This is one of my favorite in-class activities of all time, which I remembered and used recently in a class about writing description/observation. It is the "boring paragraph" assignment. I tend to give it out as a pair activity, and then have students share their rewritten paragraphs in class. It's fun. (It can also be tweaked to be about tone, which is fun too.)

On Friday I spent most of the day at a fairly new charter middle school in East Austin. It was a totally amazing and challenging experience, but there was one thing in particular that I was impressed by and wanted to share.

I'm using (with few adjustments) the showcasing protocol suggested for RHE 309S and RHE 310 this semester and I'm LOVING it. I've always had a hard time with peer review at UT (it always seemed to work better with my students at the last school I taught--but they were, generally, older commuter students.), but this all-class format seems to work well. Students get papers the weekend before the showcase and know that they are going to be responsible for their comments on the papers (I collect and look over the comments).

So, this semester of teaching for me has been very much about doing things on my terms. Don't get me wrong, I think that I generally end up teaching the things that I most want to teach the way that I want to teach them. But at some point every semester guilt seeps in and I find myself doing things because I think-I-should, or someone-thinks-it's-better, or I've-been-told-to. This rarely works out.

My RHE 306 students have a paper due tomorrow. I tried to write an assignment on the "mapping a controversy" model. I thought that I had produced a fairly clear assignment, and I also thought that we had talked about the assignment enough in class. But today, during extra office hours, and tonight, when I am trying to do my own work, I have been flooded with questions about the assignment.

I always assumed that being an English Graduate Student meant that I was going to sit around (under a tree, or at a coffeeshop, or in a bar) talking to other people about books. Wow, does that not really happen. I don't ever have a sense of what anyone else reads.

But I'm curious. And I'm hoping people might tell me here--especially when I ask the question this way: What is your dream text to teach? This can be a quick answer--just a title, or you can feel free to elaborate. Have you ever taught a dream text? Was it a good experience, or did it backfire? You know, that kind of thing.

It is entirely possible that I'm getting paranoid. But here's the deal. Today I got an email from a student letting me know that she will not be in class this week because her grandmother just passed away. In a class of 21, this is the THIRD student who has missed class because of a grandmother's death.

We are currently in the 7th week of the semester. I'm sure that this could be a coincidence, but I'm tempted to read it as either a very bad sign about the health and well-being of my grandmother, or to be very suspicious of my students.

My questions are (and excuse me if you think this is silly, but I am actually curious):

I had an interesting moment in class yesterday. I had shown 2 short documentaries, both on animals, but with very different approaches. One was very light, and accessible. The other was more "artistic"--B&W, no spoken sounds, no clear narrative. When we sat down to discuss and compare the rhetorical elements in each film, the students really wanted to talk about the more artistic one (which THRILLED me, since that is why I showed it in the first place. But I was afraid that they would feel too alienated by it and annoyed by the experience of watching it--as it is actually a pretty annoying film to sit through). They did a great job, with a little direction, of identifying rhetorical elements, but they seemed reluctant to offer any kind of interpretation of the film--which it was begging for, since the "argument" was not so easily discerned.

I have a stack of textbooks I like, and often lift stuff from (everything from definitions, to entire chapters, when they are helpful). But I figure that there is a lot of collective wisdom out there about textbooks. What do people like? Not like? What do you use in the classroom? What do you use to prepare for the classroom?

I'm going to take a look at Lanham now, but I'm sure there are other things out there that are good.

For revision strategies, I'm big on Donald Murray's book. I usually give my students at least a chapter a semester--usually a different chapter, depending on what kind of revision I think they could benefit from as a class.