Summertime is here again...

Spring 2012 ended with the predictable, although nonetheless depressing, rash of students who thought plagiarism would help them finish their work. Oh, how so very very wrong they were! Several English 120 students failed major course assignments because they copied and pasted material from websites. One failed the course because she copied and pasted in both her last essay, and her research paper. She plagiarized from essay mills, by the way, and everything she copied had terrible grammar errors and made little to no sense. Two World Literature students attempted to cheat on their final exam and earned big, fat zeroes for their efforts. One World Literature student copied and pasted the vast majority of her essay on Hamlet. I noticed. She earned a zero for the paper. Summer sessions means I am only teaching one course, Monday through Thursday, from 3:20-5:20pm. During Summer I, I am teaching English 120, and English 201 (Research and Applied Writing--which I teach as a gender studies course) in Summer II. One student already approached me to tell me that this is her fourth time taking ENG 120... I am still not lecturing, but I also need to request a classroom change, as my class is currently in a VC (video conference) room, and does not have a big white board. For all my technology use, I still need to be able to write on the board! The summer will continue my efforts to engage and teach without "lectures." I've instructed my students to stop me from talking if I've been teaching, uninterrupted, for more than 8 minutes. We are using more discussion, small group and partner work, Socratic method, and interactive media this semester to keep the "lecture" out of the classroom...more to follow soon.

Not Quite Composition

I am teaching Hamlet in my ENG 262: World Lit. II (Poetry & Drama) course right now. We are in Act II, and while looking for "modern English-friendly" resources for my students, I stumbled upon this hilarious re-working of the play.

I also found a few riotous Youtube videos on Hamlet, but they are mostly funny because I know the play and love Shakespeare, so I will only be sharing one or two with my students.

My department chair is sitting in on my ENG 262 class today, so rather than watching a handsome young Mel Gibson terrorize poor Ophelia half-naked (II. i. 75-98), I'm putting together a small-group activity focusing on imagery and themes in the play.

I'm going to assign a theme to each pair of students (I have 11 in the class) and ask them to find a line in Act II that uses imagery to support the theme. I found a suggestion from a high school teacher to have students write poems using the lines as a starting point, but I doubt that we will have the time.

Article Accepted!

It's time to toot my own horn:

I submitted an article abstract to the the Claflin University Conference on Contemporary English and Language Arts Pedagogy entitled “Regional Dialect and Homophones: Teaching Standard English Composition to Thomian-Dialect Speakers.”

I received an email this morning informing me that my article has been accepted!

I'm honored and excited to be able to contribute.

(I'm also doing a happy dance in my office...with the door closed, so my students don't think I'm even weirder than they already think I am!)

Parallelism

I didn't discover "parallelism" as a grammatical concept until high school. By then, I'd figured it out instinctively, although it certainly helped to be able to name the idea.

My students have never heard of it.

Rather than require them to read a chapter full of grammar-speak, redundant exercises, and narration designed to lull even the most attentive readers to sleep, I sprang parallelism on my Composition classes as an in-class activity.

After covering point-by-point and subject-by-subject organizational patterns for compare/contrast essays (using the thesis statement: Although Hershey's and Godiva chocolate are both well known and time-tested, they differ greatly in their price, availability, and varieties.), I handed out a piece of paper with sentences. The first page was pairs of sentences, the back side just sentences that had problems with parallelism.

I began by asking, "What does it mean to be parallel in geometry?"

Students: "Two lines that will never intersect." I responded by drawing the perfunctory "parallel" lines on the board with hash marks to represent their parallelism. (I resisted the urge to draw two elliptical lines and ask if they were parallel too...Euclid still reigns supreme in University geometry).

"What about parallelism in literature or movies?" Blank stares.

I gave examples of recent films that capitalize on "parallel" storylines, such as New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day, explaining that we consider two or more storylines that happen concurrently to be "parallel" until they cross over one another.

Student response, "Ooh, got it."

Me: "But in grammar, parallelism is about matching, patterns and balance." I pointed out that no one effectively learns grammar by reading its rules (duh), and explained that I would read pairs of sentences and I simply wanted them to tell me which of the pair sounded "better."

For example:
In English class, Tashonda learned to read poems critically and to appreciate good prose.
In English class, Tashonda learned to read poems critically and she appreciated good prose.

The class chose the first sentence (clever little darlings), which is correct. I then explained the concept of matching verb tenses (ie: consistency). We moved through 9 examples covering everything from adverbs, adjectives and lists to more verb tenses and direct and indirect pronouns.

As a side note, I teach my kids to simply "finish the sentence" to decide which pronoun is correct.

