11/04 – Making the Grade

Agenda:

• Discussion of grading exercise results
• Introduction to POWER-Grading®
• Explanation of Camtasia Project
• Discussion of the venerability of the “dartboard motif” in cartoons about grading

Queries Considered:

• How do/should/can the grade distributions outlined in the NCS affect my grading?
• How do I handle student challenges of grades given?

POWER-Grading:

Camtasia Assignments:

• Team One (Derek, Amy, Andrew W., Katrina): Create a Camtasia instructional video that shows instructors everything they need to know to create and design a pbworks wiki for a 1020 course.
• Team Two (Andy E., Danny, Sue, Aaron, & Joe): Create a Camtasia instructional video that walks 1020 students through the following actions on a pbworks wiki:
  • Logging-in
  • Using the search function
  • Creating a page
  • Adding text
  • Altering text
  • Adding links
  • Adding pictures and videos
  • Using the comment box

Assignment for 11/11/09:

• Work on Camtasia assignments

Assignment for 11/18/09:

• Read and write a response for My Word!

10/28 – Politics & Pedagogy II/Everything You Wanted to Know About Teaching 1020 but Were Afraid to Ask

Agenda:

• Everything You Wanted to Know About Teaching 1020 but Were Afraid to Ask
• Review of Responses to Save the World on Your Own Time

Observation Assignments:

• Laurie Bonventre – Joe
• Sarah Kern – Danny
• Michael Risitch – Amy, Derek
• Chinmayi Kattemalavadi – Katrina
• Clay Walker – Andy, Andrew
• Jane Asher – Sue, Aaron

Assignments for 11/0:

• Read Effective Grading
• Post your response to Fish’s text as a comment to this post w/in 48 hours of the end of class
• Grade sample papers (coming via e-mail tonight)

10/21 – Politics & Pedagogy I

Agenda:

• Review of responses to readings
  
• Next three sessions of 1020

Assignments for 10/21:

• Post your response to today’s readings as a comment to this post w/in 48 hours of class end
• Read Save the World on Your Own Time
• Compose a one-page, single-spaced response to the latter essays and bring it to class with you on Wednesday
• Prepare questions for “Everything You Wanted to Know About 1020 But Were Afraid to Ask”

10/14/09

Agenda:

• Review of responses to readings
  
• Query considered
• Next four sessions of 1020

Queries Considered:

How can I teach rhetoric when I have little to no expertise in this area?

• By recognizing that taking a rhetorical approach to teaching composition is, more than anything else, a concentration on teaching facility in argument rather than any formal system.
• By adopting a minimum of  formal systems (enthymemes, common topics) that will help your students theorize what they already know intuitively and provide them with inventional exercises for generating new ideas and techniques.
• By acknowledging that, historically, rhetorical approaches to teaching have had more to do with putting an expert at the performance of rhetoric (rather than one with expert knowledge of rhetoric) in encounters with those without such skills; more to do with providing good examples than with complicated lessons in style and arrangement.

Assignments for 10/21:

• Post your response to today’s readings as a comment to this post w/in 48 hours of class end
• Read What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (feel free to also check out the graphic novel version), Chapter 7 (”Teaching Composing Processes”) in The St. Martin’s Guide, and an essay by Berlin
• Compose a one-page, single-spaced response to the latter essays and bring it to class with you on Wednesday

10/07/09 – Templates for Teaching

Agenda:

• Review of responses to Clueless in Academe
  
• Queries considered
• Next three sessions of 1020

Queries Considered:

Why Wikis?

