ENGL 505A

I would like to propose moving the group advocacy assignment to the beginning of the semester.

First, I feel like having the students work together from the start will have a positive impact on the collaborative nature of the class by fostering more cooperation and less competition, especially important in activities like peer review. I also hope that other group projects -- perhaps a multi-media or video one (see Liz's blog) -- could be added later in the semester to help maintain this collaborative spirit throughout.

Let me start by saying that reading Welch was a lot like riding a roller coaster: slow going at first, but once it started picking up speed, there were enough twists and turns to keep me hanging on, and some steep drop-offs I didn’t expect. Once or twice, I even thought about closing my eyes; I was afraid all the back and forth, between esoteric theories and pedagogic case studies, was gonna cause me to lose my lunch.

You know that category on JEOPARDY where you're given a clue in which you have to connect two unassociated things that share a single word in order to come up with the correct answer (or in this case, the correct question)?

Well, tonight I thought of one:

While singing about the "ABC"s, be sure to include an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

What is the Jackson 5 Paragraph Essay?

I know the cognitivists have kind of fallen from favor within certain circles of composition studies, but I still agree with a lot of what Mike Rose has to offer in terms of better understanding the mental processes our students are going through while writing their papers.

After reading Perl’s “Understanding Composition,” I decided to reflect upon my own writing process to see if I could capture the elusive “felt sense” of which she speaks. Of course, as soon as one captures it, felt sense is transformed into something else, something tangible, like the way feelings of gratitude get turned into “thank you” cards. However, by looking carefully at my own routines, I hope to catch at least a glimpse of the creature before it flees back into the darkened recesses of my mind.

As I made my way to WTHR 214 to teach my first day of ENGL 106, I was feeling more than a bit encumbered by the weight of readings just assigned to me by Professor Irwin “Bud” Weiser in ENGL 591 (four to five articles per class?!?). I was also questioning my ability to pull off the precarious balancing act I was about to undertake. Sure, I’d been a grad student before, but I’d had the luxury of a fellowship during my first year at IUPUI, so I didn’t have to teach.

Since we never got around to discussing it in class, I thought I'd go ahead and post my thoughts on the Berlin article we read last week to see if anybody else wanted to comment.

My initial reaction to Newkirk’s analysis of writing conferences was, “Oh, no! I’m like a Mack Truck too!” Not that I'm unaware of the “less is better” approach to conferencing. In theory, I agree that it is almost always better to help students make discoveries for themselves than to tell them what needs to be done. But in practice, especially when you only have five or ten minutes to talk with each one, it's hard to resist the temptation to impart upon them all of your “wisdom” and send them on their merry, if slightly overwhelmed, way.