subconscious pedagogy

Okay, I had this dream a couple weeks ago. But get this: I dreamt that I was teaching WR121 (first-year writing) and I required the students to write their whole papers with only one sentence pattern. That’s right: every sentence was to have the same sentence pattern. I even felt happy about it, as if [...]

Six tips to help students gain expertise

Hello from my alma mater writing center (at YVCC). I just found a copy of Nancy Sommers et al’s pamphlet Making the Most of College Writing: A Guide for Freshmen. Nice. I especially like this section, since so often students can’t imagine how they can become scholars themselves or how they can write with real [...]

Elbow and Bartholomae and Emerson (note to self: get a copy of this)

This looks interesting, especially the Emersonian angle.
Wiley, Mark. “Writing in the American Grain: Peter Elbow’s and David Bartholomae’s Emersonian Pedagogies of Empowerment.” Writing Instructor, v9 n1-2 p57-66 Fall-Win 1990.
ABSTRACT: Argues that, although Peter Elbow’s and David Bartholomae’s pedagogies attempt in different ways to authorize students to write, both rely on the experience and resistance to [...]

reminder to get access to Charles Tryon’s “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition”

Note to self: get a copy of this.  Looks interesting, especially the emphasis on what’s unique to blogs: “blogging’s ephemerality, its focus on the everyday, and its no-holds-barred…”
Tryon, Charles
Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition
Pedagogy - Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 2006, pp. 128-132

Duke University Press
Pedagogy 6.1 (2006) 128-132 [...]

a couple of writing classroom teaching tips

Here are a couple of notes I made sometime in the last few years (I’m going through my files).
Sandy Schroeder (for English 75) has students write something first day of class, then groups them into peer groups according to their different abilities, so that each group has at least one person, say, who is good [...]

Jesus drinking gin straight out of the cat dish

Anne Lamott admits to thinking terrible thoughts that “make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish” (from a Sojourners interview).
Almost all of Anne Lamott’s sentences are great examples of words with punch. I should make a list of my favorites. They might help students who are trying to get a feel [...]

Einstein’s brain and thinking outside the box

I was just listening to an NPR interview (on Fresh Air) of Walter Isaacson talking about his new biography of Einstein: Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Shuster, 2007), and I was caught by something Isaacson said right at the end of the interview. Dave Davies had asked him, “Einstein is a metaphor for [...]

personal experience ain’t always the easiest topic for student writers

This past quarter, when I was in a consultation with one of my regular English 085 (”The Writing Workshop”) students, I was surprised that he couldn’t come up with much to say in his Self-Evaluation and that what he did say sounded fake (as if he was just writing what he thought Dodie wanted to [...]

DISing and CUSSing: Talking About Assignment Terms with Student Writers (our PNWCA conference proposal abstract)

Here’s the brief description and the abstract I submitted for our PNWCA Conference session (Bellingham, WA, April 28, 2007). We got our invitation to facilitate this session on Tuesday, and I’m excited about it. It’s not my first presentation (did one at the first annual PNWCA conference in Centralia in 2005), but this is the [...]

plagiarism (on not rushing to judgment)

Just had one of those consultations which remind me how careful you have to be about assuming a student has plagiarized.  This English 70 student (at YVCC, English 70 and 75 are the two developmental writing courses below English 101 Freshman composition) wrote a two-page summary of A&E’s version of Pride and Prejudice which sounded [...]