April 26, 2005
tj 308: week 14
technology twists around & surprises us; five years ago i'd never e-mailed anything to a student in my life. today molly was collecting drafts so she could get them back to students with comments by thursday so that they could revise them for next tuesday, & kevin pulled one out of his bag & said "oh, but i'm not going to be here thursday, so..." her first response, while he was still shuffling, was "well, i can e-mail it to you." in those five years we've gotten awfully accustomed to this. kevin's hard-copy, however, wasn't going to work well w/that now-reflexive action.
they solved the problem easily--he works on campus, and suggested that she use campus mail to get the hard copy from our office to his, so he could pick it up when he got back into town on friday, & she agreed to read it first so she could get it into campus mail tomorrow.
the moment of hesitation, though, & the to-both-of-them puzzling reversal of the computer-geek young economics major with a piece of paper & an in many ways old-school prof with an already-become-instinctive expectation for electronic communication was priceless.
Posted by ttobryan at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2005
tj 308: week 13
sitting in being mostly observational is weird. too easy, because i'm not doing the work of being the teacher--and certainly not doing the work of prepping for the course and grading student writing, and although i did have my turn of that the first half of the semester and shouldn't feel like a slacker for shifting turns, i do anyway. it's what teachers do. how can i be the teacher--a teacher, anything like a teacher--without doing the work? and too hard, because sometimes corey looks at me, with this half-smile of conspiracy, like we're students in the same class both learning from molly and watching to see what she does that we like and don't, and that's just an odd position to occupy. there's nothing wrong--or at least nothing i'd know what to change--but it's weird.
the writing she has them doing looks great, from what i've seen of it, but it isn't really passing through my hands unless i pick things up they're workshopping on the days i happen to be in class. molly's and my schedules aren't compatible at all, so every time anything needs to go through both of us--we gave them progress reports last week, and so they needed my grades as well as hers--it's an intricate logistical dance of e-mailing drafts and leaving things in each others' mailboxes that i wouldn't want to do with student papers--the likelihood that we'd lose or mistreat their work is too great, and i want it treated with more respect than that, even if that means that i'm not seeing it. they're almost done, though. 3 tuesdays left, 3 meetings i'll actually be there for, if they're in class the last day instead of just submitting work, and then lord knows what our evaluations are going to look like, or even what in the world they'll choose to evaluate--they have so many choices.
Posted by ttobryan at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2005
tj 308: week 10
molly's got the class working on something simple, but simply brilliant: they've picked a piece of their own writing, pre-existing, created for some other purpose, brought it in one day last week to talk about in groups to generate lists of stylistic observations about it, & are now working on writing what she's calling "museum cards" for the pieces.
museum cards are 250-word descriptions of the piece that do what cards on the walls beside paintings at an art museum do--give a sentence or two of contextual introduction and then tell visitors what the highlights are of the piece, what to pay special attention to, what the author's intentions were & how to seem them evinced by what he/she has written (in the uncomfortable but jarringly awareness-provoking 3rd person).
simple--short, evaluative, reflective, analytical--simply brilliant.
Posted by ttobryan at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2005
tj 308: feeling guilty p.2
(p.1 is in lj; p.3 was 2 days ago, but there's no more room in that for punitive reflection.)
molly's got 308 today without me, because it's thursday, and right now i'm pretty sure that they're in better hands. tuesday i was a dust-devil, spinning up a mess in amorphous form, scattering debris all over the place, demonstrating, i'm sure, to someone who at some point, in the interest of potential pilot programs and the like, is going to have to offer some evaluative commentary about me, that i'm a complete & total scatterbrain with no... classroom management skills? (when i was in education, "classroom management" was a good term. now it sounds authoritarian and emperialistic &... ::shudder::)
despite being an undeniably cool word, "dervish" is not usually the type of descriptor one wants to see on one's evaluations.
on one hand, i really don't feel like it was that disasterous... yes, it looked chaotic as hell, but most of the students--as individual students, although not so much as a collective--knew what was going on or were in close communication with me to get on track. they were writing, reflecting, responding, gathering materials, reading over old work, evaluating, thinking, occasionally collaborating... and i was bouncing from table to table to spot-solve problems, & interrupting them for general announcements when someone would bring something up that i thought everybody needed to hear... it was productive chaos, meaningful noise.
on the other, i feel like i'm letting molly down because she needs to be coming into a class with a plan and a focus and a movement to join, not just a rubble-heap that it'll be her problem to organize & control, like quelling a pirate-ship mutiny. i feel like even if i'm not throwing her into a feeding-frenzy, i'm giving her the impression i am. i feel like even if she's got other reasons to believe i'm probably competent, the example i portray has to be undermining that idea.
