Main | February 2005 »

January 30, 2005

quotable

Underlying this misconception of distinct, linear phases [in the composing process] is the idea that language is a muffin tin; that we have meanings, a kind of batter we then pour into molds. What we need, instead, are ways of thinking of language as an instrument, a means of seeing and articulating relationships. (Berthoff 25)

(from the making of meaning, or "the book of many 'm's," subtitled metaphors, models, and maxims for writing teachers.)

i don't have a home for this gem as of yet, but i didn't want to lose it. perhaps it will be pivotal some time down the road; perhaps it's already been so pivotal, in the 25 (ouch) years since its 1980 penning, that it's a commonplace i'll never need to pin-point. in either case, i like it, for its no-nonsense presentation of what jen wingard and i affectionately call "the scholarship of 'duh,'" and because she uses the word "muffin." c'mon, how often in the serious scholarship you're assigned do you run across the word "muffin"?

the question, though, because once i catch a good c.s. lewis line (this isn't it, but a tangential spin-off i want to come back to later) it's in my skin with permenant marker that takes years to rub off, cell by cell, is "is this a pupil's metaphor, or a master's?"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2005

and

also janet emig's "the uses of the unconscious in composition" (also in twom) is very nice stuff, although it works, perhaps, a little too well. her point, to oversimplify, is that it (the unconscious) is there, is in use, and no amount of scientific language, artful arguing, or deliberate, cat-like ignoring is going to make it go away--by which she doesn't mean just "cease to exist" but "cease to be absolutely crucial to everything that happens on--and getting to--the page."

the result, however, is that now i'm much more strongly motivated to go drink some coffee, fondle soft parchment, grind my own black ink, and write poetry than i am to carry on summarizing and synthesizing academic articles!

Posted by ttobryan at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

the believing [thing]

janet emig, in the web of meaning, presents the summary of elbow's believing/doubting game i find the least insulting of all those i've read, maybe even moreso than elbow's itself—i can't honestly remember right now if i've been to the source or not, only that the idea usually bothers me. emig says:

Essentially, with the believing game, we begin by accepting the author's or initiator's premise or proposition as our own, and live inside her paradigm for the length of the argument. With the doubting game, we find ourselves a congenial vantage and peer critically into the paradigm. Elbow suggests that we can gain the most in any intellectual enterprise by playing both games, but that it is cognitively more profitable to play the believing game first. (155)

and that makes sense to me.  that's productive and good.  what isn't--and what almost all of my experience with this oft-referenced "game" system has seemed to advise--is using the term to talk only to/about teachers encountering student texts.  in that context--not as an "also," because i've never seen it as "intellectual endeavors including student texts," but in isolation--it's always struck me as incredibly insulting. mostly it's the term "game" i can't get over, & the insincerity it almost can't help but imply.   "i, the mighty teacher, am going to play a little game; i'm going to pretend to believe that you're not an idiot and know what you're talking about, for the 20 minutes it takes me to read & respond to this piece, & then, game over, i'm going to return to my normal mental state wherein i know i'm great & you're stupid."  is this how it looks when he does it?  or is this just the resonance of the horrible things that have been done with his idea, which in emig's summary seems highly useful & not insulting at all.  its ramifications are all about the context of its application, though; in emig's summary, this "game" is a reading-tool we should be using in our own scholarly work and teaching to our students, not a farce to enact almost as a weapon against them only when evaluating (and stigmatizing) "novice" work.

(x-posted to compositionism)

Posted by ttobryan at 03:58 PM | Comments (5)

January 28, 2005

blogging (with) students

lowe & williams have--and link to--a lot of really productive ideas for using blogs in, instead of, alongside, etc. classrooms--as teaching tools, as interactive media, as semi-public spaces, as hybrid forms of journaling & peer collaboration...

and i'm really enthusiastic about these ideas. or at least i'm enthusiastic about them as ideas, as terrific ways for other people to engage other students in other blog projects. i don't have any intellectual reservations about class-wide blogs or individual blogs on class-wide aggregators, on closed or open systems... it sounds like an awful lot of play room with huge potential for using new spaces to get new students to do more of the "old" thing--writing--which of course is never really old, because it evolves along with its users and media...

but i have emotional reservations that i don't entirely understand.

