After dinner, Y asked if we could go look for a light sweater, so we hit the local mall and its several relevant stores looking for options. When we stopped by American Eagle Outfitters, Y tried on several things and she eventually settled on a couple of nice sweaters in white and black.

When we walked up to the counter, I thought that the lone female cashier looked familiar, but I wasn’t completely sure. Was she one of my former students? Her hair was slightly different as were her glasses, too. She appeared more mature than most of my freshmen students, but if she were a former student, several years might have passed. I did, however, remember her light freckles. Almost sure, but not quite, I didn’t say anything in case I had misjudged the margin of error.

Y and I said “hi” when we stepped up to her side of the counter, and she gave me an evaluative look and asked, “did you teach at Kent State?”

In that instant, she had broke the ice, and I was glad to know that she was a former student and that it was okay to talk about school. She reported that she was doing well and that she was one year away from graduation.

I remembered that she was one of my first College Writing I students, who I taught with a class theme of “space exploration” [look back at my syllabus here]. We read a number of non-fiction and fiction works relating to the human exploration of outer space, and the students wrote a number of essays evaluating and researching topics that we discussed based on their readings.

She smiled when I asked if she had been in the “space” class. She told me that it had been one of her favorite classes at Kent State, and she enjoyed the readings a lot.

Then, she told me that her mother back home had found her copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the science fiction novels that I asked the students to read. Not only did she like the novel, but she also desperately wanted her boyfriend to read it and she wanted him to see the movie, too. Knowing that I had turned a student on to one of my favorite (and earliest read–right after I had gotten to know Asimov and Bradbury) authors and novels. I consider this a great triumph, because I have not yet had an opportunity to teach a straight science fiction class.

After saying our goodbyes, Y and I made our way out of the mall and back to our car. We tried to snap a picture with my iPhone of the two of us with the sun setting in the background. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough, but I did get an arms-length shot of the two of us in the expansive parking lot.

Driving home, I was happy to know that I had made a good impression on at least one student through my teaching science fiction. Since my “space exploration” writing class, I have tried other things with “cyborgs” and “cognitive science,” but I am particularly fond of that first foray into student composition aboard a rocket ship found in the imagination. I am also glad that that rocket ship continues on with at least one student manning the controls.

I hope that my students found the course stimulating and beneficial despite it being what many of them characterized as a challenging course. As I read over these revised versions of my students’ earlier essays, I will reflect on those things that seemed to connect with my students and those things that did not connect with my students. Studying my students’ work will give me a better idea about how to revise my class in the future. I will also anticipate reading my student survey responses, which I should receive in the Fall.

I am happy to report that one student was excited about the class enough to nominate me for the 2011 Writing Program Outstanding Teaching Award. Unfortunately, I did not ultimately win the award, but it is very satisfying to know that a student cares enough about my teaching to take the time and effort to write an extended nomination letter on my behalf.

This may be my last student teaching experience at Kent State. In Fall 2011, I will work with Professor Derek Van Ittersum in the Office of Digital Composition where I will among other things put together workshops for faculty on using computer technologies and software in the classroom. In Spring 2011, I will have a service-free semester to complete my dissertation, because I received the Kent State Department of English Kenneth R. Pringle Fellowship.

To my past students: I will still be around Kent State, but I will no longer be in my old office. If I can offer advice or provide letters of recommendation, please do not hesitate to contact me at dynamicsubspace at gmail com.

My students and I discussed Capgras Syndrome and Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances today, and we had a wonderful conversation following my lecture on the importance of the amygdala and the fusiform gyrus. It was also a great day to bring in my anatomical skull and brain model to use as a visual aid in class. I was also happily surprised that my students like Atmospheric Disturbances.

In my writing classes, my students have daily and weekly writing assignments to do, and I spend the second week of class introducing them to that routine aspect of the class.

Their daily writing is usually focused on the theme of the class or some aspect of that day’s discussion. I want to give them a daily opportunity to do formal writing as practice, but it also serves a dual function to help each student formalize their thinking about the class for that day.