and tuesday, when she told me that she was totally okay with doing a lot more being-in-charge-of and letting me step down, i feel incredibly guilty to admit that i was relieved. they're my kids, i don't want to leave them; it's my job & i can handle it; i took this task on and i can carry it out... and i want to resent the offer, and i want even more to decline, but i know i'm slipping, i know i've got too many balls in the air, and impressions and faith are part of it... even if i'm relatively sure that i can fall such that the only knees i really skin are my own, this kind of jester-jumping can't be convincing them. can't be reassuring. can't make the structure-hungry ashleys secure or keep the loose-knit toms in line. can't give anybody the impression that i know jack shit about what a classroom leader ought to do or, god forbid, that i know anything at all about the content of the course, which i don't think i've said anything to let her see (i'm guessing a few of our students believe it, anyway; i answer a few questions right, i don't always say "i don't know, let me look that up"; & if all else fails, my picture's in the "faculty & staff" box of the Blackboard site...)
i've done better. i don't think i'm doing them the disservice that it must look like i am, but i also know i could do far better by them. and while i know that, in the grand scheme, there will be classes that get less of the best of me, that don't gel, that won't look back on me as being any kind of hero whatsoever, if i'm worth remembering at all. and i feel like that jeopardizes me in some ways, like it discredits not only my intentions but those of the people--and programs--i (intentionally or otherwise) represent.
Posted by ttobryan at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2005
tj 308: week 6
this was our first week back on the week-1 plan we started with: i led the class tuesday, with molly there but not doing much (which is gonna change), & then thursday they were hers, & i went to 711 instead, to duck my head into my grad student responsibilities like i was supposed to be doing, which felt a little freeing & a lot guilt-inspiring all at the same time. i haven't been in contact with her since yesterday, so i'm assuming everything went well enough--we'd met & planned & she'd bounced a hand-out off me in advance--to get them through the weekend 'til i see them tuesday.
that sounds--i know it sounds--like i'm the teacher & she's the sub. it won't stay that way. i'm committed to not doing that, for her sake and the students', and as we move into the next unit, which will be more her baby than mine, it should reverse to some degree, at least & even out. yesterday she really was stepping in to oversee a day of class i'd planned & had originally assumed i'd be there for, so i'm hoping those factors justify the impression, so long as it doesn't last.
3 of our students already know her, either because they're in other classes w/her this term or had one in the past, which is good for everybody, & she's really excited about the subject matter & about getting to know them... we're going to meet next week to make sure we've got everything solidified through the beginning of spring break, & then meet again early in the break (before i run off to CCCCs) to talk about the next unit plan, but the preliminary conversation we had after tuesday's class about her plans & ideas sounded great--easily continuous w/what they've started on but also different in tack, so that those whose demands and expectations haven't yet been much addressed will get their turn.
i've talked to miao about his intentions & what's the best use of his time, leyla about her recovering, shweta (with a lot of missing each other) about getting her back on track, & emmanuel about his concerns about having missed a chunk of american schooling somewhere along the way, which i think might make him a little less familiar with some of our vocabulary, but doesn't really set him so far back comparatively as he imagines. i've posted grammatical resources (kudos to cheryl & marc & the mighty grammar gym), hoarded a lot of their work so they won't have time to lose it between now & next week, read a bunch of things in advance of pinning a grade on them as a collected mass when it all comes in... i formally introduced molly & explained what was going on with becky on tuesday, & everybody seemed okay; molly's worried, & becky's worried, that they'll do some panicking about grades and who's doing the giving at some point, but i'm trying to keep a hand on that pulse, & i'm not feeling any nervous flutters. i've reassured them that we'll all stay in close contact & that nobody's going to be pulling any switches on them wherein they were told to work for one person's set of goals & now they're being graded on another, & so far it looks like they're believing me. & i'm believing me, & molly's right there w/me on that, so i'm knocking on wood out of habit rather than concern.
& it's going to be okay. that's really what this entry is about; i meant it to be about what's actually going on in the class, what the students are working on in their projects, how collaboration seems to be going here as compared to in 205... but they seem to be doing okay, or at least doing something that promises to coalesce into a thought-baked textual creation of some type taking on the theoretical complexities of teaching style by way of imitation, so i'm rather freed up at the moment to worry less about the "what" of their activities than about the multitude of different "hows" i feel responsible to at the moment.
next week, i promise content. but there really are a whole host of different layers to pay attention to when doing this, & you can't hit them all every time.
listening to:
Posted by ttobryan at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2005
tj 308: when "we" is spelled m-e?
in a sound--for both body and mind, & i'm applauding, not complaining!--moment of genius agreeability, my brave, esteemed, and wonderful co-teacher has allowed herself to be convinced that in order to recover fully from her traumatic event, she needs to let herself do it gradually, and that to do it gradually means not trying to do everything at once, and that to not do everything at once means to stop doing at least one of the things she's over-committed to, and that the most logical of the things she's over-committed to to stop doing is co-teaching 308 with me.
