Blogging Pedagogy

The University of Texas, of course, has fantastic online writing resources available through the UWC, but other university writing centers also offer sites worth a look. Undergraduates might find The Writer’s Handbook for the Writing Center of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/index.html) particularly useful.

This week I've been taking a look at printed grammar handbooks available for free online. One of the best I've come across so far is William J. Strunk's The Elements of Style, available from Bartleby.com.

http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html

I’ve known many professors who think highly of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. This is actually an earlier version (before E.B. White got involved), but students can get the full text for free. Though definitely dated, the handbook provides basic writing information still essential for students today.

In my search for useful grammar websites, I've also explored those not specifically designed for classroom use.

I've been reviewing various grammar websites for the CWRL Pedagogy group, and I've discovered that English Club offers a very useful site for ESL students struggling with grammar issues an instructor may not have time to address in class.

http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/index.htm

The web contains numerous sites directed at ESL students, but English Club’s page is one of the most comprehensive and complete. It provides clear and correct information in a straight-forward, easily accessible manner to students at various stages of English mastery.

This weekend, I saw the movie I'm Not There. Afterward--actually also during--my sister complained, "This movie is too long! It's hard to follow! And why is Richard Gere even in it? I don't get that part. They should have made a normal biopic and had Cate Blanchett play Bob Dylan the whole time."

I recently saw the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. In fact, I've seen it twice, and I wish I could take my students on a field trip to view it. I found so compelling their strategy for responding to the recent, ongoing rumors that the moon landing was a hoax. First they showed countless interview clips with Apollo program astronauts, carefully edited and placed to present a coherent narrative about the experience. They also mixed in tons of footage of the various moon landings.

The title of this post is pretty vague. In fact, its haziness reflects my knowledge (or lack thereof) of the 2008 candidates in the ring so far. As someone who's trying to figure out which candidate to vote for myself, is there some online resource (or print resource, I suppose) where I can refer my students who are curious about these hopefuls? I mean, is there a specific place where reliable information can be quickly obtained?

I keep waiting for something catastrophic to happen in my classroom, so I'll have something interesting to post on this blog. So far, though, the semester seems to be ending not with a bang, but a whimper. Recently, however, I have noticed a strange trend. Three times in as many days, when I've mentioned to people that I'm a graduate student teaching a college class, they've eyed me strangely and asked me if I have any plans to teach high school. Now the strange-eyeing element of this could be paranoia on my part, but why is everyone so quick to mention teaching high school? When they ask, they make it sound far more logical than continuing to teach in a college setting.

Posting on blogs makes me so nervous that I've been torturing Mary Tang for ten minutes whining about it. To shut me up, she finally suggested that I post under someone else's name. I pointed out that everyone uses their own name...unless somebody is using the name of someone else in the department. I like that idea, and I'm hoping that it's made everybody suspicious of my own entry, and now nobody thinks I'm really me.