Summer 2020: CLASS UPDATES ENGL301 Writing & The Teaching of Writing
|
Need to be in touch with me?
LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 [email protected] www.leetorda.com |
Summer 2020
All Summer Session I classes have been moved online due to the Covid-19 emergency. Online Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday evening, 7:00-8:00 PM and by appointment (email me at [email protected] to set up an a time). |
CLASS UPDATES
10 June 2020
Hello All--
Ahead of tomorrow’s class I wanted to give you my version of the discussion board prompt I gave to you. I was troubled, in some ways, at how so many of you wrote exclusively about bad classroom experiences and fear that my own first story unfortunately shaped your responses towards the negative.
Part I Our Shared Learning Experience
We start with our student selves, because we have all been students longer than we’ve been teachers. And we will run our classrooms based on how we ourselves were taught--either fighting against what we experienced or embracing it.
As I read through your accounts, what strikes me is that we all agree that using shame to teach lessons, as we say in Megan LeBlanc’s story and Maddie Butkus’s as well as my own, is the wrong way to run a class. I think, also we see, for instance in Paige Couture’s story, how unclear rules and out-sized punishments for infractions make for a bad classroom experience. Related to this, I think we also see, again, in Megan LeBlanc’s story, how an abuse of the power that a teacher has over a student--and sort of a lack of transparency with students about who has the power--feels wrong.
On the other hand, looking at all of the stories of good experiences, I think Kaylee Tavares phrased it well when she said they all seemed to be about acceptance. I would agree, but I would qualify it more. Folks talked generally about “that one teacher that helped” or “that one teacher who put in the extra work” or “cared.” Yes, I think probably all of those things feel evident in a good teacher, but a nice teacher doesn’t always guarantee a positive learning experience.
What I noticed is more about feeling respected and seen as a student in Lydia Theriault’s story. But it’s even more than that. Fiona Bell talked about a photography class where the teacher made space for students to explore the process of creating great art and did not only value the final product. That teacher instilled in her students the journey of learning to do something. Connected to this, Brianna Walsh described a classroom where the teacher encouraged the effort--the hard try--by creating a space where making a mistake wasn’t such a big deal. Creating opportunities for students to take risks, to fail, and to recover, is the vital learning space we all need to try to create for our students.
I want to close by talking about two of your stories. Hannah Dziadyk’s story about her Italian class and Alexa Parham’s experience with plagiarism. Here, yes, we see a teacher who cared enough, in both instances, to take the extra time, but we also see two other super important parts of great learning experiences: for Hannah, the class was a challenge. Students never remember the easy class, the easy grade. They remember the challenges. What made it valuable for Hannah is that the teacher supported her through the learning process. That’s the key: our students need space to risk, to fail, and to recover. Remember this: that worksheet on adverbs really changed my life, said no student ever. Difficult, challenging, creative assignments that students feel a sense of accomplishment for completing will always be the right move in a classroom.
In Alexa’s story, prior bad experiences made her feel that her only way to succeed as a writer was to use someone else’s writing. I would argue that most students don’t plagiarize out of malice but out of fear and panic. But Alexa’s teacher didn’t punish, he taught. He turned what could have been a highly punitive and disastrous situation into a learning experience--which, full circle, is the absolute antithesis of my story. One thing I hope all of you come away from our class thinking about is the powerful potential of error to actually be the catalyst for a learning moment in a classroom. This is particularly important in the writing classroom.
I have had some excellent classroom experiences. The one that really stands out to me, however, is from my Masters program. I was not a confident graduate student when I started at the University of Maine. I knew what I wanted--to become a college English professor--but I was not at all sure how that would work. Two things happened during my first semester: 1) I discovered I had a good instinct for teaching, mainly, that I could build a community of learners by being my whole and authentic class. That was an important confidence booster. 2) I learned how to struggle through a tough assignment on my own.
For an intro to grad studies course, we had to write about one of the texts in the course, Daisy Miller by Henry James. If you know anything about Daisy Miller, you’ll know that it’s one of the most written about short stories we could be assigned-which was part of the point. Our job was to use some of the critical theory we were learning to construct our argument.
