May 01, 2007

Class(es) over

Today was the last day of my WRT 195 classes, which are also the last face-to-face classes I will teach for Syracuse University. And that means that I am now free of the classroom for a good 16 month stretch. It's a pretty exhilarating feeling, when I think about it. There is so much attached to that presence in the classroom, as either a student or a teacher, that it feels like a giant relief not to have to face it for awhile. I have so many things I want to be doing, to be writing about, to be researching to write about, and maybe now that I am really on self-structure I'm excited about being able to do all of that. I kept my teaching journal up this semester, something I usually overlook. I think that was because I felt like it wasn't a good semester. I'm not sure whether it was because my classes ended up being so small, or if it was because the students were so disinterested, or if it was because I was so caught up in my exams, but nothing felt natural, or even comfortable. I always felt like I was trying too hard and getting little back. That's unusual for me in a classroom.

In other news, for those who are interested in such things, I received word that I passed the written portion of my exams. Whoo-hoo!

So now, it's on to the conversations, and the oral hearing, and the diss committee formation, and the prospectus, and the writing, and the beginning of the job search, and the teaching portfolio, which will need a major revision at this point, and getting the letters and so on and so on.

And I find myself thinking about where that next job will be. And hoping that it will be somewhere that I can be and do all the things I've been telling myself I can be and do when I am somewhere else, and still let the life I've built here grow. Not such an easy bridge to cross, now that the time is here to start across it.

Posted by cageyer at 05:51 PM | Comments (1)

April 11, 2007

Seeing racism when you hear it

I have to confess that when I saw the Rutgers' women's basketball team having a news conference on the television I left on for the dog because there were workmen here, I didn't know what had happened. I didn't know who Imus was, or what was said, or why it merited a news conference. So I poked around a bit, and found the "apology" and still didn't know what had been said. Today I had the time to go through the stack of newpaper sections that have been collecting these past few weeks, and I learned what had been said.

Holy Mother of God. What the Fuck is going on here?

MSNBC "suspends" this jerks program for a couple of weeks. Big deal. He won't even notice. But now that I get what happened, I sure as hell notice. It's not enough. If MSNBC had any integrity at all, and clearly they don't, they would just simply drop him. For good. Who needs crap like this cluttering up the airways anyway? MSNBC has a better image to uphold, and certainly better options for their airspace/time.

So I'm reading this entry from Becky today, and I followed the link to C. Vivian Stringer's comments published in the NYTimes, and I got mad. Teary? Yes. But also just downright mad.

I've tried for the last two years to teach undergraduate writers at my institution under course outcomes and syllabi that emphasize "diversity" only to be met with rolled eyes and Pollyana-esque platitudes about how racism doesn't exist in our country anymore. I can even imagine some of those students talking about this incident and saying that the mere fact that these black women got to college "proves" there is no racism left to deal with.

To which I can now reply, with some venom, "bullshit, and this is why." It's one thing to get racist e-mail messages on a family list (I have to say I am more than somewhat disappointed to be related to these people, but it sure explains a lot of my earlier life), but it is quite another in this day and time for anyone to accept this kind of foulness as acceptable.

I'm saving the articles about this incident. It sickens me that these people not only exist in the world but that they exist in levels of public broadcasting. I support the First Amendment to the Constitution, but I don't for a moment confuse a freedom with a license to harm.

I've had two women basketball players as students in my time here at Syracuse. These young women are multiple times the individuals this racist "personality" is. He should be removed from the airwaves. No apology can make up for placing those words into the public ear.

I'd say "shame" on him, and his syndicator, and MSNBC, but, of course, it wouldn't do any good, because if they had the sense of decency that makes shame effective, this incident wouldn't have happened.

To the women at Rutgers: Stand proud. Stand together. Stand above this idiot and those who follow him.

