English 1550 (Thursday, Sept. 8)

What I Observed:

Karen began Thursday’s class with a short video clip of Seamus Heaney reading his poem “ Digging,” which she read and discussed in class on Tuesday. I thought that this was a good, easy way to enhance class through multimedia. The remainder of the class (aside from my MLA presentation, which I’ll mention later in this entry) was spent on freewriting and focused freewriting on a topic related to the students’ first major assignment. I particularly liked that Karen freewrote (?) along with her students and even shared her writing (mistakes and all).

What I Learned:

Thursday was the first day that my role in the classroom really became more involved and I got the chance to interact with the students in a significant way. Karen asked me to take attendance (which, I have to admit, was slightly strange but exciting) and give a short, impromptu presentation on MLA formatting, primarily concerning headings and page numbers. After showing this to the entire class, I helped a few students individually (which reminded me of my Writing Center days). I quickly learned that it’s extremely important to know exactly what you’re doing in the classroom at all times (or at least fake it really, really well). Because the computer lab had a newer version of Microsoft Word that I was unfamiliar with, I faltered for a second when looking for the button to add page numbers. I feel as though it’s easy to lose your credibility as an instructor if you seem unsure or unprepared. I also posted to Blackboard a list of student writing concerns that I took from last week’s diagnostic essays. To address one of these concerns (the oft-repeated desire to learn the correct use of colons and semicolons), I’ll be giving a short lesson soon. Even later on, I’l l be giving the students a lesson on some interviewing techniques for their worker profiles. In this class and in my own classes next spring, I’m looking forward to incorporating some elements of my journalism background.

COMMENTS:

* Guy Shebat: If you can succeed at getting the students to learn the ins and outs of the semi-colon, more power to you! I will be curious to see just how much metalanguage you find you need to bring to bear in your presentation (I mean how much grammatical terminology you'll need). Independent vs. dependent clauses, for a start, right? How about conjunctive adverb?