(x-posted to 711 & compositionism)

i've had a personal blog--one that's not really a diary because i'm too conscious of who's in my audience, but that serves as a space to keep in touch with my far-off friends and talk primarily about things that are not academic--since 2002 (my goodness, i'm almost old school!), and i don't think i had it running for 24 hours before i started thinking about its implications as a classroom tool. so it's not like i was slow to catch on to the idea.

but since 2002 i've held off on implementing any of those ideas, and not because of the technology involved. (like blogger accounts, livejournal accounts are free, incredibly easy to set up, and terrifically user-friendly. they make closed communities easily, or can be left open. they have an array of who-can-view-this posting functions... all push-button accessible.)

i've held off for reasons having more to do (as i think about it now) with those shifting definitions of personal and private space. blogging with my students, when i imagine doing it, feels like an invasion. in both directions, to some degree. my blogspace is my blogspace--sharing it with friends is one thing, sharing it with a faceless, infinte public is another, but sharing it with students... there's a line there, and things change with its crossing. (i could certainly create an alternate "identity" to work with students online in, and never tell them that the ones i've used so far exist. there are ways to both be "out there" and invisible. but it feels like a place to me--too many viewings of tron as a child, perhaps--and unlike the supermarket, it's a place where teachers--as they appear in my head, however against my inclinations to say i don't see them this way at all--and students--in those same constructions--don't mix.) there's also a line the other way--i know most of my students have some kind of online identity, whether it's in a blogging community, through friendster, or just on instant messenger, and although i've started using IM to conference with students in the past few years, i'm still very respectful of the distance i perceive as appropriate. i almost never "ping" them to initiate conversations--if i do, it's to respond to a question i said i'd gather more information before answering.

i want them to have their world without me in it. the fact that it's in many ways an almost entirely textual (with bright pictures) world makes that more important to me as a writing teacher rather than less--i want to interact with them in ways that encourage/foster writing, sure. but (and maybe this is because all of my teacher-training was focused on the teaching of adolescents) i can't help feel that one of the most encouraging things i can do with regards to their writing is to leave them a space where they're alone--or at least alone-with an audience of their choosing & defining--alone away from me--to do it in.

Posted by ttobryan at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)

tj 205: week 2

so far, so good.

monday, we played around with handbooks, doing a little scavenger-hunt activity to get them acclimated to whichever text they'd chosen, & then did really useful* mock-ups of an annotated bibliography for them to emulate for wednesday.

wednesday, they turned in bibs, we worked together to get a list of paper 1 criteria on the board as a collective rubric, and then they looked over & made suggestions on each others' initial (2pg-ish) drafts.

today, we met in the cluster, they turned in papers, i introduced the kennedy text (there was much silence. we'll work on that. they don't (get to?) talk enough yet) & an idea of what paper 2's assignment is going to look like, then we walked through blackboard's features together, then they uploaded to the dropbox word files w/their preferences for project-types, & lastly & most importantly, we got into the discussion forum as a class to have a chat about saying/using nigger in class.

*monday, i felt like a supergenius. this mock-bib activity? 3 goals, 1 game. it was terrific. what i asked them to do: 1) think up a few good questions about research & writing work habits to ask their classmates. 2) interview 3 classmates about their work habits & preferences. 3) look up proper citation format for personal interviews. 4) imitating the example i handed out & using that citation information, summarize what they learned from each interview into an annotated entry in a short (3-4 item) bibliography. end result? they got to know each other better, they had to be reflective/reflexive about their own research/writing skills/habits, & they got some practice using the form before having to duplicate it based on their outside research for wednesday.

wednesday 3 new students joined the class. on the last working-day of the unit. i'm not supposed to complain about registration policies & the like at this point, because it's like this everywhere, and there's nothing to be done about it, and if i were smart i'd just plan to waste the first week of class so that all the late-adds didn't start out behind & thereby tangled in my hair, but i refuse. i only have 15 weeks; i'm using them. even if i always have to double-back.

today only one of those new students showed. i haven't re-checked the roster. maybe i scared the others off. maybe they couldn't find the cluster. maybe they just didn't feel like coming in, and will show up monday all blinky-eyed and further behind than ever. can't cross the bridge until i arrive at the river.

