policies ENGL301 Writing & The Teaching of Writing
|
Need to be in touch with me?
LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 ltorda@bridgew.edu www.leetorda.com On Zoom: https://bridgew.zoom.us/j/3806648927 |
Fall 2021 Open Hours for students (office hours):
MW (in-person or Zoom) 1:30 to 2:30 T (Zoom only) 10:00 to 11:00 R 1:45 to 2:45 (in-person or Zoom) And by appointment Make an appointment, either face to face or on zoom, during office hours or at another time: Let me know you want to meet by adding yourself to my google.doc appointment calendar here: https://goo.gl/3CqLf. If you are meeting me on zoom, I will send you a zoom link for the time you sign up for. |
CLASS UPDATES
Check this space for follow ups on things we talk about in class and/or updates to the syllabus and/or reminders about upcoming projects.
CLASS UPDATE 4 OCTOBER 2021
This is a repeat of the all-class email I sent out earlier today.
I only got questions for our alums from two groups, but in the interest of moving this project along, I am emailing a cobbled together and edited version of those questions here for you to send to your alums. A few things:
1. How has it been teaching the past two years?
3. How do you manage all the various aspects of teaching: differentiated instruction, motivation, discipline, disruptive behavior, social/emotional needs of students, covering all the required content, teaching skills, preparing students for things like MCAS?
4. Beyond working with students, what is it like to work with other teachers? Parents? Other staff and administration? In other words, what are the parts of teaching that we don’t really see as students in classrooms?
5. How do you balance your work life with your home life? How much time outside of the classroom do you spend on your job? Do you take care of yourself? Is teaching economically viable as a career for you? Are you lying and telling us you take care of yourself when you don’t(Torda edited these)?
6. In school, we learn a lot of “educational theory” how do you see that influencing what you do in the classroom? In what ways do you feel you were prepared to teach while you were in school and a pre-service teacher? In what ways do you feel you weren’t prepared to teach by your education and student teaching?
7. What advice do you have for folks that are about to enter into the profession?
8. If there were things you could change about the school experience of teachers and/or students, what would it be?
9. If you had to tell one story that summed up your teaching career--one story about a student, about a class, about a year, about a professional experience--what would that one story be and why does it sum up your career (Torda’s question)?
CLASS UPDATE 20 SEPTEMBER 2021
Check out this 7 minute video I made to help folks to understand 1) the late work policy for class; 2) how to understand the "WHAT YOU HAVE TO READ, WATCH, OR LISTEN TO" column on the website; and 3) formatting on Reading Journals or Reader's Notes. I don't mean it to be like a scold. I mean it to be helpful. Also, it's me without a mask! Click here to watch the video
15 September 2021Check out just a few of the other versions of “Why Johnny Can’t” articles. Keep in mind, if I wanted to, I could include three, four, five articles from 2016 on):
“Those of us who have been doomed to read manuscript written in an examination room--whether at a grammar school, a high school, or a college--have found the work of even good scholars disfigured by bad spelling, confusing punctuation, ungrammatical, obscure, ambiguous, or inelegant expressions. Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges, has known men who could not write a letter describing their own Commencement without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old.”
You wanna know who wrote that? It’s a man named Adam Sherman Hill, and he wrote this about students at Harvard University in 1879. Yes, you read that right, 1879.
So if you were wondering when the golden age of literacy in the United States was--and we must assume there was one since literally every single article above suggests that literacy has precipitously declined--it must have been sometime around the Civil War.
And let’s consider another point: he’s talking about the .0001% of super elite, rich white men who went to Harvard. And if he is essentially saying they can’t write for nothing, what does that say about the rest of us slobs? And, further, if things were so bad in 1879 and have, by our long list of articles published since, disintegrated further, how is it even possible that we are even able to communicate with each other?
So what is my point? Let’s move away from Deficit Ideologies I started to make this point at the end of class, and it’s my job to both prove it to you and prepare you for the truth of what I’m saying: maybe it’s not that we are all such lousy writers. Maybe writing is hard. Maybe it takes time to learn. Maybe it takes meaningful opportunities to read and to write, over a very long academic career, to get decent at it. Couldn’t that be why you are all such competent writers at this moment in your career?
Check this space for follow ups on things we talk about in class and/or updates to the syllabus and/or reminders about upcoming projects.
CLASS UPDATE 4 OCTOBER 2021
This is a repeat of the all-class email I sent out earlier today.
I only got questions for our alums from two groups, but in the interest of moving this project along, I am emailing a cobbled together and edited version of those questions here for you to send to your alums. A few things:
- If you have not yet reached out to your alum with your intro email, please do.