I was tremendously intimidated by the scope of the assignment, by the faculty member who taught the class (an excellent and formidable scholar) and the other students in the class (all more accomplished than I was as a student). I struggled to find my way in to the text until I found an obscure reference to an etiquette manual that Daisy Miller would have been familiar with. I was charmed and horrified by the unsubtle ways this manual shaped how a woman should behave. And then I was off. I sweated out finding all these similar conduct manuals, I taught myself enough about rhetoric to be able to talk about “epideictic” rhetoric--which is the rhetoric of praise and blame. And I wrote the sh_t out of that paper. I got an A-, which is like getting a B in graduate school. But I was still proud of that paper, and I left the class knowing I could handle what came next because I understood that what I needed to do is find my way in to the project through my own interests. I made learning my own and not something performed for a teacher. And, as a teacher, I’ve tried eve since to develop assignments that encourage my students to do the same.
Part II The State of The Profession
If we begin a conversation about teaching reading and writing, then the next step is to think about what what the wider world understands about the profession. If we look at the articles we found out there, the first thing that stands out to me is that the majority of the articles you all found were about the myriad things teachers are expected to teach as well as how they are supposed to teach them. Kaylee Tavares found an article about a pretty thoughtful community based effort to diversify the reading list for students--of course that means teachers have to read and learn the texts in order to teach them. Lydia Theriault’s article stressed the active classroom. Brianna Walsh’s article talked about how to teach reading. Paige Couture’s article stressed how to teach writing. And Maddie Butkus’s article talked about the need to teach both reading and writing. But that’s not all: Hannah Dziadyk’s article talked about the need for close student teacher relationships.
I was surprised that only two of you located an article about how the Corona virus is affecting teaching and learning. Of all of the complexities of teaching right now, Lindsay Vo’s article on how teachers are both exhausted by tending to their students and grieving the loss of the school year mot captures what has to be the most significant hardship teacher’s have had to confront. Ali Nolan’s article on how different states are asking teachers to do varying degrees of online teaching (and students to be responsible for varying degrees of learning)
In year’s past, there have been a fair number of articles, like mine and Alexa Parham’s, that dealt with standaridized testing, particularly MCAS. I think Kaylee Tavares summed up what many teachers feel about MCAS and the like: managing it in a classroom is one of the toughest parts of the job.
Kylie Bock’s and Fiona Bell’s respective articles both essential remind us that teaching is hard, always shifting, always making new demands on teachers. Why start class with what is a rather overwhelming picture of the profession? Because it’s important to know what you are getting in to if you really want to be a teacher in the K-12 classroom. It is not for the faint of heart. If you can do any other job, you should do it. This shouldn’t be your plan B. Go in to it knowing how hard it is and that, despite that fact, you have to do the best job you can do, because literally everything is riding on it. You want to hurt a kid? Be a bad doctor. You want to pretty much screw them up fo their entire life? Be a really crappy teacher.
In summary, taken together, the two halves of our first few discussions, tells us this: it’s hard to be an effective teacher, and there will be myriad obstacles put in your way, but you were all students once and you know what good teaching looks like and feels like. Our job as teachers is to mitigate as best we can the adverse effects of all the stuff that gets in the way of a student’s learning. And you can’t do that if you don’t know what you are up against. So let’s jettison romantic ideas about teaching and get down to the real business of creating and maintaining and thriving community of learners.
LT
3 June 2020
Hello Everyone--
Something has been up with my website or my internet this week. I've posted and reposted the discussion board about "Why Johnny Can't. . ." three times now. At first it didn't post at all and then I checked today and it looked like the bottom half of the post, what I am asking you to do ahead of our class tomorrow, was not visible. I believe I've corrected that as of now, but, in case it's not fixed, this is what that bottom half said. It does not change what I asked you to post, only what I asked you to do for class. It mirrors what I covered in the syllabus, but, for clarity's sake, I repeat it here:
FOR THURSDAYS IN CLASS MEET UP: To follow up on this, on your own, locate any article that uses as it's title "What Johnny or Jan Can't . . . " It'll be great if we can get a wide range of titles from a wide range of time periods. A quick google search should do it.
Come to class ready to talk about what your article says Johnny can't do and how it makes it's argument. Be ready, also, to talk about what commonalities you see across the two articles--yours and the original. We'll explore what we find and talk about what this tells us, as future teachers, about what we face teaching today in the US Classroom. Hopefully, we'll be able to combine all three meet up sessions discoveries and conversations to make the point.
BUT HERE'S THE FUN PART THAT ISN'T DUE UNTIL NEXT WEEK THURSDAY:
Summer ENGL 301 Class Profile Scavenger Hunt!!!
