Traffic!

Thanks to the three-day weekend, my only ENG 120 class meeting thus far this week was at 9:30am today. Or, should have been, I ought to say. I spent thirty minutes sitting in my car, staring at the building where my ENG 120 class meets while police ineffectively directed traffic around an accident .5 miles from the University. Frustrating, to say the least.

I had plenty of time to compose the questions my ENG 120 cherubs would have to answer on their beginning-of-class quiz; however, I did not have time to double-check the syllabus, or I would have realized that three of my uber-clever questions were from a chapter they hadn't read yet. As they say, "Well-laid plans of mice..."

While my dedicated students doggedly attempted to answer questions on a reading that hadn't done (and didn't bother to question me on it until I asked them to turn to a page number in the chapter in question...How many students do you think read any of the reading at all?), I gathered my wits about me, turned on the projector and computer, and threw together my gameplan for the morning.

(Did I mention that I also did not get through grading all 65 Diagnostic Essays this weekend, like I had planned?) We began by going over START, a technique The Confident Writer suggests for organizing and writing an essay:

S = self (what is my role?)
T = topic
A = audience (who are they?)
R = reason (purpose)
T = tone

We did call and response after I introduced the five words; example:

Me: "Why is 'self important when planning and writing an essay?"
Student: "Because I'm the one writing the essay?"
Me: "Brilliant."

To help along the glaringly obvious, I chose a simple, fake, essay topic to use as an example: "Why do people go to college?"

After making it through START (simple though it is, some students absolutely love it and rarely use any other technique to get from their essay topic to the final product. More power to them.), we reminded ourselves that we had two types of Prewriting yet to address.

Still using the "Why do people go to college" prompt, I asked the class to get out a piece of paper and just start writing anything and everything that came to mind about why each student is going to college. I timed them for 5 minutes, told them to disregard neatness, spelling, grammar, etc. When I noticed people slagging off after 3 or 4 minutes, I told the class as a whole that if a student found himself distracted, thinking about breakfast, he should write about breakfast until he made his way back to the college topic (Ex: I am so hungry right now I want breakfast I can't wait until class is over I hope I have enough money for breakfast I can't wait to finish school and be making real money [hey look--you're back at college!]).

When they finished the 5 minutes, I explained that they had just practiced 'Freewriting,' and for it to be most effective, they should go back through and cross out any irrelevant parts, underline anything clearly important, and circle anything possibly helpful from the wordspew.

We discussed using "Questions" as a Prewriting technique, but as it is not my favorite and I do not find that students think it helpful, I summarized it like this: "Use the question words-Who? What? How? When? Where? And when you get to the almighty WHY, ask, 'Why does anyone care?'" The idea being that at no stage in writing should the writer or reader be able to say, "Who gives a d---?"

We then used our brilliant ideas for why we go to college to introduce what I call "Professor G's Formula for Awesomeness" (and yes, I do accept this as a correct answer on tests and quizzes).

Formula for Thesis Statement (guaranteed never to fail):
Big Idea + 3 Main Points

Ex: I go to college (BI) because a high school education just isn't enough anymore (MP 1), my family needs a strong example (MP 2), and I want to be in a better place in life at my parents' age than they are now (MP 3).

See? Awesome. No student passes my class without being able to write the world's most effective thesis statement. Ever. (If you are out there, Karl Yergey, I want you to know that I learned this from you in AP U.S. History in 10th grade!).

Tomorrow and Thursday will bring a day of chaos (otherwise known as editing Diagnostic Essays); each student will receive her essay back, along with my proofreading notation, and we will do a class workshop on editing (including a fun "proofreading" scavenger hunt in each person's essay!--oh fine, so it will be fun for me, heh!).

Cheers for now!