This past week I had conferences. Since Elisa had conferences last week, I was able to steal her grading strategy of grading the papers in the order that the students had their appointments. In Monday's batch, I had a nice range of writers. Wednesday's group will filled with a bunch of strong writers, which left me feeling confident and proud about my prompt. Yes, my prompt was a success and my students were running with it just as I had hoped. On Thursday night, however, the final batch of papers deflated my puffed out chest. All but two of the papers did not follow the prompt. As a result, the papers got less-than-stellar grades. The conferences yesterday were not as rough as I had anticipated them to be. I put on my "keepin' it real" attitude and the students seemed to respond well to that. I noticed that the conferences where the papers were average, I asked the students how THEY thought they did. We talked about the paper before I gave them their graded copy. When our talk was over, I would give the student back his or her paper and I would sit in silence while the student looked over my comments. All but one of my conferences were productive and positive. The one that wasn't involved a student who is a good writer, but she skirted around the prompt. She came into the conference very excited, most likely anticipating an A. Additionally, the student was peeved that I had docked her 1 point on all of her journal entries for not following MLA citation and heading format. Other than those slight snags, my conferences went well thanks to my grading rubric and dedicated students! Let's see how excited I feel when the final revisions are submitted on Wednesday.
My question to my readers: Would you dock a student 1 point (out of a 25 point journal) due to lack of proper MLA-style heading and/or citation?
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Re-entering Blogville
In the lost episodes to my blog, I workshopped my Project 1 prompt with a tutor at the writing center, passed out my prompt, and assigned an experimental Thought of the Week Journal for my class. Here is the prompt:
This week, we discussed Tan's "Mother Tongue" and Anzaldua's "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." In regards to the latter, the essay is not a conventional text: it makes unexpected demands on the reader. The text is, as Anzaldua says elsewhere in her book, "an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work, ...a crazy dance." In response to the conversations that Tan and Anzaldua address (discourse communities and voice to name a few), I invite you to create a body of text that uniquely represents you.
I also made a video, which I will post here that does more than words can when I think about this experimental Journal #4.
This week, we discussed Tan's "Mother Tongue" and Anzaldua's "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." In regards to the latter, the essay is not a conventional text: it makes unexpected demands on the reader. The text is, as Anzaldua says elsewhere in her book, "an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work, ...a crazy dance." In response to the conversations that Tan and Anzaldua address (discourse communities and voice to name a few), I invite you to create a body of text that uniquely represents you.
I also made a video, which I will post here that does more than words can when I think about this experimental Journal #4.
Monday, October 10, 2011
And Then They Spoke
Monday 10/10
I got to class today prepared and excited to talk about Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue." Much to my surprise, the students were equally as excited to give opinions and make connections to the text. First off, the students and I wrote down some key conversations that Tan addresses: language, dialects, and identity. I introduced the students to the term discourse community and I wanted to make sure I made it as concrete as possible. My activity for today started with getting the students to pair up with someone they have not yet worked with in the class. I had the students sit silently for one minute and think of all the many discourse communities that each individual student belongs to. After the minute was over, and the students seemed eager for that silent minute to be over, I gave the students the following directions:
1) Introduce yourselves to your partner
2) Share some of your discourse communities with your partner
3) Find a mutual discourse community that you and your partner both belong to
4) Collaboratively write your own definition for that community
Most of the students, about 99% of them, seemed to really enjoy talking about themselves and finding out that they had similar interests/backgrounds as their partners. I had each pair share their mutually-agreed-upon discourse community with the class along with their definition of that community. After each pair spoke, I asked the class who would "like" this post if it were on Facebook and who would "dislike" it. The students, and I, really got a kick out of the whole activity. They seemed to be genuinely engaged and enthusiastic about discourse communities, which was a term I introduced to them at the beginning of class.
For the first time, I couldn't get my students to STOP talking! It was truly great. Elisa, who just so happened to be sitting in on my class, said I was a liar for complaining about my silent students. Well, I'm glad that they made me into a liar and that they choose to become talkative on a day when a fellow TA could be witness to it!
