505 Course Syllabus

ENGL 505A
Professor Samantha Blackmon
Office: 302B Heavilon Hall
Phone:(765) 494-3742
Office Hours: 10:30-11:30 a.m. TTH & by appointment
Email: blackmos@exchange.purdue.edu

This is a practicum in the teaching of writing. Most of our time together will be spent discussing materials that you will be teaching, talking about student papers, and working on evaluating student writing. In addition we will be reading pedagogical essays. It is important that you come prepared so that we can have a lively and useful discussion. Near the end of the semester we will also spend time preparing for teaching English 102. This practicum is meant to be helpful to you and I will try to address all of your questions and concerns, so you will need to voice any concerns that you have during our meeting times so that everyone can benefit.

Every week you will be expected to bring the proposed plans for the next week's classes to our mentor group meetings for discussion and suggestions.

We will have alternating week's of theory and practice discussion. We will keep a journal of our teaching experience for discussion on practice weeks. These journals will be kept electronically. We will discuss this in more detail in class.

I will visit your classes once (or twice) during the semester after you have had time to get to know your students and establish the mood of the class. I will schedule these visits with you in advance. They will never be unannounced and a few days before the scheduled visit I will ask that you give me a written description of what you will be doing in class on the day of my visit. After the visit we will meet and discuss how the class went.

I also want you to visit each other’s classes. You should sit in on a minimum of three classes each semester. You will find it helpful to see how other people cover similar material and how other students react to the material. After the visit I suggest that you get together with the other instructor and discuss what went on during the class. The person being visited should see this as an opportunity to get informal feedback; the person doing the visiting should be looking for reflections of his or her own teaching. I suggest that you start these visit early in the semester and that you make your students aware of the fact that other instructors will occasionally sit in on the class so that there is as little disruption as possible.

Around mid-term, I’ll give you an opportunity to do both self- and course-evaluations. At the end of the semester there will be three additional kinds of evaluation. Your students will have an opportunity to evaluate the course and your teaching using specially designed forms. These forms include a computer-based evaluation and an open ended one. You’ll also receive a written evaluation of your work from me. The third evaluation will be yours of this practicum and of me as instructor. While student evaluations are often unreliable and erratic, you’ll find that patterns of response from students may offer you tips about making changes in your teaching. Most research on student evaluations suggests that there is a direct correlation between student evaluations and the grade they expect to receive in the class.

This is a pass/fail course that will usually meet once a week. I order to receive a grade of pass, students must complete all assignments and attend class regularly. In any case, missing more that three class sessions will constitute failure. It is the sole responsibility of the student to contact group members for missed notes, assignments, etc.

And always remember that my door is always open and no problem is too small to bring to me if you consider it a problem at all.

The second semester of this practicum will follow the same schedule as the first and will include exercises that are reflexive of your teaching practices. These exercises along with the teaching evaluations that were done by your instructor and classmates, and other materials will be collected in the form of a teaching portfolio which will be submitted at the end of the semester.

RESOURCE LINKS FOR HELP WITH COMPUTER QUESTIONS:

Your Purdue Career Account information page (available at http://www.purdue.edu/CareerAccount)
PUCC Lab Information page (available at http://labinfo.cc.purdue.edu)
Directory Services (available at http://directory.purdue.edu)

106 Materials and Assignments

Attached are the 106 syllabus, schedule, and some assignment sheets.

Please feel free to add any or all of the assignment sheets that you created during orientation week.

Ed's Ethos Assignment

Advocacy and Gaming Response

-Andy's Version of the Gaming Response

Portrait Playlist Assignment

-Andy's version of the Portrait Playlist

Group Advocacy/Advertising Assignment

Abstract Assignment

Nation States MMORPG Assignment (might be used as a paper topic or a later response paper)

Thesis Development Handout

505 Course Calendar (Still Very Much in Progress)

Schedule

Conferencing Worksheet

Attached as a PDF

Technology Resources

ITaP New Technologies: Includes links to things like The ITaP email course list, available software on-campus, DACS (Distributed Access Computing Servies) which allows you to access applications over a network, and the location of the swipe keyboard. This is the new news page so it will hopefully be updated often. The ITAP teaching and learning technologies homepage can be found here as well. You can also request additional computer classroom time or the installation of new software on ITaP machine.

DACS: Distributed Access Computing. Access software apps on the university network without having them on your home machine or being on campus.

Purdue Email: Use can use Purdue webmail or set up an email application to retrieve your email.

H Drives: You can access yoru H drive from home so that you never need to carry a disk again. You can connect from both PC and Mac (instructions immediately following the preceding ones).

DLC: Want to reserve a room or equipment from the DLC? This can all be done through their web site.

Mentor Group Drupal Site: Online community for all new GTAs, announcements, and links to some other things.

ICaP web site: Site has information about the course and the program. PDF on the technology goals can be found here.

SIS Online: Access your course rosters.

Writing Resources

Mitch Simpson's pre and post conferencing worksheets to use with students.

ICaP web site: Site for information about the course and a store house for the most recent version of documents pertaining to the course.

Class Resources: By Samantha. Please use freely but attribute creator. Handouts on summarizing, peer eidting, abstracts, proofreading,  in-text citation, and grading.  Also some interesting stuff on critical approaches to literature and basics on writing about literature.

Evaluating web sources: There are a million of these. Here is one that has been around for a long time and that I have used regularly. it's out of UNC-Chapel Hill. The Purdue University library also has the interactive CORE tutorial and the information evaluation guide, as well as generic resources for students.

Purdue University OWL: The Online Writing Lab is the most accessed online writing center in the world (really!) and is a storehouse for lots of handouts, powerpoint presentations, and other resources for teachers. Definitely a valuable resource.

NCTE Position Statements: On everything for writing instruction and language usage to grammar and mechanics and linguistic diversity.

MLA Resources: The MLA also has some documents on language usage and diversity available.