composition

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of picking up Richard Miller's Writing at the End of the World , a book that voiced many of the concerns I was already having and further complicated my stance as an educator. I'd recommend everyone read this book. Miller , a professor at Rutgers University, well-known for his blog text2cloud , examines writing, reading, and what it means to our world. As English instructors, we are often blinded by our idealism. We love reading and writing because we believe it is transformative, that reading can make people see the world anew or inspire them to be "good" (whatever that means). A glass bottle theory, Miller takes a cherry bomb and ignites it from the inside, shattering the illusion. According to Miller, neither literature nor writing is truly transformative. He writes: we tell ourselves and our students over and over again about the power of reading and writing while the gap between rich and poor grows greater, the Twin Towers come...

I have just come off of my panel at the 2011 British Women Writer's Conference on "Educating the Nineteenth Century Child." I presented on Augusta Webster's Daffodil and the Croaxaxicans: A Romance of History, in which I believe Webster has taken and revised the Alice model to support an image of child heroine as emerging New Woman. Before my presentation, came two wonderful presentations, Sandra Burr's "The Curious Case of Harriet and Lousia Beaufort: Questing Women, Inquisitive Texts" and Ashely Faulkner's "Christ Among the Doctors: Pedagogy, Pediatrics, and Divinity in Alice Meynell's Criticism." At the end, when the floor opened up to questions, an audience member remarked that we (all three panelists) were all working on recovery projects. Though Ashley saw his process as a different kind of recovery than the work Sandra was doing, I think this very keen audience observer was correct in her statement. With that said, I believe it f...

C--- E- ----- passsedd the exit exam... sooo do i really have to do all these papers and assignments? 41 minutes ago  ·  Like  ·  [anonymous] likes this. The other day, this interaction popped on my Facebook newsfeed. If this doesn't explain why we need to get rid of standardized testing, then I don't know what does! The student who posted this is a senior in college. In theory, at this stage in the game, she should understand the value of education for its own sake, but testing is clearly setting up a false indicator. Maybe, she's right, though. If all we want students to do is pass the exam, then should they have to do any more work after they pass? What's the point? I know I'd find it hard to make meaning of my education if I was simply being pushed towards completing an exam that declared me "college educated." I learned long ago that if I'm involved in my education for its own sake, I learn. If I learn for a test, I forget it all after I've em...

Part I: Corkboard.me It's not always easy to get a class involved, especially if your students are shy. Corkboard.me , however, seemed to really be effective in facilitating class interaction. Corkboard.me is a virtual representation of the classroom bulletin board. Students can stick post-its up anonymously and synchronously about just about anything. In my classroom, we use it as a brainstorming tool. My students post their ideas, while we have our Corkboard showing on the projection screen. The sheer number of post-its on our Corkboard show just how well it worked. For the last assignment, about 30 post-its were put up in 5 minutes. Last semester, I used Wallwisher to have students do some brainstorming for their Writing as Activism projects. They posted problems they foresee the world facing in the next fifty years. As you can see in this older post , students had fun using it and really did a great job of brainstorming and had fun doing it. Many of their thought bubbles were ...

This weekend, I spent time in lovely New Hampshire at the Northeast Writing Center Association Conference at Southern New Hampshire University. The theme of the conference was writing centers as community gardens, a metaphor that inspired a great deal of thoughtful discussion and insight. It was a great experience! As a first time conference goer, the relaxed atmosphere and the friendly conference attendees took off much of the pressure I was feeling. It was a mix of writing center directors, faculty, tutors, and graduate and undergraduate students. I met up with some old friends from the Montclair State University Center for Writing Excellence, forged stronger bonds with my current St. John's University Writing Center community, and met some interesting new folks along the way. Throughout the day, conference goers were tweeting about the panels they were participating. The day kicked off with a keynote by Harry Denny, our own St. John's University Writing Center Director and ...

Early Thursday morning, my grandfather passed away at 74 years old. It was not a shock; he had been battling cirrhosis for months. Nothing, however, could soften the blow of seeing the casket shut for the final time, knowing that we would never see his face again. Of course, even in times of tragedy, we learn, and we grow. I know my grandfather would not want me to mope and mourn. Even on his death bed, he never shed a tear for his own mortality. He was a man who believed in loving life and humanity and was satisfied to pass on knowing that he was loved. My grandfather was a good man. Though he was a skilled furniture maker in Greece, he moved to America with very little money and no knowledge of English to take advantage of the Land of Opportunity and became a union worker, doing construction jobs. He worked in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, for six months, living in a small apartment with several other men, until my grandmother and my father came over to join him ...

When I began teaching, I decided that I would let my students take the wheel when it comes to designing rubrics. I think that students look to the professor as the container of all knowledge, especially when it comes to writing. Letting them design the rubric helps them to see that I'm not the only one who knows what makes good writing. (Plus, they find it harder to claim they are being graded unfairly when they have chosen the criteria) To design the rubric, we start early in the semester with George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which talks about what makes bad writing. That conversation is followed by a discussion about what makes good writing. As students share their thoughts about the elements of good writing, I write their ideas on the whiteboard. Later, I copy these down. The next step in this process is giving them a voting sheet. I lay out a spreadsheet of their ideas, along with SAT writing standards for a "6" essay, good writing te...