Follow-up to the Nancy Sommers workshop

Many people have expressed their gratitude for the Wednesday's workshop on responding to student writing.  I know that it recharged my disposition and my essay marking right away, helping me simplify, step back, identify patterns of strength and need, and direct students toward future learning in upcoming online exercises, lab tutoring, and essay assignments. 

Maybe there was just too much to cover since the issue of grading deserves its own week-long conference, but we really needed to spend more time discussing the student essay by Estelle Costanza (Frank's wife, George's mother) so kindly and bravely provided by Kristen Hren.  (Who else would have volunteered to do this?)  This essay was an incredible choice for our workshop, so perhaps we could continue the essay-response discussion in the comment section of this blog post.

I would also ask that those of you who marked the essay give your marked copies to Kristen so that she can compare the different strategies.  I had hoped that during the workshop we would be able to go into small groups and compare our response strategies and the aesthetic of our marked papers, but there was not enough time.

One reason that there may not have been enough time was that we may have talked a bit too much about the assignment sheet.  That was important, of course, since one of our goals was to analyze the relationship between assignment design and student/teacher response, but we needed to give more attention to what the student wrote and our responses to that writing.  We can do that in the blog comment area and discuss ways to help Estelle Costanza reach even more of her potential.

I hope that our dialogue on this workshop material and our dialogue on responding to student writing will continue to unfold.

Again, thanks to those of you who prepped and participated, and a special thanks to Kristen for helping all of us, including Nancy Sommers, by sharing her work with us.  We owe her!  So give her your marked copies at the very least.  Thanks.

To the comments!

Thank you, Nancy Sommers!

Nancy Sommers provided a truly wonderful workshop on responding to student writing yesterday in Batmale Hall. Many of us have been energized by the dialogue, and hopefully that dialogue will continue. Another way to continue the dialogue is on Nancy's blog: http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/hackerhandbooks/. There you will also see links to Nancy's movies with students and teachers.

And, hey, if you haven't seen the free videos at Re:Writing via the Rules for Writers companion site, take a look.  You and your students might like them, among other things.

Jump to Video Central.

Brilliant and Inspiring Composition Scholar!

Is Proper English Dying? And Should Us Care?

This Jeff Yang piece is in the October 29 Wall Street Journal.

If, as Laurie Anderson sang, language is a virus, then English is the common cold.
Already ubiquitous — English has an estimated 1.5 billion speakers — it’s only growing more so, given its status in fast-growing emerging markets. Especially the fastest-growing and emerging-est market of all, China, where it was estimated last year by the China Daily newspaper that up to 400 million people are currently actively learning English, or nearly a third of the population. (It’s this statistic that led Jon Huntsman, former Ambassador to China and soon-to-be-former GOP presidential candidate, to remark recently that in a few years, China will have more English-speakers than America.)

Read the entire article in the October 29 Wall Street Journal . . .

Gene Yang at the SFPL on 11/5

You and your students might be interested in Gene Yang’s upcoming lecture on the inner workings behind graphic novels and his latest project(s). He is a rising star in the graphic novel narrative art form, and his novel ABC has been taught at CCSF and featured in reading groups. You can find out more at his site: geneyang.com

Event: Leveling Up with Gene Yang: Mixing Magic with Graphics

Date: Saturday, Nov. 5, 2011

Time: 1 – 2:30 p.m.

Place: San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch
100 Larkin Street
Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room
San Francisco, CA 94102

Bay Area Community Colleges Deal With Dropouts

John Delgado on "The Practicality of an English Major"

In the words of Alison Schoenberger, English Literature Club President . . .

"We will be holding a meeting this Friday, October 21, Batmale Hall room 349 from 1:30-2:30 p.m. That is all the same, however, our speakers have been moved around. For this meeting we are excited to announce Professor John Delgado speaking on 'The Practicality of an English Major - Learn how to make English as your major work for you while you're matriculating through undergraduate and graduate studies. Make stronger social and professional connections, earn more money on a part or full-time basis, use the literature you've learned to overcome obstacles in your life, personally and professionally.' 'You either have it, or you've had it!'"

Coffee, treats, a congenial lecture, chatting afterwards, and planning for future talks and events: the usual mix!

Christoph Greger's talk, originally scheduled for this Friday, will now take place on November 18th.

Thank you, and we hope to see you this Friday!

--Matt Duckworth

English Literature Club Advisor

Al Davis was an English Major!

And now the commitment to excellence
shall dominate our labs and classes more than ever.

 

B.A. in English, Syracuse '52

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