the forum is... i don't know yet. people put some good stuff out there. they got right to the crux of several issues we're going to have to take up, and they didn't all agree--right off the bat, there's some difference of opinion concerning the gravity of the word, the propriety of its use, the designations of people who are and aren't (or should and shouldn't be) "allowed" to use it, the way we should handle it in class, the difference, if there is one, between hearing it and only seeing it written. i'm not sure whether i should take all of that input in and do something to summarize or respond to it, or if i should turn that task over to them. my inclination is towards the latter--but am i going to stir up trouble by doing so? and, more importantly, will it be productive trouble, or the kind that creates mistrust and division & will screw up our subsequent collective work?

Posted by ttobryan at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

tj 308: week 2

(the best bit's at the end)
with becky out, everything is different, or at least different from how we'd hoped it to begin to be--with only a single week accomplished first, it's not as if we had the opportunity to establish any patterns. this is not a surprise, of course; one can't expect team-teaching to work out well without one's team. right now, though, everything feels very much--at least to me--as if it's been thrown completely into chaos. there are several reasons for this that are completely out of my hands: the arrival of a new student as late as tuesday, the presence in the class of several students who'd met her last thursday but were new to me, the fact that no one plans a car accident, of course, but beyond that her not only being not there but not really in any shape to be making course-determining decisions. which means i'm on my own. in really deep water.

and i don't mind doing it on my own, in theory. i can swim, i can teach a writing class, i know at least a few things about style and should (at least "should") be able to talk a bit about the stuff.

but we weren't as prepared as we needed to be to have this happen gracefully. we were planning to run pretty loosely with this course, debriefing each other about our ideas, our plans, the actual practices of what-went-on when one or the other of us (which was planned to only ever be me except for a possible snow-day) wasn't in the room & making things up on the fly to go with what the students wanted & needed & where things seemed to be going. it was supposed to happen pretty organically. which can be great, when you have a cohesive organism doing the evolving. but with the roster still changing, the students at varying levels of proficiency with not just software but with writing and talking about writing, and her & my images of where the course needed to go still so nebulous--for each of us, let alone for both of us together!--it's not so much set up for evolution as entropy.

on tuesday, the class tried--or at least i tried--to talk about the reading we'd assigned them from gage, who had thwarted and confused most of the students. i gave them the crash-course of his main ideas: 1) it's possible to talk about style from a linguistic perspective, a rhetorical perspective, or a philosophical perspective, and people confuse each other easily when they don't specify; 2) the major philosophical divide he acknowledges as pivotal, and talks about for the second half of the article, is essentially (although he never uses language this plain) the difference between believing that "style" (form) is divorceable from meaning ("content")--that you can change the style/form of something and retain meaning, or express the same meaning in many different styles--and believing they're inseparable--that a change in style/form always, automatically changes the meaning of a piece. they nodded a lot, which might mean that helped clarify, and might not.

i'm supposed to be reading their summaries and responses, but i already know that most of them didn't get it--so they won't summarize well, and their responses will be worse, reactions to misunderstandings. this doesn't motivate me to get into them or give me much of an idea how to respond. i'm also supposed to be reading the papers becky asked them to write for thursday--originally a project she was going to manage, that she picked up as an idea from her husband's teaching practices & had some idea what she entended to do with--and turning whatever responses i manage into something that guides our work next week. i can do this. (i'm going to keep telling myself that.) really, i could do it any number of ways. but what i want is to do it the best way that's going to be the most conducive to the broad picture of where this course is going & what our driving intentions are, so, lacking those things, my hands are to some degree tied.

this is where the proverbial teacherly "bag of tricks" comes in. "never be without extra tricks in the bag," they tell you. i'm used to planning. i'm used to being more on top of things than i am right now. i'm not used to digging into that bag very often; i have no idea what kind of sentient purse-lint i'm going to find amid the eraser-fluff and candy wrappers i'm sure are down there. i have no way of knowing that what i find and what this group of students wants and needs are going to match each other.

