Cinnabar and Alabaster

we've actually been writing in this writing class, which i'm quite pleased with. i don't feel like they're doing enough... stuff sometimes--i have a hard time coming up with heuristics when anne asks. but although i'm still talking too much--they're not really discussers, & i have to figure out how to engineer that differently next time i teach this class--i'm often standing by not saying anything at all, because they're writing. and about that part i feel pretty good.

friday it was summaries--i asked them to read part of the first chapter of a sequence for academic writing, & bring in a source they'd found for their papers, & then after we talked about the chapter (including their technical difficulties (a) with getting the pdf to open read-ably (3 of them) & (b) with remembering to do the reading (3 others)) they each wrote both a 2-3 sentence annotation-sized summary of a 3-4 page chunk of one of their sources & a 3/4 page elaborated summary wherein they were supposed to take the book's advice & break their readings into small summarizeable chunks, to make sure that what they ended up with accurately represented the author's distribution of & emphasis on different ideas.

then, almost out of time already, we spent 7 or 8 minutes reviewing wednesday's work with warrants (from chapter 11 in the craft of research)--i couldn't put our nice board-diagram back up because yesterday, inexplicably, the room had a blackboard eraser but no chalk--and had them take whatever they said in their 2-3 sentence summary was the main claim+reason in their piece and find & write out its overarching warrant.

the book does a not-terrible job with warrants, although the chart they use as an example has to be built exactly backwards every time you draw it. working just with the book, it's not very intuitive. once we got it on the board, it made a lot more sense... at least to me. some of the people who most would have benefitted from the demonstration, though, were the ones not there. too often that seems to be the way. tiffanee, for example, who's making a good effort but is easily frustrated & seems to feel like she's just missing a few things everyone else takes (or seems to take) as already-obvious--i try to set up these lessons & activities to build some of those conceptual bridges, & she always seems to miss the days i do it. or casey, who picks these things up really quickly if he's here for them. neither one of them is chronically absent, either; it would bug me less if they were. they're usually there, just not usually on the days it would probably be most beneficial for them if they were.

& that's at least a lead-in to the thing that's been starting to worry at my mind a lot lately about my teaching (& everybody's): to what degree do we design classes--individual lessons more than entire courses, for me, but i've heard other people say they do the opposite--around one student, or around 2 or 3, when there are 20 of them there who may or may not have the same or even similar needs & interests? do we always do that? (& only notice when that one student isn't there the day the lesson's just for him or her?) do we have any choice but to do that? we couldn't teach 20 lessons per class even if we could know exactly where they're each at & what they most need to hear.