palimpsest

LOC streaming video

The Library of Congress offers a Guide to Poetry & Literature Streaming Video. It looks very useful (might be fun for those hated PowerPoint presentations). (Link from MoorishGirl.)

Reading aloud in class

One of the more puzzling discoveries of my first year on the tenure track has been my students' hostility and bafflement at having to read aloud in class. (And what's prompting this post is one of my wife's students' attacking her for "wasting time" reading aloud, so it's not just me.) I've had grad students and undergrads alike say that no other professor asks them to read aloud in class, and a few have been brave enough to say that they don't see the point, unless it's to compensate for people who haven't read.

A few benefits to reading aloud:

1. With poetry, it's an instant reading check. (Sometimes with fiction, too.)

2. The blindingly obvious benefit is that it brings the sound of the text to the class's attention in a visceral way. How else would you raise questions of prosody?

3. It can focus discussion. Rather than having an abstract discussion of, say, doubling in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you can work from the language of a specific passage, tracing the way syntax, diction, and figuration work together to create aesthetic (or, if you insist, ideological) effects.

4. It brings an element of performance into the discussion. Frequently different students will read a line slightly differently from one another, and we can talk about the consequences of these shifts in vocal emphasis.

There are days when reading aloud feels like the best thing we do in class. (And students routinely say that they hear things in the reading aloud that they don't see when they read silently.) Students, however, frequently declare that they would rather voice their own opinions than read aloud, and they report that "no one else" makes them do it. I didn't quite believe this, but I can offer two pieces of evidence in support of their position:

1. A senior colleague and one of my office mates report that they never ask students to read aloud, in part because students frequently are slow readers.

2. When I was observed at my last job, the observer reported that reading aloud was one of my "traditional, yet effective" tools (the other? Writing on the board.).

This reaction has puzzled my wife and I, since (obviously) we picked up the practice from our (somewhat overlapping, but generally not so much) professors. So it's not like we've invented some shiny new pedagogical technique. Do others have students read aloud? Why/why not?

(Crossposted from The Salt-Box, where George connects reading aloud to quoting in a paper.)

pirate powerpoint

From Earth Wide Moth:

EN106ers commandeered the course two weeks ago; they organized, mobilized, demanded an opportunity to take the PowerPoint sequence one step farther by siphoning two speeches of historical import into slideshows...
We switched into groups for the speech conversion activity; they worked in clusters to remake Ursula LeGuin's "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech into PowerPoint shows (admitting, along the way, that such gross reductions felt irresponsible). Their essays--due Tuesday--are framed loosely as critiques of the process, critiques of the other group's work at identifying key bits in the speeches. Here are their shows, if you're interested.

Ursula LeGuin, "A Left-Handed Commencement Address"
HTML version | PPS version | Full Speech

Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have A Dream"
HTML version | PPS version | Full Speech

If I did this again, I would build in a round of peer response--some kind of interchange and revision for polishing the shows (this part of the process was left off due to time constraints in the semester). The best part of the sequence was our class session the other day when we started to talk about the process by borrowing the premise of the extreme makeover programs on television lately. We had a good time working through the transformation in light of the mad-dash grab-n-fix that is so popular on the tube. The Extreme makeover: discourse trope was fun and seemed to be an incredibly rich pop culture pass-card toward theorizing what PowerPoint does--and in ways we didn't appreciate as fully when we worked from the smattering of articles.

general principles: planning a new course

My first semester teaching was fall of 1993, but I learn new things about teaching all the time from my own experience and from peers. With this post, I'm soliciting input on general principles for planning new courses.

I'll be teaching three new courses next year plus a revamped version of a course I've taught once before:

• Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing, described here.
• Introduction to Shakespearean Drama, which I'd like to teach with a focus on film adaptations, perhaps something like this.
• A graduate seminar, for which I have a working title, Reading, Writing, and Race in the Eighteenth Century, and some ideas (too many) for primary and secondary texts to assign.
• A section of the second course in the composition sequence: English 225, in which I plan to focus on information technologies and literacy.

My questions for Palimpsest authors and readers are these: How do you go about planning your courses? How do you move from the original spark of an idea to the semester- or quarter-long plan? To what extent do you borrow ideas from others? How much re-reading of texts do you do before the semester starts? How much does your reading in the scholarship on a text affect how you discuss the text in class?

blog redesign assignment

Jill Walker points to her course assignment (PDF) for blog redesign.

Note, the assignment is in Norwegian, but perhaps Jill will provide an English translation. (I looked for a babelfish-like tool to translate, but could not find one that handles Norwegian-to-English).

Digital Blake Assignment

Modest comparative and analytical assignment using various Blake resources on the Web.

"Advanced College Writing"? Any suggestions?

George suggested that I cross-post this here.

Next semester, I'm scheduled to teach a 3000-level course called "Advanced College Writing." I've checked the catalog for the description, which is predictably vague. I've asked a few people who have taught it, and I've gotten some old syllabi. Some people run it like Comp III (there are normally only two sections of composition). Some people run it as a class in creative non-fiction. Some people run it as "academic writing."