Yes, my young friends, three exclamation points, a piece of punctuation I am loath to use in regular life, but my excitement over this class assignment merits such a reckless use of excessive punctuation.
To be a little meta for a moment: The online environment can be entirely alienating, and you’ve got to work really hard, as the teacher, to make folks feel like they are part of something bigger than just themselves alone in a room. So, maybe you thought that the class profile thing was some one and done event, but no, not the case at all. This week, as one of your tasks, due, again, on Thursday, 11 June 2020 by noon, I’m asking you to successfully complete this class profile scavenger hunt (again with the !!!). This will require you to use the Class Profile Page on our class website and read about your fellow classmates. You are a charming bunch! And many of you are animal lovers! So don’t rush it. Read thoroughly while you frantically try to match the right “my name is” to the right class profile, put a name to a face, and come out of it knowing each other just a little bit better.
To complete this assignment: I would suggest cutting and pasting the body of this email in a word or google doc. Then read through the class profiles, matching the right person to the right fun fact snippet. Then cut and paste your completed document back in to an email addressed to me at [email protected] and [email protected].
Completing this assignment will count as one acceptable reading journal assignment that you can sub in for any reading journal post that you want to take a break from completing during the rest of our summer session.
1. My name is________. I love artistic activities such as drawing (I am always asked to do the bulletin boards at my work – which I actually LOVE doing). I used to be a competitive figure skater. I also started a photography account and am a photographer for the website “Pendants by Petra”.
2. My name is _______and I'm a psychology major with a minor in writing studies. In September I'll be a senior and will be applying to William James College to study clinical psychology where I'll hopefully get my PsyD and a license to practice. My 8 month old golden doodle named Vinny has kept me company during quarantine.
3. My name is _______and I am an avid Dungeons and Dragons player. I often stream on Twitch or make speedpaints of my artwork for YouTube.
4. My name is _______and I am a member of Alpha Sigma Tau on campus. I like makeup, Halloween-themed things, Green Day, and Harry Potter. I also have a leopard gecko named Apollo – who I own only because I am allergic to our other pets at home and my mother felt bad for me.
5. My name is_______ and I set the school record for most threes pointers made in a season last year and I have a fraternal twin and her name is Olivia and she also goes to Bridgewater and is also a part of the basketball team.
6. My name is_______. I have a 2-year-old bearded dragon named Apollo who is very energetic and lazy. I live in Braintree and work at Bed Bath and Beyond as a key holder.
7. My name is_______. I am a huge horse freak; I would love to live on a small ranch someday with a bunch of farm animals. When I was younger, I was into show jumping and would train for shows.
8. My name is ________and I’m a big fan of Stephen King, America’s Sweetheart: Conan O’Brien, playing guitar, being with my dogs (Barney and Teddy) and cats (Raj and Taylor Swift), vanilla egg nog, nature, the live action Jungle Book, hammocks, Killing Eve, and weird folksy music.
9. My name is________. I live in Stoughton Ma (you know, where IKEA is) with my husband and three kids. Yea, three kids – two daughters and one son ages fourteen, twelve, and eight, respectively. They are great kids.
10. My name is ________ and I am studying English with a concentration in creative writing. Something interesting about me is that I was just offered a position with AmeriCorps working with a non-profit organization called College Possible as a High School Coach.
11. My name is ________and I graduated from Bishop Feehan High School where I was captain of the girl’s tennis team. 2019 was a rough year but I ended up adopting my new best friend, Bailey! She is a very energetic puppy who loves to eat absolutely anything and everything she can get her mouth on.
12. My name is _______and I am a tutor for Second Language Services in the Academic Achievement Center and I am a part of CPDC on campus. I have two dogs: a yellow lab and a pug. The lab's name is Bear and the pug's name is Popeye, and I love them so much.
13. My name is _______ and I have lived in Georgia and Vermont. I have a cat named Ellie who very well may appear during a Zoom meeting or two. She typically only wants attention when it is most inconvenient for everyone in the house to give it to her.
14. My name is _______. I have boring English-nerd hobbies: reading; knitting, but mostly only scarves; Joyce Rain Anderson is trying to teach me how to bead, leading me to realize how much my eyesight sucks; I don’t so much “run” as I do “plod,” but I get where I’m going.
Greetings ENGL 301--
Welcome to the first day of Summer Session I, ENGL 301 Writing & the Teaching of Writing. This introductory email will outline what you need to know in order to get set up for the next five weeks. Please read this email carefully, and, when you are finished, complete the first task of the summer, outlined at THE END OF THIS EMAIL, acknowledging that you’ve read and understand this email and other related course materials.