I got to class today prepared and excited to talk about Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue." Much to my surprise, the students were equally as excited to give opinions and make connections to the text. First off, the students and I wrote down some key conversations that Tan addresses: language, dialects, and identity. I introduced the students to the term discourse community and I wanted to make sure I made it as concrete as possible. My activity for today started with getting the students to pair up with someone they have not yet worked with in the class. I had the students sit silently for one minute and think of all the many discourse communities that each individual student belongs to. After the minute was over, and the students seemed eager for that silent minute to be over, I gave the students the following directions:
1) Introduce yourselves to your partner
2) Share some of your discourse communities with your partner
3) Find a mutual discourse community that you and your partner both belong to
4) Collaboratively write your own definition for that community
Most of the students, about 99% of them, seemed to really enjoy talking about themselves and finding out that they had similar interests/backgrounds as their partners. I had each pair share their mutually-agreed-upon discourse community with the class along with their definition of that community. After each pair spoke, I asked the class who would "like" this post if it were on Facebook and who would "dislike" it. The students, and I, really got a kick out of the whole activity. They seemed to be genuinely engaged and enthusiastic about discourse communities, which was a term I introduced to them at the beginning of class.
For the first time, I couldn't get my students to STOP talking! It was truly great. Elisa, who just so happened to be sitting in on my class, said I was a liar for complaining about my silent students. Well, I'm glad that they made me into a liar and that they choose to become talkative on a day when a fellow TA could be witness to it!
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Trial and Error
I am a slacker. Yes, it has been far too long since I last blogged. No, I have no reasonable excuse that would forgive me. Sooo, I have decided to produce somewhat of a highlight reel of the past week instead.
Wednesday 9/28
I felt defeated after class on Monday. I was not going to let Wednesday defeat me too! Since we were discussing Berger today, I decided to also talk about perception, audience, and author's intention. I had the students start the class off by having them quick-write about the following three images that I put up on the projector: the Twilight novel, the Twilight comic, and the Twilight DVD. Twilight, in my opinion, always gets a conversation going. Intentionally, I left the prompt wide open for student interpretation: write about how each of these is seen differently. I gave them 5 minutes to write, then told them to discuss it with the person sitting next to them. Gradually, the classroom was buzzing with conversation. Bingo! I figured out how to get them to talk! I walked around to see what a few of them were chatting about and then opened up the paired conversations into a classroom discussion. As I did, I could hear a silence falling upon them. Nooooooo! Just when I thought that I had figured out how to get them to speak up in class! Wah wah. One by one, the students began to speak up, but I noticed that the only ones who were talking were the ones I had talked to while walking around. My plan to get the students to be more talkative in a group setting was a moderate success. I plan on using a similar premise in other class meetings.
Monday 10/3
Thanks to a few hours in a cat-owner's home on Sunday, my allergies were making me feel like crap on Monday. Although I had a lesson planned, I didn't know how I was going to manage through my fog of sinus congestion and sneezing. I decided to send my students on a scavenger hunt to the library. In 609, Rhodes had us work collaboratively to find books in the library and do other such library-related tasks. The end goal: Getting familiar with the workings of finding things you need using the library's resources. To be certain, I asked the students how many of them had been to the library. Only 3 students raised hands; 2 had only gone there to meet someone. The final task on the scavenger hunt was to find a book written by an author with the student's last name, check it out, and bring it to me in my office. The students said the activity was challenging, but that they were glad I had them do it.
Wednesday 10/5
Since we did not discuss Literacy like I had initially planned on Monday, I had to do double duty today. I wanted to show the students how it feels to be illiterate, so I wrote the quick-write prompt on the whiteboard in IPA. Only one student was able to identify the language, but I told her to keep quiet until further notice. The students were absolutely baffled. I told them to respond to the prompt or to write down how it feels to not know what the prompt says. After 5 minutes of allotted writing time, I gave permission for them to look up the letters and talk to each other to try to get some meaning out of it. After a minute or two, students started shouting out a few words at a time to see if their guesses were right. To my delight, they guessed what everything said! My plot to get them to see how it feels to be illiterate worked, according to my students.