Posted by cageyer at 04:01 PM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2007

Starting to figure it out

A short while ago, I was reviewing a little short textbook on argument, thinking about using it for my then-upcoming WRT 195 class. This book, Good Reasons: Designing and Writing Effective Arguments, was written by Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer. The authors begin by discussing Silent Spring, the reasons it became such a hit/classic, and how that text demonstrates principles of argument. I particularly liked their analysis of Carson's intervention is an otherwise dominant dialogue. The authors move on to discuss several types of argument, including visual, narrative, causal, etc. I thought it would be great to pair this book with Silent Spring, which I don't think anyone reads anymore, and the other texts they analyze as the readings for a course.

Jack Selzer also wrote one of my favorite chapters in What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. The chapter is "Rhetorical Analysis: Understanding How Texts Persuade Readers." I found his explanation of rhetorical analysis to provide an excellent umbrella theory for the other topics in that book (that's fodder for another post, however).

Now I'm reading Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives in detail, with a view to exams, and I'm finding myself, for the first time ever, interested in being able to teach a graduate level course in a comp/rhet program. The course would feature this text, and all of the readings he discusses and analyzes in developing his philosophy of rhetoric. The range here is amazing, from the ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric teachers and orators to English Literature, to political economists, to Marx, to philosophers. Most of the references I've either read, or at least heard of, but what an interesting course that would be (for me, anyway) because Burke's point is that with a widened view of what persuasion is and his concept of identification as the other key to understanding rhetoric, every discipline has something to offer to the understanding of rhetoric, and rhetoric has a foundation to offer to every discipline. Exactly what I've long been thinking. Rhetoric should be a central part of the university, and should serve as a foundational course for all other disciplines, such that material from all other disciplines is considered in rhetoric instruction. Phew! How big an agenda would that be?

Anyway, I was reading blog posts yesterday about the nature of rhetoric instruction, where one entry remarked on the distance between the first year composition course, where students might get some degree of instruction in rhetoric, and the PhD course in rhet/comp, with not much in between. Someone proposed rhetoric as a major. Well, a liberal arts education used to be philosophically driven (hence the ultimate title) and rhetoric and philosophy still seem closely aligned, so why not?

So if I have this spark, this first ever thought about a graduate course (which I see as being an introductory course at the graduate level), maybe I am starting to have a definable sense of my own place in all this that I can articulate and attach to established theories. Wouldn't that be something?!

Posted by cageyer at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2006

AP Reading - Day 6

We lose track of what day of the week it is. We only know how far in we are, and how far we have to go. As of noon today, our room of roughly 305 readers had read 72% of the papers we have to read for the whole of the week. Yesterday, we read 54,000 essays, or 20% of the week's total in a single day. The statistics are impressive. More impressive to me is our accuracy rating: we are within hundreths of a point, the most accurate of the three rooms, as these things are measured. And we are reading on day six with the same accuracy we read on day 2, indicating that even though we are going faster, we are not sacrificing our quality.

Cool.

Tonight's outing was a visit to the next over local tourist attraction, the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse. It's all a historic site, all a museum. I climbed to the top of the tower to get this (among other) shot(s).

.

In its day, the light from this lighthouse could be seen 19 nautical miles out to sea. That's a long way. It was also very near here that the Commodore sank. The Commodore, literature fans, is the gunrunner upon which Stephen Crane was a crewman. He survived the wreck, and the experience inspired his story "The Open Boat." The light they aimed for was the Ponce de Leon Inlet lighthouse. No wonder AP Readers in English travel here year after year...

This will be the last year, though. AP English is moving next year to Louisville, Kentucky. Seems we have outgrown the capacity of this resort town and need to find bigger digs. So to the home of the Derby we go. I hope I get invited back. This has been a really interesting experience, and I've learned a lot from it. More about that later.

