revisionspiral

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Welcome to my blog. I am Liz Kleinfeld, mother to Lily, wife to T, and Assistant Professor of English and Writing Center Director at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Here are 100 things about me.
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    model intro

    « H E comp :: books, film, etc. :: pedagogy & teaching :: email
    posted Sunday, 27 May 2007
    I am reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse and think I want to use the prologue as an example of a strong introduction in my composition 2 classes in the fall. The introduction does a number of things well, such as outlining the book’s basic argument, positioning the author, and explaining the rationale for the methodology, and does it all in an interesting manner. I’m surprised at how well the book is written. I haven’t read Guns, Germs, and Steel, and wanted to read Collapse for its content; I did not have high expectations in terms of style. But Diamond hooked me from the very beginning with the comparison of two farms and the revelation that second farm was in medieval Greenland.

    The only real problem with having students read the prologue is that it’s 20+ pages long. I can’t justify having students buy the whole book if I’m going to have them read only the prologue. The paperback version is $12 plus shipping and handling on amazon; hard to justify. I suppose I could put the book on reserve at the library and have students read the prologue at the library or copy it, but I haven’t had good luck with students actually doing readings that are on reserve unless I threaten a quiz and I hate doing that.

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    1. Holly left...
    Tuesday, 29 May 2007 5:56 am

    Does yr library have an electronic reserve option? Not many faculty at my college seem to use or even know about this, but I've found it useful in such situations: students can print out copies (which saves me time, lets me see whether they've accessed the document by requiring them to bring it to class, and gives them a paper copy to annotate) and it fits within fair-use guidelines.


    2. Elizabeth Kleinfeld left...
    Wednesday, 30 May 2007 8:41 am

    Electronic reserve sounds like it would be perfect for what I want to do, but our library doesn't offer it. I did talk to our head librarian who said it wouldn't be an issue to put the one copy of Collapse on reserve for a few weeks, but I am afraid I will have to resort to a quiz to make sure people actually read the one chapter. Ugh.