Cinnabar and Alabaster

February 10, 2007

what makes you miss this

one of the things i'm doing for one of the chapters of this dissertation is examining a handful of popular handbooks & textbooks to look at what our assigned texts tell students about our beliefs regarding sources of authority--their own authority as writers and the authority of others that source-use in research writing seeks to invoke. doing this requires pouring over the books at a microscopic level, asking questions like "what language, exactly, do these writers use to tell students why they're citing sources in the first place?" <--do we tell them it's a way of entering into broader conversations? a way to prove we know what we know by revealing where we've been? an ass-saving shield to avoid being charged with plagiarism? (i've come across all of these portrayals, actually...)

outside of the specifics of what each writer or group of writers says about x, though, whichever-x, it has to be indicative of something inherent to the nature of these books that even skimming--let alone close reading--the handbook we've been using here for the past few years makes me wish the pages weren't waxy-shiny because i'd really like to set the thing on fire, and reading through the latest edition of Hacker makes me long for a classroom to get back into so i can put my hands on this stuff and teach some writing.

so kudos to the late DH. (xp to lj)

Posted by ttobryan at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

okay, first *week,* then.

that e-mail i sent my classes about that room? the one wherein i told them everything that had been told to me, like a trusting fool? yeah. i trusted the wrong people, the ones working in the building who i thought likely to know their way around it. turns out the registrar was right, there *was* a 147.

i only found this out, however, after conducting my first class, or at least the first 45-minutes-or-so of it, after which i let them go, in a hallway/lobby because the only room we could find was 149 & somebody else was scheduled to be there. we did find a few other locked, unlabeled doors, & it later turned out, somewhat miraculously, that 2 of those doors led into the same overheated little room with something less than the 20 desks the class requires & a chalkboard with one piece of chalk but no eraser, but the bonus of a piano.

there's a new sign on the door now, & today it was unlocked. i'm knocking on wood in hopes it'll continue to open for us, & while i'm at it hoping for another desk or two & maybe some ventilation in the building that didn't happen to be working today but will work by next week? all things are possible, i suppose. a few of them might even happen.

to balance that, because balance is good, the students in that class are a flexible, agreeable bunch who followed me good-naturedly around when we had no room & showed personality during our summer-camp-ish name-game today, & had more to say about their reading assignment than we had time to account for.

the other group, who has a room with a thermostat that might even work, plenty of desks, a window they can see out of, 2 chalkboards, plenty of chalk, AND erasers, had to be coaxed and cajoled into saying anything at all for the first hour-fifteen i had them in there, & almost unilaterally didn't bother doing their homework because... who knows why "because." they just didn't. i think i asked them, in addition to reading (which only some of them bothered with), to write an entire sentence, or maybe two, & make a list with some words in it.

i flex my hands & pop my knuckles & get ready for a semester of ad-hoc dentistry.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

first day (kinda)

classes start today.

i'm teaching a T/H this term, so mine don't start until tomorrow, but knowing my students were getting into it today, i went ahead & e-mailed both classes to (a) let them all know that they're supposed to be finding the 3rd edition of the book everybody else is using the 4th edition of, just in case they're overachievers & prowling around the bookstore early, & (b) tell my 9:30 class how to navigate their way (knock on wood) to the beautiful classroom hidden deep in a residential labrynth we're supposed to be meeting in. the instructions go something like this:

if your schedules are like mine, they say the course is meeting in WATSON 147. i was over in watson checking the room out last week. it's a great room--but it's 149, not 147. there is no 147.

to get to 149, you have to come in the main doors of watson hall, cross the courtyard, enter the doors on the right side of the room/lounge straight across the courtyard from the entrance (the building is a square w/a square courtyard inside), & then go up a small ramp or flight of stairs. the first door you'll see labeled 149 is always locked; go around to the lounge in the center of the area & enter through the door by the lounge TV. sound confusing? it gets better:

because watson is a dorm, the front door will not open unless your student ID gets you past the ID scanner. mine doesn't work--i had to e-mail ID services to ask for temporary access, and haven't heard back yet, so you might find me standing outside the building waiting to be allowed in. i'm assuming all of your IDs will let you in the building, but (a) make sure you bring them, and (b) if you're a UC student or live off-campus and aren't sure whether your ID grants you access to on-campus dorms, you might want to call ID services to ask about that--or at least plan to be early so you'll have time to wait for someone to open the door!

i don't know if i'd find that daunting or amusing on my first day at a new school (i'm teaching 2 sections of research writing for transfer students this semester, & really looking forward to having classes at least mostly filled with students not already seeped in SU attitude), whether it would sound more like an impending headache or a "welcome to the chaos--and you're not alone!"; i'm hoping they're more of the 2nd. in any case, tomorrow promises to be an adventure of several varieties.

this afternoon's agenda: get to campus for a while, collect copies of syllabi, make sure nothing else has dramatically changed in the last few hours, then come home again & clean/organize this office so i can find surface, relevant materials, etc. this semester--i've been avoiding my office all summer & keep looking around at the piles thinking i'd like to keep doing that for another term, but that's really not responsible thinking. i'm sure it's going to be easier to impose discipline on this madly amorphous exam-process if i have a neat workspace wherein i can find things--and where the last 2 years' clutter isn't in the way of everything i want or need to find!

good luck to everybody out there getting started on a brand-new year!

Posted by ttobryan at 10:40 AM | Comments (1)

August 16, 2005

out of the mouths of

Comments: Here is my last paper! I wanted to say thankyou for a great semester! I was apprehensive at first I had no idea what to expect from an online class, but it was a great experience and I feel like I can write again! So I hope you have a nice rest of the summer! And great fall semester! ~Julia

***

A day doesn’t pass when I don’t wonder, contemplate, or reason about something. To make a decision, I must research the subject at hand. Research outside of the classroom can vary immensely from calling different auto repair shops to get the lowest price on an oil change to contacting doctors and reading medical journals on how to best treat a heart palpitation. As seen, it can be cost worthy and even deadly if a person simply believes anything or doesn’t bother to look into different options. I realize now that the best choices can sometimes lie in places you would never look. When researching any subject, I will now look in many different places, not just those that are comfortable and agree with what I believe. It is through research that we think the things we do and continue to discover new things everyday.

***

While I do realize after taking this course that research may appear to mean, merely, “citing,” and the inclusion of a bibliography, there is also something more impressive about research writing, as I have found. The idea that even research writers can be creative in their end product is wonderful. The process of researching will be the same, regardless of the content that a writer is covering, but the notion that a writer can now include information that they gather from places far beyond the local library is a wonderful door opened. Research writing was once a very boring, close minded task in my mind. I realize that the possibilities are endless to an inquiring mind. I have hope that this field will be further extended and that I, as a writer will now continue to look at each issue with an intellectual mind open. This is just another tool in the belt of an educated individual, and I appreciate the opportunity to have learned here.

***

I never took time to make an annotated bibliography before this course. I have actually never known what one was before this course. In the past when I wrote papers I would find research when I felt necessary and just add it in as I wrote. This, now, seems like a very inefficient way to go about writing a sufficient research paper. When the first annotated bibliography was assigned I understood that you would like to know that we are making some progress by seeing that we have some sources but I could not understand why you needed paragraph descriptions on each source. I went through this assignment thinking of it as more of an assignment that will benefit you and it would me. I found out later I was wrong. When it came time to actually construct the first research paper, I remembered that I had all these sources already lined up in a Word document that I had already sent to you. This not only gave me the location of my research so that I could easily relocate it, but it also reminded me of what each source included and allowed me to choose which one was more applicable during a specific time. From this experience I quickly learned that the annotated bibliography is a crucial step in the research process. It is obvious to follow my thinking pattern by reexamining my first and second annotated bibliographies. An except from the first bibliography is as follows:

“CrowleyClan.com." 28 May 2005 < http://www.crowleyclan.com/>.

Gives the clan history, origin of the Crowley name and Irish history. These can help build my knowledge and develop my paper on the Crowley genealogy.

You can see that this excerpt is extremely brief, giving the impression that I did not understand why this was really going to aid in my research process. When I look back at this CrowleyClan.com I can see that there is much more information than just the origin and history. I know that it could not just “help build my knowledge and develop my paper” but also allow me to realize my background and compare the characteristics to my primary family to those that are listed on the website, creating an interesting comparison.
An example from my second annotated bibliography shows that I now understand how important the annotated bibliography is.

