Newly Proposed Course ID Numbering System

Many if not all us have received requests to comment on the recently proposed Course Identification Numbering System (C-ID), a supranumbering system being developed to ease the transfer and articulation burdens in California’s higher educational institutions.  This is something that could impact the look, content, and feel of our courses. We have just a little bit of time to comment on these descriptors by registering at the C-ID site and then responding to what has been proposed.  You might love or hate what is in the works.  To learn more about C-ID, please visit their ABOUT page. To access FAQs for faculty, please click here. 

I have linked the proposed descriptors here, if you don't want to use C-ID's simple registration.  You could comment (anonymously) here in our blog, and we could compile those comments (hit the comments link below) and send them to C-ID and/or our articulation officer.

Here are the descriptors:
ENGL 110: Freshman Composition
ENGL 115: Argumentative Writing and Critical Thinking
ENGL-CW 100: Introduction to Creative Writing
ENGL-LIT 100: Introduction to Literature
ENGL-LIT 105: Critical Writing and Thinking Through Literature
ENGL-LIT 160:  Survey of British Literature 1

THE BOWLING EVENT OF THE CENTURY: 10/21, PRESIDIO BOWL

You got a date on Friday, October 21, baby!

We will be bowling with and against the CCSF librarians at the Presidio Bowl (presidiobowl.com).

The sign-up list is on the whiteboard in the English Dept office.  You will see options to roll during one or all of the hourly slots: 4-5pm, 5-6pm, and 6-7pm (the bonus round).  We will have four lanes at $50/hr per lane, which includes shoe rental.  Up to 6 rollers may use a lane. They have a bar/restaurant because, well, the Presidio Bowl is a bowling alley.  This bowling event is in place of the softball game we were going to play with the librarians.  We will save that for the spring.  

So who's going to roll?  Sign up!

Hey, it might be more convenient to use the blog's comment space
to sign up for your rounds, but that's, like, just my opinion, man.

New Videos on Responding to Student Writers!

Jump to this video filmed locally.  You might recognize some of the participants.

For more resources, jump to this handbook page.

Fishy Sentences

Most people know a good sentence when they read one, but New York Times columnist Stanley Fish says most of us don't really know how to write them ourselves. His new book, How To Write A Sentence: And How To Read One, is part ode, part how-to guide to the art of the well-constructed sentence.

Fish is something of a sentence connoisseur, and he says writing a fine sentence is a delicate process — but it's a process that can be learned. He laments that many educators approach teaching the craft the wrong way — by relying on rules rather than examples.

Analyzing great sentences "will tell you more about ... what you can possibly hope to imitate than a set of sterile rules that seem often impossibly abstract," Fish tells NPR's Neal Conan.

A good sentence may be easy to pick out, but learning to understand what makes it great, says Fish, will help a student become a stronger writer and a "better reader of sentences."

Jump to the NPR piece.

What's wrong . . . or right?

What's wrong with our universities?

This fall more than 19 million students will enroll in the 4,000 or so degree-granting colleges and universities now operating in the United States. College enrollments have grown steadily year by year, more than doubling since 1970 and increasing by nearly one-third since the year 2000. More than 70 percent of high school graduates enroll in a community college, four-year residential college, or in one of the new online universities, though only about half of these students graduate within five years. The steady growth in enrollments is fed by the widespread belief (encouraged by college administrators) that a college degree is a requirement for entry into the world of middle-class employment. A college education is now deemed one of those prizes that, if good for a few, must therefore be good for everyone, even if no one in a position of academic authority can define what such an education is or should be. These conceptions are at the heart of the democratic revolution in higher education.

Read the rest of this piece. It offers much to discuss...

The Mechanical Muse

By LEV GROSSMAN
Published: September 2, 2011

Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was circa 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. But if you go back further there’s a more helpful precedent for what’s going on.

Read the entire article on this computer screen.

Join the English Literature Club: Fridays 1:30-2:30

The English Literature Club will be meeting most Fridays from 1:30-2:30 p.m. this semester in Batmale 349, the usual place.

This Friday, September 9th, will feature a club introduction, and I will give a brief talk entitled "Roses, Rats, and the Shortest Poems on Earth." I will use short pieces by Langston Hughes, Carl Rakosi, Robert Burns, William Blake, Dorothy Parker, John Keats, and the team of Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser as an introduction to reading poetry. I will focus on voice and character in relation to the unfolding drama of even the shortest poems.

If you have students in your English 1Bs (and other classes) who are a bit anxious about reading poetry, send them to the Lit Club meeting this Friday, and I'll try to help them out a bit.

Thank you,
Matt Duckworth
English Literature Club Advisor