I want to bring attention to the summer 2008 MLA Newsletter--hot off the press at this very moment. Gerald Graff's presidential column, "Bringing Writing in from the Cold," articulates the need for the university community to embrace, or re-embrace, the teaching of first-year writing.

Someone asked me recently who my "Mad Libs" are for teaching. I wasn't initially certain what that meant (you mean who are my nouns, verbs, and adjectives?), but on further thought I see the point of the question. Whom, it asks, do I imitate or simply mime when I have trouble knowing what to say, or how to say it, to my class? Whose language, gestures, formats, structures, reactions, jokes, or aphorisms do I seize on, filling in the blanks with information from the present situation?

ссылки

I just stumbled across this four-year-old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching

The article gives three pieces of supposedly helpful advice to professors who try to use technology in the classroom. It says to avoid

Today a I asked my class, a bit (though never far) off our designated topic of Shakespeare, popular culture, and rhetoric, what they made of Chelsea Clinton's response to a question about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Here's a clip of her answer:

It recently occurred to me how little I consider the difference between how I imagine myself teaching an how I actually teach. I fancy myself quite an innovator in the classroom--or at least, that's what I tell people when they ask (if ever) about what I like about teaching. I talk about how I like to put unlike things together, or find unexpected analogies, or give assignments that move perpendicularly to their goals, or how I try to turn student questions back on the student, or how I create an atmosphere of healthy anxiety.

Today I taught a lesson about Shakespeare's sonnets and love songs. First we discuss a couple of Shakespeare's sonnets, how the reading audience witnesses the love-interaction between lover and beloved. Then we listen to various love songs (some well-known, others less so) and discuss how the situations are strikingly similar to that of the sonnets. In each form, a (typically male) lover sings to his beloved about the effect she has on him. Then we discuss how other cultural forms work similarly. Usually students volunteer media like television or movies.

Many views exist concerning the usefulness or necessity of the few days before Thanksgiving break. Some instructors hold class and enforce their normal attendance policy on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Thursday. Others make class on Wednesday optional. Still others (many, from what I can tell) cancel Wednesday's class outright. My own students were actually outraged that I would hold class on the Monday--THE MONDAY--before Thanksgiving, since many of their Tuesday-Thursday instructors had canceled Tuesday's class, and they wanted to turn the break into a week-long furlough.

As per usual, my post has little to do with pedagogy, except that today I discussed the content of the post in the class I teach.

That said, I found David Kirkpatrick's article for the New York Times Magazine compelling and insightful. Though I usually spend my time on NYTimes.com assiduously avoiding Stanley Fish's column, I was surprised to see my own home state the subject of...analysis? Scorn? Condescension? Such is the plight of a Kansan.

I've found that many PhD students at UT--and at other similar universities--alter their courses of study after they teach rhetoric for one or two years. Offhand I think of at least ten students who entered graduate school without the slightest intention to make rhetoric (or rhetorical theory) part of their studies but who, having made the necessity of teaching Rhetoric and Writing into a virtue, alter their plans and identify themselves much more as students of rhetoric rather than literature.

My class this semester has been sequestered by a First-Year Interest Group, or FIG, a group of students with similar interests or majors who take several classes together. According to the FIG office, the purpose of these groups is:

* to help students connect with each other, advisors, faculty and ultimately, to help them feel connected to the institution
* to help students make the transition from being a high school learner to a university learner