My class is at 5:10-6:15, so I'm reflecting on last week's classes before my class this evening. Last week went very well, so there is much to talk about.
Monday we discussed Wysocki and their homework assignment was to do a dialectical journal before class due to the large amount of terms I knew they would not know. Their journals were fairly lengthy, and not near as in depth as what I thought they would be, or rather, I hoped they would understand more of the reading than what they actually did. We tackled three main concepts with Wysocki: format, argument, and purpose, so they would at least have those to think on. When talking about format I asked what they thought of the layout of the article and the way she highlighted certain things, formated with pictures, and drew the human eye. Many of my students were comfortable talking about the very surface level critiquing. They said she was using her piece a s a visual example of her text and argument. This is when I reminded them of the Project #2 and that they should consider experimenting like Wysocki. However, they struggled with her overall argument. Several said she just didn't like nude pictures, others thought she was being a critic of art, a few admitted they didn't make it passed the fifth page of reading without losing the main concept. So for this struggle, we broke down each page with a main thought or point and pieced it together. this took about ten minutes of class, but many of them were taking notes and understood the vocabulary better afterward. Next I asked what the main purpose was. This is where I think the most interesting point was made. One of my students, who was female, said that she thought the main argument was that we have "beautiful" in our own minds versus what the world tells us to consider beautiful. Then a male student said "Well I thought the argument was that authors frame their articles sometimes to be so confusing that you can't find the main argument, because that's what she was talking about with the picture: where your eyes are drawn against what is important." Even though he was complaining about the piece being long and dense and he was struggling to understand, I still thought that this was a very intelligent answer, that we as a graduate class didn't even talk about. So I opened the class to discuss the issue and it went very well, even when I asked how many females agreed and how many males. It was split down the middle by gender. The females agreed with the female student's comment and the males agreed with the male student. I just though it was very interesting what the student preferred to defend. At the end of class I reminded them to meet in the library on Wednesday, and that Project #2 was underway. I also told them the day they would receive their papers back by e-mail, which varied by order in which they turned them in. I dedicated myself to do three a day until finished.
On Wednesday we had our first lab day, which went well. They had read their group members' literacy narratives as homework and identified three different points in which they had common interests and experience. So in class, they came ready and put these thoughts together. By the end of class I had them type out their group members' names, the argument they were focusing on, where they thought each student would branch out in the project and what forum they were using to communicate. All of them turned in very good work. This was a successful day.
On Friday, I had several missing students. I figured this would be the case because it was homecoming weekend and a Friday evening. This made it difficult to do group work with at least one group member missing from each group. So I demonstrated the different forms of presentations they could do and told them to think about which one interested them the most. I then showed the Pixar video of storyboarding and they liked it very much. In their groups they began mapping out on paper storyboards and then converting them to digital. Some of the groups made excellent headway, others struggled a bit, but after I went around to each group and answered their questions and brainstormed with them, they are doing much better. All in all, it was a great week.
I love what I do, have I mentioned that? :)
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