Johnson, Bridget. “’Tard and Feathered: How Did ‘Let’s Get Retarded’ Turn Into ‘Let’s Get It Started’?” Editorial. The Wall Street Journal Online 7 Oct 2004. 19 June 2005 .

Johnson talks about the popular song by the Black Eyed Peas and how the word retarded was changed to “started” and how she contacted the ARC inquiring about their actions on this word. She goes onto more depth and speaks about being politically correct. The purpose is to raise a point as to what is too far, unacceptable and how can we replace a word and make it acceptable.

As you can see, I put more time in effort into this second annotated bibliography mostly because I understood the importance and how it can really help in planning a successful research paper. Having put more time into this bibliography I was able to save time by truly understanding what each citation included. From the beginning of the semester until this point, I can fully appreciate the need for this step that I never included in my research until this course.
Seeing that I am an accounting major I find no real need to use research in this specific concentration, but I plan on one day beginning my own business, a summer day camp. In addition to taking WRT 205 over the summer, I also was enrolled in EEE 457, an entrepreneurship course taught at Syracuse University. The course is created to teach students how to write a business plan, which requires a large amount of research. I was lucky enough to be able to apply what I learned in this writing course to EEE 457 and I will again apply this skill when I write a business plan for my day camp. During my senior year I will most likely use this skill in any paper or report I have to. This skill aids in a well-planned, clear and concise paper or report.
I have learned more than I had anticipated while enrolled in this course. I assumed that since I already passed WRT 307 that this course would not be any more challenging, but I was wrong. I learned more in this research course that I have in WRT 105 and 307 combined. The hard work I put into this course created skills that will stay with me and help me form stronger papers. I could have only hoped that I took this course sophomore year so that I could have applied my knowledge in the next two years at Syracuse.

***

Comments: This IS difficult to research... but its fun! that's the point of this one, right? It's pretty cool. :o)

***

I have the tendency to think my research stands alone and doesn’t need clarification. I may say why do I need to explain it if someone else already has? Instead I would just weave citations in my paper as it seemed them should be their own entity and that it didn’t matter what they were but that they made sense and that they were there. I realize that citations shouldn’t be speaking for me, but instead with me. It was a habit that has stuck. This assignment made me see the citations separate from the paper for the first time. As soon as I finished each part of the assignment, I could almost hear myself saying “OH!” (as in “I get it!”) as I was forced to show for the first time my citations on their own. It was so clear to me that I wonder why it never dawned on me before yet obviously as you become accustomed to things you stop questioning them somewhat. It’s almost sad to know that I could have been quoting a plumber while writing about the intricacies of medicine. It just clicked! I HAVE to introduce them, although I have done the research, no one knows where it comes from. There needs to be some authority in citations as you transfer them from the source to your paper otherwise they can be seen as weak, and, rightfully so. This directly ties into the idea of thinking that my research can also stand alone sometimes. It’s not that I’m lazy or don’t feel like writing it out, but I just have the tendency to not want to explain my citations because I fear saying the exact same thing. I think that it makes me feel like I will be “dumb-ing” down the reader and presenting them research to children who prefer repetition opposed to variety, and that can be insulting. It seems like both introducing a citation and explaining it are both important yet obvious ideas. I clearly saw this only when I separated my citations from the rest of the paper and said, “so why does this have meaning?” I hadn’t ever done that before. I think that in my upcoming writing I may do that before I even being to include the research in my paper. Additionally, putting the research into conversation is like the spark that lights the fire—everything suddenly fits and is heading in the right direction. Instead of having to make up for not having a spark, it makes so much more sense just to create one from what you have. I feel like as a result my research will be much stronger, more precise, and more sophisticated.

***

After I recoiled from the total failure of my Loser paper, I made prominent changes to my style and applied them with my third paper (Stem Cells). I kept a detailed procedure in my mind, kept my paper organized and clear, and tried my best to stick to my thesis. I really liked the technique of introducing sources. Looking back I can’t believe I have never done that before my third paper! It’s simple, adds a personal touch to the paper while making your data stronger and it just makes your paper more professional over all. I feel like everything I learned in this class seeped into my head throughout the course, but (unfortunately) I didn’t bring it all together until the third paper.
I now see the paper as an analytical problem – I have to propose this information in this way to make my point. The third paper is the first time I did this ‘engineering perspective towards writing’ and I think it resulted in a very successful paper. This course opened this new outlet for my style and I know it’ll be invaluable in my field. I know I can get into a PhD program but I’d like to do an MD simultaneously; with this background I could do vital research on human disease. When I’m in the field doing research, I’ll have to write grants that are poignant and display the work we are doing so our labs can get funded. With the way I wrote before - I would never be able to accomplish this. Furthermore I’ll be writing papers on my results – I’ll have to be able to explain the data in a concise manner that makes sense to other people, I couldn’t have done that before taking this course.

***

Upon finishing research, many drafts and revisions, I really began to understand how to incorporate quotations into my writing style by introducing speakers and their ideas. This attribute of writing really explains sources so as to show why the readers should believe the author of the quotes used. By introducing the authors of the quotes used, it allows me to focus the reader’s attention to what it is I am trying to prove. Not only does it give the writer credibility and trust, but incorporating this information helps to maintain the flow of the research paper.
I saw an enormous change in my writing skills while composing, and after submitting my final paper about animation.

***

I realize that by breaking up a quote and stating how/why it relates to your claim, is imperative to keep the flow. Otherwise you just have long quotes that lead into tangents and leave your reader to fend for themselves as to what the author is trying to say. Hopefully after taking this course I will keep up these new and sharpened skills and continue to reference The Craft of Research. I know now the significance of keeping the readers attention, the small things the author does can really make a difference to the reader. I feel like I learned a secret that will give me power or at least my words in the future, when I’m writing.

***

Before I began this course, every paper I had previously written was perfectly planned out. I always created outlines with detailed descriptions of what I wanted my paper to say. For project 3, we were given complete creativity and control over our topic. For someone who plans everything to the last detail, this was a daunting task. After much brainstorming with friends and family, I finally decided on the topic of beauty. However, while I knew that I wanted to cover the changing nature of beauty, the topic was so broad I just could not get a handle on it. I tried making one of my infamous outlines, yet I couldn’t quite fit in or figure out exactly everything I wanted to include.
With the help of The Craft of Research, I narrowed down my topic to supporting the claim that concepts of beauty change according to the time and place it is being explored. I went to the library and researched the topic extensively, focusing on feminine beauty and beauty found in artwork. I found research that supported my claim that beauty changes with time, and that beauty also changes with respect to location and culture.
After the first two drafts of my paper, I thought I had the topic nailed to a concrete set up with all the supporting details I had been looking for. However, I was thrown a curve-ball. I ended up finding an article on how beauty is considered extremely dangerous in the nation of Islam. I was absolutely fascinated with this point and wanted to incorporate it within my paper. After much editing, I ended up scratching the whole section about Jackson Pollock, finding it to be too off topic, and added in the section on women in the nation of Islam. I absolutely love this section of my paper. Instead of scratching this fascinating article in the name of preplanned essay writing, I instead threw caution to the wind and took a chance on this new piece of research. My paper now flows much better without the Jackson Pollock section, and adding how displaying beauty is not necessarily seen as a desirable trait all over the world backed up my thesis about the fickle nature of this concept.

***

My experiences with Writing Studio One and Writing Studio Two at Syracuse University were, in a phrase, polar opposites. Where, one class challenged me, the other did not really test my mental acuity. Where, one class piqued my interest in a myriad of different subjects, the other was full with busywork. There is no question as to which I had a more enjoyable experience in. However, there is a great deal of irony in the fact that I have enjoyed Writing Studio as much as I have. My decision to take Writing Studio Two over the summer as an online course was the result of my tumultuous experience taking Writing Studio One my first semester at Syracuse. I feel as if I have learned a great deal in the second level of the Writing Studio classes, and this can be attributed to a lot of different reasons. Firstly, I felt as if every assignment that I was given was an actual, credible assignment (to this day, I am not sure if this is because of my mindset at the time, or because the work was actually important). Secondly, the reading material in the second class was much better than its predecessor’s reading curriculum. Lastly, the techniques and methods that I learned in the second class were much more important than that of Writing Studio One.
The assignments in Writing Studio Two seemed to pertain to what we were learning much more than any other writing classes that I have taken before. Many other writing classes had a lot of superfluous reading assignments and assignments that were just for extra grades. However, in this class, I felt that the assignments actually taught me something. For example, the summary assignments were extremely important to my success in the second unit of this class. At first, I felt they were difficult, but as I started to grasp the concepts behind them, I started to understand the book Nigger a lot more, and this in turn, helped me with the construct of my paper.

