Dynamic Subspace

As important as the rudimentary and routine parts of a writing class are, I am always glad to have the groundwork completed so that my students and I can move on to the fun stuff that forms the core of the writing that they will do during the semester.

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.

Last night, Y and I had a welcome boost to the second week of the semester: Mack and Sue took us out to eat at Ray’s in downtown Kent. We had a great talk with them over dinner about their holiday and our trip to South Georgia and Taiwan. It was a relaxing start to the week.

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 . . .