Their weekly journals are equal in length to two days worth of daily writing (one page each day for daily assignments and two pages for each journal). The weekly journal is an out of class reflection exercise that challenges students to consider the how, why, and what of the types of writing that they do each week. This work will give them material to drawn on for their fifth and final essay in the class.

This week, we also went over the basics of MLA formatting and documentation. My students will have an exam on Tuesday to reinforce the basics so that they will more easily be able to employ MLA throughout the course rather than in the middle as I had done in my previous writing classes. I was particularly impressed by how attentive and inquisitive my students were in today’s class. I believe some of them have used MLA before based on their questions, but I hope that the lessons we covered on Tuesday and Thursday helped everyone get up to speed.

Now that my students have begun these routines and covered the basics of MLA formatting, we can move on to talk about brains, brain trauma, and explorations of the brain. We will have much to talk about and I believe that the topic should be very engaging. Also, it will easily allow us to cover all of the critical thinking and research skills that we need to engage in the first tier writing course at KSU.

Today, I had my first office hours of the semester, during which time I saw no students, but I did prepare my lesson plans for the week. I have adopted a new tact this semester for my first tier writing students. Instead of saving a professional writing style for later in the semester (in this case MLA), I am putting on the damage now. I have increasingly noticed students using online tools to create their citations and works cited lists that would have formatting issues. Furthermore, many students flat out refused to follow MLA formatting for their major essays. This semester, I want my students prepared enough that if they want to use those tools to save time, they will know enough about MLA (and Microsoft Word) to fix any problems that they may encounter.

Class went more smoothly than I had anticipated since I have returned to a fully digital classroom. Everything will be done electronically by email or through the school’s Vista system. Some students introduced new problems that I had not anticipated, but as a whole, my students were attentive to the way that our class would be run for the rest of the semester. I have high hopes for the remainder of the semester, particularly after we slog through MLA and can begin talking about brains.

My only complaint so far this semester is that an individual instructor or the English department is rearranging the desks in my classroom. I have moved the desks back to their original configuration once, but they were moved back into the new configuration today. The new arrangement makes it difficult for me to move around the classroom and attend to students with questions while observing others are on task. Thus begins an email to the writing center . . .

However, this is true of any literature that you may read whether it be mainstream fiction from one particular historical period versus another, or another genre such as detective fiction or the western. Any reading requires a certain amount of heavy lifting on the part of the reader to engage the story and its characters. Perhaps with science fiction there is an additional attendant requirement to figure out the science, technology, and estranging qualities of the story, but the reader’s success at figuring these things out is part of the joy of any kind of revelation.

Below, I have written out some strategies for reading science fiction that can equally apply to other literatures. If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

• Read slowly and carefully. Reading is not a race to the finish. You may have to read something more than once to completely understand the story, and you may have to read it a further time in order to uncover any greater meanings lying beneath the surface.
• Keep a notebook handy as you read. Jot down ideas with the page numbers that attend those ideas.
• Diagram the characters and actions in a flow chart or story outline to better make sense of a complex narrative. Who are the characters? Where do characters go? Who do they encounter? What happens to them? What do they do?
• Keep a web browser open with two tabs: one for your favorite search engine and the other for dictionary.oed.com. Search terms that you have not encountered before.
• Be smart with your reading. If you don’t have the time to read and re-read something, you should search the Lexis Nexis database for reviews of the novel. Wikipedia also has a number of plot summaries. However, I cannot warn you enough that these serve as a guide or introduction only; you should read the work at hand in order to fully understand it and experience the novel itself through the act of reading.
• Don’t always think literally, and vice versa. When you come across something like, “She turned on her right side,” it could have more than one interpretation. She could turn over onto the right side of her body, or it could mean that she powered up the right side of her body (cybernetic implants, computers, etc.).
• Pause during your reading to imagine what it is you are reading. This can be hard work, but it does get easier as you encounter it more often.
• You only build new and powerful connections in your brain through challenging and unique experiences. The readings in my classes are intended to be just that. If you don’t do the heavy lifting though, you won’t get any of the long term benefits of engaging and surmounting these challenges.