but they're hanging out there in space right now. i can feel it when i look at them. we have no focus, and they know it. we have no cohesive plan. and the fact that our lack of cohesion is corresponding with becky's accident and absence can't help but communicate to them that she's the one w/the plan & vision (only half true, in both ways--she herself only has half of our joint plan/vision, & we collectively only have half of a plan/vision!) & without her we're a wreck (currently quite true)--which means that when she comes back, they'll look to her to carry/save them. i'm not making the grade right now. (this post is one stylistic boo-boo--mainly in the form of stressed-out clichés--after another. this is what happens--have we told them this yet?--when you're too busy and fragmented to focus. whether style and meaning are irrevocably entertwined or not, when you're this flustered, they both suffer--and drag grammatical functionality, as a general rule, right down with them.)

she keeps forwarding me e-mailed questions they've sent her. and i'm answering them--technically it's working just fine. but they're sending the questions to her, not to me. corey's initial inquiry lulled me into a false optimism. their trust is going elsewhere. & i've got to do something about that. because a) this won't work as a truly team-taught class, no matter how much collaborating she and i do outside the room, if the students see me as her assistant rather than as half the team, and b) she's not in a position to be the leader they want to make her right now--envisioning her "in charge" doesn't just work against our agenda, it's going to hurt them, because she's not there to answer (and i am. so i have a lot of work to do this weekend, several hundred pages of reading for L & some conners & white for becky & whatever collin wants us to know & all the planning i'm behind in for my other class aside, because tuesday has to go differently. tuesday has to be pivotal, and productive, and grounding. otherwise this entire experiment is going to unravel before we even get a good cable-knit started.

for the record, tom, tuesday, required no management at all. i have to thank martha kolln, however, for her wonderful example-sentence selection in rhetorical grammar, the book they had a chapter from to begin looking at sentence-level style with. kolln begins by dissecting a paragraph of annie dillard's about weasels, and so the first set of her example-sentences, taken from or based off of this paragraph, are all about weasels. then, later in the chapter, presumably once she's weaselled-out, she builds a grammar excercise out of an extended explanation of the british navy's experience with scurvy. weasels and scurvy. never a dull moment here. tom and his groupmates spent a little too much time looking scurvy up on the web to quite finish their grammar lesson, but a) it was a learning experience, b) it wasn't disruptive, and c), hey, if they're more likely to remember this on account of scurvy, more power to them!

Posted by ttobryan at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2005

711: lexicon

today's new words:
transclusion. bloggers apparently know this word, and use it right and left with great furiousness. wikipedia's entry, like most of those i've come across, can't help but get into coding. apparently this isn't just a verb, it's a technical, medium-grounded verb, a verb that can't be metaphoricized or removed from its physical circumstance of existing only in the non-physical web-world.

and remediation (which is not like "remedial")--"new media present themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media" (cgb).

ex: "hypertext remediates books" (cgb)

and weblogs, as we learned firsthand this morning, don't easily, at least in their current-natural capacities, remediate classrooms.

Posted by ttobryan at 03:18 PM | Comments (3)

611: a starting point:

hayden white's "moves" (categorizations of discursive "tropes"):

(x-posted to 611)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2005

711: blogs and (+"rhetorical") genre

this particular slice of van dijck's article i selected as a direct result of derek's challenge to applying the term genre to blogs (madeline, i hadn't read yours yet when i started this):

i too have the same problem with calling all "blogs" members of "a genre" as does van dijck below:

Weblogs or ‘blogs’ is a rather general container for a variety of genres; the so-called lifelog seems to come closest to the traditional diary genre. But can lifelogs and blogging be considered the digital counterpart of what used to be a paper diary and diary writing? As the cartoon implies, the answer to this question is a paradoxical ‘yes and no.’ Cultural practices or forms never simply adapt to new technological conditions, but always inherently change along with the technologies and the potentialities of their use.

as van dijck points out, the problem with naming a genre "blog" is that there are many kinds of blogs--people blog in many different genres. (i'd never heard the specific term "lifelog" before--how 'bout the rest of you?) but people talk about them as if they are a genre, or a few genres ("lifelogs" vs. "academic blogs" vs. "poly" (multi-authored) blogs vs. ???)--a move that seems to make at least a little sense because they're clearly something other than the print-genres we're used to--so, the logic goes, they must therefore have a genre of their own.

i see the slippage there coming from two places:

