ENGS 345: Practicum in Teaching Writing

Hey everyone. Your students may not have followed the health care reform battle(s) in Congress, which will make reading and understanding Rose Ann DeMauro’s excellent op-ed, “Diary of a Wimpy Healthcare Bill” especially challenging and probably unproductive for them.

Instead, I’m asking my students to read the following two op-eds from today’s (November 9, 2010) Burlington Free Press,”:

• “Licensing will give integrity to massage therapy“
• “Licensing massage therapists in Vermont is unnecessary“

Also, I’ve updated the course calendar to reflect our updated research paper schedule. Draft 1 is due today (Nov. 9), and I’ll get these drafts back to you on Tuesday. Draft #2 will be due on the Tuesday after we return from our long Thanksgiving recess (November 30th). That will give me time to get those back to you so you can revise them for your final portfolio.

Here’s the updated reading schedule for the rest of the semester. I’ve updated the Course Calendar with these readings on these days, and other small changes, so be sure to check it out!

10/21 Thursday

• Ilona Leki: “The Preferences of ESL Students for Error Correction in College-Level Writing Classes” (Foreign Language Annals 24.3 1991)
• Robert E. Land & Catherine Whitley: “Evaluating Second Language Essays in Regular Composition Classes: Toward a Pluralistic U.S. Rhetoric” (Richness in Writing ed. Donna M. Johnson &Duane H. Roen)

10/28 Thursday

• Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies for Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” College Composition and Communication 31.4 (Dec. 1980): 378-388. (Available on JSTOR)
• Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 33.2 (May 1982): 148-156. (Available on JSTOR)

11/4 Thursday

• Nancy Welch: “Sideshadowing Teacher Response” (College English April 1998) (JSTOR)

11/9 Tuesday

• Jui-Chuan Chang: “Talking About My Omelet: Why and How?” (The Writing Lab Newsletter September 2003)

11/16 Tuesday

• Patrick Hartwell “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” (College English 47.2 February 1985)

12/2 Thursday

• Fan Shen: “The Classroom and the Wider Culture” (Signs of Life in the U.S.A.)

12/7 Tuesday

• Mary Louise Pratt: “Arts of the Contact Zone” (Profession 1991)

Hi all,

I’m going to try to take quick notes from our meeting with Pat Mardeusz at the Library.

Here’s the link to the research guide for GTAs. All of this is posted to the research guide — with handy tabs! This live-blogging is just intended to jog your memory of what we did with Pat.

• Book searching – by subject heading AND by keyword searching
• Finding articles: MLA (literature etc.) and ERIC (education); there’s some overlap, but not a lot, so check both indexes
• Don’t START with JSTOR and Project Muse — the search parameters are just too loose; save these for last, when you know what you’re looking for, specifically
• Keyword searching: remember to truncate! For the Library, use “?” for other databases, use “*”. In the Library catalog, teach? = teacher, teachers, teaching. In MLA/ERIC, teach* works the same way.
• Websites: Educause, NCTE, CCCC, WAC
• And don’t forget the English Graduate Student Research Guide that Pat put together!
• Subject heading searches can give great results! You’ll get a wider range of results than if you search for keywords or title words. Pop in a subject heading and then scroll down the list to see what comes up.
• Remember: when searching the Library catalog, always omit initial articles (a, an, the, etc…)
• Use Recall Item to force anyone who has a book you want to return the book so you can check it out. Remember: with great power comes great responsibility, so recall wisely.
• Subject Headings: Hint: “(Higher)” = Higher Education = College/University stuff = What you want, most of the time.
• Even when you have a gazillion search results in the Library catalog, you can SORT your results using the box on the top right-hand side. “Publication Date Descending” is a good filter, because it shows you the most recent books first!
• “Research is both a science and an art.”
• Sample Guided Keyword search: first year (as a phrase) AND writing composition (any of these). Search!
• Use Pat’s “Keywords to Consider” list! The “Useful Keywords/Key Phrases” are like a basic cookie dough. You need this to have cookies, but you’ll want to add some “And More…” words to make your cookies chocolate chip or banana walnut, or M&M… (now I’m hungry for cookies. Darn.)
• The online catalog is great, but remember to use the books you find! Check out the index to see how often & where your topic comes up. Also, the Bibliography/Works Cited can be a great source of other scholarly works to look for.
• Laurie Kutner (x6-2213) at the Library and the CTL (Center for Teaching & Learning) are good resources for using EndNote. (I’m with Pat — I don’t use it, but some people swear by it.)
• When using MLA and/or ERIC, remember you can restrict the search to particular journals, like College English, or CCC by using the “SO Journal Title” (source = journal title)
• A research hint from me (REP): ALWAYS “Exclude Dissertations” in MLA. They won’t be useful to you at this stage, and they’ll junk up your results.
• “Find it at UVM” isn’t always reliable. Try this: click on Quick Search from the Library main page. Click the “Find Results in Journal Title” then type in the journal title (NEVER the article title), and click search.
• The MLA database has a handy “Cite” function when you look at individual items that will render the item into the major citation formats. Handy!
• If the Library doesn’t have what you find, don’t despair! Use Interlibrary Loan (ILLiad) to request an article, chapter, or book!
• In ERIC “Descriptors” = “Subject Headings” in MLA. Different names, but they work the same.