***

Now that we’re at the conclusion of this course and all work has been turned in, I can safely say my ideas about critical research have been dramatically affected. Rather than weeding out one small aspect, a skill that I have come to see differently is writing. Sure it’s broad, but it’s true. Writing is definitely a skill that needs to be worked on and can always be improved upon. In the past I thought I was quite good at the skill of writing. I was confident in my grammar and mechanics and just felt that I knew the formula involved to construct a well-written piece. However as I reflect back on my comments and evaluations throughout the duration of this class, there were and are areas of my writing in need of improvement.
After our reflection on a derogative term, it was then when I realized that perhaps I don’t know as much about the skill of writing as I was giving myself credit for. I’ve always been prone to problems with run-on sentences, but my punctuation was never commented on so drastically. I was taken back that I should do exercises to improve my comma use. It was especially eye opening to go through my paper again against the comments that were made. I felt like I was placing commas randomly, in most instances where they made no sense at all. This was also apparent in some of my other earlier works.
As the semester began and I received feedback, I can honestly say it was taken more as sharp criticism than anything else. Sure I read the comments, but simply thought back to my other college level writing courses. Maybe for instance my reflection on book Nigger was just a “bad egg.” However when I finally admitted to myself that I could in fact use some help, it was after reading comments on my paper dealing with the term “bitch.”
Throughout the paper on the term bitch I noticed an overuse of commas. From that paper on, I really tried to focus on the grammatical aspect of writing. As I read books I would pay attention to how the author used commas. Anything I read, I would focus on how words were used and more specifically punctuation. Writing as a skill takes a lot of effort, as I believe I was able to show from my first paper to my last.
Writing is a skill and though today’s society writes less physically, emails are easily sent and instant messaging is the new form of communication. Even though these aspects of writing are generally less formal, there have still been a number of instances in which I had to address a professor through email. I believe it’s these two areas we overlook, because they’re so accessible. Though if you want to be taken seriously or are speaking to someone who is not a close personal friend this is how you are presenting yourself. The reader of the email or letter or memo can’t see your face, they are simply reading something you yourself have written. How that piece is written and perceived by an audience will ultimately be a reflection of you as less of a writer and more a person. In future careers it may be necessary to write interoffice memos or perhaps look over memos for errors. From something as little as an email to a professional working environment, to simply helping a future child with homework, writing is a skill necessary in all facets.

***

The research process is one of, if not the most important, skills a college student must be familiar with. Whatever major classes or even required classes you take you will need to know how to collect data about that subject and figure out what facts are important to use in presenting that subject and which ones are not. This class has taught me many invaluable lessons about the research process as well as research itself. However, I feel the most important and productive skill I have learned from this class is to constantly question everything. Good researchers are good researchers not because they find facts about things and report them but instead because they are intrigued and concerned with addressing a specificquestion(s). It is not just about questioning other people but also about questioning yourself about a certain subject or idea which can make for great research.
During this class we have covered many different subjects and assignments where we first had to obtain information, then analyze the information and then write our own opinions on the subject, the whole time questioning. Out of all these assignments the one that really got me interested and excited was the first assignment about the history and meaning of our own names. During this assignment I discovered information about my family that I had never known before. For example, my father (Peter Leo Varriale) did not find out his real name was Peter until he needed his birth certificate for marriage in his twenties because everyone always called him Leo. It really amazed me that for all these years of knowing my father I had learned something new about him from an English paper. I would have never found out about this if I didn’t interview my father and ask questions.
During the begging of the semester I thought I knew how to write a good paper. However, now after this class constantly picking papers and books apart and exercising these long dormant research skills I realize that I probably wasn’t such a good researcher at all. In the beginning of the semester when asked to read a book and report on it I would read the whole book and tried to remember what it was about then throw some quotes in it and call it a report. However, if I were to receive the same assignment now you would find the book marked up with notes as well as a separate page of notes reminding me of each source’s argument and of course an extremely more informative and intriguing final paper than the previous. This would be because I would be asking and answering questions throughout the whole process.
The skill of constantly questioning everything is one that I feel is extremely important to have in life. Whether you are a doctor, businessperson, lawyer, teacher, or even an artist you must always question yourself as well as the people around you. This class, I feel, will not only help me with things pertaining to the standard grammatical English language but more to stimulate your mind to constantly look at things in life from all its different angles and then from there in turn, you will be smarter and able to make better decisions throughout life.

***

I just want to let you know how much i truly enjoyed your class this semester and that i really learned alot. I know that I may not have been the best student in the begining of the semester, but its been a very hectic summer. Do you teach writing 307? i need to take it this coming year and would very much like to take it with you

here's the prompt the students above were responding to in the longer entries (the few short ones were taken from the comments section of the paper-submission interface):
Part II (informal reflection)

• what have you learned about critical research? look back over the assignments and readings i've given you this semester, and the array of writing you've done in response to those readings and prompts. then choose one productive idea or skill that you've either newly encountered or come to see differently over the course of conducting and writing about your research. in 2-3 pages, write a detailed account of your process:
o what did you read or do that started you thinking or re-thinking?
o where in your writing for this course does evidence of your thinking appear? (include specific examples)
o how is your understanding of this idea or skill different now than it was when the semester began?
o what specific applications can you predict or imagine for this idea or skill, in your life, now that this course is over?
(note: if you don't think you can answer all of these questions about the idea or skill you selected, select a different one!)

---

this is why i do what i do. as the prompt above shows, i didn't ask them to tell me why i was great or why this class was better than any other class; i didn't ask them to blow sunshine up my ass; i didn't ask them to plead for their final grades. i did tell them i wasn't handing these assignments back--so they weren't even writing in hopes of a "thank you." these are just a handful of college students who signed up for a summer writing course, online, probably hoping that it would be easy & require little of their time. 4 of the 21 i started with dropped the class, either for personal reasons or because they found out that "hoping it would be easy" assumption was wrong. the rest of them buckled down, busted their asses, were incredibly valuable contributors to each others' success, and learned a whole hell of a lot, many, as evinced above, surprising the crap out of themselves in the process, & blowing me away.

they didn't all get As in the class. most of them have Bs & Cs, actually. some of them are going to be pissed about that, & the "it's not fair" e-mails will surely follow. but they learned something. they learned a lot of things. so as i sign off because i have to go dig another trench to duck into to outwait the barrage in a newly-developed departmental battle over whether or not i get to keep implementing the policies that let this happen in the first place (they say not, of course, or there wouldn't be a battle), i do it with more than a little confidence. they might win, because they make the rules, but i'm not resisting out of stubbornness. i'm resisting because i'm actually a pretty damn good teacher, & that's just not something i'm prepared to let go of.

Posted by ttobryan at 08:32 AM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2005

205 ego-spur

Citations Assignment
Submitted by: Mxxxxxx Fxxxx (xxxxxxxxx)
Received on: 2005-07-31 9:13:23 PM
Comments: This assigment was really great! It really made me think of citations and quotes in a more clear way instead of just throwing them in.

i know why i'm doing this, anyway.

Posted by ttobryan at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2005

CSS week 5

all day yesterday i wore my teacher-hat (okay, it's invisible, metaphorical, etc.) & graded summaries & bibliographies & wrote margin- and end-comments & calculated grades & e-mailed invididual students & e-mailed the class & updated my roster (again) & planned out their weekend peer-review activity & wrote out patient instructions for using features on the site & typed "commas & periods go inside quotation marks" a good thousand more times & reviewed heaps of good paper topics & a few that look like they'd really like to crash in a firey tangle of half-formed intentionality, but there's only so much listening you can ask of them when they never, ever, even once in their entire lives, will hear you. maybe i should record an audio hello and post it somewhere, link it to the site so that at least i have a voice. maybe they'd like me better speaking in the one that they invent inside their heads. the picture's small, obscure, uninformative. i wonder if i look grandmotherly in their heads, or hippie-lesbian, or 24 and inexperienced? i don't suppose it matters much; they take me seriously or suffer the consequences.