- When you email your alum, please CC me or "reply all". This way I can keep track of your correspondence with your alum without you having to do anything about it. Correspondence is part of the requirement for the B grade.
- When you email your alum with the questions, continue to CC me on them. Again, this is a requirement of the B grade as spelled out in the assignment and the easiest way for you to earn that part of the grade is to just CC me.
- If you have not heard back from your alum within 72 hours after you email the questions, please let me know so I can figure out why. You need information from your alum a week from today. So you want to make sure they are communicating with you. I gave a timeline in the original match email, you might want to remind your alums about it so we stay on track with this project.
1. How has it been teaching the past two years?
3. How do you manage all the various aspects of teaching: differentiated instruction, motivation, discipline, disruptive behavior, social/emotional needs of students, covering all the required content, teaching skills, preparing students for things like MCAS?
4. Beyond working with students, what is it like to work with other teachers? Parents? Other staff and administration? In other words, what are the parts of teaching that we don’t really see as students in classrooms?
5. How do you balance your work life with your home life? How much time outside of the classroom do you spend on your job? Do you take care of yourself? Is teaching economically viable as a career for you? Are you lying and telling us you take care of yourself when you don’t(Torda edited these)?
6. In school, we learn a lot of “educational theory” how do you see that influencing what you do in the classroom? In what ways do you feel you were prepared to teach while you were in school and a pre-service teacher? In what ways do you feel you weren’t prepared to teach by your education and student teaching?
7. What advice do you have for folks that are about to enter into the profession?
8. If there were things you could change about the school experience of teachers and/or students, what would it be?
9. If you had to tell one story that summed up your teaching career--one story about a student, about a class, about a year, about a professional experience--what would that one story be and why does it sum up your career (Torda’s question)?
CLASS UPDATE 20 SEPTEMBER 2021
Check out this 7 minute video I made to help folks to understand 1) the late work policy for class; 2) how to understand the "WHAT YOU HAVE TO READ, WATCH, OR LISTEN TO" column on the website; and 3) formatting on Reading Journals or Reader's Notes. I don't mean it to be like a scold. I mean it to be helpful. Also, it's me without a mask! Click here to watch the video
15 September 2021Check out just a few of the other versions of “Why Johnny Can’t” articles. Keep in mind, if I wanted to, I could include three, four, five articles from 2016 on):
- We have an article that originally appeared in 1955 in McClean’s magazine by Rudolph Flesch excoriating parents that their children couldn’t read.
- He was still pretty sure no one could read in this 1985 article in Edweek by Rudolph Flesch that argues that whole language instruction is to blame for our supposed decline into illiteracy.
- There is this 2006 article in Inside Higher Education by Laurence Musgrove that says there is not enough writing infused into the entire college curriculum.
- I found a 2009 article by J. Singleton Jackson that says even graduate students don’t know how to write.
- Here is a 2012 article from The Atlantic that says the same things as the article in 2006 and 2018.
- Here is a 2013 piece from NBC News that says Johnny can’t write and it’s upsetting employers.
- There is this 2017 New York Times article that says kids can’t write because they don’t have enough grammar instruction.
- We have this 2018 article by Matthew Lynch about why college students can’t write essays that blames the embrace of the writing workshop and teachers not requiring enough writing.
“Those of us who have been doomed to read manuscript written in an examination room--whether at a grammar school, a high school, or a college--have found the work of even good scholars disfigured by bad spelling, confusing punctuation, ungrammatical, obscure, ambiguous, or inelegant expressions. Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges, has known men who could not write a letter describing their own Commencement without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old.”
You wanna know who wrote that? It’s a man named Adam Sherman Hill, and he wrote this about students at Harvard University in 1879. Yes, you read that right, 1879.
So if you were wondering when the golden age of literacy in the United States was--and we must assume there was one since literally every single article above suggests that literacy has precipitously declined--it must have been sometime around the Civil War.
And let’s consider another point: he’s talking about the .0001% of super elite, rich white men who went to Harvard. And if he is essentially saying they can’t write for nothing, what does that say about the rest of us slobs? And, further, if things were so bad in 1879 and have, by our long list of articles published since, disintegrated further, how is it even possible that we are even able to communicate with each other?
So what is my point? Let’s move away from Deficit Ideologies I started to make this point at the end of class, and it’s my job to both prove it to you and prepare you for the truth of what I’m saying: maybe it’s not that we are all such lousy writers. Maybe writing is hard. Maybe it takes time to learn. Maybe it takes meaningful opportunities to read and to write, over a very long academic career, to get decent at it. Couldn’t that be why you are all such competent writers at this moment in your career?