10 June 2020
Hello All--
Ahead of tomorrow’s class I wanted to give you my version of the discussion board prompt I gave to you. I was troubled, in some ways, at how so many of you wrote exclusively about bad classroom experiences and fear that my own first story unfortunately shaped your responses towards the negative.
Part I Our Shared Learning Experience
We start with our student selves, because we have all been students longer than we’ve been teachers. And we will run our classrooms based on how we ourselves were taught--either fighting against what we experienced or embracing it.
As I read through your accounts, what strikes me is that we all agree that using shame to teach lessons, as we say in Megan LeBlanc’s story and Maddie Butkus’s as well as my own, is the wrong way to run a class. I think, also we see, for instance in Paige Couture’s story, how unclear rules and out-sized punishments for infractions make for a bad classroom experience. Related to this, I think we also see, again, in Megan LeBlanc’s story, how an abuse of the power that a teacher has over a student--and sort of a lack of transparency with students about who has the power--feels wrong.
On the other hand, looking at all of the stories of good experiences, I think Kaylee Tavares phrased it well when she said they all seemed to be about acceptance. I would agree, but I would qualify it more. Folks talked generally about “that one teacher that helped” or “that one teacher who put in the extra work” or “cared.” Yes, I think probably all of those things feel evident in a good teacher, but a nice teacher doesn’t always guarantee a positive learning experience.
What I noticed is more about feeling respected and seen as a student in Lydia Theriault’s story. But it’s even more than that. Fiona Bell talked about a photography class where the teacher made space for students to explore the process of creating great art and did not only value the final product. That teacher instilled in her students the journey of learning to do something. Connected to this, Brianna Walsh described a classroom where the teacher encouraged the effort--the hard try--by creating a space where making a mistake wasn’t such a big deal. Creating opportunities for students to take risks, to fail, and to recover, is the vital learning space we all need to try to create for our students.
I want to close by talking about two of your stories. Hannah Dziadyk’s story about her Italian class and Alexa Parham’s experience with plagiarism. Here, yes, we see a teacher who cared enough, in both instances, to take the extra time, but we also see two other super important parts of great learning experiences: for Hannah, the class was a challenge. Students never remember the easy class, the easy grade. They remember the challenges. What made it valuable for Hannah is that the teacher supported her through the learning process. That’s the key: our students need space to risk, to fail, and to recover. Remember this: that worksheet on adverbs really changed my life, said no student ever. Difficult, challenging, creative assignments that students feel a sense of accomplishment for completing will always be the right move in a classroom.
In Alexa’s story, prior bad experiences made her feel that her only way to succeed as a writer was to use someone else’s writing. I would argue that most students don’t plagiarize out of malice but out of fear and panic. But Alexa’s teacher didn’t punish, he taught. He turned what could have been a highly punitive and disastrous situation into a learning experience--which, full circle, is the absolute antithesis of my story. One thing I hope all of you come away from our class thinking about is the powerful potential of error to actually be the catalyst for a learning moment in a classroom. This is particularly important in the writing classroom.
I have had some excellent classroom experiences. The one that really stands out to me, however, is from my Masters program. I was not a confident graduate student when I started at the University of Maine. I knew what I wanted--to become a college English professor--but I was not at all sure how that would work. Two things happened during my first semester: 1) I discovered I had a good instinct for teaching, mainly, that I could build a community of learners by being my whole and authentic class. That was an important confidence booster. 2) I learned how to struggle through a tough assignment on my own.
For an intro to grad studies course, we had to write about one of the texts in the course, Daisy Miller by Henry James. If you know anything about Daisy Miller, you’ll know that it’s one of the most written about short stories we could be assigned-which was part of the point. Our job was to use some of the critical theory we were learning to construct our argument.
I was tremendously intimidated by the scope of the assignment, by the faculty member who taught the class (an excellent and formidable scholar) and the other students in the class (all more accomplished than I was as a student). I struggled to find my way in to the text until I found an obscure reference to an etiquette manual that Daisy Miller would have been familiar with. I was charmed and horrified by the unsubtle ways this manual shaped how a woman should behave. And then I was off. I sweated out finding all these similar conduct manuals, I taught myself enough about rhetoric to be able to talk about “epideictic” rhetoric--which is the rhetoric of praise and blame. And I wrote the sh_t out of that paper. I got an A-, which is like getting a B in graduate school. But I was still proud of that paper, and I left the class knowing I could handle what came next because I understood that what I needed to do is find my way in to the project through my own interests. I made learning my own and not something performed for a teacher. And, as a teacher, I’ve tried eve since to develop assignments that encourage my students to do the same.