::swings power around like a spiked ball on a heavy chain:: <-- ::is far more likely to hurt self this way than any long-distance course participants::

next lesson: how does peer review & commentary work between peers who've never met each other either & don't have gradebook clout to make their suggestions externally-validated as consequential? 15 out of 20 have posted the drafts due 10 hours ago. i've just sent a nagging note out to the delinquent 5 (2 of whom have been delinquent for enough assignments lately that i'm starting to wonder why i'm bothering to keep nagging, since currently i seem to be the only one in these particular exchanges bothering with much of anything at all). we'll see, we'll see.

in the meantime, juggling: i must convince myself that ths writing i'm supposed to be doing for the last of my graduate courses (eeek!) is both relevant & possible; skirting one possibility or another has drug this out for months already & it's starting to make me sick of myself, frankly.

Posted by ttobryan at 07:49 AM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2005

CSS week 4

so how's the online class going?

it's ambiguous, actually, in the true sense of the word: i like it, and it still makes me uncomfortable. i'm having some great communication with some of my students, and feel like i've lost/am totally not here for others. i'm becoming even more dependent on expressing myself in text than i was before, which in my real life is starting to feel like a serious handicap, but it's a writing class. if not here, nowhere. i'm asking a lot of them, and feeling bad for pushing and good for challenging. i'm still not sure i'm asking enough; it's hard to gauge time when the class is always "in session" but there's no face-time, no casual conversation, no chance for them to overhear each others' great and crap ideas if i don't announce, direct, assign their attention (and even after doing so i have far less of an idea whether they've actually gone than i'd have about whether they were listening or not when they're before me in the room).

i get enough e-mails and IMs to feel useful & teacherly, but not nearly enough to feel burdened at all; i'm always thinking of things i want them all to know and then forgetting again before i've managed to add yet another e-mail to the baragge. i was smart enough to figure out early on that if i was going to be e-mailing frequent updates and instructional moments, i should archive those on the site so they could check back and keep up with whatever might get lost, without having to all depend on their own organizational skills in that capacity.

i'm starting to learn who's who and what sort of things to expect, at least from some of them; i have some frequent contributors and semi-frequent AIM-pingers, some worriers who e-mail me long, twisted questions about what seem to me like simple things. i like when they do this: it's a chance for me to be more articulate, to address them individually, to be a person out here with ideas and questions too, not just the Source of Assignments and Grades, which is what i too-much feel like, especially in what i project as the minds of the ones who aren't talking, aren't consistently doing the work, are checked out even while their names still on the roster swear that they're signed in.

i've managed to annoy dustin 2 or 3 times already, but after i scolded him for sounding like a whiner in the first e-mail he sent me about it, i've gotten nothing but polite inquiries and comments from him, and we've engaged in a productive discourse about some of his questions and concerns; i figure if he comes out of this not entirely thrilled with me, but has learned to think twice about the tone he's sending when he sits down to send e-mails, especially in a professional capacity, which at the moment he's doing and i hope he remembers to keep, then this has already been valuable for him, and i'm a success. i screwed up yesterday, failing katie on an assignment i'd forgotten i'd agreed to extra time on because she'd been having trouble getting a copy of the textbook, and she was perfectly kind about reminding me of what i'd said, which of course i remembered as soon as she said it, and i changed the grade at once.

overall, i'm a little out of the rhythm of it--sometimes i'm a few days later in getting back to them about work than would really be most helpful to guide the next thing they're supposed to be doing--but i'm getting there. i'm learning, they're learning: i just hope some of what they're learning is about research. if teaching a research class is a classroom instead of a computer lab or library is hard (and i kvetched about that a lot last semester when i did this course in real life), teaching it online to a group of students whose resources i can't imagine--i have a few in town, a few in NYC, one in jersey, one in colorado, one in france, one in turkey, and a few whose locales they've never shared--is a little bit ridiculous. all i'm really doing is gathering online writing-resources for them, outlining assignments for them to test those suggestions on, and commenting, always feeling like i'm doing so belatedly, on the ways they haven't really done what i'm not sure they had any way of knowing they were supposed to do. but i'm giving them lots of graded chances to contribute ideas-only with no formal constraints, and the ones who are leaping in there will do pretty well even if they never do get their MLA citations in order.

the ones who aren't doing it, though... i don't know why they're not doing it; that's what bothers me. it could be that they're slackers, or that they just don't care. it could be that they have more important things to do with their summers, and are planning to re-do this for credit later; it could be that all they need is a graduation credit and they've already calculated out the minimum-contribution they need to put in & that's all they mean to do. but it could be that they don't know what they're supposed to do, and aren't doing it not out of laziness but because they're unaware. and if that's true, it's my fault for not finding a way to make it more clear... even though without them here to talk to, if they don't ping me via one medium or another to ask, i have no way of knowing what's clear and what isn't.

to that effect, i'm trying to put together an early midterm-grade for everybody to hand out early next week (since i'll be away all weekend and the last assignment i'm planning to reckon in is due tonight at 10, or 12, for dustin, since i wasn't awake enough to argue with his bad math when he asked for extra time). maybe seeing ugly letters will spur a few to action. maybe seeing nice ones will relax the others. i feel like it has to have been longer than 4 weeks already, like we've been doing this forever, like we're going to run out of time, and at the same time like we've barely started. a few of them have nothing to their credit on the list at all--but i've talked to all of them. intentions are gliding and soaring, flapping madly about, limping a little--they're all over the globe. we can only wait & see.

Posted by ttobryan at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2005

CSS week 1.5

the summer online course went live--kind of--last monday. it was entirely re-located and officially enlivened--depending on who you acknowledge as "official" this time--last tuesday. i think as of a day or two ago the last of my students contacted me to say something, although i'm not sure yet that all of them have actually gotten into the site and made the technology go.

the rant about the technological collides (a little reminescent of tectonic plate movement, at least as it was happening) is behind me; anyway it's not like i didn't expect a snafu or sixteen or so. i hope we're almost done, but i'm not holding my breath about that. in the meantime, a few discussion forums have been going on at the site, which is good; people have e-mailed me questions and concerns, which is also good; one girl even found me online, like i assured them they were all welcome to do, which is even better; and they turned (most of them) their first actually-gradeable assignment in last night.

now i just have to figure out how to grade it.

i mean, i know how to grade it. i wrote the assignment, i know what i'm looking for, i've told them what i was looking for; now i just have to read each piece, see whether or not they've done what i asked, and determine how much of a consequence small infractions warrant. easy. but. i also have to comment. i have to talk to them. end-notes, margin-notes, whatever. and therein lies the stalling-point that's had me looking at these all day, updating site content, sending e-mails about fifteen other things, and continuing to avoid starting to grade/respond to anything.

writing is a sensitive business. writers' words are... vulnerable. they've taken risks, to commit them to the page. and while that's true of all writers, it feels different when the page is all i have. i don't know the cadences of their voices to help me fill in what a phrase is probably intended to convey, when it doesn't quite. far more troubling--because i read things by writers i don't know all the time--is that they don't know mine.

i'm sarcastic by nature. cryptic, at times, in commentary, although i try not to be. succinct. i had to quit teaching middle school because my little darlings (no sub-i) didn't understand sarcasm and i'd accidentally make them cry. i don't worry much about that when i'm commenting to people who know me in real life, who've seen me "smile when i say that," who've heard that my voice is warm, who hear me drawl & call them "sugar" after i've just told them you can't do that with a comma in this language. and i'm pretty good at it. they don't cry often. i'm usually pretty-well liked, and at least pretty-well understood. me-in-person & me-on-paper complement each other rather well, i think. and here, i've got no avenue through which to show that other side. no real way to balance out the pieces. smiley-faces in mass e-mails get overdone really easily. perhaps i should forward comic strips around. i certainly don't want to encourage them not to take me--what i assign, what i say, how i critique, instruct, and analyze--seriously. but i also really don't want to make them cry.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:56 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 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 06:50 PM | Comments (0)

observation

dave nentwick's 205, 8am, thursday, april 14th.

at 8:02 there are 4 students in the room, and 2 whose things are there but whose bodies aren't. "don't sit too far in the back," he warns me after welcoming me to the room; "i'm gonna be putting you to work. i'm terrible at keeping secrets!"

the plan for the day, he explains to me and the 4 students there, is to work with handbooks and sentences. he and i debate the relative merits of a few handbooks we've worked with, while he waits to see who else might trickle in. "do they all have the same one," i ask him (mine don't). "i hope not! you all set, matt?" he asks, turning his focus to a particular student whose project seemed a little uncertain last time they'd talked.

his plan for the day, he explains, is "a little healthy competition, a game with sentences--i have sentences from things you've written over the semester that i've been pulling out that we're going to play around with. any other questions or problems before we get started?"