Here's my thinking so far:

1) To my mind, "academic writing" is what Composition ought to be about. That's the way I run my composition classes--as an introduction to writing the kinds of essays that will be expected of students throughout their college careers. My students write academic prose, deal exclusively in writing arguments, and learn how to use the library to conduct research using academic databases. So I don't want to simply teach another comp class.

2) We already offer a creative non-fiction class, and I believe that if students want to learn how to write creative non-fiction, or if they want to write personal essays in a formal workshop setting, they'll take a class about it. There's no need, then, to ram it down their throats.

3) While Introduction to Literature provides the beginnings of instruction on how to write essays about literature, it is really a class about putting students in a room with some literature and having them shake hands, and then occasionally having them write essays.

So... at the moment, here's what I'm thinking: I'll make the class about writing for English majors. That is, it will be a writing class where prospective/current English majors can learn how to write the kinds of essays that will be expected of them in their upper-division English courses (this is a 3000 level class). I don't _think_ that students ever get any real instruction on how to write an English major-y essay in their 3000 and 4000 level courses, and so a workshop course in this kind of thing could be beneficial to them.

Here are the assignments and texts I'm considering at the moment:

--Two novels, one old (undecided) and one new (currently, Yann Martel's Life of Pi
--Perhaps a copy of The Best American Essays of 2003 (this is a problematic book, since it's really better suited to a creative non-fiction course)
--A cheap anthology of poetry
--Two major essays, ~6 and ~12 pages each, one at mid-term and one at the end.
--One 15-minute presentation (~6-8 pages) throughout the semester.
--I want to have them keep a Commonplace Book. I am resisting having them use the web for this, since I think there will be a value in having them write these quotations out by hand.
--Lots (~10) of short "position papers"--essentially brief arguments that force the students to write efficient prose. I am reluctant to use these because I absolutely find them painful to write, but I think they have pedagogic value at the undergraduate level.

I'm thinking that all essays wil be heavily workshopped, much more than the week or so they get in Freshman Comp for each assignment (comp is often about producing lots and lots of writing--at the expense of spending lots and lots of time on each essay). I'm also considering having them do a great deal of reading around in academic journals to get a sense of what it is academics write about and how they write. This would also allow them to get a sense of how much bad writing by academics is out there, and, hopefully, learn to hate such obfuscatory prose.

Any suggestions? I'm particularly interested in whether anyone can recommend a book about academic writing other than Altick's The Art of Literary Research. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Lit/Rhet/Comp resources

Lisa at IT: Instructional Technology writes,

I wanted to point to a few resources for blogging among teachers and scholars in literature, composition and rhetoric that have emerged since the CCCCs conference. First, a list of blogs by teachers and scholars in composition, literature, and rhetoric hosted by Kairosnews.org. Second, a listserve growing out of the CCCC SIG for "comp/rhet/lit folk devoted to exploring the personal and professional applications of weblogs and wikis in teaching, writing, and research."

And I recommend her blog. Her tagline is, "Useful tools, sites, references, and opinionated commentary about technology, with particular attention to Instructional Technology and the Humanities, from the perspective of a Digital Medievalist."

linked assignments, or the long-distance scholar

In my department, the upper division classes are typically taught to both graduate students (who sign up at the 500 level), and undergraduate students (who sign up at the 400 level). This semester, I'm teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature II (syllabus in PDF , course website).

I give my students multiple assignments over the course of several weeks leading up to the final paper: research, idea for argument, rough draft, feedback and revision, final draft. Here are what the assignment sheets look like:

• Annotated bibliography
• Prospectus and final paper

I will also provide them with a peer editing worksheet, but I have not yet revised the one I use for my entry-level classes in order to make it suitable for this level.

Students live with the project bouncing around in their head for weeks. They talk about it with me, and ideally they talk about it with others. They are required to talk about it during the rough draft, peer-editing day. They get feedback at multiple stages of the process. Scholars do not write good papers (including research, drafting, and final revisions) in one caffeine-fueled sleepless night, and the aim of these linked assignments to to teach students how to grow from being experts at the 100-yard dash into long-distance runners.

You'll be able to see what a student prospectus looks like when I post them all to the course website next week. Students (and I) will then provide feedback using the online discussion features of the website.

students' frustration with distance education

Via Dennis Jerz: an article from First Monday entitled "Students' Frustration with a Web-Based Distance Education Course" by Noriko Hara and Rob Kling. The abstract reads

Many advocates of computer-mediated distance education emphasize its positive aspects and understate the kind of work that it requires for students and faculty. This article presents a qualitative case study of a Web-based distance education course at a major U.S. university. The case data reveal a taboo topic: students' persistent frustrations in Web-based distance education. First, this paper will analyze why these negative phenomena are not found in the literature. Second, this article will discuss whether students' frustrations inhibit their educational opportunities. In this study, students' frustrations were found in three interrelated sources: lack of prompt feedback, ambiguous instructions on the Web, and technical problems. It is concluded that these frustrations inhibited educational opportunities. This case study illustrates some student perspectives and calls attention to some fundamental issues that could make distance education a more satisfying learning experience.