Part II The State of The Profession
If we begin a conversation about teaching reading and writing, then the next step is to think about what what the wider world understands about the profession. If we look at the articles we found out there, the first thing that stands out to me is that the majority of the articles you all found were about the myriad things teachers are expected to teach as well as how they are supposed to teach them. Kaylee Tavares found an article about a pretty thoughtful community based effort to diversify the reading list for students--of course that means teachers have to read and learn the texts in order to teach them. Lydia Theriault’s article stressed the active classroom. Brianna Walsh’s article talked about how to teach reading. Paige Couture’s article stressed how to teach writing. And Maddie Butkus’s article talked about the need to teach both reading and writing. But that’s not all: Hannah Dziadyk’s article talked about the need for close student teacher relationships.
I was surprised that only two of you located an article about how the Corona virus is affecting teaching and learning. Of all of the complexities of teaching right now, Lindsay Vo’s article on how teachers are both exhausted by tending to their students and grieving the loss of the school year mot captures what has to be the most significant hardship teacher’s have had to confront. Ali Nolan’s article on how different states are asking teachers to do varying degrees of online teaching (and students to be responsible for varying degrees of learning)
In year’s past, there have been a fair number of articles, like mine and Alexa Parham’s, that dealt with standaridized testing, particularly MCAS. I think Kaylee Tavares summed up what many teachers feel about MCAS and the like: managing it in a classroom is one of the toughest parts of the job.
Kylie Bock’s and Fiona Bell’s respective articles both essential remind us that teaching is hard, always shifting, always making new demands on teachers. Why start class with what is a rather overwhelming picture of the profession? Because it’s important to know what you are getting in to if you really want to be a teacher in the K-12 classroom. It is not for the faint of heart. If you can do any other job, you should do it. This shouldn’t be your plan B. Go in to it knowing how hard it is and that, despite that fact, you have to do the best job you can do, because literally everything is riding on it. You want to hurt a kid? Be a bad doctor. You want to pretty much screw them up fo their entire life? Be a really crappy teacher.
In summary, taken together, the two halves of our first few discussions, tells us this: it’s hard to be an effective teacher, and there will be myriad obstacles put in your way, but you were all students once and you know what good teaching looks like and feels like. Our job as teachers is to mitigate as best we can the adverse effects of all the stuff that gets in the way of a student’s learning. And you can’t do that if you don’t know what you are up against. So let’s jettison romantic ideas about teaching and get down to the real business of creating and maintaining and thriving community of learners.
LT
3 June 2020
Hello Everyone--
Something has been up with my website or my internet this week. I've posted and reposted the discussion board about "Why Johnny Can't. . ." three times now. At first it didn't post at all and then I checked today and it looked like the bottom half of the post, what I am asking you to do ahead of our class tomorrow, was not visible. I believe I've corrected that as of now, but, in case it's not fixed, this is what that bottom half said. It does not change what I asked you to post, only what I asked you to do for class. It mirrors what I covered in the syllabus, but, for clarity's sake, I repeat it here:
FOR THURSDAYS IN CLASS MEET UP: To follow up on this, on your own, locate any article that uses as it's title "What Johnny or Jan Can't . . . " It'll be great if we can get a wide range of titles from a wide range of time periods. A quick google search should do it.
Come to class ready to talk about what your article says Johnny can't do and how it makes it's argument. Be ready, also, to talk about what commonalities you see across the two articles--yours and the original. We'll explore what we find and talk about what this tells us, as future teachers, about what we face teaching today in the US Classroom. Hopefully, we'll be able to combine all three meet up sessions discoveries and conversations to make the point.
BUT HERE'S THE FUN PART THAT ISN'T DUE UNTIL NEXT WEEK THURSDAY:
Summer ENGL 301 Class Profile Scavenger Hunt!!!
Yes, my young friends, three exclamation points, a piece of punctuation I am loath to use in regular life, but my excitement over this class assignment merits such a reckless use of excessive punctuation.
