this semester's classes
In my Comp 1 class, I’m having students do two portfolios—one emphasizing excessive revision in the Nancy Welch-sense and the other emphasizing revising toward a focus—and a final “Editorial Board Project” in which the entire class will act as an editorial board to critique the writing the class has produced, shepherd one piece of writing from each class member through an extensive review and revision process, and then put together a class magazine modeled on The Sun.
In my Comp 2 classes, I’m doing my usual multigenre multimodal thing, but I’m putting more emphasis than usual on the concepts of knowledge production and consumption. I’m using the Wysocki and Lynch text, which I like for the most part, although their intended audience is clearly NOT community college students, which is typical and irritating.
In my Women & Lit class, I am mostly planning to just stay the hell out of the way. The students have already taken ownership of the class and I truly feel that if I didn’t show up for class one day, the students would still stay for the full class time and have a deep and wide-ranging discussion. This week, students read and discussed Francine Prose’s “Scent of a Woman’s Ink” and Maxine Hong Kingston’s incredibly sad “No Name Woman” and were deep into discussion when I arrived. The first novel they’ll read is Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and then we’ll read novels by Isabel Allende, Maya Angelou, and Joanne Harris, a book of poems by Mary Oliver, and various other poems.
All of my classes are blogging (of course), but I’m giving the comp classes specific prompts and time in class to at least start their blog entries, which seems to be effective so far in getting students to actually do the blogging reliably.
blogarama
