English 1539 (Monday, Oct. 24)

Because I will be attending the National College Media convention from Wednesday through Sunday, I will only have two journal entries (one for 1539, one for 1550) this week.

1. Class:

* Read key points and reviewed good example of individual essay component (for Literary Analysis and Critical Thinking Assignment).

* Gave presentation tips to students (primarily less reading of slides and more presenting).

* Allowed students the rest of class time to work with their group members on presentations (which begin Wednesday).

2. Class analysis:

I particularly like the way that Nikki emphasizes her advice/guidelines with examples of actual student work. For instance, as noted above, she used a former student's individual essay (with the name blacked out, of course) to illustrate what she wanted to see in her current students' essays. Additionally, instead of reading through the entire essay with her class, she noted and explained several key points, like the great title and the strong thesis statement. This way, I think, makes it easier for students to understand exactly what was good about the essay. It also gives them the opportunity to take these techniques and model their own essays after them. She also used this approach to explain the difference between a good PowerPoint presentation and a bad PowerPoint presentation. Her other 1539 class began their presentations today (and she required students to submit full-page printouts of the slides), so she showed students one page/slide that was covered with paragraphs and paragraphs of text. In this instance, too, the student presenters had actually read the slides word for word. Nikki also noted that these students hadn't acted like professionals during the presentation, and she emphasized that knowing how to effectively present will benefit them in future classes. However, she also mentioned some positives of student presentations in the previous class. For example, one group incorporated video clips into its presentation.

3. Class implementation:

Again, several students were noticeably absent from class today. Subsequently, this made group work difficult for some students, and students who were absent on Friday were confused about upcoming assignments. Nikki emphasized that college--particularly a college-level writing course--is the ideal time for students to learn about responsibility ... including their responsibility to attend class (or understand and deal with the consequences). As noted before, I'm thinking about somehow reworking my attendance policy and perhaps also incorporating a presentation/group work component into my course.

COMMENTS:

* Guy Shebat: Sample papers are a good idea – but you want to be careful about not giving the students too much of a script or model to follow. In the past I have sometime created a ‘dummy’ sample paper/draft of my own, one that is less than stellar, and used it as a way to get the students to think critically about a draft for a particular assignment. But it takes more time to write up one’s own dummy draft than to pull one in from a previous course (I wouldn’t let the students keep the sample, though). Group work is a good idea, but, given the weather early in the Spring semester, your best bet will be to hold off on group work until after Break – when a) you have good weather and b) you have pretty much a ‘working roster’ of regularly participating students.