ENGL 505A

Hi all,

The last two readings have really spoken to me as I have contemplated, struggled, and internally argued with myself (I'm not crazy, I promise) about how to work with my students on their sentences. I started the semester by encouraging my students to analyze the bigger rhetorical picture. Many of them were SO focused on sentence-level editing instead of paragraph- and paper-level revising that I spent the first many weeks introducing them to the larger units of a paper.

My husband is always telling me I have a chip on my shoulder about education; I'm relatively defensive of secondary public education, mostly because as a dual-role academic/teacher I hear both sides critique each other fairly regularly. More specifically, I constantly hear academics complain about the "crappiness" of secondary public education, and as a teacher in that system, I have a tendency to get offended and defensive. Thus, my response to Connors' article should contain no surprises.

I've attached a survey I created for my students. I was curious what they thought about the class so far. My class has a very open, friendly atmosphere, which is the only reason why I decided to do this... it might be a little risky depending on what your students are like. I have faith that my students will supply me with useful information, so I'm going to have them type responses to this and print them out/hand them in anonymously.

Use if you choose

Liz

Hi everyone. I might be a little ahead of myself here asking about this assignment, but I foresaw some confusion in my future and thought I would nip it in the bud...

What is the visual rhetoric assignment, exactly?

Liz

Hi everyone..

Where did we go on PU's website to change things like our office information and phone numbers? I can't remember where that was...

Liz

Hey all. I'm a little confused about the portrait playlist thing so I thought I'd post my question for all to see in case anyone else is confused:

The assignment says:

"This exploration/expression will be presented through three pages of typed text (approximately 1,000 words) and a mix CD."

But it also says:

"take as much creative liberty as necessary, so long as it is an identity/personal narrative in some medium (text, pictures, objects, music, web content, multimedia, or a combination of these)."

Booth reiterates a statement made by Jacques Barzun when he says "to bore the teacher is a worse form of failure than to anger him" (142). One of my greatest goals as a teacher is to help my students -- middle school or university -- understand that their audience is not just me, and that writing for a grade is basically the equivalent of "boring the teacher" by ignoring an implied, broader audience.

I was looking for something fun to do today in my computer class since their ad projects are due tomorrow and they're all FREAKING OUT. Since a lot of my students said they had never created a web page and would like to learn how to do so, I decided to do a crash course in web development. This was only partially motivated by the fact that it's a HUGE hobby of mine and, as we all know, a little bit of us always comes out in our teaching.

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to share something with all of you. I just posted my student-led discussion rubric to the handouts page. I've decided to require all of my students to do one day of student-led discussion. I divided them into groups of three and gave each group a discussion date.

Their requirements include leading 30 minutes of class with an activity and discussion questions that focus on the readings and content covered that week. This will happen almost every Thursday, which falls at the end of my instructional week (I have conferences with them on Fridays).