1) new technology seems to easily lead to blurred distinctions between genre and medium--a blurring that would never occur in the standard print-genres of the technology we've gotten used to. one doesn't wonder whether a poem is still a poem or becomes prose if it's on parchment rather than notebook paper. it's possible to say that "blog" is the same thing--just a different kind of "page" on which any type of thing can be written.

in their 1997 "postings on a genre of e-mail," michael spooner and kathleen yancey* have the genre-vs.-medium debate about e-mail (the title is misleading; the designation begins and ends under debate, so they never agree that e-mail is a genre at all). the arguments they present will sound similar: e-mail is a way to convey information, but that information can appear in different forms--so it can be used for many different genres. BUT it also allows for, encourages, even demands textual practices that are different from what print media allow, so it creates (or allows the creation of?) (a) new genre(s). their point (that they can't answer the question?) is underscored by the format of the piece--appearing in a collection of scholarly essays, their contribution appears as an e-mail transcript, a print-out of a conversation going back and forth between correspondants, much like these postings turn into conversations in the comment sections. print genres don't do that. one person speaks. another person might speak later in a rebuttal, but both (many) voices don't appear to challenge and contradict each other. in e-mail, as in the blog (and here i'm getting to madeline's ideas), the audience speaks (strikes? i couldn't help it!) back.

2) genre means very different things in the literary tradition, where it's primarily spoken of as a form-based classifying appellation each particular work carries or a set a work belongs to, and in rhetoric & communication fields, where "genre theory" is theory about & the study of the purposes that drive, demand, and modify form. so while coming out of the literary tradition we might look at a blog to see what properties it has on its page, and compare those properties to the propertires of other pieces of writing on their pages, and from such observations decide what generic category to place it in (or that it needs a new one), a rhetorical genre scholar is more likely to look at what the blog does--what need it was created to fill, how it fills that need, what other ways of filling that need there might be--to answer questions about the uniqueness of that need. are blogs just another, comparable way of doing something old, or do they do something different and new?

*in bishop, wendy; hans ostrom, (eds.), genre and writing: issues, arguments, alternatives; portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook publishers. at comppile, search under "myka."

(x-posted to 711; see comments there)

Posted by ttobryan at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

on blinker's barley and mushroom soup

"don't goats eat barley?" -elisa
"and little-lambs-eat-ivy." -tyra
"horses eat barley. that means people shouldn't eat barley." -elisa
"i'm sure all kinds of animals eat mangoes when they can get ahold of them, but that's not going to stop me--them things are good!" -tyra
"mangoes don't look like barley." -elisa

(it's a notoriously bland stuff, just for the record, although i'm not convinced the barley, particularly its aesthetic, is to blame.)

Posted by ttobryan at 02:28 PM | Comments (2)

January 23, 2005

tj 205: plansketch

here's what it looks like at the moment:

details forthcoming, i can only hope...

but that way i mix it up--they work sometimes collaboratively, sometimes w/partners, sometimes alone (or at least w/others' help on individually-defined projects); they have short, quick assignments and longer ones w/more development allowed/required; they have opportunities to do both guided and unguided topic-selecting: lots of room here for a wide range of learning experiences & for them to do a LOT of the work of defining & guiding our foci--my favorite! now i need to figure out a) a timeline for all of this, b) when & on what schedule to assign the craft of research (we'll do kennedy the 1st week of unit 2), c) how & where i'm working presentations in, since i'm sure they're required, d) what role blackboard is going to play, & e) what i'm going to expect/demand in terms of portfolios of informal work. i want to see some of it and interact with them about it, but do i need to grade it? is it enough to give them some feedback (maybe verbal) about what they're doing? can i handle that entirely in conference conversations and/or in the classroom while groups are working on other things, and never take huge stacks of their process-work away with them & home with me?

this is me, giving uncertainty a a GREAT BIG HUG.

Posted by ttobryan at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)

latinate

abdicate, abnegate, abrogate

synonyms, for the most part, do not annoy me. we have them for several reasons: because english has acquired words with similar meanings from multiple languages, or because words initially meaning different things have been used, metaphorically or otherwise, in ways that have caused one or more of their meanings to slide together until they're predominantly interchangeable. we tend to like having lots of words. i'm especially fond of them when i'm writing, because i notice the rhythm of phrases and sentences, i notice when consonance and assonance is working and should be emphasized, or is detracting and ought to be avoided, and having other handy words that mean close-enough-to the same thing but sound different makes more play possible. when, as in this case, though, you have a set that are almost entirely homonymous, sharing the same meter, beginning-sound, ending-sound, emphasis, and most of their spelling, the purpose of maintaining all three of them begins to elude me.

this ramble sponsored by louise rosenblatt's use of "abnegate," my geeky obsession with & thoroughly naïve knowledge of linguistics & etymology, dictionary.com, &, of course, the letter "a."