Posted by cageyer at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

AP Reading - Day to Day

It's been an interesting, really interesting couple of days. The first full day of reading, I noticed two of my tablemates were reading at least one and a half folders to my one. I'm not usually competitive that way, but somehow this bugged me, so I determined to increase my speed without sacrificing the quality of my reading or my judgement. I must've done okay, cuz I didn't get any additional "you might want to look at" notes from my table leader.

It's hard, though, to go too fast. Every paper is a little bit different, even though there are some common (often superficial, often just wrong) themes in the responses. I find myself having all sorts of teacher zone-out moments - those times when I see a particular kind of problem in a student response, and think "how would I teach literature, and writing, in such a way to try and address this gap?" That for me might be the biggest reward for doing this: to learn how to be a better teacher by reading the writing of students who hope not to be in my class. More on that later.

Meanwhile, a brief view of the scenery here - an arrival day picture taken before I knew I wasn't staying there...

Posted by cageyer at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2006

AP Reading - Day 1

As you might expect, the first day is all about norming. What you might not expect, as I didn't, was spending the first full hour introducing ourselves (in tables of 8) while runners brought people copies of missing stuff. (Excuse me, but the room is fully set, nametags and all, and there are copies of stuff missing from various places? Score -5 for preparation).

From a very large stack of sample essays, we were asked to read sets of 3 or 4 and assign scores based on the rubric provided. Then we took a survey of the room to see how well aligned we were. I was surprised, at first, at how central the center of the distribution was. But then I recalled that many of these folks have been doing this for years, so maybe it's not so surprising.

Anyway, here's the deal: The readers for this project at mostly high school teachers who teach AP courses. Some of us are college folk, including my roommate (who reminds me sooo much of my friend Bridget that I keep forgetting her name...). All the student who take the exam answer 3 "free-response" questions. Each of us is assigned to 1 question. Mine is a selection from an Oscar Wilde play (I knew that Victorian Lit specialty would come in handy...).

As you might expect, if you know me, my scores are usually below the room majority. Not by much, but by a point usually. Sometimes I'd right on the norming mark. Sometimes I'm generous. But mostly I'm more critical. I'll have to see how that develops after I've read a few hundred of these things.

The room situation worked out okay, I guess. We're almost 3 miles from the reading site, and there's a shuttle bus on an uncertain schedule. I walked this morning, and I'll walk back again tonight. Since I can't use the fitness center I was planning on having, the walk on the beach seems a good substitute.

Stay tuned for more exciting reading details....

Posted by cageyer at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)

AP Reading - arrival

Sometimes I think my ultimate destiny is to be a meeting planner.

We arrived from Orlando in fine style. The thunderstorm had passed and there was sun over the beach when we arrived. But after standing in the predictable line for check-in, the young woman behind the counter excused hereself when I presented my name, and went to someone further down the counter, then picked up a list and walked out from behind the counter, none of which boded well. She returned to tell me that despite the little green paper in my hand, I was not, in fact, staying in the central hotel for the project, but I was staying at some hotel about 2 miles away. Hmmmmmm.

I was invited to move across the lobby to join a small but steadily growing group of people who were somewhat unsure what would happen next and were in varying degrees of unhappiness about that. I wasn't happy, but I wasn't too upset... yet.

Then the site coordinator for this event appeared. She said we needed to be patient and trust that it would work out, that she had only learned of "the problem" at 12:30 that very day and she was diligently working to get a contract cut so we could move on to the designated last minute new hotel.

hmmmm....

she didn't know about this until the day of arrival??? Our numbers were a surprise to her???? They bought us all plane tickets - so they were surprised that we showed up??

heyh?

Okay, so we wait. Some of us for three hours. Then we get on a bus to make the journey to the new hotel, who doesn't know who we are, so we have to check in one at a time (in a group of 50) with 1+ desk clerks. Hmmm.....

Then, when we want to get back to the conference site for the dinner, no one can tell us how that will happen.

