Students in my classes are able to define plagiarism pretty easily and they understand that plagiarizing comes with consequences. Those same students identify plagiarism under the heading “bad” and its attendant ramifications as catastrophic. Most syllabi include a statement about plagiarism with consequences that range from a failing grade for the essay to failing the […]
First-Year Writing
Zombie Clones and Other Time-Saving Tips
If I could offer you a zombie clone of yourself to either, A, teach your class, or, B, comment on, grade, and communicate by writing with students, which would you choose? I ask this because it can seem, at mid-semester, that you are in fact two people—the one conducting a traditional, familiar class (see: […]
Amazing, Brave, Consistent, Dull, and Fragmentary: On Grading
The conclusion of fall semester is near, and it will soon be time to submit final grades. What final grades are supposed to mean (and what they communicate) remains contested. We hear about grade inflation and wonder how we could be the one to ding a student’s GPA. They all have 4.0s, right? And yet, […]
Letter to an Instructor
In the past decades American academic institutions have experienced a steady increase in the numbers of international students. Increasing economic pressures and the commodification of education have led college administrators to intensify recruitment efforts overseas in an attempt to bring an even larger number of international students to US campuses – a development that in […]
Using Student Texts
In our Teaching Develop Seminar on Tuesday, one side note of the conversation fascinated me. As instructors talked about how they respond to student writing, it became apparent that many (possibly most) feel reluctant to use current student work (“live writing,” Lisa called it) as content to be addressed in class time. These instructors may […]
Legos and Eggs
I’ve been sampling bits of the new 4th edition of Jim Williams’s Preparing to Teach Writing, in part because I wanted to see whether Williams had changed any of his approach (he hasn’t), but mostly because I was thinking about his chapter on the relationship between teaching grammar and improving writing (there is no causative […]
What Makes a Good Course Text?
I’m in the process of choosing texts for my course, and I’m reminded of all that goes into those choices. Our course is a course in academic writing, which means that students are coming to terms with what it means to use writing in academic contexts. I don’t think this means that they are learning […]
This Is My Theme for English 1010
The question of content in first-year writing courses comes up a lot. Do these courses really have “no content”? One answer is that the content of the course is the writing that the students produce. Mostly, I like this answer, as it nicely pivots the attention of the question away from what gets read over to […]
“…to see the object as in itself it really is.”
I read a lot of monographs over the last year for my Ph.D. exams, and there were a number of times where I wanted to find the author and shout, “But what are you saying about Thomas Hardy!? You’re just saying Tess of the D’Urbervilles is kinda like this other thing. I’d give my students a […]
Ovular Logic
In the opening scene of Orson Welles’ 1962 adaptation of The Trial, a suddenly awakened and apparently under arrest Mr. K. (Anthony Perkins) responds to the oblique requests of police inspectors. One inspector begins to document the evidence in the room by writing in a notebook. This writing, we learn in several ways, is a […]