Fouts’s Teaching Blog

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Ok What can I do to make things go even better in my five oclock class? My one oclock went pretty well but the computers didn’t work so we couldn’t practice uploading a paper to the BlackBoard. Instead we talked about how to write a good thesis statement and looked at the instructions on page 22-23. That went over fairly well. After that we took a student’s thesis statement and ran it through the instructions. That went ok as well. After that we did some brainstorming which also went over pretty well. I guess I’ll just do those things again. That should work pretty well actually. If the computers are working I can have them work on their own thesis statements and upload them.

Today I was observed in my eight am class. It was probably good that this was the class my observer chose to watch because it is generally the most troublesome class I have ever had. The students’ writing abilities range from high to nearly illiterate and their behaviors in class range from disruptive to sleeping. So as I say this is a good class to be observed in, yet the thought of that observation is not a comforting one.

things went fairly well and the assessment was essentially “pretty good, but could use work in a few areas.” This is basically a good review.

It will be no surprise to anyone who knows me that what I need to work on is being more serious, which would help students to take the class more seriously.

I understand this criticism of my teaching style. I agree with it. I find that I am able to act more serious with each passing semester so I think I am headed in the right direction, which is good. It’s also good to get the occasional nudge in the right direction.

The lesson was indeed more effective by going straight to the in-class group project. Sadly, only a couple of students stayed to use the extra ten minutes for research. On the other hand, this did allow me to spend some quality time working with those two so maybe a “blessing in disguise.”

There is one student who I wish had stayed. I would really like to help her with both her paper revision and the next assignment, but she left before I had a chance. Too bad. This student is clearly intelligent but struggles when it comes to writing. It’s funny, I don’t think she struggles with the “how” of writing so much as the “why”. I suppose it’s my fault because I haven’t convinced her that developing writing skills further is worth the effort.

I wonder. What could I do in the future to convince students that what we study in the class is valuable. In other words, how could I make them want to write papers? This question is probably asked by all composition teachers, but for good reason. Any student who can be inspired to write well, will find it a great deal easier to learn the processes that will help them do so. This will require more thought.

The lesson plan for my afternoon class went ok, but not as good as I had thought it would. I felt like, for the first half, I was kind of repeating the same things I’ve been talking about for weeks, invention strategies. this may not be a bad thing, but I think it’s time to move on.

Solution: Start with the group project. This should free up about twenty minutes of class time. Now what to do with that twenty minutes. Damn. That’s a good question. Well, what did I feel was missing from this afternoon’s class? I felt like I should be taking it a bit beyond the invention stage. Ok so, we do the exercise, then we use the questions to to make a list of sources, then they get a few minutes to look for sources on the computers. I think that will be, even at worst, marginally better than this afternoon. So good.

Today in my Comp I class, I had students write a nonsense essay. The requirement was for them to support the argument that “All Snortblats should wear goldfarbs.” Since we are studying ways to incorporate “the naysayer” into your own argument, they were required to invent two fake sources in favor of the proposition and one fake source against.

It went fairly well. At first I lamented having a sample to read them before they started, but I noticed that, without a sample or reference, students all defined Snortblats and goldfarbs differently which made the whole exercise more fun once we started reading our essays out loud.

This is something that I would do again.

This post is simply for me to work out some thoughts in writing, as I can’t seem to make a decision on how to do this. What I want is to incorporate a class blog into my comp I and II classes. I want the blog to serve as a sort of raw ideas, or commonplace book, or repository of zero drafts, that kind of thing. What I want is for the class blog to be reletively free form, as blogs generally are. I would prefer not to dictate the things that students have to write about.

The first thing that I need to decide is whether to have a single class blog or individual blogs for each student. I am tending toward a class blog because that would put everybody’s ideas in a sort of community chest which might give ideas to students who can’t decide what to write about. Would there be any advantage to having students create individual blogs? let’s see, well the individual blogs would be a little less confusing as each one would only have posts from a single student. But I still think the class blog would be a better setup.

So, the question of signing then up. What I would really like would be to have a website where I can set  up a blog and then give students a class password so they wouldn’t have to all register with wordpress. I tried using edublogs yesterday and it can’t quite do that. Got to do some more research on this.