Excuse me?

so later I learn that they have booked 800 rooms at the primary hotel. There at least 1400 of us here, and even with doubling up, since some folks are allowed to pay for the private room, and even though this isn't the Math AP reading, it seem obvious there was going to be a shortage. That it wasn't planned for is just unreasonable to me.

and so it goes.

We'll see what comes next.

Posted by cageyer at 08:02 AM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2006

Reader for fun (?) and profit

A couple of months ago academom told me about this opportunity for summer work: reading Advanced Placement exams for a company called ETS. So I logged in, applied, and voila, here I am in not-so-sunny Orlando for a full seven days exploring the writing skills of would be advanced placement high school students. Pretty ‘citin’ stuff!

The afternoon thunderstorm arrived just as we did. We flew through it about ten miles north, or maybe east, of the airport, and then it followed us in. When it rains, it means it. Glad I found that plastic poncho before I left this morning. So far, everything on the trip has gone well. Flights were pretty full but good, on time and short. The layover in Charlotte was just about an hour, which was fine. Charlotte is a nice airport, in what appear to be really pretty country I’d like to explore more someday. I didn’t realize there was so much wine produced in North Carolina. I visited the Biltmore Estate on my move from Washington to Syracuse four years ago, where I found some of the best wine I’ve every had. I brought two or three cases with me to New York, but it is long since gone and I can’t get more without traveling south. That’s a good reason just by itself, but it appears that there is a whole wine industry here that bears touring. So now I have one more trip to add to my list of things I want to do someday.

Headed now by bus to Daytona Beach, where I find out what’s in store for the rest of the week. Stay tuned!

Posted by cageyer at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2006

Listening to What I Teach

I had two meetings with students this morning, despite it being Spring Break here. One is working through last semester's work with me, while the other is a senior who has asked me to be a reader on her Honors Thesis. I'm learning an awful lot from working with these two very different students.

With the first, I am learning how to teach writing. And by that, I mean that I am having to research basic writing texts, to rediscover how to explain a paragraph and its function, the relationship of the sentence to the paragraph, and the paragraph to the larger essay, to revisit the idea of a topic sentence outline and its value, to learn how to discuss and explain topic sentences, supporting sentences, and the differences between example, explanation, and expansion. Most college composition teachers probably have a whole bibliography of texts they consider useful, but right now my money in on A Writer's Workshop, 2nd ed., by Bob Brannan. After combing all my handbooks, my shelf staples (such as Patterns for College Writing and Literature for Composition) and a whole stack of other anthologies I've glanced through but never called on, this one book proved to be the most straightforward and comprehensive. I needed that, for this teaching situation, but I also find myself remembering cool stuff that would help my own writing, if only I would remember and use it.

Which brings me to student number two and her thesis. She's working very hard to keep it under a hundred pages. One hundred. I can't imagine writing something that long on a single subject, and yet as I look at my growing pile of "projects to do when (fill in the blank) event is over, I realize that there are a few book length projects there. Hmmmm.... so today, as I'm talking about the next level of revisions for this thesis, I hear ideas come out of my mouth I didn't know I owned; ideas that tell me how to write the length of paper I've never attempted. Things like:

Wow. It sounds so simple when I say it like that. Sounds so much like what I was taught in my first comp class - so much that hasn't managed to guide my writing for reasons unknown. Maybe it's really true that you truly learn something when you learn it to teach it to another.

Posted by cageyer at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2006

The Cluetrain keeps on chuggin'

Last semester in my WRT 307 class, I asked my students to read the 95 theses from The Cluetrain Manifesto. They had to post a responsive comment to at least two of them in a Blackboard post, and respond to the comments of at least two of their classmates. You talk about filling up a discussion forum! I was most interested to see how many of these aspiring management and marketing types disagreed with the theses offered. Their belief in the wisdom of the corporate structure was surprising.

This is a lesson I intend to keep in my future professional writing classes, and to build on. So I was pleased the other day to run across this over on Presentation Zen.