To be a little meta for a moment: The online environment can be entirely alienating, and you’ve got to work really hard, as the teacher, to make folks feel like they are part of something bigger than just themselves alone in a room. So, maybe you thought that the class profile thing was some one and done event, but no, not the case at all. This week, as one of your tasks, due, again, on Thursday, 11 June 2020 by noon, I’m asking you to successfully complete this class profile scavenger hunt (again with the !!!). This will require you to use the Class Profile Page on our class website and read about your fellow classmates. You are a charming bunch! And many of you are animal lovers! So don’t rush it. Read thoroughly while you frantically try to match the right “my name is” to the right class profile, put a name to a face, and come out of it knowing each other just a little bit better.
To complete this assignment: I would suggest cutting and pasting the body of this email in a word or google doc. Then read through the class profiles, matching the right person to the right fun fact snippet. Then cut and paste your completed document back in to an email addressed to me at [email protected] and [email protected].
Completing this assignment will count as one acceptable reading journal assignment that you can sub in for any reading journal post that you want to take a break from completing during the rest of our summer session.
1. My name is________. I love artistic activities such as drawing (I am always asked to do the bulletin boards at my work – which I actually LOVE doing). I used to be a competitive figure skater. I also started a photography account and am a photographer for the website “Pendants by Petra”.
2. My name is _______and I'm a psychology major with a minor in writing studies. In September I'll be a senior and will be applying to William James College to study clinical psychology where I'll hopefully get my PsyD and a license to practice. My 8 month old golden doodle named Vinny has kept me company during quarantine.
3. My name is _______and I am an avid Dungeons and Dragons player. I often stream on Twitch or make speedpaints of my artwork for YouTube.
4. My name is _______and I am a member of Alpha Sigma Tau on campus. I like makeup, Halloween-themed things, Green Day, and Harry Potter. I also have a leopard gecko named Apollo – who I own only because I am allergic to our other pets at home and my mother felt bad for me.
5. My name is_______ and I set the school record for most threes pointers made in a season last year and I have a fraternal twin and her name is Olivia and she also goes to Bridgewater and is also a part of the basketball team.
6. My name is_______. I have a 2-year-old bearded dragon named Apollo who is very energetic and lazy. I live in Braintree and work at Bed Bath and Beyond as a key holder.
7. My name is_______. I am a huge horse freak; I would love to live on a small ranch someday with a bunch of farm animals. When I was younger, I was into show jumping and would train for shows.
8. My name is ________and I’m a big fan of Stephen King, America’s Sweetheart: Conan O’Brien, playing guitar, being with my dogs (Barney and Teddy) and cats (Raj and Taylor Swift), vanilla egg nog, nature, the live action Jungle Book, hammocks, Killing Eve, and weird folksy music.
9. My name is________. I live in Stoughton Ma (you know, where IKEA is) with my husband and three kids. Yea, three kids – two daughters and one son ages fourteen, twelve, and eight, respectively. They are great kids.
10. My name is ________ and I am studying English with a concentration in creative writing. Something interesting about me is that I was just offered a position with AmeriCorps working with a non-profit organization called College Possible as a High School Coach.
11. My name is ________and I graduated from Bishop Feehan High School where I was captain of the girl’s tennis team. 2019 was a rough year but I ended up adopting my new best friend, Bailey! She is a very energetic puppy who loves to eat absolutely anything and everything she can get her mouth on.
12. My name is _______and I am a tutor for Second Language Services in the Academic Achievement Center and I am a part of CPDC on campus. I have two dogs: a yellow lab and a pug. The lab's name is Bear and the pug's name is Popeye, and I love them so much.
13. My name is _______ and I have lived in Georgia and Vermont. I have a cat named Ellie who very well may appear during a Zoom meeting or two. She typically only wants attention when it is most inconvenient for everyone in the house to give it to her.
14. My name is _______. I have boring English-nerd hobbies: reading; knitting, but mostly only scarves; Joyce Rain Anderson is trying to teach me how to bead, leading me to realize how much my eyesight sucks; I don’t so much “run” as I do “plod,” but I get where I’m going.
Greetings ENGL 301--
Welcome to the first day of Summer Session I, ENGL 301 Writing & the Teaching of Writing. This introductory email will outline what you need to know in order to get set up for the next five weeks. Please read this email carefully, and, when you are finished, complete the first task of the summer, outlined at THE END OF THIS EMAIL, acknowledging that you’ve read and understand this email and other related course materials.