"m"s & "w"s have a lot in common, especially if you're a dyslexic child.
there's a lot they won't have in common in the real-live application of me taking over this course single-handed, which i'm not quite sure right now whether i'm doing or not. i've offered. i want to. but it's a department, see, with lots of smart, experienced people in it, & it tends to try to involve several of them, & not just one sometimes-hasty grad student to make these kinds of decisions.
if i get to keep the course, single-handed, i won't be, of course. no one in a good program--and for all i bitch, this really is a good program--ever is. "we get to carry each other." if it's just me officially in charge, i'll still have becky on board (i should make a diamond-shaped sticker to that effect, & affix it to everything i own), because she's my fpp advisor--overseeing & advising my teaching endeavors is already one of the other things she's over-committed to. & she's quite willing to help with the planning & the idea-bouncing & the rationalizing & explaining that'll go on behind the scenes. i'll be supported, thoroughly. i'm not at all afraid of being stranded.
i'm more afraid, really, that i'll be asked to either hand the course over or take on another partner.
the first idea upsets me for a combination of selfish & altruistic reasons: i want having taught an upper division course on my resume when i leave here; i also don't want to disrupt these students, who've been great so far about flexing with our ever-changing demands, any further. they've done their part, & then some. i'd like things to fall into & stay in a rhythm for them. i'd like to make that happen, & be continuous, & allow them to finally relax into knowing what to expect next week & having a sense of how they're being judged & how much risk they're safe to take. and--i'm not sure which category this fits into, really--i really want to see where this is going. just because i don't have a detailed plan yet doesn't mean i don't have a lot invested in the outcome. i'm desperately curious. i stand to learn a thousand things. i want to be there to do the learning.
the second idea upsets me primarily because it would completely dissolve the veil. i don't know what i'm doing in this course, although i do think i'm at least almost as qualified as anybody else here to puzzle along with it. i can keep rolling the ball i've started in motion, & see where it goes, & stay just one step behind it, & guide it like a soccer ball all the way down the field. i learned to dribble when i was eight, & i haven't forgotten; i got to practice kicking lumps of ice down the sidewalk w/j just a handful of days ago. but i can't see far enough ahead to explain, to ask for help in an intelligent way, to really include anybody else in where i am right now. so asking someone in--not just to observe, but to co-create--won't be much different from relinquishing the whole project altogether, except for how i'd still have lots of work to do.
would i, honest-moment, be relieved if someone took it away & said "you have enough to do; we'll handle this"? to a degree, yes; i saw that relief on becky's face today & felt a little twinge of envy. but there are burdens i'd far prefer to have lifted, if burden-lifting were an open option... and the regret would be by far the bigger burden.
listening to:
Posted by ttobryan at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2005
tj 308: week 4
status check: still rolling.
when i'm feeling helpless, i visualize the first few weeks of this course like a football bobble. "ooh, he's got it, no, he's losing it, wait, it's in the air, no, his fingers are on it, you know, i really don't think we can call that 'control of the ball!'"
when i'm more optimistic, i see it like scattering wildflower seeds in a large arc over the patch of grass-less mud beside our house last spring. we had no idea what would grow when, & for a while we weren't sure anything would, but then this wild, unpredictable blooming started, & little plantlings that had been invisible burst forth.
i'm hoping, & most days betting, on the seeds. the re-starts weren't wasted efforts to scrap, but planted kernels we're obliquely watering, that we'll come back to with that sunlight, & when we do, strange & wonderous things will bloom.
more specifically, i have several incomplete stacks of papers i keep delaying grading because i'm not sure yet what to grade them for, and i don't want to be capricious; i also don't have all of any of them, and i'm a little anal about that. it's infinitely preferable to me to look at everybody's initial imitation response at once, when i'm in an initial imitation response groove, than to read 10 of them now, 4 next week, 2 the week after, & always wonder where the last three are. i don't want a procrastinated groove, i want to do this, return it, discuss it, move on!
but they'll need these for them to move on, so the ones who are on the ball shouldn't have to wait. sports metaphors infiltrate everything. about the rest of it, though, i'm seriously thinking about just holding on to it until the end of the unit, then commenting on & returning stacks of things to students who i've asked to bring folders to class, & having them respond to their portfolios as a whole, right there, first-glance-back over the stuff they've done. it's not just a stalling impulse; if i do that, they won't have the chance to lose any of the pieces. i'll keep collecting, i'll know where things are, & then when they turn those folders in, i won't have to search & wonder where things are & what in the world they've madly labeled them, because i'll just have seen all of the pieces already anyway.
sounds crazy. we'll see what happens. that's been the most persistant motto of our year so far: we'll see. but at least with becky back online--and planning (knock on wood) to be back in the classroom on tuesday, there's more of a "we" to squint ahead & try to do this seeing!
