Playing catch-up: Random thoughts

I am so far behind, both here and in real life, so here are some highlights of the past, uh, week or so:

 

A pet peeve, on writing

Tonight, I’ve been grading college application essays that I received from students yesterday, and I’ve noticed a pattern that I’ve encountered before during student teaching, so I have to say something about it. If you are a student in an English or writing course, I suggest you read closely.

 

A yellow brick road

I’m in the midst of grading autoethnographies, and I’m taking this very short break from grading to reflect on one specific paper. (After I finish with them, I intend on returning to the assignment to gauge its efficacy and my efficacy in teaching it.)

 

Frustrations and exultations

Since I last wrote here, I have encountered my first instance of outright plagiarism as a full-time teacher, one so flagrant that it was almost immediately identifiable as something other than the writing of a high school junior and which I found almost immediately with a Google search as an Apache creation myth (the assignment was for an original creation myth). At first, I was furious about it, but now I’m just disappointed and have cooled down maybe enough that I can handle the student the way he/she deserves to be handled: firm but with mercy.

I say “with mercy” because I’m providing a second opportunity for the student. If he/she will turn in an original myth by tomorrow, I’ll accept it for a significantly reduced grade (but higher than what he/she would otherwise get: a zero), and if not, I’ll give a zero and inform the principal of the violation. I was perfectly clear on my syllabus that plagiarism is not something I take lightly, and I intend to make my example here for future violations. I think I’m being more than fair.

On a totally different note, I have felt like planning has come together very loosely, and I’m still working out details for instruction this week despite having the weekly assignments up for students. (I might have set a bad precedent by doing this, although it helps keep me accountable.)

But one thing that I will change – in a very positive way – is due to something I just found. In searching for information on the 1992 movie version of Of Mice and Men (starring Gary Sinise as George Milton and John Malkovich as Lennie Smalls), I found an online streaming version of the full movie on imdb (streaming provided by that great video site, hulu) that I can use today for my students. I had wanted to show parts of this but wasn’t going to be able to get it in time; it’s available on netflix, which we use pretty much exclusively now for movies at home, but it wouldn’t have arrived quickly enough, and it isn’t available for instant watching.

And I took a phrase that has been a part of my teacher’s toolbox for quite a while – Don’t panic! from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – and printed out an image of it with Marvin, laminated it, and put it in my classroom for easy reference (and another decoration for the room).

Another week, a mixed bag – but onward I press in this journey of teaching. As long as I enjoy it, I think it’ll be just fine.

 

Model teaching

Okay, that title is meant to be a little obfuscatory: I’m not really talking about model teaching in the idiomatic sense of ideal teaching (or best practices).

I agree with and try to practice the idea that students often need a model to follow before they go off on their own doing something. It has been painfully obvious to me that the autoethnography assignment that I gave to my seniors is definitely one of those things, since these students are new to the term and have probably never read an autoethnography (or if they have, they probably didn’t know that it was called autoethnography).

The problem: there aren’t really any models of autoethnography out there that are readily available. Certainly, I don’t have any writing resources for this assignment, having cobbled together an assignment from information available online from Susan Bennett (which was actually provided to me last fall by a professor at my alma mater who has, unfortunately, not returned my E-mail asking for assistance in finding a model).

So what’s a teacher to do when there is no readily available model? You make one.

 

It really is true: Writing as discovery

I guess it’s taken the creation of syllabi – which is almost finished, thankfully – to make me understand something about writing that I’ve seen before but also very recently: sometimes writing is not merely about clarifying ideas but about discovering them.

I have to admit to myself that until very lately I have not entirely known what I am going to do with some of my classes. Some have been better than others, and with the sophomore and senior classe especially, I have had to discover the material in order to determine what I want to teach from the materials I have. (What my co-op once said is true: Don’t worry about having all the background knowledge before hand – you can learn whatever curriculum you teach, and I think it’s even true when you are the one putting it together.)