"my computer had a virus," one student explains (the logistical snafus never end). "so my e-mail's been broken. that's why you haven't heard from me. i have everything in hard copy, though."
"hard copy is like cash," he assures her; "it still works in most places."

at 8:14 the 2 girls they were waiting for come in with handbooks--they'd gone back to their dorms to fetch them--and the rest are still idling in front of computers or scanning the web. over the next 5 minutes 2 more of them appeared, so he tired of waiting with a total of 8--2 teams of 4 at least made his intentions plausible.

he calls them together up to the front of the room, assigning them to groups & telling them to get together, & puts instructions for the game on the board: for each sentence he puts up, they have 3 minutes to locate/identify the problems with its commas (1st team to do so correctly gets 10 points), then the winning team gets a chance that bumps over if they fail to name the problem in grammar-speak for 5, then they have 3 minutes to compete to find the relevant sections in their handbooks for 10, and for 5 each at the end can point out any other problems in the sentence. "i didn't want to lecture at you," he explains, "because talking about grammar can be as boring as anything on the entire planet, so i wanted to have a little fun with it. if i were making more money, i'd have a prize for the winning team, but you'll have to make do with honest competition." i'm designated as the judge of good revisions & the tie-breaker for disagreements, which i manage okay--i concur with most of his assessments, have purely stylistic disagreements with one, and do a probably inarticulate job of trying to explain the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, which is really not easy to do without a whiteboard marker that works to make examples with.

as a class, in the time they have left, they only get through 3 of his 9 sentences, both because the many-stage nature of the game has them spending a lot of time on each one and because they're all lethargic about the whole affair--or perhaps just in general. each step takes coaxing each time, and is met with a lot of quiet resistance. "i don't know. i haven't done this since 6th grade. who's got a book?" i don't suppose it's ever easy to get excited about grammar, games or otherwise, and he'll pace it differently next time--you never know how these things will play out until you run them with real students in real rooms. and i'd wager that with 20 students NOT at 8am he'd have stirred up more interaction, movement, engagement (if not earnest enthusiasm).

i like the idea. i'd tweak it, but i always tweak my own after i run them too--games are also on my list of things i need to work on b/c other people do them quite effectively, and variety is always supposed to be better for students and classes--when you're predictable, or at least when i'm predictable, people assume they won't learn anything new by coming & stay home. i wouldn't, however, admit to them that i was trying something new. confidence counts, & grumpy morning-faces aren't usually the best responders to being cheerfully made guinea-pigs of. well. i say that. i usually admit too much of that stuff--i'm not good at keeping secrets either. i'll settle for i'd advise against it, and probably fail to follow my own advice!

watching dave's classes and working with him has been fantastic. that's the short answer. the long one will have to wait until i'm more caught up with writing about my own!

Posted by ttobryan at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

observations: conferencing (2)

friday, april 8th, 3:20 pm
his next conference comes in early, interrupting his scattered attempts to eat lunch, but he just smiles at her and says "how are things?"
"good!"
she's chipper, has a bibliography in her hand, and immediately starts in with a question—she had trouble finding stuff about violence in cartoons at the library, she says, so she googled it & got lots of hits, but "they're mostly opinions—I'm not finding any real facts."
dave responds by observing that opinions are still part of public knowledge: they show trends, reflect what people are talking about—"can we back up," he interrupts, "and can you give me a kind of overview of what you're doing and what you see it looking like?"

she explains—it's obvious that they've talked about this relatively recently and she's re-explaining—that she's planning a report about the effects of television violence in the form of a children's book, she's thinking of "giving a survey to kids" (by which she means SU students who used to be kids), & "maybe just research."
dave asks her to specify: "what kinds of research might you get or have you been looking for?"
she recounts the trouble she's been having with finding sources in the databases (my first thought as i was listening was that she probably really needed better keywords; i'd have rolled over to the machine with her & tried a few, or at least asked her to produce a list of the ones she'd tried next time) and describes one editorial she's read that really intrigued her.
dave suggests ways a writer can center a piece like that & come at it from different analytical angles, investigating its agenda & using other ideas to do that.
"i'm having a hard time," she says, getting to what i was already seeing as her biggest problem with this project, "because there are so many places i can go."
"can you do all of them," dave asks, giving her the benefit of the doubt, "in the kind of project you're envisioning?"
"i think it would be really jumpy—from one topic to the next."
he offers her some advice about narrowing—that she go through what she's found so far and read for her interests, common themes she sees reocurring, connections between them—look for ways to connect key elements because she won't be able to do everything her rapidly expanding topic makes possible.
"how do you isolate variables to link them to behavior?" he asks rhetorically, having pointed out a ridiculous net of possible variables already—"it can't really be done."
he asks her next about how she envisions her audience, and they talk about the "for dummies" book series as a genre.
"are you going to draw?"
"i might, a little bit. i might use images from cartoons."
"good—connecting claims with examples." they talk a little about what kind of cartoons, what the virtues might be of doing that. "are you gonna make like a book-book? front cover, back cover, bound & everything?"
someone in the class is apparently making her own paper for her project—the range of possibilities for project-scope & the created artifacts to demonstrate their work is really broad.
they return to discussing the potential for her to highlight the editorial she's found, talking about ways to pull out and center its claims to refer other sources to, and then move into talking about how she might do interviews or even simple surveying to gather more information—he suggests strategies so simple as lists of check-boxes or open-ended informative questions—"so and so says x; what do you think about that?" "it also sounds," he says, "like maybe you're having trouble with the scholarly stuff." he's got an old paper from a previous year's student whose bibliography he offers to send her, & suggests she try experimenting more with search terms—"who do your editorials mention? what surveys or sources do they cite or refer to? go to those places first."
then they pull their chairs together to look in detail at what she has so far on the bibliography she brought this her, and he asks questions about each one: "who are these people? what do they say their mission is? who works for them? what clues about this organization can you get from its url?"
he sends her off with an overall evaluation of "cool" & some ideas for "round 2" of her searches—"work over the weekend," he tells her, "and then in class we can sit down together and poke around a bit [on the web]. i don't have any other questions if you're okay."
she is, or says she is, & heads out looking purposeful, while he turns to me to talk about how he's structured the assignment, what ideas she started with and abandoned already, & how beautifully some of their projects (every year) are envisioned, which visions some of them will follow through with triumphantly and others will neglect to the point of atrophy.

Posted by ttobryan at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

observations: conferencing (1)

friday, april 8th, 2:15pm
1-to-1 conferencing in dave nentwick's office.
dave asks the student's permission for me to stay when she comes in; i'm at another ta's desk with a pad of paper dave's torn sheets out of for his own note-taking. she's seen me sitting in the back of the room before & says she doesn't mind.
"so how are things," he asks, starting off really generally: "feeling like you've got a direction?"
"no," she says simply.
"you bagged your proposals & all that stuff we talked about before?"
"well, no, but…"