Posted by ttobryan at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2005
tj 308: week 3
this week was an actual week! i was in the classroom both days with our WRT 308 class--a first, & it looks like this week will be a second, although noël reminded me thursday that i'd said at least once i'd let them meet online & discussion-forum or live-chat a class discussion instead of meeting in person. we don't have anything on board to discuss yet, though, so i'm guessing that's going to have to be later, if the weather warrants it, or maybe even if it doesn't.
a whole week was wonderful. for the first time they felt like my students--like it's possible this actually is "our" class, because it's also-mine.
tuesday we met in the cluster...
and i ad-libbed through the things i'd planned to do, spending way more time on grammar & glaser than i'd planned--becky kept insisting that glaser was easy, & i kept trying to agree, but the class was repeatedly stumped by things i thought were simple. of course, i found kolln more accessible than she did, and they were stumped by that too. these grammar books expect a working-knowledge that i think our students lack--or at least a working vocabulary. they're good at noticing when things are wrong... most of the time. and either fixing them or creatively working their way around them. but they can't tell you that what's wrong w/a sentences is called an "adverb," and getting them to take filler out of examples to create more clear sentences was way more like i imagine pulling teeth would actually be like than i'd expected this to go. so we didn't end up w/time to do any peer review, although i did get corey's paper up on the overhead so we could at least make a few comments as a class. his was too slick, though (he was the one who volunteered), for us to do more than look at a few of his minute stylistic decisions in terms of "i like how you do this," and "i think i would have done this this way instead." not, i'm guessing, a very informative model for the rest of the group.
they're all well-versed in the practices of the workshop, though--and of workshop avoidance. "i read his already. she's got mine. i've already read that one." <-- that's tom & kevin, who seemed to always have print in front of them that they weren't reading & to be muttering about something else during thursday's rescheduled workshop session. everybody else seemed to get something out of it, though, even the people who'd missed classes & come in w/last-minute work no one had pre-read, so that was very nice indeed. the intricate plans i'd laid out for who would read whose when had completely dissolved, and i explained that. "it's going to be chaos," i said. "there's really no help for it. you've read some papers--find those people and share your ideas w/them. somebody's read yours--find that person too. if nobody's read yours yet, find somebody who isn't doing anything." and they did. i don't know why the freshmen lose it at those kinds of instructions, but these guys--in that 30-minute block so clearly not freshmen--choreographed the time beautifully. i did a little nudging for a few people, but even without it most of them were reading & talking about each others' texts the whole time.
the imitation handout i made & the mini-lecture introducing unit 2 that went with it didn't go over as well... i've been reading this stuff for too long to have any idea where to start, and the place i made up as a starting place wasn't helpful, apparently. betsy was so confused as to be almost hostile about it, but i'd already gotten the "sometimes betsy gets hostile" vibe, so i didn't worry much, just tried to connect it to a few strands & promised we'd come back. once we got a discussion going about how it could be negative--before i'd really done anything to convince them of the positive, other than to lay the obvious on the table--they took off & got thinking, though, & that's the part that matters. the handout was just a jumping-off point, and there's jumping happening.
i'm not concerned about betsy. i'm concerned about wade, but he wasn't there thursday to worry about. i'm afraid he saw me tuesday--when i was nervous & overly hyper--as being overly critical & confrontational instead. i wasn't trying to be, but that doesn't matter at all in light of whatever he percieved.
what's both weird & good: lots of people at work offering to help out, cover classes, pitch in however. i really appreciate it, although it seems a little strange, since i was supposed to be teaching this class anyway, albeit w/more input from becky. i keep telling them i have it all under control. i don't, but it's not a hopeless mess, either, and i really think it'll go better if it's a little jagged but steered by only this 1 1/2 pilots than if we get another 2 or 3 involved. my own vision of where this is all going (or ought to be) isn't clear enough to share in a way that'll make help productive right now--which is probably similar to where becky is, really--so i have to shrug it off politely.
i keep hoping, though, that near the end of the semester when i'm still backlogged, &, say, not keeping up w/my workload in somebody's class, that that memory will have lingered & there will be forgiveness. or at least extensions!
Posted by ttobryan at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2005
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 23, 2005
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 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)