with my other students; they all have some good things to say. So I try to shape them in my assignment's next, second part — a final, reflective bluebook essay on a paragraph from their essays. Here's my common rubric, part of a larger exam:

Writing style is a matter partly of principle and partly of personality. It's the precise conjunction of the two that most often marks a good style. Pick a stylistic principle you think marks your own writing, illustrating it with a paragraph from "_________, __________, and the Art of Writing," explaining how your own personality and that principle intersect, and trying then to reflect on what their conjunction means. In reading your essays, I'll be looking for signs that you can shape ideas, offer illustrations, and develop implications. Strive for clarity, coherence, concision, and completeness. Develop several, fully-formed, coherently-focused paragraphs, trying to analyze and evaluate your own good style.

Naturally, though not all students can rise to my assignment's full challenge, most in fact do, providing a useful check on final grades. That's the main purpose of portfolios, provided, as I think, students reflect on their own learning. I hope you might agree. My work tries, in any case, to frame at least one helpful portfolio cover.

I'd Like a Little Ketchup for My Crow, Please

2004-12-17T17:54:00.000-05:00

Because, after all my bitching and moaning in the previous post, our portfolio exchanges were actually rather satisfying. I attribute this to the participants; the majority of the full-time faculty weren't there, and truth be told, those of us with full-time status are the contentious ones. The part-time faculty come to talk about teaching in a productive, non-politicized way and without the baggage and agendas that the full-timers carry. It's amazing how the tenor can change when part-timers outnumber full-timers in a meeting. They are a great bunch of people, and I appreciate their commitment to a job that asks way too much of them and gives back way too little.

Because I'm going to be serving as the writing program coordinator next semester, I floated out a few ideas at one of the exchanges (we had separate meetings for basic and freshman comp), including having our in-class essay be a meta-cognitive piece on the student's portfolio and writing process rather than the sort of classic academic essay it currently is. That idea seemed interesting to a few people. I would do away with the in-class piece entirely given my druthers, but many of the other teachers feel some demonstration of on-the-spot writing is necessary, so a meta-text related to the portfolio is something I could live with.

Now, I just have to finish reading and grading my own portfolios. And then there's that Christmas shopping thing. . .

The Silly (Portfolio) Season

2004-12-14T13:28:00.000-05:00

Yes, they're what's on everyone's mind, it seems. Certainly on mine. Between the huge pile on my living room floor and the arguments they caused yesterday at my department meeting, I can't get away from them. But yet, I still love them.

I hold to the belief that they are the best way to evaluate student writing even if, in my department's desire for something they can call "outcomes assessment" (and yes, I said "they" and not "we," since in this area, I feel very much apart), portfolios have become a different animal from what I always thought they should be. My department's portfolio does not require students to submit rough drafts and includes a mandatory in-class essay in response to a text which is written over two class periods. Every portfolio is read by another instructor, who assigns it an adisory grade of pass or not pass for basic composition and high pass, pass, low pass or not pass for composition. The instructor of record then decides upon the student's final grade.

Thus, portfolios are primarily a method for evaluation, not development and growth, which is how I always understood them. There is a page length requirement, an MLA documentation requirement, and the in-class essay requirement. The student does get to choose most of the pages which make up the bulk of the portfolio, but within those pages, he/she is supposed to be sure to demonstrate certain things: knowledge and control of thesis, essay structure, development and support, grammatical proficiency, integration of texts, etc.

When we sit down to read and evaluate each other's portfolios, certain problems always arise. Because we cannot agree amongst ourselves about such things, we argue about whether a strong voice trumps grammatical errors, whether a weak in-class essay is balanced out by strong revised essays, whether missing MLA documentation really matters in an otherwise brilliant and obviously unplagiarized portfolio. These could be fruitful discussions, but they haven't been. Instead, people have often just dug in their heels. The upside is that in the end the outside reader's evaluation is only advisory, but some department members have even questioned whether that should be changed and the other reader's assessment should be binding (at which point I fantasize about being Lucy Lui in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and jumping on the table with a very sharp sword).

It's an imperfect process, and one which for me, frankly, violates many of my beliefs about portfolios in particular and the effective teaching of writing in general. I understand how portfolios became the humane answer to institutionally or state-required assessment (See Elbow and Belanoff in Kathleen Blake Yancey's Situating Portfolios, for example), but there is a very real danger in destroying everything wonderful about them in the process. I wonder, in fact, if our attempts to kill the assessment bird and the teaching bird with this one stone have been wise, and if portfolios would be better used as the teaching tool they were created to be and assessment were left to other methods.

The Portfolio Rubric --a Draft

2004-12-13T09:52:00.000-05:00

This is what I've come up with for my BW students. I wanted to include some very un-portfolio issues like following instructions while addressing the writing component. I've been guided by the idea of what I want BW students to leave BW with, like stronger writing skills, of course, but also a better sense of being a college student, which is reflected in their writing. I'm going to use the Strong/Adequate/Poor levels that our freshman comp portfolio rubric uses.

Here's the draft--would love feedback.

I. Format:

A. Student has followed instructions for formatting the portfolio, using a white MC folder, tab dividers and word processed papers.
B. Portfolio contains an introductory paragraph, an in-class essay, an out- of -class multi-paragraph essay, and a revised piece of writing of the student's choice.

II. Content:

The portfolio demonstrates the writer's ability to develop and organize a piece of writing in either a timed or untimed environment, using a thesis or main idea and supporting the idea with well-developed paragraphs. All essays are organized with a clear beginning, middle and end.

III. Audience:

The essays reflect the writer’s ability to understand and respond to an assignment.and to respond appropriately to the given audience

IV.Process:

All of the essays demonstrate that the student has developed a writing process.
The untimed pieces show the student's willingness to rework a draft of writing until it is solid.

V. Grammar and Usage: The writing shows that the student has control over sentence boundaries, verb usage, spelling and punctuation.

Based on the contents of this portfolio, the student is writing at an__________ level.

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