I'm also really interested in developing a more polished theory about how these lessons apply to teaching. When I first came to my graduate career, I brought with me a long history of teaching professional continuing ed seminars, general financial fitness seminars, and formal academic courses for professional designations. I also had some in-depth experience with facilitating seminars, which is much different than teaching. I've tried, over these past few years, to bring the things I learned there to my teaching. I've had some success, but I've also lost touch with some stuff I used to know. Stay tuned - when I get the revision worked out, I'll post it here.

Posted by cageyer at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2005

Teaching Journal - Weeks 2 and 3

The fact that it's already week 4 and I'm just getting around to this entry is suggestive of how the weeks have gone. Week 2 is always a funny rhythm because of the Labor Day holiday, and then Week 3 starts to feel like something will stabilize. Balance hasn't come yet - I'm still trying to figure out how to fit my student work into the schedule created by my teaching. The weekdays just seem to get completely eaten up without any clear time (or mental power) for my own homework. So I have to be all the more focused on the weekends to prepare ahead.

As for teaching, I could summarize both weeks by saying I talked too much, and acknowledging this as a direct result of not feeling in control of my plan. But it seemed to work, and at the end of week three I am pretty happy with where both classes are and where we're headed for the next few weeks.

Writing 105 was involved in the introductory unit for both weeks.

During Week 2, our discussions focused mostly on their reading notes and research results. After reading Manning Marable's introduction to The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life, titled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Race," and discussing key concepts such as "life chances", "lucky days" and "unlucky days" the students did a database research project on the emergence of "life chances" as a concept/term in sociology, and an internet search on "the color line." For the first part of Tuesday's class I had them tell me about their results - one key thing that stood out for them from their notes. It was a good discussion. They brought up interesting observations and were able to tie them back to the underlying text, Gregory Howard Williams' memoir Life on the Color Line: The True Story of A White Boy who Learned he was Black. They had also been asked to expand on an in-class exercise from week 1 where I randomly assigned the students to one of three quotes taken from Williams, and had them work in groups to come up with passages from Marable that would help them imagine how Marable might respond to Williams. For homework, they were asked to take those results and expand their thoughts into a 400 word response paper. I had them submit those responses to the Drop Box in Blackboard, mostly to be sure they could all do it before the major essay comes due.

Tuesday they were asked to write a "discovery draft". In class, I explained the idea, emphasizing that it should not be considered formal, did not require an introduction or conclusion at this point, and should be mostly about testing what they know and still needed to know to write the final paper. On Thursday I grouped them according to the prompt they responded to and had them share drafts and discuss strategies for revision/organization. For homework over the weekend, they were asked to revise their drafts, to read a section from Writing Analytically on introductions and conclusions, and to write 3 different versions of each for discussion in class.

Week three was all about making a coherent paper with these drafts. They again grouped up to discuss introductions and conclusions, in an attempt to select a good one for their revised draft. We reviewed the prompts for the invention portolio. For Thursday, I had them bring their handbook, an expensive little chunk known as The Writer's Harbrace Handbook Brief (yes, really in that order). I showed them various sections pertinent to final editing, and pointed out the section about MLA citation, which they are required to use for this paper. Papers were due Sunday night in the Drop Box. The invention portfolios will come with them to class in Week 4.

WRT 307
Week Two was a short week because of the holiday, so most of what happed was the first three of the Genre Presentation Project presentations. They did a pretty good job, given how little instruction I had given them. The first presentation was about presentations, and it didn't cover all I wished it had but it was okay and gave the students a good example to work with. The student who got edged last week got back in. I completely revised the schedule for the rest of the presentations. I had set them all up to come in steady succession for something like four weeks, and I realized this wouldn't allow me to talk about any of the writing I was asking them to do until it was over, several weeks after they wrote. Not good for context. So I changed it so that there is only one presentation per class session, and then other stuff can happen.

