One by One

I have been a teacher of record for Freshman Comp as a graduate assistant for the last 2.5 years. My stint is up in December, as I will graduate. We were given minimal guidance on what or how to teach. So I naturally pulled on my 40+ years of experience teaching things like Nursery, Primary Music, Sunday School, Relief Society, Ballet, and as a homeschooling mother.

The most important thing I ever learned about teaching is that everybody is an individual. I do not teach a class of 30, I teach 30 individuals in a class. Each comes with different experiences, different styles of learning, and different skills they need to build. Their brains and bodies each work in their own unique ways.

I try hard to learn every name every semester. I try to remember their strengths, weaknesses, tolerances for complication and to adjust my discussions, expectations, council, and encouragement for each one.

We can never choose what others are ready to learn, and if they are not ready to learn it, no amount of lecturing or assignments will get them there. What a true teacher really needs to do is meet the students where they are at, and work with them where they are at. If that means sectioning your lecture to cover different needs for different students, then do it.  A beautiful, cohesive, focused lecture will only help the students ready for that material. But if you hit 5 topics, perhaps you can help 5 times as many students.

The other thing I think is crucial is to love them, everyone, individually. Get to know them. Acknowledge their presence, and thank them for coming, discuss their favorite topics. Moving away from home, to a dorm, being in classrooms or lecture halls with 100s of other students, eating dinner in a noisy dining hall, can all be human processing- even dehumanizing. It is easy to become a number or an ID login, and everyone, especially those in emerging adulthood need to be reminded that they are more than a grade or a transcript. So I look in their eyes, write down what I like about what I am seeing in their papers and make a point to call them by name at least once every class. I grade individually, looking for growth in their skills and thought processes, and try to challenge appropriately.

No, I do not teach according to the latest techniques or theories, even if I know them, they are only useful to a small subset at any one time. No, I try to teach what each student needs.  I teach one by one.

The Birth of a Paper

Writing a Seminar paper is a lot like giving birth to a baby.
Going into it, I get an urge to clean, only this time, not the kitchen, it is shelves of the library. I scour them for everything I can find related to my topic. I waddle out of there, my hands low, wrapped around the big belly of books that reach to my chin.

When the labor of writing sets in, there are lots of deep breathes, moans, squeaks. Inbetween expulsions of words, I get up and pace, looking for nourishment to fuel my task, to stretch my sore muscles. My back aches, my hips are sore. Sleep comes in fits. No diversion works for long, back to the pushing, relentless and seemingly never-ending, until in full bloom the paper emerges, full of the red squiggly lines, mucus of misspelled words and grammar mistakes. It needs to be cleaned off. It needs to be wrapped in the proper format.
Then exhausted, I sleep, snuggled up to dreams of concepts that came to life as the paper's ideas were born.

Interesting Ideas in Digital literacy:

"Digital literacy is not about the skills of using technologies, but how we use our judgment to maintain awareness of what we are reading and writing, why we are doing it, and whom we are addressing."

Maha Bali makes a most interesting point that judgment and awareness are needed even as we are quietly sitting at home on a computer because now this time is spent connected to the world.

Wow- makes me want to snuggle up with a good book.

What do you think?

Writting Education- does it make a difference?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/

This is an amazing series of articles exploring the usefulness of how and whys of writing education at a High School level.

Helps answer the question of if teaching writing does any good at all?  What do you think?

Aphra Behn and the Feminist Mystique

Aphra Behn, one of the earliest professional female writers (in English) wrote the play "The Rover" that was first produced in 1677 and was a great success. The plays introduction, however gave her no credit. It only says "This play was written by a Person of Quality." She did not take credit until after it's prolonged success.
        I find it interesting that her characters and even her speeches were largely taken from stock, but yet her play showed resilience. Being as I have yet to totally immerse myself in the works of the time,  including Thomas Killagrew's Thomaso, I can not directly compare her characters to others. But from what I know about Alphra Behn, and about theater successes, I would guess that she took the stock characters and gave them her own twist, flavors that not only made fun of the stock formulas, but also added to the experience of the characters as understandable and relatable to the audience personally.
       Of course, as so common to female authors and produces, females actually carry on conversations with other females about their hopes, dreams, and ambitions. I once read an article that claimed Walt Disney's animated "Sleeping Beauty" was the most feminist of all movies she studied because women had conversations with each other about other things than men.
    Alphra Behn faced a backlash of being "bawdy" like her characters in this play. Is "bawdy" an insult? Heaven forbid that females have thoughts, feelings or expressions of the biological work of their lives. Sex, birth, babies, yup very feminine. And guess what? We are going to talk about it now. (It only took several hundred years from Alphra Behn). I am sorry my typing is so poor. My toddler is nursing with one hand and hitting my keyboard with the other.
    Recently there has been a nice trend of accepting the biological feminine. From period panties to comfortable bras, advertisers have brought it out of whispered obscurity. I also believe the Internet has helped, as women bloggers have often broached subjects that would leave most men embarrassed to even imagine. Mommy bloggers, who often start out fairly anonymous, gave us a voice. Now the feminine is taking over even some of the traditional male genres like Star Wars, with strong female leads that are not just eye candy.  Thank you Aphra Behn.

Behn, Alphra, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works. Janet Todd, Ed. Penguin Books. London 1992.

Revamping this Blog.... for a School Class

Yes, for the first time in years this blog will be used daily. It is now absorbed by English 3177/5177 at Bemidji State University. So besides using my blog daily, I have to learn how to tweet. Who would like to follow this mom on twitter?