Example: She is taller than I/me.
If I complete the sentence, it reads either
1. She is taller than I am. or
2. She is taller than me am.

The correct option is clear, although it sounds funny because no one speaks in proper English grammar. As simple as this grammar lesson on parallelism seems, it's by far one of the most successful. My students rarely muff up parallelism after we go over it.

Just in case you haven't smiled today:

Student Feedback on Lectures

The Chronicle gathers some student feedback on lectures in this article supplemented by Youtube videos made by students: "Lecture Fail?".

I plan to ask my students in an evaluation at the end of the semester how they felt about the course throughout the semester, but perhaps I should do an eval now, too?

(By the way, I've been swamped in grading lately, which is not a great excuse for leaving you out here in the cold, vast Internet without my words to guide you, but it is true.)

Fallacious Fallacies

Today was Argument day. Not debate, but argument--the principles of logic and argument.

We started with inductive and deductive reasoning; I asked my students and they supplied me with definitions of each, and I provided the examples. We then moved on to Aristotle's three appeals: pathos, ethos, logos.

I gave them word associations to remember which was which (pathos = sympathy, ethos = ethics, and logos = logic), then we distinguished each from the other with examples. The students provided most of the examples when I asked, although I have some tried and true examples that I threw in as well:

Pathos: Humane Society commercials
Ethos: Every adult who has ever said to my students "Because I'm an adult and you're a kid"

I also shared my cupcake (or ice cream sundae) analogy: Logos is the cupcake itself, ethos is the icing, and pathos should just be some sprinkles on top.

We then moved on to fallacies in argument. I love teaching fallacies--there are just so many great examples to go with each (especially during an election year)!

Today's class was closer to lecture, but truly I made the students tell me most of the material, so rather than talking at them, I had a conversation with my students about what we have experienced to be successful or unsuccessful arguments. We remember conversations, but rarely monologues, I have found.

"Can't I just Google it?"

My ENG 120 students have turned in their research prospectuses (or prospecti?), narrowed their topics and are perfecting their thesis statements. Now, all that remains is to write the outlines and the essays. Oh, that's right--and do the research!

While I am no stickler to "books only" research (I would be a hypocrite!), I am very strict about what constitutes an up-to-date, valid academic source. Wikipedia is so far from my students' minds by the time they start their research, I often wonder if I've brainwashed them. WebMD and other "reputable" sites are always a challenge, however.

When it comes to how recently an article was written/published, I tell my students "If you weren't born when it was written, it's too old!" The exceptions here are primary historical sources or sources for subjects that simply don't change.

When it comes to the author of a source, I warn them, "If you can't figure out who wrote it, run away!"

Most importantly (and most terrifying for those of us who have taught today's students and know how lacking they can be in this department--), I tell my students to use their common sense.

To illustrate just why Wikipedia (sorry, boys!) isn't an academic, verifiable, or valid source, we read "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia", by Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse in The Chronicle. My students were shocked--and we had some great impromptu vocabulary work, too!

To illustrate why the World Wide Web isn't to be blindly trusted, I sicced this little gem on my students: "The Science of Vampires," courtesy of the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency. Oh? You didn't know FVZA existed? Or that HVV (Human Vampiric Virus) is the cause of Vampirism? Right, because ".org" at the end of a web address does not always (or often, for that matter--most are biased) a valid, useful academic source make !

Amusingly, some of my female students who have been caught up in the throes of Edward and Bella's bliss (and seizure-causing spawning), the slightly more mature True Blood, or any of the other blood-sucking obsessions this generation drools over, actually believed the article--as much as they could, anyhow. One student flat out sighed, looked me in the eye and said, "I want to be a vampire." I maintained my composure...mostly. For the most part, though, my students realized that this article is absurd, albeit entertaining. They acknowledged that it was logically written, but their common sense simply would not allow them to buy into this nonsense about a virus causing vampirism--or the existence of vampirism at all.

Smart kids.

To drive the point home, I introduced my bright little minds to The Flat Earth Society: "The mission of the Flat Earth Society is to promote and initiate discussion of Flat Earth theory as well as archive Flat Earth literature. Our forums act as a venue to encourage free thinking and debate."

I shan't deign to elaborate on that. I will, however, thank Mr. Bill Loughran for corrupting my adolescent mind with the fascinations of Shakespeare, Latin, ancient Greek and Roman history, and ancient Greek, along with thousands of witty barbs for students--all of which I must admit I freely use today--and, the buttercream icing of it all, an introduction to The Flat Earth Society.

And thus concluded my lesson on how not to be an idiot when using the Internet to find sources.