Week Three was still about the presentations, but I also was able to review and discuss the key ideas that emerged from their initial papers on the anticipated difference between academic and workplace writing. It was interesting to me that they believe business writing to be more clear, less fluffy, more direct - even to the point of being terse. We talked a bit about how different workplace situations call for different levels of brevity or "fluff."

I asked them to read The Cluetrain Manifesto online and respond to any two of the 95 theses found there. I also asked them to read the Preface to Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and to post comments on that, especially in relation to Cluetrain. It will be a few sessions before I can get back to those discussions, because next week I want to work on their cover letters and resumes.

Both classes move into Unit 2 as week four begins. Breathe out and carry on.

Posted by cageyer at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2005

Critical Thinking

Cleaning out some old notebooks, I found these notes:

Critical Thinking Skills
1. gather complete information - more than one source
2. understand and define terms (make others define terms, too)
3. question the methods by which results were derived
4. question the conclusion: do the facts support it? is there evidence of bias? remember correlation does not equal causation.
5. uncover assumptions and biases
6. question the source of information
7. don't expect all the answers
8. examine the big picture
9. look for multiple cause and effect
10. watch for thought stopping sensationalism
11. understand your own biases and values

Where did I find these notes, you ask? One of the thousands of writing readers published in the last 10 years? A research guide? You'd think so, wouldn't you? I mean, this is a great little list of exactly the kinds of things we attempt to teach our students with respect to writing in both our first and second year studios, exactly the kinds of things the good folk in English and Cultural Studies try to get students to use with respect to reading, so it stands to reason that this nice summary should have come from such a course, right?

Not so. The origin of this list is...

Human Biology: Health, Homeostasis, and The Environment, 3rd Edition, by Daniel D. Chiras.

Who'd have thought to look in a biology textbook for this lovely, clear, succinct list. When I was building my teacher toolbox from prior assignments, prior courses, textbooks I don't plan to use, etc., it never occured to me to check my Biology 101 textbook. So I'm glad I found that note; glad I took the time years ago to copy that information out of the text so I could find it amongst notes I was tossing.

Daniel Chiras, by the way, has written some cool stuff with emphasis on sustainable living and building practices. Along the way, he has managed to ruffle some feathers, as this article notes. Now, if the conservative folks in Texas want to reject his work as “anti-free enterprise, anti-Christian and anti-American," I am definitely in favor of its wholesale adoption and widespread integration in a variety of school curricula. There is certainly an enterprise to be developed around sustainable living, just as there was around wasteful consumptive living. Not only is sustainability not anti-Christian, it reflects sound Christian doctrine, from God's first instruction to Adam to steward the earth through Christ's instruction to his disciples to travel with the bare minimum they needed, and to his believers everywhere lay up their treasures in heaven rather than accumulating things on the earth. Sustainability is also perfectly in line with Thomas Jefferson's vision of an American built as a society of yeoman farmers (leaving aside, of course, the obvious problems with slavery, etc.). It is American to have freedom to claim land (even if not fairly) and build wealth (even if not fairly). But it was, originally, also very American to conduct one's affairs after a moral imperative. That part seems to be missing in much of our history.

To return to the point, though, with Madeline and Becky's recent comments on sustainable living in the wake of Katrina, Dr. Chiras's work seems newly compelling. You can find him here. Other bios appear here and here, at sites of organizations who support sustainability.

Posted by cageyer at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2005

teaching - week one

*phew*
That's how I felt yesterday when I left class. Glad to have navigated the week, feeling like I was either completely off or on autopilot or otherwise not really on top of my game at all. I think I did okay, and my students were engaged, so I think it went better than it currently feels like it went.