I just finished my syllabi for two sections of College Writing II at Kent State in Fall 2010 with the theme: Humans, Technology, and Cyborgs, and I have attached them here (section 002) and here (section 007). The classes are identical, but the meeting places and times have been changed in each syllabus.

This semester, I have designed the course around the image of the cyborg in fiction and our everyday lives. We will read C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” to get things started. Then, we will segue into William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Grant Morrison’s We3, and Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, “The Best of Both Worlds” part 1 and 2. This will be a lightly theoretical class for sophomores, but it will have a heavy independent research component for the second half of the semester. I still have to finalize the three major essay assignments, but I have penciled in the topics on the tentative schedule on the syllabus.

One important change about these classes as compared to my previous classes at Kent State is that I have decided against using classroom computers for all assignments. I found in my last two semesters that students weren’t revising as much, and they weren’t generally writing their assignments to meet the minimum word count (a tedious task at times with Blackboard). Writing in long hand in class and revising that on a computer later will encourage revision practices, and having a printout of a student’s work will quickly let me see if word counts are reached. Using paper will also eliminate problems with students’ digital files (corruption, fonts, version incompatibilities, etc.). Perhaps Michael Scott on NBC’s The Office is right and paper is still very important.

I am excited to get things started in a few weeks, and I am glad that I have the latitude at Kent State to devise a class theme on my own. I enjoy working with these texts, and I believe that I will demonstrate that in the classes. Also, it will be useful to think of these texts in relation to my dissertation, which I will be working on concurrently with these classes.

After my students completed their beginning of class writing (15 minutes) and reading quiz over part 4 of Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (5 minutes), I began to go over the quiz and open the floor to questions about the novel. This is where things got exciting. My students began asking me insightful questions. They were seeking clarifications on plot holes in the text (e.g., TMA-1 coverup on the Moon, particularly after the Discovery is on its way), as well as seeking better understanding about HAL and his neurosis.

Then, I introduced their third major essay topic:

For your third major essay in our class, I would like you to write at least 1000 words about your future career choice and how you would feel about working with and competing with intelligent machines like HAL from Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is an exploration not only of the kinds of work you may do in your future career, but it is also a personal reflection on how you would potentially interact with machines in your work place.

In your essay, I would like you to write about your future job and the intelligent machines you may encounter there. Your manager may be a computer, or the surgeon may be a robot. Creative ideas for the type of work you do may be devised or distributed by a computer. There are many other possibilities, which I would like you to think about and include in your essay. Basically, think about existing jobs performed by human beings, and consider what it would be like to work with a machine instead of a human being.

Your essay should include at a minimum these things:
- introduce your topic and your personal feelings toward working with intelligent machines
- briefly explain how 2001: A Space Odyssey and HAL provide a model for your discussion
- provide some examples of where you may work with intelligent machines in your workplace and how you might deal with that–positively or negatively
- conclusion in which you discuss the ways in which intelligent machines should or should not find their way into your workplace

This is my first time offering this essay topic on 2001, and I let my students know this. I asked them to help me clarify the assignment as I went over it. They responded with more questions and possible examples that we then worked through. Also, several students approached me after class with further ideas about how to proceed with their writing, and I was happily surprised with the connections that they had already made in the final 30 minutes of class while they brainstormed their examples.

My students know about my blog, so if they find their way here, I do want them to know that I applaud their attention and questions in today’s class. I’ve tried different approaches in our class, and today, I believe that we made a very positive breakthrough that I want to carry forward in our further work together in our introductory writing class. Furthermore, it acknowledge that it wasn’t just the text or my essay assignment that made things connect today; it was my students who made things happen today and I was only too happy to go along for the ride.