Between Last Thursday and Sunday, I slammed through 71 five page essays. I just finished slugging through 5 business proposals weighing in at nearly 20 pages a piece (some more, some less), and sorting out grades on a multi-tiered system for them.
Here are some more stats:
Overall, I read over 3,050 pages of student writing this semester, and that doesn't include revisions; so I wouldn't be surprised if there was another 150-300 pages sneaking around that average that I didn't account for.
I went through 7 pens.
I averaged 10-15 student emails per day.
For my business writing class, we read two books: Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma, and D. Michael Abrashoff's It's Your Ship, as well as three 30 page articles from CQ Researcher, and a good chunk of The Business Writer's Handbook
In Composition, we read five essays: Gerald Graff's "Hidden Intellectualism," Christopher Lasch's "The Lost Art of Argument," Sven Birkerts' "The Owl Has Flown," Susan Bordo's "The Empire of Images in the World of our Bodies," and Arlie Russel Hochschild's "From the Frying Pan into the Fire." We also watched and discussed Steal this Film.
On the side, I managed to read Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, and The Watchmen. Currently, I'm reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.
Oh and I haven't written a word of fiction since...um...maybe November? So sad.
As far as students, I noticed a dramatic improvement in attentiveness, class participation, and overall quality of writing in comparison to the fall semester. Part of this is due to students moving into the comp class after having taken an introductory class (which is optional based on entrance tests), and/or repeating the class after having failed in the fall. In any event though, we generated a lot of good discussion, and I didn't have any 'dead' sections like I experienced in the fall. I also had a dramatic improvement in seeing students going to get writing tutor help; largely this was a good thing.
I did however learn that there are several topics that I never want to read about again. They include:
- The Drinking Age
- Gun Control
- Abortion
- Steroids
- Gambling
- The Smoking Ban
- Stem Cell Research
- The Death Penalty
- Alternate Fuels
- Global Warming
- Illegal Drugs
- Capitalism
- Piracy
- The Information Age
- Counterculture
Now that I have a couple semesters under my belt, I hope to start revising and deviating my lesson plans a bit for the future. I want to incorporate more focus on MLA citation in my Composition classes--this semester's addition of the Annotated Bibliography assignment revealed that many students are still clueless about proper citation. Also, in one of our departmental meetings, Craig presented a sort of handout relating to asking "Good Research Questions." It's something I hadn't considered before, and when I presented it a couple weeks ago, the students really seemed to like it; so that'll go in much earlier in the semester. Also, I think I'd like to develop Problem Statement Format introductions more clearly from the start-- the weaker writers in my classes always benefit from this, as it helps them form a clear direction to their papers. Currently, PSF comes in around week four; I think I'm going to move that up to hit before the first essay is due.
I altered the way I handled open revision this semester (in the fall I didn't put a timeline on revision and received a deluge of last-minute revision), and it worked really well, so I'll definitely keep that as an option.
I'm also working on creating a sort of revision checklist of common errors that I'd say 80% of my students make. Things like putting your punctuation inside your quotes, proper citation format, not opening or ending paragraphs with evidence, etc. Hopefully such a document will help them organize their workshop sessions more, and help them get away from focusing only on grammatical feedback.
So now that School is over for the moment, I've been working at gainful summer employment. At the moment RGIS is my only current holding. I had my paid training session today. The work is ridiculously easy; the hours are awful. Strange times are dealable--Verizon hardened me against weirdo shifts, but the pay is awful, and they only have me down for 17 hours in the next 2 weeks; nowhere near enough to pay the Man.
Fortunately, I managed to land an inteview tomorrow for a Marketing/web development gig at a place that's less than two miles from my house. From the sounds of it, it might solve all the summer monetary problems. So I'm looking forward to that with gusto.
Plus, since my next big project is to build the site for Ontologica, it'll be nice related practice. Speaking of Ontologica, I am finally going to be able to start drafting the essay that's been floating in my head since before Rod posed the notion of putting this journal together. Although I'm not traditionally an essay writer, I'm pretty psyched up to write this, so hopefully it'll pan out well.
Finally a note on the homefront: Sue's gone back to work, and though on many levels I feel like I'm somehow failing at bringing home enough money to cover bills, her work environment has changed drastically for the better, and she's really enjoying herself there; which is really good (and it's really helping with finances).
Molly's just coming out of a real bad stint of no sleep week (see my previous blog post). I guess most of the molars have cut through, because after nearly a week of no naps, and really poor sleeping at night, she's more or less back on her regular schedule (though the daytime nap is more floaty now--she used to crash immediatly after lunch, now it's hitting anywhere between 10:30 and 14:00). She and I have been hitting up the Zoo pretty regularly, and Molly likes that a whole lot. We'd like to hit some other zoos this summer, so hopefully that'll happen--kind of all dependent on work schedules and whatnot.
So now that I've written a blog post that, by all website usability rules is far too long, I'm going to end with a hopeful note about summer.
I hope summer rocks as much as I think it's going to rock.
No comments:
Post a Comment