she describes her tentative intentions for doing some interviewing, for a focus & approach for her topic—"i have a few questions i'd like to run by you, actually," she says in reference to the mention of interviews." "my friends pay more attention to late-night tv than the news as sources of information—i'm going to try to find literature on this."
dave re-states his understanding of her topic & asks her to relay her major claim & intentions.
she explains that she heard a new version of a media story she was relatively familiar with from a professor whose expertise she trusted, which led her to wondering what the media wasn't disclosing.
dave re-states again: "so you experienced a kind of disconnect. seems to fit in with the gist of the course—the influence of media on popular opinion." her interests so far seem to point in two directions, one toward an interest in finding out what's really going on in the story she's researching, and another in finding out where her peers actually get their impressions of & understanding of this & other current events. it seems a little overwhelming, & she's waffling.
dave encourages her to "[not] throw out a topic too soon until you've talked to people" & asks her about her plans to do some interviewing.
she explains her plan for sending out a series of successive e-mails with only a few questions in each one, because she knows when she gets surveys from people if they have a lot of questions she won't answer them; the sample she's considering is about 10 of her friends in california.
"do you have a hypothesis in mind for what you expect to find," he asks, & she explains the media version of the story she thinks everyone has heard. "& what might you do with these pieces of research," he asks again, to get her thinking; she responds by sketching out an array of things she's seen directly or found reference to in other places.
"do you have a sense of whether you'll be able to get archives of shows?" when she says she really doesn't know, he rolls over to the computer, talking halfway to himself and halfway to her about what materials he thinks might be available through communication studies or the library's website. he finds her a link to the "archive of television news," but nothing about late night programming. "know anyone who tapes them? i don't know anything about how tivo works—"
she doesn't know anyone who tapes the shows, & explains that you still have to plan ahead of time to record things on tivo, so that won't work either, & they start talking instead about how she can use interviews to find out from people who do watch the shows what impressions they got from watching them, even if she can't get ahold of the shows to watch them herself—"quiz the people who said they got their information here—what facts seem to be the most memorable? what other media do they consume?
"is that sensible," he asks her, when they've gotten a handful of possibilities out there: "does it make sense?"
"yeah."
"are you feeling any better about it?"
"no." they both grin when she says this, she a little sheepishly, him warmly; he's got almost a half hour left and a wealth of good ideas.
"what are you worried about?"
she says mostly she's having trouble finding "scholarly literature," and she's concerned about the lack; he suggests some places she can look for more support, but reassures her that the few more scholarly sources she has, combined with the more popular accounts fitting to her subject that she's already working with sound pretty good to him!
"once i get researching!" she adds, and then "oh—my questions!" pulls out a typed list of potential interview questions to hand to him. "i was just wondering if you could add anything—or take away their bias."
dave reads the questions aloud (another thing i need to get better at doing) and reacts to each, letting her know which ones look clear to him, which ones he's kind of guessing at & that she thus needs to further refine. "this is really the hinge question that lets you move from these general questions to this more recent phenomenon," he says, identifying a rhetorical shift she probably doesn't notice herself making in the middle of the page. he takes a really in-depth look at the content and implications of her questions, pointing out what seems to be missing and that there's a discrepancy in focus—the opinion questions seem more centered around the right-to-life debate while the others are more about the media, and either set could easily be branched in either direction, but she needs to decide exactly how she wants to structure the conversations and her findings. when she agrees that he's making sense, he moves on to making some suggestions about how she arranges the questions, to talking with her about the pros & cons of interviewing via different media—phone calls instead of e-mail force you to be more structured, he pointed out, and always remind whomever you're interviewing how much time or how many questions is/are left—"it lets them know they're near the end & makes them more likely to give you good answers."
"okay, i guess that's it," she says. "i need to figure all this out soon, because they're going to forget about the [current media firestorm] case."
dave reminds her she needs a detailed proposal plan for tuesday—"how do you plan on presenting all this?" he says it's something he's planned on asking everyone, and sounds to me as if he's both letting her know he's not directing the question only at her and reminding himself.

Posted by ttobryan at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2005

tj 205: week 10

despite the fact that doing so runs entirely contrary to my understanding of blog-ethics, i'm fully intending to go back and fill in a few of these missing weeks. i have my doubts about blog-ethics anyway, to be truly honest, and the point of having a record rather exceeds trying to live up to them anyway.

this week we're at the "have started doing lots of research, have gone through a few rounds of proposals, are thoroughly committed to topics, and are out in the world gathering & starting to write" stage of unit 3; next week we're meeting in individual conferences monday & wednesday & then getting together friday to collect annotated bibs & start talking about drafting & style.

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.

Posted by ttobryan at 01:55 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: animals on wheels | plot lost sixteen

Posted by ttobryan at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

tj 205 week 6

we're teetering on the edge of being finished w/unit 2 & sliding into 3, & i let myself be bullied into extending the deadline of the one into the gearing-up period of the other... although i recognize that that's really just linguistic dodge-ball: they weren't actually bullies, & i didn't decide anything that didn't make sense; it would have been more arbitrary to keep the date just because it was decided-on than to change it based on polite requests for a little more time to coordinate around group members' schedules.

as for the groups, they seem to be... wildly various, but problem-solving on their own & not crying to me for intervention, which is really all i ask. they're going about it very differently, and i'm trying to be pretty hands-off about it:

eugene & landel & tanard are doing a lot of their work together in athletic tutoring, & always look a little scattered about it, but have astute questions & observations to make when i come around to see how they're doing; tiffanee & casey c. are having a little trouble working around a rush week issue, but seem to be juggling it with aplomb on both sides; george & nicole are so on top of the working-together deal that they're making each other nervous about whether or not they're overlooking something, i think because they both think this should be harder than it is; i'm not sure what john & javier are doing, but every time i check in they have either a question or an answer at the ready; bryce & julianna and the tacie-casey-jon crew are so organized they make my academic work look like a train wreck. jen & ken are kind of a train wreck in their own right, but they're aware of it & taking steps--maybe not the best steps in the best order, but they're learning from the stepping anyway, & that's really what it's all about. i'm a little nervous about scott & jesse only because so very much of what they're up to is going on behind the scenes, but they keep giving me chances to ask one or the other of them alone if it's working, and i'm getting guarded but hopefull yesses from both, so we're just going to keep rolling on.

the big fear with group work is always that someone will disintegrate & take somebody else along, & i think we're in the clear on that; the ones who are a little off-balance seem either to be stablized by who they're working with or working to counter-balance somebody else's "off," so i'm not anticipating any pinpoint-blame-able falls. i do worry that i'm not doing enough... hands-off as a philosophy works for me, but i'm not sure--you're never sure--how much guidance they really need, & how well they really know whether they have it as under control as they seem to or not until the work comes in. we're not spending much class time on the craft readings, because i'm not getting the sense that they need the same babysteps, but i don't want to find out later that i've stepped entirely around anybody who doesn't even know he/she is behind to ask for a hand.

they have a chunk of draft, or most of them did, in class today; they did a global workshop today & have a more specific one monday; monday we start brainstorming for unit 3, close-edit papers, & then they're on their own to finish up for friday while we carry on. we've talked about claims, today they were scrutinizing each others' introductions for background, problem-stating, & responses, describing concluding strategies, & trying to account for main & supporting claims (i should really have them share those findings on monday before we get to the close editing)...

so, yeah, we're rolling, rolling, rolling right along.

listening to: jill scott | honey molasses

Posted by ttobryan at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)

February 21, 2005

rolling with whatever "it" comes along

670 semester 2 observation 2

stats:
dave nentwick, WRT 205, thursday, 2/17/05, HBC 009, 8-9:20 am

materials:
2 handouts, one an overview of annotated bibliographies explaining what they are, what they're for, why they're a good idea & what different types of annotative elements they can include, with a few example entries on the back, & one outlining questions to answer about each others' papers w/space to fill in representative observations.

students:
by 8:07 he's got 8, sitting 2, 2, 3, & 1 at the cluster-tables, but he overrides that will-to-entropy this time; after his intro he drags them into the center to work at the table interactively such that eye contact & conversation happened--and they did.

david started slowly, letting the students trickle in while he concluded an argument with the copier; it was a snowy, slow, grey morning, & everybody seemed in rhythm with "slow." when the handouts were ready & it was too late to keep stalling to see who else would come in, he shared the papers with them & talked through the annotated bib assignment due next class, for which they need to have citations & 4-5 sentence annotations ("make all three of these moves: summarize, evaluate, & reflect--how does each source fit into your research?") for everything they'd found so far for their projects.

while tedious in production, annotated bibs are useful research tools, he explained, ones that make comparing, contrasting, & aguing from a wide array of sources much easier. "we've already actually done all of this," he added, referring to the citing & summarizing & responding in short paragraphs they'd done previously--"so if you've been keeping up, you've done this for a lot of your sources already & will just have to cut and paste those in. if you don't have them typed up yet, you'll need to do that, but then you'll find yourself cut-and-pasting elements from these summaries into your papers later on--and your final works cited page will just be a matter of cutting and pasting too."

