My second week of teaching has been full of commenting on homework, memorizing names, clarifying that students do, in fact, have to work to keep the "B" in the grading contract, and selecting interesting ways to teach the text. Subjects had several questions about Project #1 and creating a writing construct. I had a student ask "Is it like, if we could break any rule while writing a paper, which one would we break?" And in essence, I think I agree. While they read the intro explaining constructs, we still needed to go through a list of constructs as examples. Since we were out of class on Monday and library research was on Friday (which, by the way, Loraine Wochna did an awesome job helping) I will just talk about Wednesday's class.
I revised my plan for Wednesday, because I think I had planned too much interaction, and not enough teaching moments. So I broke down the exercise I was going to do with them rewriting a news article to the class suggestion of picking out claims from facts out of a funny article. this seemed to help a lot. I chose rare and funny news pieces and then had them argue what they thought was fact and claim. We then talked about the rhetorical moments at hand and how that could have skewed the view. Overall, many of them related with Shirley out of the Kantz reading, and could see themselves not adding original thought to papers. We talked about original topic ideas and ended reviewing homework and reminding to meet at the library.
"Is it like, if we could break any rule while writing a paper, which one would we break?" And in essence, I think I agree.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a bad place to begin thinking about constructs but it is too limiting. So, e.g., few students would get into an issue question such as, how should OU alter its academic misconduct rules? This relates to a construct, but would not come out of the student's question.
Kantz work sounds good--I think it is important to get them to think about the difference between Shirley and Alice's view of research, facts, the purposes of writing etc.