composition

I return to my post about the Aurora shooting because some new information has recently come forth. From the beginning, law enforcement said that they believed the attack was premeditated, and last week, Fox News published that law enforcement found a massive notebook that had been mailed to a university psychiatrist on July 12, days before the attack. In other words, had it been delivered and had someone taken it seriously, the attack might have been prevented. This leads me back to some of the things I have been thinking about over the past two years: How do we judge if someone is simply being creative with a dark edge, or sincerely needs help?  How do we deal with traumatic/confessional writing?   Who gets heard in a world covered with writing?   Why do we make students write about the "purely academic" and separate themselves from the real world?  These questions immediately lead me back to Chris Anson's short piece, "What's Writing Got to Do With Campus Te...

This morning when I woke up, the first thing I heard about was the shooting in Colorado during the premier of The Dark Knight Rises. Since I had gone to the midnight showing, getting to the theater two hours before the movie started despite having advanced tickets, it clearly had freaked my mom out to think that it could have just as easily been at our local theater. I imagined myself there, with all the chaos of bullets flying, people scrambling, gas oozing. As my friend Eye said, "Talk about life imitating art." Sad, but true, in this case. It was like a real life Joker attack, senseless and without motive thus far, incited to create fear and chaos. It was homegrown terrorism (of course, unless he was Arab, the media wouldn't label it that way, but that's an argument for another day). My first reaction after I heard about it, like any good academic, was to read about it from different news sources to find out what really happened. There was no shortage of sources. R...

Last week, my online course began. As I posted earlier, I have never taught online before, and the idea of smooshing my 15-week course into a 5-week warp-speed summer course was making me very, very anxious. I was also upset that the powers that be forced me to use Blackboard rather than Wordpress, as initially planned.  The Blackboard Homepage for My Online Course I changed my syllabus 4 times, but in the end, I went with a blend between an activist writing and an iSearch project approach. There are very few assigned readings in my course, but the ones that I do make them read are mostly related to writing studies (Sommers, Flower and Hayes, Lamott). I also have them doing some writing about writing, disconnected from the major project. The end result will be a portfolio that includes their big project, some smaller pieces, a reflection, and a self-evaluation. So now, I'm a week and a half in, and I think my fears have been assuaged. I'm sure it speaks to the students more to ...