I'm teaching two different courses this term. MW afternoons I teach WRT 307, Professional Writing. This course is required for some of SU's programs, notably the School of Management. On the first day, all but one student acknowledged taking the class because it is required. That one student, unfortunately, got edged out of registering for my section. I was upset about that, but glad to learn that he had successfully enrolled in another section. I hope he likes it. Anyway, 20 students, juniors and seniors, some with real world work experience and some not. Some experienced in a wide range of workplace writing, some not. I think it will be a good mix. This week, we discussed the genres of workplace writing, assigned the Genre Presentation Project and scheduled presentations. In addition, they have written a short essay on what they expect the difference between academic and workplace writing to be. For next week, they have to write a letter of application to my class and accompany it with a resume. So I think we're off to a good start there.

My other class is a WRT 105, meeting TTH at 8 a.m. It's a weird sensation to finish a class at 5:00 in the afternoon one day and be back but in a different class at 8 am the next. The week felt a little off getting used to that rhythm. Since the TTH class meets before the program office opens, I have to be prepared before going into my MW class with all the stuff I need TTH. It requires a bit of planning and forethought.

I'm following the shared syllabus for the course, even though I'm not required to, because I believe the assignments are well-written, deliverable, and serve the tasks of academic writing well. The first unit keys off of the university wide summer reading selection Life on the Color Line by Gregory Howard Williams. The campus has really taken this reading up, to the point of potential overkill for some students. This week, my students read an essay by Manning Marable, which is the introduction to his book The Great Wells of Democracy. I became acquainted with this book in an earlier graduate course I took and found it provocative and compelling. I was very pleased with the work the students did with that essay. Their journal entries and discussion around the two texts this week indicated we will have good, productive, sometimes contentious class discussions around the issues of race in this country. I'm also working to keep their focus on the writing, on why and how certain kinds of writing have more authority than others, how the claims in the texts are being presented and supported - the kinds of things they will need to know how to do in their academic writing here and beyond. So far, I feel very good about the assignments and the results.

I didn't have any classroom or equipment problems. I feel good about that, given what Tyra had going on, and some of what I heard other folks talking about during the week. I did have a rather painful start to the week when I stepped out of Crouse Hinds hall on Monday afternoon without realizing it is a step down. I wrenched my foot pretty good, and after continuing to walk on it all day and into the evening, got home feeling like it was broken. So I was a little foggy Monday afternoon in class, and a little bit still on Tuesday morning. I think it's all good now.

This weekend I hope to get on top of what's to come so I don't feel so scattered. I'd like to return to the classroom on Tuesday morning with a good sense of both schedule and calendar (that is, the work my students will be doing in the weeks ahead and the way my time will flow as I move through those weeks). Every semester is a new rhythm; this one just feel more fragmented than most.

Posted by cageyer at 12:10 PM | Comments (1)

August 29, 2005

First Day

Today is the first day of the fall semester, and my first day to teach. I feel strangely nervous, or maybe anxious is a better word. It's been over a year since I was in a teaching stance. Although I'm sure I'll be fine once I get there, I have pre-class jitters. This is normal for me. When I was conducting seminars all the time, I was anxious all the time, even though things always went well.

I have both syllabi completed, copied and ready for distribution in class today and tomorrow. I've got calendars for the first units in both classes, which buys me a little time to remember the really cool stuff I wanted to be sure I got in this semester. My Blackboard sites are getting populated, if not as fast or as prettily as I'd like. So really, everything looks good and seems good.

I begin my student life tomorrow. I have books for both courses, and some sense of what a "typical" week will look like. All I have to be sure to do now is schedule in some time for exercise, study, and blogging.

Posted by cageyer at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2005

Calling all composition teachers...

Another gem at 43 Folders.

Follow the link - it's interesting.

Posted by cageyer at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2005

Correctness counts

I found this wonderful entry from Jennifer Rice about building one's blog. Great advice to lay alongside the other helpful tips we've had in Networked Rhetorics. But notice Ms. Rice's comment, the first one on the list, on what will instantly disqualify a blog from link eligibility.

I couldn't help but think about the debates we have in our field over sentence-level pedagogy and other forms of teaching "correctness." Apparently, correctness does still count, even in the blogosphere.

Posted by cageyer at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)