(x-posted to lj)

Posted by ttobryan at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)

tj 308: "tom-management"

b & i have a student, tom, (yes, that's his real name, but not much of it), who's setting himself up as a person either in need of management or in search of the kind of attention that leads one to consider whether or not he needs managing. we don't know yet. she's a little more concerned about it than i am, but probably with reason--she's more experienced that i am and has probably seen students like tom become the kind of problem you wish you'd done something about early on. i'm mostly in the ignoring school--if what he's doing disrupts the class for a minute or two each time, and he only does it once a class, even if it's every class, 15-30 minutes of tom-time out of approximately 45 class-hours of the semester isn't much to me, especially if acting out a little makes him feel strong but doesn't hurt anybody else.

here's what happened on day 1, when i was there: we had the class in the computer cluster and were walking through the various features of Bb together. we opened a chat-room and asked them all to join it and say something, so they could see how it worked. tom joined (perhaps not realizing that his name would be displayed alongside the comment?) and wrote "fuck yourself" as his contribution. someone else said something encouragingly dismissive (i don't know how else to describe it) that managed, without being directly insulting, to tell him that was dumb, & he dropped it; in our discussion forum later in the period someone else said something else along the same vein. becky, at the time, smoothly pointed out that yes, names were attached, so there were no such things as annonymous chat contributions, and suggested (& i demoed for the group) that he use private messages for such commentary in the future.

it was maybe 2 minutes worth of disruption, he laughed it off, we laughed it off, and it created a window for a side-lesson about the program's functionality: all good.

on day 2 (i wasn't there for this) when everyone was supposed to bring in 2 examples of something exhibiting "good style," one written and one not, his non-written example was some sort of graphic including a man flipping the camera the bird. when she told me about it, i asked her, "does that strike you as continued insolence or self-aware irony?" she answered: "i told him he must have tourette's." later, our continued aim conversation on the topic looked like this:

[becky]: you'll notice that Tom's group set an objective just for him ;) [the groups were defining learning objectives for their own style; the first item on that list was: "refinement (tom)"]
[becky]: that was after I accused him of having Tourette's
[becky]: as for what he's up to: not sure. he may just want attention; he may want to express his independence or disaffection; or he may have a combative attitude toward women in authority.
[becky]: If it's that last one, he'll continue to push until he forces us to a confrontation.
[becky]: I propose just taking a wait-and-see attitude about that, but lso not letting him go further than he should
[me]: i like assuming he's just immature & giving him enough to work on/worry about that he doesn't have time for this silliness.
[becky]: I'm kind of thinking that he has a third strike coming, and then I/we can quietly take him aside at the end of class and ask him WTF dude
[me]: if he wants to work the word "fuck" into everything he writes all semester, & he does it w/finesse & is actually learning about style in the process, i couldn't care less. :)
[becky]: same here

so it's not an immediate concern, but something to keep an eye on. at the very least, he's earned himself a term. "tom-management" is on our list of potential discussion-topics for next week's planning-meeting!

Posted by ttobryan at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2005

611: method/methodology resource

this is the short (9 pages, & good luck w/the formatting, because playing with that was part of my point at the time) piece i wrote as a final synthesis/theoretical essay (yikes) in margaret himley's methodology course in fall of 2003. our esteemed professor has suggested i share it with anyone interested in taking up further examination of the conversation we started in class on thursday. it takes brief forays in several of the directions we thought about but resisted starting down in the interest of time; our conversation reminded me a lot of margaret's class and of writing this paper, so i'm using this medium as it's designed to be used, & linking: here's a downloadable copy of the document itself.