- I DO NOT USE BLACKBOARD. That’s always the first question I get. I don’t use blackboard because it’s ugly, glitchy, and complicated. Instead, I use a teaching website. From here on out, after this email, all information you’ll need for our class will be available on that site. Click her to get to my teaching website (www.leetorda.com).
- Once at my website, you can access all the information for our class by following the “Summer 2020 ENGL 301” links on that page. By clicking on that link, you will be taken to the POLICIES for our class. That is the first thing you should read. It outlines the course objectives, general requirements, and the evaluation process for our class.
- If you hover instead of click on “Summer 2020 ENGL 301” a drop down menu will appear for our class. The first link you will see is CLASS UPDATES. Updates for our class will appear on Wednesdays and Fridays each week by 5:00 PM. I will email you to alert you to that announcement. If you go to that page right now, you will see this email reposted there. Sometimes I will video a message. Sometimes it will be a powerpoint with audio. Sometimes it will just be text. Class updates are more than just information about what to do next--they are that--but they are also a place where I try to bring together ideas and concepts you’ve been discussing in class as well as information that I think might have gotten left out of the conversation. It’s also a place for me to acknowledge particularly good ideas and the people in our class who have them.
- Just below the Class Updates page is the SYLLABUS for our class. The syllabus is organized by week (Week One, Week Two, etc) and By day (either Tuesday or Thursday). The work outlined for each day is work you need to complete on that day. I have not determined the time it is due yet as I am waiting to see everyone’s availability (if you have not yet indicated times you would be available to meet synchronously, click here to take the survey). You will have some reading and some written work due every class period. The syllabus page is linked to any readings that are not in the texts you need to purchase, and it is also linked to the assignment page, discussion board, and any other document you need in order to complete your work. KEEP IN MIND: as all of you are probably pretty aware, things can change. So the syllabus might change over the course of the next five weeks.
- Directly below the link for the syllabus is the the ALL-CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD page. Future assignment pages will appear beneath that page as they are ready to post. I have some of the assignments ready for you to read, primarily those that you need to know about in this first week of class, which include a number of ALL-CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD posts.
- Fill out the availability survey.
- Read the policies and syllabus for this class and send me an acknowledgement that you’ve done so as explained at the end of this email.
- Email me a 200-300 word bio. I’ve included a sample (mine) above. Please note that, besides me, your classmates will read these, and, on the very, very outside chance that someone happens upon my class website, some total stranger might read it. In your bio, let us know the basics (where from, year in school, etc), and some cool and interesting thing about you (and stop yourself from saying there is nothing cool or interesting about you). Include a picture that you are comfortable with the above audience seeing as well.
- Post to the ALL-CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD a response to this question: recall a best or worst class experience. It can be from K-12 or college. You can include both a best and a worst or you can focus on one or the other. Roughly 200 words. I will include a sample post. After posting, read through a few of your classmate’s posts. Respond in roughly 100 words with what you see these experiences have in common with each other--either in good or bad ways. Complete details about what to post are available on the Discussion Board.
- Locate and read ANY ARTICLE written in the past year on any aspect of teaching or learning. It doesn't have to be some fancy scholarly article--it could be from Time or the Globe or wherever. I will include a sample post. Bonus points if it is an article about teaching reading and writing. Post a summary of the article, roughly 200 words, on the ALL-CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD. Read through your classmate’s posts. Respond in roughly 100 words with what you see as what the state of teaching and learning--both te joy of it and the difficulty of it. The Complete details about what to post are available on the Discussion Board.
- Finally, post one question you have about the syllabus, policies, or assignments you’ve been able to read about on our class website to our ALL CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD. I will try to answer all of them by 5:00 on Thursday.
- Now that you’ve read through this email and taken a look at our class website, send me the following information in an email.
- Send me an email at [email protected], CC me at [email protected]
- In the subject line, write "Syllabus Check-in Email". Write it exactly as I've written it here.
- In the body of the email, include a greeting: "Hello LT," "Hi Professor Torda," "Hey Dr. Torda." Whatever. But have a greeting.
- Cut and paste this sentence into the email: "I've read through the policies and syllabus for the course, and I understand how to use the website to find out information about assignments, course policies, due dates, and classroom expectations, and to post my own writing to the class website in fulfillment of written assignments."
- Include a meme that describes how you are feeling about things at the start of Summer Session I.
- Sign off on your email, "best, so & so" "see you in class, your name here" "sincerely, John Doe." Again, whatever. But sign off on your email.