with that arranged, he put them in groups--since a third of the class wasn't there, their original groups weren't going to work, so he asked them to just come in & work 4 & 4 at the ends of the long central table--to re-do tuesday's whole-class conversation about sources & what writers do with them in specific contexts in small groups focused on each others' artifacts. "share the 3 copies of your homework that you were supposed to bring... if you didn't, you'll just have to improvise." they didn't, but they didimprovise; one group pulled papers out, traded, & started reading, the other pulled nothing out, pulled their chairs closer, & started talking.

improvising was the theme of the day; when dave went through the sheet of questions & things he hoped the students would talk about, it was detailed & sounded time-intensive--he had high hopes for the intricacies of their conversations. when they got going, they went fast, & zipped through the questions, so he had to keep juggling, sliding back & forth between groups to ask harder questions than the ones they were trying to take up, to push their analysis deeper, to make examples out of whoever's work was on the table when he came back by, & that seemed to be effective; when he'd leave each group, they'd keep up with the strains he'd started. the paper didn't provide as much guidance as he'd hoped, so he had to do more work to get out of them what he wanted them to put in, but with only two groups meeting, going back-and-forth worked just fine.

one elaborated worksheet task, broken into sub-questions: 1) "think through your opening moves--when i read through your last papers, i noticed a lot of variety in how you approached beginnings, so there are a lot of different ones in the class--the more options you have on the table, the better you can make decisions about where you want to go"; 2) "the blank space is there for you to jot down others' ideas"; 3) "consider why--what are the reasons for your choice? what does it allow to happen? what options does it limit?" then, at the end of the sheet, he left space for a brief reflective paragraph saying "which things you've heard in the group will be the most helpful or likely to influence your writing."

one thing i learned today, from eavesdropping on david fine-tuning students' use of vocabulary in the group nearest me: "flack" isn't just any criticism of the media--it's specifically "conservative groups critiquing the media for being too liberal"--"it's like propaganda--we can't spread it, it has to come from the highest levels of power in society."

what's cool: his students are working with a wide & admirably diverse array of sources, from academic papers to popular publications to the D.O. to live tv news broadcasts to letters & editorials. i wouldn't feel qualified to offer advice & guidance to them for all of those things, b/c i've never done most of those kinds of research, but dave's either better qualified or just braver than me--and does what i try to do & want to do--ask more of them than i know how to do myself, because the goal is for them to become better at what they need to know & be able to do, not for them to leave knowing more of what i already know than they did when they arrived.

what's also cool, although more clearly to me, i'd imagine, than to them: the group i was closest to had this conversation while he was working with the others.

"this is hard! my 105 teacher was like a kindergarten teacher, like 'okay, kids, now we're gonna do this!'"
"mine was like somebody's grandma."
"i got an A in 105--now i'm like 'aaaaaaaa!'"

"aaaaaaaa," according to this teacher, anyway, is fantastic. the end of kindergarten, the beginning of some legitimate challenges. brain-stretchers. things that hurt, & require hurdling. kudos to david for pushing them there, and for the tone of rueful but entirely not resentful frustration in the "aaaaaaaa" i overheard. she might not like it, but she knows--and believes, not just is able to repeat the maxim--it's good for her.

(+ critical glaring note to self: dave's planning next week's conferences, & i haven't scheduled any yet!)

Posted by ttobryan at 11:04 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: gordon lightfoot | canadian railroad trilogy

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)

tj 205: week 5

(no, i don't know exactly what happened to week 3--it must have been swallowed in that kennedy reflection.)

unit 2 is pretty much running itself, & i'm delighted. we've been lucky enough to get lots of chances to be in the cluster--teaching at 9:30 means that not many people are meeting then, & so the competition for the space isn't fierce at all--so they've gotten to do some unstructured initial-research browsing, & then to walk away from it to read a few chapters of the craft of research to talk about & do mini-activities from, supplemented by improv debate, of course, & then monday we're back in for them to get serious now that they've had a chance to reflect on both their processes & the specific projects they want to undertake.

nagging (although ostensibly already either solved or solveable--look, resident anxiousness, refusing to be logically quelled!) concerns:

• where the hell is rachel? i have a lost student--she's e-mailed me to explain, but then not shown up again. i understand things go on in their lives, i do, and i could leave her to sink or swim about it, but (a) i'm a worry-wart & too much of a nurturer, & (b) she's got a partner she's never met with on a project whose timeline is almost half over, & that's, as we say in the business , "seriously uncool." the good part is, jon, her assigned partner, picked a topic that another pair is already working on, so he's been gathering data with them. if she doesn't come back, i suppose i just have 2 groups of 3 instead of this being a purely partners activity like i meant it to be.
• all of my school football players are in the same group. anne says--we're on exactly the same page about it--that that's fine; they have the same schedule, they meet together in athletic tutoring, so it's far easier for them to do the work this way. i'm neither pampering them nor isolating them in any substantial way. it's fine. i worry anyway.
• the african-american kids in my class (i think they all are this time so i can call them that; last semester both of my visibly black students traced their roots to carribean groups, not africa at all) still mostly sit together at the far-end of the table from me. as a group (because visually all but one of them usually place themselves to create that designation) they'll move & mingle without objection when i ask them to, they answer when i call on them, they volunteer, they're with-it in the work, & they're openly interested in my input when i get the chance to walk trip around the tightly-cluttered little room to make it down there. everything seems a-okay. i shouldn't worry. but if someone were just to look in and not linger, it would look like we might have a problem. so while i don't feel like we do, i can't help but wonder if that visual impression isn't a problem in its own right.
• did i piss scott off on wednesday? is that why he didn't come on friday? and does it matter--not does he matter, but does it--should it--matter--if he's staying home because he took offense at my being busy? he's a grown-up. his decisions to attend class or not are entirely his own. i can not be responsible for what these guys put in, only for what i do, for the kinds of invitations i make, the kinds of guidance i offer, the space for experimentation & risk-taking & productive failure i create (allow? they have an awful lot to do with that creation too--and certainly the power to completely undermine my intentions if they so choose).

Posted by ttobryan at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2005

on observing, & being observed (p.2)

670 semester 2 observation 1

stats:
dave nentwick, WRT 205, thursday, 2/3/05, HBC 009, 8-9:20 am

materials:
handout about the burkean parlor--brilliant & already stolen from
hw/source activity questions--also brilliant; i especially like q#5

students:
11 total; 8 women, 3 men, all sleepy-headed & reluctant to speak at 8 in the morning; some of them proved more prod-able than others over the course of the period, & i'm interested in seeing them again to get a broader sense of that dynamic. 009 is a big room for 11; the hum of the machines creates a lot of white noise, the lights are bright and far away, the empty space dominates. i didn't think of it then, but now i think if i had only 11, i'd have them at the front 2 tables (5 machines ea) + the main station & kept it closer in.

because this is an observational write-up of a colleague worthy of dignified treatment, i will not say anything connecting tim from his student-run "we want to change voting access in new york!" organization to head lice in homeroom.

i will simply move beyond tim, and the polite introductions dave made for the class of him and me and the class's brand new student (who would have been # 12 had someone else not been missing), & get to the part where dave prefaces the day's activities by explaining & contextualizing their homework assignment--not just what to do, but how it's like & unlike the last assignment (they're writing another in a series of summaries, but this time specifically not looking for a scholarly source, trying to find something produced by mass media for its necessarily wider audience. he also gives them some guidance as to how to do this, suggesting (while they're at the screens to see them) specific databases & database categories to search to find the kinds of sources they're looking for.

next, he "gathers them around the boardroom table" (009's perk) to talk about the handout. he does the vast majority of the talking, but not for lack of trying--he asks good questions, he gives them time to read back over the sheet & think, he's incredibly patient, in that silent room, w/the wait-time, & when he eventually does give in & start calling names, the agreeable tone of their responses suggests to me that they're relieved to have the silence broken too, but had forgotten how to do it.

once he pulls the first few teeth, they extract really insightful gems, make non-obvious comparisons between the different research-models the handout presents & at least a handful of them are willing to discuss the relative merit of those models for their own thinking. bridget says "in burke you're more passively listening & you just fall in but in the encounter model [adapted w/permission from anne & margaret's pre-publication intro] there's more active seeking-out of relationships and meaning." danielle says "the parlor looks more unchangeable, whereas the encounter loks more like you can change things, have opinions--it's more free-flowing." carla says in her research she starts in a place like the parlor model, & then moves more towards the other. dave's wrap-up gloss of her & others' contributions: "the 2nd one puts you in the driver's seat; the parlor model is relatively static--it's a physical room you're sitting in, it's contained. the encounter model explodes that 'space.'" he added connections to technology & the web changing space-metaphors & then bridged the handout to the work they've been doing with readings & the database searching they're supposed to do next.