And so it is with my writing elective, which has been vague and somewhat ill-defined almost from the beginning. I asked for clarification once and was told that it was more of a creative writing course than a research-intensive one, so I have strayed away from a major research paper (although I will likely incorporate some aspect of research into a creative piece). Other than that, I have little to no idea: no background on what has been done in the past, no course listing or blurb to indicate the direction of the course, and (as I noted earlier) no text to organize my thoughts around.

So I sat down tonight with my syllabus template in front of me, which has worked excellently for three other courses, and I thought about the course objectives as I was writing a description. Quickly, what emerged was a vision of a course that gives attention to multiple modes of writing, using a code-switching model to focus students’ attention on the importance of understanding how language needs to be shaped by considerations of purpose and audience. I listed things I want students to have had experience with: personal and reflective writing, communicative writing (which could be informal or formal), creative and expressive writing (fiction, poetry, etc.), and even a little of professional/technical writing, like formal letters.

And now I feel like I’ve already taught the class. Lesson ideas abound to me; I feel like this course will virtually write itself.

It truly is a unique discovery to make, especially since it is one that I can hopefully pass on to my students. And more importantly, now I am one step closer to securing my broad plans for this year, which itself is a discovery worth celebrating.

 

Decision: Submission to National Gallery of Writing

NCTE has been sending me these lovely Inbox E-mails for almost a year (since I became a member last fall), and one of the things they mentioned in recent E-mails is the National Gallery of Writing, which is taking submissions right now in preparation for NCTE’s National Day on Writing on October 20, 2009. I like the idea a lot, especially the emphasis on a variety of compositional formats (not that I’m surprised that NCTE would take such a stance), and I’m thinking of contributing.

Here’s the catch: I can only contribute one piece.

So, faithful readers – help!

 

Review: Things Your Grammar Never Told You

I promised a review of a little grammar text I recently finished, Things Your Grammar Never Told You, and since I’m a man of my words, here goes.

 

Current reading: Two little grammar texts

As part of my summer reading (which is a sizable list: the majority of 3 literature textbooks, at least 3 canonical novels, and some other smaller works purely for enjoyment), I am taking a look at two grammar texts that I happened upon in my new classroom, obviously left from previous teachers (either the most recent one or the veteran who retired the year before). One should be familiar to many: William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style. I can’t say I’m surprised to see this one, honestly, given how revered it is in so many circles.

The other is Things Your Grammar Never Told You (there’s a picture of an old woman on the cover, supposedly a grandmother figure – get it, grammar, gramma? …yeah) by Maurice Scharton and Janice Neulieb. The latter is a figure familiar to me: she is a professor at nearby Illinois State University, the executive secretary of IATE, and the editor of the Illinois English Bulletin. (At least one of my regular readers should be familiar with her as well.)

I’m about 50+ pages into the latter – I’m saving up my energy for Elements after hearing both the highest praise and serious criticism of it – and while it has a lot of redeeming qualities (computer tips, for instance, which are interspersed throughout the chapters), I have my reservations about many of the things it says. A full review will of course be in order once I finish it. (Whether or not I say anything much about Elements depends on how much of my comments will be any different than what more knowledgeable people like Geoff Pullum have already said.)

 

Why educators should blog: A rationale

I have long found blogging to be an excellent exercise for the reflective individual. There is something about writing, especially self-writing, that is great for critical reflection that can be incredibly useful for self-evaluation and -improvement.

Once, long, long ago in the beginning days of this blog (okay, only over a year ago), I proposed that a program in my own university should utilize blogging as a way of promoting reflection upon teaching, something that our school of education promotes highly in its own practicum. To my knowledge, that idea was never really considered too highly, but I still stand by the importance of teachers doing real reflecting, the sort that blogging is so great for.

But the benefits really do reach beyond even what I suggested there, I think. So here is a rationale for why the reflective teacher should consider blogging: