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!

Proofreading for the Obvious

My last section of ENG 120 wrote their Diagnostic Essays this morning. While they wrote, I started grading the first section's essays...suffice to say, there is a reason why they are in my Composition course!

In the midst of scraping my poor eyeballs over the essays, it occurred to me that instead of merely handing out my "Professor G's Proofreading Notation" sheet and blabbering through the whole thing in class this semester, I should make the kids work for it. Okay, so that sounded quite a bit harsher than I meant it to sound, but, it's fairly clear to most people that the more effort a student puts into a particular project, concept or lesson, the better she learns it.

So. I am going to split up my fresh-faced little butchers of the English language into groups of 3-5. Each group will have a set of ten questions about the most common knives wielded against proper English grammar:

1. What is a 'fused sentence?'
2. What is a 'run-on sentence?'
3. What is a 'comma splice?'
4. What are the eight (8) parts of speech? (side note: I do not allow students to use questions or exclamations in academic writing unless it is part of a quote).
5. What is 'verb tense?'
6. What is 'subject-verb agreement?'
7. What are 'transitions?' Why do we need them?
8. What is a 'sentence fragment?'
9. How many sentences are in a paragraph? (I constantly battle that horrid habit middle and high school teachers ingrain in my students' heads that a paragraph is five sentences--this is flat-out not the case at the college level).
10. What is a 'thesis statement?'

I realize that all these questions are dry as overcooked chicken, but there is a method to my madness here: because these are my students' most common mistakes, it behooves me to find out now, at the beginning of the semester, if they even know what they are. If they do, great, we immediately dive into how to recognize, avoid and fix them in the future. If, as I suspect, they haven't a blessed clue what they are, we will start with creating an attainable explanation for each and do some more basic grammar work.

Obviously the last two questions are a bit of a different animal, but as students in each of the three ENG 120 sections asked me, "Is it okay that I included the thesis statement in the Introduction instead of writing it by itself?" over the last two days, I'm pretty sure this will be fruitful.

(And not to leave you out, dear readers, I will be sure to post the most witty, clever and asinine responses to all of the above. There is a problem in our English language teaching methods and it will help all of us to understand what the heck is going on inside those eighteen-year-olds' heads!)

After we've done the group questionnaire, we will check each group against the others and come up with common definitions for the terms for which that is appropriate. Then, I will give the students their essays back, along with my Proofreading Notation sheet. Commence the scavenger hunt! Each student will have to find an example in his or her own paper of the notation as we go through the sheet. (For example: // for parallelism, so the students will be looking for a place where they had a parallelism issue in sentence structure).

More to come tomorrow...

Week 1

Monday, January 9th: 85% of my registered students attended the first day of class. We went through the usual motions of going over the syllabus and I went through my usual speech about having ZERO tolerance for plagiarism and the necessity of attending class (and owning the textbooks).

Wednesday, January 11th: All ENG 120 students are writing their "Diagnostic Essay" in class today. Two sections of the course meet on MWF, so the classes only meet for 50 minute sessions. This means I will receive a batch of largely unfinished essays; I'm okay with this as I'll be grading them and handing them back for revision anyway.

Friday, January 13th: At the moment, the plan is to field any questions about our Blackboard page (I am piloting the new version of Blackboard Learn for all my classes this semester), their blogs (instead of handing in typed, printed journals each week, my students are keeping a blog this semester), or any other housekeeping issues. Once that is taken care of, I'm going to split the class into groups for a series of short "Getting to Know You" activities built around language and vocabulary. I have a few I'm considering right now, but I haven't decided yet which ones I'll really use (Stand by!).

On a slightly different note, I receive an email every day with a quote by an author from Goodreads.com. Today's quote:

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.

- Jasper Fforde (author of The Eyre Affair)

I found this rankled me a bit--but only just a bit. I do believe that reading is a creative process, and as I read, I follow a sort of mental cinema, complete with color, voices, accents, fashion, etc. I truly feel sorry for those who do not experience this vivacity when reading. However, as an English Composition professor, I must insist that this same creative, sensory process is necessary for writing (I doubt anyone would debate that). The problem with many students (and adults) today, I would posit, is that they never learned how to read with this level of engagement and commitment, hence, they also cannot write in vivid, real language. This can't be allowed to continue!