Thanks, Pat, for putting together this great page, and for helping us become super ninja researchers!

I posted this to my course blog for 001, then thought it might be useful for you guys, too. Enjoy!

To access your Zoo space (that’s the storage space you have reserved for you on UVM’s computer network), you can either use a University computer (they should all have an icon that will let you pull up your Zoo space), or you can use your own computer. If you’re using your own computer, you’ll want to use a program to place and retrieve your files.

Head to https://www.uvm.edu/software/, and put in your UVM netted and password. Then you’ll be taken to the Software Download Archive. Choose your operating system (Mac, Windows, or Linux). All of the software that you’ll be shown is free to UVM people. You could download all of it, if you wanted to. For our purposes, we’re going to focus on a good SFTP client (the technical name for the type of program you’ll need).

If you’re on a Mac, scroll down to a program called Fetch and download it. Be sure to follow the instructions above the download button, because you’ll need to access and input a serial number to make Fetch work on your Mac.

If you’re on a Windows machine, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and download WinSCP.

If you’re on a Linux machine, UVM doesn’t care about you. But you’re probably computer savvy enough to find your own SFTP app.

Once you’ve downloaded your program and started it, you’ll need to tell your new program where you want to connect. This information is what Fetch needs (WinSCP should be largely the same — the information doesn’t change, just where you put it, and what the terms are the program uses in asking for the information):

• Hostname: [netid]@zoo.uvm.edu
• Username: your UVM netid
• Password: your UVM password

(Replace the [netid] with your netid, no brackets. So, when I log on to my Zoo space, I tell Fetch or WinSCP to connect to reparent@zoo.uvm.edu, because “reparent” is my netted.

Once you’ve connected to Zoo, you’ll see a folder called “public_html.” This folder contains stuff you want to make public. Right now it should be empty. But if you want to put something there for people to be able to see and/or download, that’s your call. Anything in your public_html folder will be accessible at: http://www.uvm.edu/~yournetid.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions or problems accessing your Zoo space, let me know.

Welcome to the start of the Fall semester! The blog is up and running, with the course syllabus and calendar posted, and a page full of links and resources you may find useful, or not. I encourage you to poke around the resources page — you may find something that sparks a thought or helps with a project!

As we move through the semester, we may decide to shift items around on the schedule. All readings and assignments are listed on the schedule. If we decide to move anything, I’ll change it here on the blog, and will put up a new post reminding us all of the change. This blog is always to be considered the most recent and most accurate schedule of what’s happening when.

This is your official notice that everything below this post is at the other end of a time warp, and you do not need to read any of it. (Though you may have aspirations to being a chrononaut, and so might enjoy reading posts from the previous times I taught this course. The choice, of course, is yours.)

As everyone knows, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas… on hidden-camera surveillance footage to be unearthed and used for future (or present) blackmailing purposes. Duh.

And I’ve mentioned before that everything you put online stays online in one form or another. Forever. Right, Monica?

And I always make it a point to talk with my classes about how everything other people put online about you stays online forever. This isn’t news, and it isn’t rocket science. You’d think a smart up-and-comer would have figured that out by now.

So, pop quiz time: Who’s The Guy On The Left Honking Hillary’s Hooter?

Read the rest of this entry »

As promised, I’ve revised the Calendar. Here’s the summary of changes:

• The Teaching Journal #2 will include a 2-4 page reflection on the journal to date; it will be due on November 6
• The Greatest Teaching Fear revised draft will be due on November 20

That’s it!

Welcome to the Fall 2008 section of English 345: Practicum in Teaching Writing, or as I’ll almost certainly refer to it, the Teaching Seminar.

On this blog you’ll find the course syllabus, course calendar (listing readings, special events and assignment due dates), resources for teaching composition and rhetoric, and a steady stream of composition- and teaching-related materials happening around the world and on the Web.

I’ll post materials here for you to read for our in-class discussions, so check this page every few days to stay current.

Finally, while I won’t ask you to post here about your classes or the details of your teaching experiences (I don’t think this is the right format or venue for that), if you have questions about assignments or want to respond to any of the posts I put up here, feel free to do so!

Oh, and just to clarify: everything below this post is from last year’s section. You’re welcome to read it, but I’m not sure how relevant it’ll be for you. Just so you know.

I’m going to use this space as a virtual discussion board for our collaborative revision of the assignment sequence.

After each class period’s discussion, I’ll post the main points here. Feel free to post your thoughts (as they develop) on the sequence here in the comments. Also, feel free to use this as a way to remind yourself what we discussed, and where the changes seem to be heading. This will be especially handy as you continue to ponder your own desired changes and tweaks to the sequence.