Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Blog 1: Reader's Autobiography

I'm using this blog to post about my own reading but also to blog alongside my students in ENGL 104 and WR 121. For this reason, I'm going to complete the first blog post for ENGL 104.

1. My name is Nancy Knowles. I prefer to be called Nancy, but Professor Knowles or Dr. Knowles work fine. I got a BA in East Asian Studies from UCLA, so I didn't major in English as an undergraduate, but by the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to be an English major. I later went back to school for graduate study in English. My main hobby is reading, so I'm getting paid for my hobby! :) I also like to play with my daughter and walk my dogs.

2. I don't remember learning to read. My parents must have read to me, but I don't remember that either. I remember reading to my younger sister from a fairy tale book with a red binding. I also remember reading under the covers with a flashlight after I was supposed to be asleep. I loved escaping into the adventure in the book! I had long "thinks" where I would picture myself in the action of the stories.

In terms of school reading, I remember reading "Dick and Jane" books in first grade. I read a book called Savage Sam in fourth grade that was the sequel to Old Yeller. I loved the smell of that book! By eighth grade, I had read all the books the eighth grade class would be reading that year, except Moby Dick. So, I read Moby Dick (I enjoyed all the whaling details, including the time a sailor fell into a whale that was being cut up--gross!), and then my teacher told me to read whatever I wanted and to write up a worksheet he could use to assign that book to other students. That was totally my style!

My reading preference has always been fantasy. My current favorite fantasy writer is Martha Wells. I also assign myself classics to read and try to keep up with my students' reading and my dad's reading. I recently read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. That was a hard book to get through because it is very bleak and violent! However, my dad read it, one of my students recommended it, so I did it. Since then, one of my other students with whom I talk about books has read it, resulting in some interesting conversations. I plan to write a separate post on it, so I won't say any more.

3. I still need to do my interviews... I'm working with some teachers today and will try to pin them down about their reading.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Warnock's Teaching Writing Online

Scott Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online is an important handbook for college teachers of writing to consult when setting up an online writing course for the first time.

The philosophical orientation of the book is process writing. It assumes that writing is a process involving recursive steps that a course would employ, and organization follows that logical order: from developing your online persona, to lessons and syllabi, to structuring the course and managing course dialogue, and then to writing response, collaboration, and assessment. In each section, Warnock provides tips, examples, and questions for consideration.

The aspect of this book that I am using today as I get my summer online courses up and running is the section “A Word on Redundancy.” Redundancy helps students remember what to do when. This probably true in any classroom situation. Warnock provides a list of places he provides deadline information:
  • Syllabus
  • Assignment
  • Weekly plan
  • Response to the rough draft
  • Course announcements
  • Group email a few days before the deadline (56-57)

Deadlines aren’t the only aspect of the course requiring redundancy. I used to have weekly folders and put everything for the week in them. The problem was that sometimes we needed those things in other weeks, and then even I couldn’t find them! Now, I have a redundant structure where materials are grouped by purpose (assignments, lectures, readings, etc.), and they also exist, or I create a link to them, in the weekly folders.

Another aspect of the book that parallels my recent development as a teacher is the section “How Do We Know They Have Read?” I’ve been assuming that if we do enough dialogue (informal writing) and formal writing about reading, I will know whether students have read, and they will know that reading is important to success in the course. I am particularly careful to request that students refer to or quote specific passages on specific pages. This helps in encouraging specificity in analysis. It also indicates that they’ve read enough to find the quote. In research assignments, I’m headed toward requiring more summary and synthesis before drafting to ensure that students have read their source materials and can discuss them as unique wholes rather than cherry-picking quotations.

However, sometimes, by the time we’re talking and writing about our reading, it’s too late for those who haven’t read to catch up. So, after teaching for almost 20 years, I think I’m going to resort to quizzing, not in an antagonistic way, but in a way that gets students into the text and reminds them about important aspects of it. And, quizzing in an online environment is easy because I can set the whole business up to score and post the scores in the grade book. Here are Warnock’s quizzing recommendations:
  • Same day of the week
  • Easy questions
  • Five-minute time limit
  • Create question sets and randomize which are given to each student (to deter cheating; 64-65)

As an experienced online instructor of writing, I benefited by checking my own practice against Warnock’s step-by-step recommendations, but as I’ve started to incorporate more multimedia into my teaching (albeit not very capably yet), I feel as if I could rewrite the book to add those elements to his discussion. Of course, the book was in progress before many of the current multimedia tools existed, so I’m sure my feeling is out of line, or maybe because the field is changing so quickly, the book went out of date quickly and just needs a second edition. I’d also like to see a more detailed chapter on online collaboration and an anthology of specific assignments and documents associated with the various chapters. So, I think this book is good for the first-time instructor of writing online who just needs the big picture and general philosophy. 

Works Cited
Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2009. Print.

Asher's "Why Reading Is Always Social"

When I think of reading, I think of me, my book, a comfortable place, and time to myself. I might be reading in the quiet, sleepy time before bed. I might have taken a book to my daughter's swimming lesson or aikido class. I might be waiting in a doctor's office. Wherever I read, I often think about reading as time for myself where the world slows down, and I can relax in my own imagination. As a relatively introverted person, this time to myself is incredibly rejuvenating.

Yet, as Levi Asher argues in "Why Reading is Always Social," it totally is! Asher writes, "To read another person's words is to conduct a meeting of minds." This is absolutely true. Reading takes me to another place and time where I can see through another person's eyes. If the reading is fiction, I experience the perspective not only of the writer but also of the characters. And, if the narrative includes allusions to prior narratives, I've got windows onto those writers and characters, too.

Asher goes on to indicate that reading is social because readers like to talk about their reading with others. I get to do this in my classrooms with students, which is kind of inauthentic, as they are forced to talk to me. My family members are all great readers, so we often talk about books. I also have colleagues with whom I like to discuss reading. As Asher concludes, literature is about reading together.

But, sometimes even in this crowd of readers, I still feel lonely. I want to talk with people who like to read and who have just read exactly what I have read. Although I work with English majors, few of them read what I read for fun, and even fewer stop by to talk about their reading and suggest new books. While many people around me have heard the same news or watched the same movies, few have read the same books. So, maybe that's why I started this blog, so at least I can talk to myself! :)

I also seem to need to keep a record of my reading, as I read a lot of books and sometimes want to go back and refresh my memory about them. I even have a stack of books near my desk about which I want to write but have not yet gotten to. I don't want to put them away until I can record my thoughts. So many books, so little time!

Friday, June 8, 2012

Thanks, Ray Bradbury!


McCarthy Badass

I have yet to write a post on McCarthy, but I will write about Blood Meridian soon, as one can't read it and not write about it. I just want to keep track of the link to "10 Reasons Why Cormac McCarthy Is a Badass" by David McMillan: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/10-reasons-why-cormac-mccarthy-is-a-badass/