then they get back into the groups they were in before (he adds emily, the new girl, to one) to workshop drafts, looking specifically at their work with outside sources. their tasks:

• list purposes other than agree/disagree people have for using others' voices
• list other possible purposes you/they could have
• find & eliminate hanging quotes
• notice/create/improve language used by the writer to connect outside sources to each other
• & what became the homework question: choose 1 place in your paper where you bring in another author's voice, cut & paste it into an e-mail to dave, & explain what your purpose was in this instance & how it connects to your larger goal in the essay.

what was really smart & cool: using the room's technology in a way i hadn't ever thought of. he put the questions in a word-doc on the main screen & through the projector so everyone could see them, gathered responses the way in a "normal" room you'd do on the blackboard, & entered them in under the appropriate question, so that the gathered information could then be printed & copied as a handout for everyone or uploaded to Blackboard for everyone to access &/or print at will. written out, that looks simple, obvious, & like something i know i've heard suggested in some form or another by someone, but when he was doing it, it was quick & clever--& allowed him to combine agendas, recording their ideas & observations, making them collaborators in the handout's creation, & also making sure the things he wanted them not to miss made the list.

before they leave, he reminds them again what their homework assignment is, reminds them also to answer question #5 for hw since they didn't get to it in class, & collects papers.

then, as they leave, he tells me he was nervous having me watching. nervous? the great and mighty dave? being watched by li'l ole me?
i told him i forgot people got nervous, because i'd been doing this for so long, but that i thought (true story) he was terrific, & (also true story) i've already stolen & implemented more borrowed ideas than the burke passage i read aloud off his handout to my class today.

Posted by ttobryan at 01:15 AM | Comments (2)

February 11, 2005

on observing, & being observed (p.1)

i prepped for class today more than i usually do, because i knew in advance an observation was happening... or at least because that knowing coincided with my plans to do something i wasn't entirely familiar with already. usually i don't plan much at all; i sketch out intentions, & then i go w/the flow. & i think it was prepping that made me a little nervous, because usually i'm also not nervous at all about being observed. the little disappeared once i got going, of course, b/c i was responsible to 16 people who had something to learn from what i had to say, & 1 there (ostensibly) to critique, & critical mass of interest/purpose triumphs really easily in that direction for me. & then my usual approach takes back over--i didn't do half of what i planned to, but elaborated on what was working well to let it keep on doing so.

anne came to be my stealth-observer, but she wasn't very stealthy, mostly b/c i gave her no opportunity to be--fortunately, she didn't want to be, & responded beautifully to me throwing her into a demonstrative skit with no warning whatsoever (i picked an easy question). & the class was terrific.

"housekeeping" first, of course; here's something to keep in mind about blackboard, who else has responses to hand in, here's a re-cap of why you're revising summaries (i should e-mail a reminder just to make sure we've all got it all straight, b/c i keep adding tiny things to make sure that they end up w/a paper trail to refer back to come write-up time) & by when & what "summary" really means anyway.

then i read them a passage of burke on the "parlor model" for visualizing the researcher's job/positionality, having them close their eyes & visualize the actions he described, & from there took them to thorley's key verbs that encapsulate the same idea: there are ongoing conversations out there about whatever you want to learn about. your job is to 1) locate those conversations, 2) listen in to what's being said by whom, 3) report back on what you've heard (geniuses, they got right away that "summarize" was another verb for that step) & THEN & ONLY then "weigh in" with your own ideas, interpretations, questions, responses.

we talked a little about that, in terms of the work they've started doing as conversation-locators & listen-in-on-ers w/their projects so far, & that seemed to clear up too a little of the confusion about how summarizing isn't responding, b/c they're distinct steps in the model, & the i asked them "so let's say you've been kicking around this question about why you're here--why this is a required course in the first place. where might you locate conversations about that to listen in on?" & they had a few good ideas, & then eugene pointed at me, & then i said "oh, look, & there happen to be two of us here!" & threw the question at anne.

& we went back & forth for a few points talking about some pros & cons to the requirement, & she brought in some scholarship on both sides (crowley & i can't remember who in opposition), & they listened. & then i had them summarize/"report back," sharing what they wrote down around the circle, & then i had them "weigh in" first on paper & then sharing those contributions too, & then anne & i decided we needed them on the next decision-making board, because they brought really thoughtful & good considerations to the table. (& obviously i'd completely forgotten about any baggage related to "observation" i might have wandered in carrying by then, b/c we conducted this conversation w/me sitting cross-legged on the table between tacie & julianna, b/c i wanted to be closer to the rest of them & not just standing at the board-end far away.)

& then i asked them & their partners to start "reporting back" a little on paper about the conversations they'd started listening in on so far in their research, & we spent the last 15 minutes of the period on that, with me wandering around to listen in & contribute & ask questions.

it was great. seamless. building from one idea to another. they started out w/slightly dubious faces, got into it in the middle, & i had to interrupt their busy working to dismiss them at the period's end.

as anne noticed, as we walked chattily back across the snowy, sunny campus, they're a great group. far-ranging in opinion, background, experience, interests... but all with interests in putting something into this, & getting something out. i may be totally faking my way through this course, but i'm not in any danger of drowning at all. because they're great. and this really is--more than it's ever been in courses i've taught, although i've often idealized about it being (& said it was to try to nudge it there) a collaborative project. i told them this course would only be good if they made it good. they're making it good.

Posted by ttobryan at 10:51 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)

tj 205: kennedy in retrospect

i'm a little behind, as you can tell, although since i wasn't actually here friday to finish out the week, i suppose being off-rhythm isn't entirely inappropriate. it's the first day of week 4, and we're at the end of our requisite "researched text," which i'd be remiss if i didn't mention i've had plenty of hesitation regarding teaching and talking about. i tried not to show that. i tried to act confident, act relaxed about the potentials for disagreement, & to channel that into the discussion-forum--which was amazing, and i need to figure out how to get it into a format i can post ethically.

we had a fantastic discussion today about people's reactions to kennedy's book as a whole. most of them said they'd recommend it to others, that they were glad they'd read it, that there was a lot in there that either they hadn't known, or they thought others needed to know, or both. stepping up to be particularly articulate about it, george said "i would definitely recommend it. because i think a lot of people--especially a lot of black people--don't know nearly enough about the word, about its history, about what it means." jesse added: "we think about a lot of this as being history, things that happened a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago. but a lot of the examples he's talking about happened just a few years ago. this is still relevant--it's still going on today."

they were also observant about its rhetorical properties; john said he'd reccommend the content but only moderately recommend the book itself, because the abrupt ending frustrated him. he was looking for more of a conclusion, more guidance as to what to do. even as he said this, though, he started making room for qualification; as others immediately stepped in to point out, there are no answers. kennedy knows, just like they know, that exposing the complexity of the issue doesn't solve the tension underlying it. "you can't just tell people 'don't say nigger,'" george said. "they won't do it."

but it's still a book, as several people noted, and we have expectations about books. "we expect conclusions," casey said. "this looks like he just... quit. his whole conclusion is four pages long & doesn't say anything." i brought up authorial choices & the tension between form & content--they agreed that the content required leaving the discussion open-ended, but most of them thought the form demanded something else, & that put us in a great place to start talking about the choices they'd soon be having to make regarding their own projects. they'll have to choose voices as well, and consider the audience they want those voices to reach. landel spoke approvingly of kennedy's stylistic decision to be straightforward, using plain language and putting aggressive ideas right out there, rather than circumlocuting using the legalese that as a harvard law professor we can only assume he has at his ready disposal. "he was writing to everybody. regular people," eugene summarized.

the best part was their comfort level. george and eugene let the word fall un-self-consciously, nobody else flinched, they contributed ideas that didn't entirely agree without frowning at one another, people who hadn't been saying much spoke up (maybe feeling particularly qualified by the subject matter?)... it was a good class. i don't want to say "i did that," because i didn't. they did. if i'm lucky, if i'm good, decisions i made helped enable more than restrict the possibility from forming, but that's all.

Posted by ttobryan at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2005

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 evoluti