Category Archives: teaching

sharing teaching resources

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Five years ago when a few savvy instructors rushed to integrate the Web into their teaching and put their syllabi online the idea exchange so crucial to academia was alive and well in the teaching realm of our work. A few years later, witness how various password-protected courseware adopted by so many campuses is making it increasingly impossible to see othersí teaching materials. Sure, some people may not want to share their syllabi, but I suspect many wouldnít mind. Regardless, the increasing proliferation of these services makes the teaching side of our work less and less visible to a wider audience.

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

In terms of web resources, what do those who teach courses in English need that a committed group of bloggers might create? I’m not talking about software, mind you, but I’m agreeing with the assumption that the open source philosophy can be successfully applied to all kinds of projects. We’re all going to be coming up with course materials anyway. Why not collaborate or at least share?

Jack Lynch, who doesn’t have a blog but should, has an impressive Guide to Grammar and Style that might prove useful as well as an unfinished Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms. I have a brief guide to the mechanics of quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing in MLA style. Of course, materials like these are widely available in print, but when so many of us are creating websites for our courses, it is more than a little convenient to be able to link directly directly to information that students will find helpful.

Would it make sense to create a group blog devoted to teaching English language and literature, one where ideas could be exchanged, resources shared, pointers to already existing sites posted, websites collaboratively created?

Consider these questions:

  • What have you created that you’d like to share with others?
  • What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
  • What have you not found that you wish were out there? What’s on your wish list?

Can we work to make these things available without taking an inordinate amount of time out of our already busy schedules?

Update 1: And if you think this is a good idea, please mention this post in your blog to increase the chances that potentially interested parties, who may or may not read my blog, find out about it.

Update 2: Okay, possibilities for format include a database (like DISC: A Disability Studies Academic Community, using MySQL) a blog (like the many group authored blogs out there using MovableType), a Wiki (like the Wikipedia), or some combination of such things.

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the wind cries lawley

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Because there are only so many scales you can learn, my guitar instructor is now teaching me the Jimi Hendrix song “The Wind Cries Mary.” I’m not a huge Hendrix fan, but he is, so…

It’s an interesting experience (no pun intended) to get inside someone else’s head to see how they created something. The opening of the song, which you may or may not be familiar with but can get for 99 cents on iTunes, features a smooth three-chord phrase repeated twice in two slightly different ways. It sounds really cool, but your hands do something fairly simple. Throughout this very melodic piece, Hendrix’s musicianship is impressive. It’s not a showcase for flashy virtuosity, but instead demonstrates his ability to phrase and rephrase things up and down the guitar’s fretboard with an elegant economy of expression.

I was thinking about this, believe it or not, as I was working on implementing Liz Lawley’s MT Courseware, her adaptation of MovableType for teaching purposes. What Liz has done is really ingenious, but also impressive because of its simplicity. In particular, the graceful way she pulls off the menu of tabs along the top of the content of each page using a stylesheet and some MT template tags just blew me away. Liz writes that she learned how to do this from A List Apart, which features a similar navigation scheme, but I believe the the bit of code using MT template tags that made it work with her particular application is all her own.

I’m sure Hendrix picked things up from other guitarists, too, and then added the bits that made his music his own. That’s how we learn, isn’t it? Imitation followed by innovation. I’ve learned a few things from using Liz’s templates that I plan to use in my own blog.

Oh, and it appears I’ve pulled it off. The MT Courseware, that is. I’m still working on the song.

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rules for ivanhoe

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My classes start on the 13th. I’m updating one syllabus and writing another one from scratch.

I have tweaked my explanation of the rules (PDF) for “Ivanhoe: a game of critical interpretation,” an unconventional assignment that I blogged about earlier. I’ll be having my students play Ivanhoe in my Spring section of Introduction to British Literature, 1

If you were a student, would this make sense to you? What might seem unclear? What questions would you have?

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i had planned to go to bed early…

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…because a late night of karaoke meant I spent today in low-watt mode. But I’ve been working on getting Liz Lawley’s MT Courseware set-up to work on my teaching installation of MT. Still have kinks to work out (I’m pretty sure the kinks are on my end, somehow), and coding/tagging always seems to keep me up later than I intend.

Earlier, I made some good progress on revising syllabi for the upcoming semester, including refining my use of the game Ivanhoe, something I wrote about earlier.

We were also fortunate enough today to catch the Marsden Hartley (images via google) exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I had seen his painting entitled “Christ Held by Half-Naked Men” (1940-1941) at the Hirshhorn in D.C., but I was unfamiliar with his larger body of work, which is quite varied.

Finally, I continued to tweak this blog’s layout. Thanks to Jason for reminding me to check out the CSS provided by Blue Robot and to Eric Sigler for the pointer to MTSimpleComments.
There are still kinks, but I’m just too pooped right now to figure them all out.

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grading anonymously

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I require my students to leave their names off the front of their essays because I do not want to associate the person with the essay when I grade. Instead they just provide me with their social security number. In this way I hope to be unaffected by the characteristics of a student that are extraneous to the writing. If they’ve made many smart comments in class, for example, I don’t want to automatically give them the benefit of the doubt if a written paragraph is unclear. If they’ve missed several classes, I don’t want to feel like I should dock points on an essay as a response.

I realize by writing the above I run the risk of making myself sound like a capricious grader. I’m not. But I’d like to reduce the distractions running through my head as I’m making comments in the margins and considering the quality of the writing. I’ve not had a problem with my grading. I’ve been teaching since 1993, and I can count on one hand the number of times a student has come to me to complain about a grade on a paper. (Hmm. Maybe that makes me sound like an easy grader.) However, I’ve adopted the anonymous grading policy recently, and it seems to work pretty well.

When they don’t get the grade they think they deserve, students often get quite upset, and I can understand why. Writing is a pretty personal act, and getting a negative reaction to your writing can feel like a personal attack. This is the logic behind the exclamation, “But I’m not a C student!” I would argue that there’s no such thing as a C, or B, or A student. This is an essentialist argument, as if grades are a response to some quality inherent in the individual that magically makes itself apparent in the student’s work. But I’m not grading students; I’m grading assignments. The anonymity assures this.

In a subsequent entry I’ll address some of the potential drawbacks of this policy.

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