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April 15, 2005
tj 205: week 13
papers are due monday.
monday night, after we do some last-minute editing work in the computer lab monday morning, but monday nonetheless. my sense is that very few of them have actually planned out the things they need to have all in order for this to work out well, and i'm terrified at the prospect of them turning in 12-15 pages each of crappy last-minute work, but they haven't asked for an extension, & i wasn't going to be the one to propose it. i might do it anyway, giving them 'til wednesday come monday, as an 11th-hour bonus, but i wasn't fool enough to offer today: nothing would get done all weekend!
the other thing i'm terrified about: i've completely not planned for the reality of having 12-15 pages each of paper--crappy or brilliant--to grade in addition to everything else i'm supposed to be doing next week. i've spent more time this semester in downright denial than probably combined throughout the rest of my life.
we spent the week doing small doses of sentence-level work: how (again) to introduce sources, nate's generic these-words-must-be-included thesis formula, prepositional phrases & "tion"-words as indicators that you're making an awful lot of things--probably too many--into abstractions, abstract phrases as less effective (especially when they're endemic) sentence-subjects than more direct "characters" (i hate that term, but so long as i'm using this book--and i like most of the rest of it--i'm stuck w/their word-choice) as acting agents.
we spent the last 2/3 of the week workshopping drafts, too. i gave them lists of things to accomplish, but i didn't do a lot of fierce enforcing. i'm always afraid i'm going to impose too much of my structure on their projects--they have their own needs & worries & agendas. i don't want to waste their time with lists of questions to answer that work well for some of them & totally aren't relevant to where they are for others. but i think i need to do a better job teaching them how to be readers & listeners & suggest-ers. i think i give them too much credit, not for being more capable than they are, but for being more knowledgeable and confident.
Posted by ttobryan at April 15, 2005 06:50 PM