Hypermediated Teaching Philosophy November 24, 2009

Cognitive Theories of Writing iFeminism Document Instruction Teaching Philosophy Literacy Autobiography

How it all happened… November 5, 2009

My parents raised my brother and me according to the hands-off theory of child-rearing. We were sent outside most of the time, so I was a semi-feral heathen child until a few years ago. I don’t recall my mom or dad reading to me (though, I’m sure they did), but I do remember being in [...]

October 29, 2009

The best way to improve teachers is to turn us all into robots with microchips in our brains. I would like a special bionic arm that can crush things. That would be the best way. The hard way is to be constantly self-reflective. I believe that all CIs are required to post online their thoughts [...]

October 22, 2009

This is going to be obvious, but I think that a FYC teacher should come to class knowing how to be a teacher. I have no experience teaching, so this concern looms largely over my head like a pterodactyl or something. A teacher needs to know the material, know where the gaps of education are [...]

Grading October 15, 2009

I try to grade based on content. Everyone makes typos, slips up with grammar usage, and writes an awkward sentence or two. I spare the occasional accidents, but I also point some out. I had a professor who was working with me on a long paper. She asked me to come and visit with her, [...]

October 11, 2009

I did my classroom observations this past week, and I could not the shake the feeling that it was just really weird. It is just weird that next year, I’ll be teaching — teaching –  a group of students. It isn’t that I don’t want to teach, I just feel too much like a student [...]

Working with others September 30, 2009

I’ve been trying to get my head around the idea of collaborative learning. My knee-jerk reaction is that I hate group work. Whenever my teacher told us to get into groups, I would panic. First, because I’m an introverted person, the social anxiety would kick in. I like everyone, but sometimes personalities just don’t mesh [...]

…and then chaos ensues September 22, 2009

My writing process is much like the terms the authors of our assigned texts use euphemistically: overlapping and recursive. Things do not fall into  nice little patterns. I was taught, back in my TAAS days, to write in a linear fashion. Once you figured out the system, what those TAAS machines wanted, it was supposedly [...]

September 14, 2009

How ironic. I just spent several hours wading through the mess of student essays attempting to squash any hint at individual voices that might peek through. One girl (I could tell just from her writing that she was female) wrote in a way that sounded exactly like she was talking to me, that some person [...]

Things to Teach… September 9, 2009

I think that First Year Composition should strive to be practical. Most of these students are not going to be English majors, so they need to gather the tools and skills in writing that are cross-disciplinary. Grammar, the necessary evil, ought to be taught to mastery (or at least, competency). I don’t think the nitty-gritties [...]