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Third student reblog—this post is well-developed and really reflects the informational tone of science blogs.
Crude oil, also known as petroleum (or “black gold”), is a naturally occurring liquid substance made of hydrocarbons. This liquid fossil fuel is incredibly combustible and when combusted, releases a massive amount of energy. Thanks to our “over-use” of crude oil, we have saturated our atmosphere…
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Here’s another blog entry from my student about eco-carpet. As an interior design major, he’s especially aware of the value of sustainable construction which shows well in this well-developed post.
Currently there is about 4 billion lbs of carpet added to American landfills each year. This carpet is added to a disgustingly large amount already sitting there today. It takes at least 7 years for carpet to decompose and yet an estimated 9 billion lbs of new carpet are sold a year with the only…
(Source: interfaceflor.com)
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The first contributions by my students to our class Tumblr were posted this week. Here’s a particularly savvy post by my student Jake about the benefits of live Christmas trees over fake.
-Rachel Thomas, christmas tree farm
Each year around December, many American families make the trip to find and cut down the perfect Christmas tree. Some families, like my own, opt for a less traditional plastic tree. My family bought ours the year I was born with the intent of…
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Announcing…a class Tumblr!
Since the scope of Auburn’s English Composition II curriculum is pretty far-reaching in terms of content, I’ve decided to move a little bit of the course into the extracurriculum of Tumblr. My class blog, In Consideration of Sustainability, will eventually contain at least 75 Tumblr posts from my students about different issues related to sustainability. They’ll use this project to compose writing for a real audience while learning how knowledge is transfered more and more through social media.
I hope to expand a little more on what I learn from this project as students start submitting work. For now, here’s the prompt and rubric for the assignment.
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This semester I’m finally switching to digital grading. I have, from time to time, utilized Track Changes in Microsoft Word to comment on student papers. I found, however, that the ease of typing lengthened my comments to students, creating blocks of texts that students could easily glaze over. With written comments, it always seems like students pay extra attention due to the significant contrasts between type and writing. So, I’ve always preferred to handwrite comments, killing trees for my convenience.
Now, with my awesome new Bamboo tablet, I can do digital composing on my Mac. Unlike Windows tablets that have built-in compatibility with Word, Mac’s Word 2011 has no compatibility with writing or drawing unless the document is viewed in the “notebook’ format. This invariably screws up the formatting of the original document.
In Adobe Acrobat, however, I can edit with freedom on the Bamboo without screwing up the format. The result is a clearly marked-up document. This solution doesn’t come without cost, however—I have to teach my 75 students how to convert their papers to PDF’s—a harder task than I originally thought.
So, this semester I’ll be experimenting with Bamboo grading. The tablet is really responsive, so my handwriting doesn’t look too bad. I hope to load some screenshots of graded papers soon.
If you have any questions about working with Bamboo, I’d love to answer them, just let me know!
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The candle gets burned at both ends with respect to grading student papers…it’s a long evening in the office tonight!
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“I wish I had an answer to that, because I’m tired of answering that question.”
Yogi Berra’s wisdom endures, it seems, in my composition classroom. In today’s review of the academic analytic process, I hit hard on the importance of addressing the “So What?” question, charging my students to keep pressing and asking questions of the details within the advertisements they’re analyzing.
I sensed a lot of resistance from my writers as I explained strategies for looking closer at their advertisements. How do you ask questions about something that seems exhausted of further interpretation? How do you say things about an advertisement without it seeming like a reach? What if the interpretation of the ad is totally off base, or wrong? My writers tire of answering the “So What” question, especially because the answers simply yield more questions.
My students also incorrectly fear having wrong answers to their questions. Again, this requires a paradigm shift, from understanding a subject to acknowledging the need for experimentation. Students must understand that analysis is a process, that it takes time, and that failures and misses happen. Students should get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable about their topics.
Analysis then, can seem like a wild goose chase. Maybe students don’t see that more questions can be asked of a topic. In reality, I suspect my students don’t want to see that more questions can be asked, that assumptions can be challenged. Typically, when that happens, things start changing. Students start questioning the world around them, start working harder.
For me, it’s difficult to lead my students through this shift, this heightened awareness that leads to good analysis. My own process of instructing, however, is governed by the same principles of analysis, of knowing how to ask the right questions and interpret the events in my classroom—how my writers respond to prompts, how students interact with one another, how I interact with them.
Maybe it’s ok to acknowledge that, like my students, I’m not always going to have the right answers for them. I’m not always going to ask the right questions. But I can try, fail, and learn. And ultimately, I want my goal-driven students to know that it’s ok. It will be ok…
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I just completed Writing Assignment #2, just to get a student’s perspective about how they might have approached the work. I chose two advertisements for Converse shoes:
I chose this ad from 1961 to compare to this ad from 2008-2009:
My response links here. My thoughts about the assignment:
1. I found myself being repetitive—what I wanted to say about logos seemed to be the same as what I wanted to say about pathos.
2. The kairos question was the hardest by far. I’m not sure if it’s because I picked such an old advertisement for the first ad, but I feel like a student might have a hard time answering that question if she doesn’t already know a lot about the political, cultural, economic, and social conditions of the particular decade.
3. I wrote pretty lengthy answers. I was thinking that the questions would be 2-3 sentence answers, but I wrote more.
4. The assignment took me 30 minutes. I’m a pretty efficient writer, but it still took longer than I imagined it would given my knowledge of Aristotelian rhetoric. I’m thinking my students will finish it anywhere between 30 minutes-1 hour. I really hope that they didn’t spend more than an hour writing the assignment.
Overall I think this is a good way for students to start looking at details and making conclusions. I’ll ask my students what they thought about it tomorrow, but early finishers can post a response here.
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A discussion of the Aristotelian pisteis, or means of persuasion, is incomplete without a brief discussion of kairos. This term was one of the two words the Greeks had for the concept of time. Whereas chronos/khronos referred to empirical, measurable time, kairos refers to the idea of right time and seasons, or proper measure and association.
Kairos is a huge part of an argument’s context, or situation in which the argument exists. Sometimes, that context can mean the difference between an argument’s persuasiveness and its ineffectiveness.
The link I’ve posted above explains the poor timing of a Levi’s ad recently introduced in the UK. To some, the video, which features young people rioting, seems too similar to the recent riots in London. This is a perfect example of kairos gone wrong—only the poor timing of the ad in relationship to current events makes it a tasteless and ineffective way to sell jeans.
Of course, context is contingent upon the audience. If this ad were shown in America, we might not care so much since we’re a little removed from the violence in England. For us, right time means something different.
This isn’t the first ad campaign to fall victim to poor kairos. Can anyone out there think of other ad campaigns criticized for bad timing?
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Last class, I had my students write me a short autobiographical note. I asked my students for their names, majors, how they passed out of ENGL 1100 (the prerequisite for my course), and something about themselves that would help me be a more effective writing teacher for them. A lot of students talked about past experiences in English classes, or their affinity (or lack thereof) for writing and English.
I thought I’d write something similar so that my students get to know a little bit about my teaching style, which should give them some insight into how I teach and assess writing.
Name: Pearl Shields
Undergraduate Major: Double major in English and Politics
Graduate Emphasis: English, Rhetoric and Composition Studies
Something about my teaching: I really love teaching writing, and I’m really enthusiastic about my students becoming better writers. I definitely challenge my students, but I challenge them because I know they’re learning to write more effectively that way. I try to teach writing in a way that makes it relevant to their own lives, that good thinking makes you more than a good student of English—it applies to so many careers, vocations and situations in life.
