Teaching journal 9/24-9/28

             For Monday my class had read Dawkins and Bryson and completed an IWA and a Dialectical Notebook. I have noticed that their Dialectical Notebook entries consist of a lot of unknown words and definitions for them. While I appreciate them looking into the word definitions, I'm wondering how long it takes them to do their homework if they have to look up so many before they can read and understand the argument. Their vocabulary bank is far less than what I expected. However, many of them were excited about the reading because it fits with their constructs and made great sources for their papers. They found Bryson entertaining and one student  compared Bryson to being the "Stephen Colbert" of composition theory. I'd not thought of it that way, but I see my student's point. Bryson does make fun of silly rules and critiques the way in which the rules came into place. 

                 For their in-class example, I had each one of them bring in one page of an essay of their own having removed all punctuation.  We traded with partners, including me, and did punctuation work on the other student's paper. They had a lot of fun with the exercise, realizing the tone changed tremendously with different authors and punctuation. After doing this for 15 minutes, I then applied this to when they peer review. I explained, surface level punctuation on first drafts is not to be mentioned, but we should examine the use in which the author intends for such punctuation before wanting to correct. So on Wednesday, when we peer reviewed the sample essay in class,  could tell that they had applied the ideas well. there was actually a debate in which two students grappled with the use of a question mark and how it changes the whole paper. Interesting stuff, this composition teaching.