From there, I highlighted the main points in Dale Spender's article, "The Politics of Naming." We made a list of things a person needs in order to become literate and discussed the underlying meanings that are embedded in language. I told them that today's class session was going to be more of a lecture-style delivery rather than a seminar like our past class meetings had been. Oddly enough, the students spoke up more and seemed to be more engaged the whole class session than they had been up to this point in the quarter. Maybe they felt like the pressure was taken off of their shoulders? Their attitude could have changed because I was so passionate about what I was teaching that they became intrigued too. I'm not sure, but all I know is that students came up to me after class saying how they really enjoyed what we were discussing today and that they hoped we did more things like it. Win!
Wednesday 9/28
I felt defeated after class on Monday. I was not going to let Wednesday defeat me too! Since we were discussing Berger today, I decided to also talk about perception, audience, and author's intention. I had the students start the class off by having them quick-write about the following three images that I put up on the projector: the Twilight novel, the Twilight comic, and the Twilight DVD. Twilight, in my opinion, always gets a conversation going. Intentionally, I left the prompt wide open for student interpretation: write about how each of these is seen differently. I gave them 5 minutes to write, then told them to discuss it with the person sitting next to them. Gradually, the classroom was buzzing with conversation. Bingo! I figured out how to get them to talk! I walked around to see what a few of them were chatting about and then opened up the paired conversations into a classroom discussion. As I did, I could hear a silence falling upon them. Nooooooo! Just when I thought that I had figured out how to get them to speak up in class! Wah wah. One by one, the students began to speak up, but I noticed that the only ones who were talking were the ones I had talked to while walking around. My plan to get the students to be more talkative in a group setting was a moderate success. I plan on using a similar premise in other class meetings.
Monday 10/3
Thanks to a few hours in a cat-owner's home on Sunday, my allergies were making me feel like crap on Monday. Although I had a lesson planned, I didn't know how I was going to manage through my fog of sinus congestion and sneezing. I decided to send my students on a scavenger hunt to the library. In 609, Rhodes had us work collaboratively to find books in the library and do other such library-related tasks. The end goal: Getting familiar with the workings of finding things you need using the library's resources. To be certain, I asked the students how many of them had been to the library. Only 3 students raised hands; 2 had only gone there to meet someone. The final task on the scavenger hunt was to find a book written by an author with the student's last name, check it out, and bring it to me in my office. The students said the activity was challenging, but that they were glad I had them do it.
Wednesday 10/5
Since we did not discuss Literacy like I had initially planned on Monday, I had to do double duty today. I wanted to show the students how it feels to be illiterate, so I wrote the quick-write prompt on the whiteboard in IPA. Only one student was able to identify the language, but I told her to keep quiet until further notice. The students were absolutely baffled. I told them to respond to the prompt or to write down how it feels to not know what the prompt says. After 5 minutes of allotted writing time, I gave permission for them to look up the letters and talk to each other to try to get some meaning out of it. After a minute or two, students started shouting out a few words at a time to see if their guesses were right. To my delight, they guessed what everything said! My plot to get them to see how it feels to be illiterate worked, according to my students.
From there, I highlighted the main points in Dale Spender's article, "The Politics of Naming." We made a list of things a person needs in order to become literate and discussed the underlying meanings that are embedded in language. I told them that today's class session was going to be more of a lecture-style delivery rather than a seminar like our past class meetings had been. Oddly enough, the students spoke up more and seemed to be more engaged the whole class session than they had been up to this point in the quarter. Maybe they felt like the pressure was taken off of their shoulders? Their attitude could have changed because I was so passionate about what I was teaching that they became intrigued too. I'm not sure, but all I know is that students came up to me after class saying how they really enjoyed what we were discussing today and that they hoped we did more things like it. Win!
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