Thur. Jan. 21, 2010

An okay day, today. I had a challenging situation come up with a disgruntled student after class. Turns out, he's frustrated because he feels we're moving too slow for him. I reminded him I have 28 students and he's only one of them. I suggested he use this as a learning experience, that in his career, he'll come across situations that will challenge him to be patient and he can use this experience as one way to become better at handling adversity. i'm going to check withhim next week to see where he's at. This is good for me as well--I'm seeing the old adage in better clarity--no pain, no gain.

Tue. Jan. 20, 2010

Today was our first foray into Pratt and "Arts of the Contact Zone." I tried to get students situated into the text by the class reading a fair amount of the piece together--each student reading a paragraph. I'm not sure if this worked too well. We had discussion afterward, but it was mostly me asking questions and getting short responses. By the looks on their faces, I don't think they related Pratt's text to their lives. Thursday, we're going to watch Dave Chapelle's "Clarence Bigsby" skit. Last quarter, we watched this skit and the students laughed and relaxed when they watched Chapelle's version of an authoethnography. In regards to the accompanying writing assignment, I'm not making students create a parody (a la Chapelle), or even truly write an autoethnography, just engage the contact zone and think about writing to the representations others have of them.

Thur. Jan. 14, 2010

Things going well. Thursday's class encouraged me because my students did a goood job of engaging our discussion. I didn't have to prod or pull, they walked right in to Bartholomae's introduction and staked a place to sit. The idea I had for each student to talk about what they highlighted worked. Each person was able to share why the piece spoke to them. I look forward to trying this with Pratt. This is a lively group--I wonder if the afternoon classes are regualry this way. It could be that we're in winter quarter, so the nervous apprehension of university has worn off. Either way, like I mentioned, I'm encouraged--I'll seek to convey and translate my enthusiasm over to my students.

Tue. Jan. 14, 2010

Back at it--class went well. Students this quarter seem a bit more like they've been around the block. Last quarter, I had to spell things out at times--this group looked at me when I asked them if they knew how to access BB like I was from another planet. Also, when I assigned the first day's reading, there were no sighs, just matter of fact grunts. Good stuff!

This quarter, I decided to let them peruse the syllabus and come back on day 2 with questions--last quarter, I went over the syllabus on the first day. I'm excited to get into this quarter--for Thursday, I scanned the introduction to "Ways" and asked them to mark it up with highlighters, pencil, etc. I want to see how they go about placing emphasis on what's meaningful to them. We're going to talk about what's important to each reader, first summarizing the piece and then working to find which parts of the text they make meaning from. Then, my notion is to explain that from this standpoint they can begin to incorporate the new information in order to forward it and add to the conversation. We'll see how it goes.