• Storage: everything in one place (paperless classroom)
• Collaboration: asynchronous multi-author document construction w/ time-tagging and user ID *
• Access: comprehensive searchability *
• Motivation: Panoptic, Hawthorne-ish effect *

Assignments for 10/14:

• Post your response to Clueless in Academe as a comment to this post w/in 48 hours of class end
• Read chapter 8 (”Teaching Invention”) and the Lunsford/Glenn essay (474) in the St. Martin’s Guide and essays by Booth, Crowley, Fish, Fulkerson, Hawhee, Kugelmass, & Walker
• Compose a one-page, single-spaced response to the latter essays and bring it to class with you on Wednesday

09/30/09 – The Teaching Thing II

Housekeeping:

• Picture Day
• Last week’s painstaking accounting of teaching time management uploaded as PDF (see “Masters of Time” link in previous post).
• Desk Copies: You have been provided with desk copies of Good Reasons and They Say/I Say. Comp copies of Shooting War and Fame Junkies were impossible to obtain in bulk. At least 6 weeks before the start of the Winter semester you should submit individual desk copy request forms to the appropriate publishers for these texts (I e-mailed you a PDF of our departmental form). The information for faxing a request for a desk copy of Fame Junkies can be found here. The original Shooting War has recently been posted in its entirety online in web comic format (the hard copy has additional material, but the web comic is pretty substantial on its own). Thus you may choose to use either the digital or hard copy edition; if you choose the latter you can snail mail your request to the address provided here.
• Providing Course Information to the Campus Bookstore: You also need to fill out a “Course Book Information Request Form” (also e-mailed to you) and submit it via fax, mail, or hand-delivery to the campus bookstore at least a month before the start of the Winter semester. Again, if you decide to use the online edition of Shooting War, you may omit it from your book order.

Agenda:

• Review of responses to St. Martin’s Guide essays
• Sessions 2-4 of our model wiki syllabus

Assignments for 10/07:

• Read Graff’s Clueless in Academe and Chapter 9 (“Teaching Arrangement and Form”) in the St. Martin’s Guide
• Compose a one-page, single-spaced response to the Graff text (though feel free to reference the St. Martin’s chapter as well) and bring it to class with you on Wednesday

09/23/09 – The Teaching Thing I

Housekeeping:

• Fresh blog pages
• Copies of St. Martin’s Guide and Good Reasons
• Please post responses to Jule’s assignment as a comment to the 09/09/09 post

• Next week is picture day (submit your photo or participate in the shoot next week)

Agenda:

• Review of responses to Finding Our Way
• Queries considered
• First two sessions of 1020

Queries Considered:

• Masters of Time
• What (Not) to Wear

Assignments for 09/30:

• Post your response to Finding Our Way as a comment to this post w/in 48 hours of class end
• Read chapters  2 (“Preparing for the Course”) and 3 (“The First Few Days of Classes”) and the following essays in the St. Martin’s Guide: Logan (392); Bartholmae (403); Rose (418); Moss/Walters (438). Read also this article by Royster which complements and extends the argument of the Logan piece.
• Compose a one-page, single-spaced response to the latter essays (though feel free to reference chapters 2 & 3 as well) and bring it to class with you on Wednesday

09/09/09 – Introduction to Course

Agenda:

• Review Syllabus
• Review Model Wikis

Assignments for 09/16:

• Send me an e-mail – to jeffpruchnic (at) wayne (dot) edu – identifying your top 2-3 interests/concerns about your preparation for teaching at WSU (i.e., the primary worries you have about teaching and/or the primary topics you want to make sure we address in this class).
• Read short essays (linked here) by Brooks, Clark/Healy, Harris, Haselwander, Ineich, Lunsford, Mullin, and Stephenson.
• Choose at least two of the above to focus on in composing a response for next week’s class (bring it with you next week); your response should be approximately the length of a single-spaced page.

Assignments for 09/23:

• Read Finding Our Way
• Compose a single-spaced page response to FoW and bring it with you to class on 09/23; you may focus on one or more essays in the volume. Ideally said response should end with a question or provocation that will encourage further discussion.
• Register your own wiki via pbworks. At minimum, you should create a frontpage for your Winter course(s), as well a roster page that includes an entry for you (see the roster page and my entry for the 1020 section I’m currently teaching). Consult the video embedded above as well as the pbworks manual for wiki formatting instructions. Drop a link to your wiki as a comment to this post when you’ve completed these items.