(x-posted to 611)

Posted by ttobryan at 07:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2005

tj 308: week 1

1st day of class: loved the desk-(opposite-of)-piracy, didn't mind the chaos, & felt a little weird about there being only one front-of-the-room chair in both classrooms (ridiculously small 204 & 227) & me being in it--did becky do that strategically because i'm the TA, or because she wanted to sit and watch b/c i've seen her lead the room but she's never seen me, or just b/c she had the option of sitting down in the room to check out the perspective? i should ask--but not for long, b/c there were things to do & i knew how to do them, so i didn't worry about it.

it did feel good when one of the students e-mailed me a question that evening about the assignment, b/c i felt like he was convinced--i was ask-able.

day 2 & not being there i'm not so happy about. she left some xeroxed notes in my mailbox that i haven't looked at yet, & said everything went fine, but i missed it. & i don't know how to build--from notes & maybe some work left on blackboard--on what went on in the real live room. it's like subbing. only it's going to be like subbing every other day all semester, & i'm going to have to find ways to feel less left out--without having much time for catching up, because i don't have it.

right now, i feel completely out of the loop. i've intercepted no more e-mailed questions. i haven't reviewed enough uploaded assignments on Bb (and i need to--that's one of my weekend projects, probably every weekend, but it's also something i should have done between tuesday and thursday to be ready for what happened even when i wasn't there for it). and i haven't had time to talk to becky about any of the details. so it's really, right now, like it's her class, and i sat in & introduced the software on day 1. or at least that's what it feels like to me.

collaboration with a twist. & right now while i love the idea of collaboration, i'm not sure how much the twist is going to skew it out of functionality.

Posted by ttobryan at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

tj 205: week 1

brilliant decision #1: have the 2nd day of class in the cluster (especially nice when the cluster's next door to my office instead of across campus and it's -12 degrees outside), to 1) let students "get their hands dirty" doing something instead of spending the whole 1st week listening to me talk b/c they aren't ready to speak up yet, 2) give them an easy cooperative project to encourage conversation--again that i'm outside of, b/c i'm stationed at the front or pacing around and they're sitting facing each other in small groups--something our classroom simply won't physically allow, 3) introduce them to some resources, to the building where the clusters live, & most importantly the building where my office lives (they'll need that)*, & 4) put off starting out in a groove of any kind.

what we did:

on day 1: "went over" the syllabus (i still need to get better at that, but it's so boring. and i feel like dwelling over-much is insulting, like it implies they can't read. it's much more my style to give them plenty of time to read & then take questions. except that then a) the room is silent, & b) they don't ask many questions. i wish there were talking instead of silence; i'm not naive enough about this, though, to think that me talking (especially when i'm just reading what's already in front of them at them with periodic embellishments) is actually an improvement over silence), introduced/talked about (got a few more questions here, which was good) their 1st writing assignment & the night's homework to get it rolling, played the name-game, & had everyone write names on the board for the visual learners. yes, there will be a quiz.

for HW they called someone who knew how they had been named to do some relatively informal interviewing & searched online for general information about 1) their own name(s) & 2) naming practices in general and/or for specific cultures.

on day 2: in groups they shared sites they had found, did more searching, & then collectively created & e-mailed to me a list of sites their tables had found helpful or informative either about just their own names or about naming more generally. we did a too-fast once-over of resources on the library's homepage (i promised to come back to it in more detail when their next projects call for more detailed research), & then pulled chairs to the center table to share anecdotes about interviewing, what people had found, & the stories of their own naming.

my HW was to compile their lists of suggested web resources & send it to the class (done); theirs is to physically go to the library & get their hands on some other types of sources for these papers.

reflective moment: they seemed busy, curious, a little unfocused but in an exploratory, not-bored way. a good beginning. i'm thinking this is working--starting with a really simple, very personal project to get them to play a little with research tools before we focus in on more ostensibly school-related topics. they all seemed to enjoy telling their own stories. i need to make time for more of that next week--we didn't hear from everyone, it'll help us get acquainted, & discussing research out loud is a habit i want us to get & stay into.

*i saw someone's class come trooping through the building on day 1 having an orientation "field trip." don't know if i think that's a good use of 1st-day time or not--i like & don't like the idea. hm.

Posted by ttobryan at 01:23 PM | Comments (0)

"let me explain..."

"... no, there is too much. let me sum-up."

Posted by ttobryan at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)