Starting the Class
On the first day I do a get-to-know-you exercise where they find a partner, ask them their name, and interview them with some simple questions, like one interesting thing about them, and one moment from their academic career that stands out, good or bad [be prepared for the room to get noisy]. We then go across the room and share out.
Some questions you might want to put to them at the beginning are:
– How should I be evaluated in this class? What should the grade reflect?
– What is my role in it?
– What are the logistical challenges I face [time, distractions, technological challenges]?
Time permitting, I’ll do the opening diagnostic: I give them a short, 1-2 page text that is good for a personal response [what can they all write about? Education, technology, gender norms, food].
I give them no instruction, other than to write an:
– Introduction
– Analysis Paragraph
– Personal Response Paragraph
– Conclusion
I tell them not to worry if they have no idea what to do. I take the work home, grade it lightly, and give supportive feedback combined with advice on where they need to improve in these basic building blocks of the course.
After returning them, I show them detailed guidelines on what generally makes each one of these paragraphs effective, and post them to the course web page.
Often I will show them a slideshow called “Course Layout” which speaks to the hard and the soft skills the course will emphasize, and some of the larger demands like the essays. Personally, I think first-year writing courses exist so the institution is on record as having communicated to the student what the hard skills necessary for reading and writing proficiency in college are. But the class would be dry and technical if that was all we did, of course.
Early in the semester I assign a very short essay which I call the “Lawnmower Paper”
When I was in high school, I took an auto shop class where my teacher had us disassemble a lawnmower engine, describe all its parts, and put it back together. The Lawnmower Paper is a three-paragraph essay that does this, sort of: it is made up of an intro, analysis paragraph on one key point of the text, and conclusion. I give them heavy support instead of no support, with advice and model paragraphs showing how these should look.
After this, we do a personal response essay [there are a variety of ways to structure these – see this example]. In her essay “Teaching Composition: Research on Effective Practices” instructor Kathleen Cotton cites studies that show “Student writing skills improve when instruction follows a sequence from personal and concrete to impersonal and abstract.” This second unit attempts to do that [see #22 on this list for various approaches to the unit].
It’s helpful to consider what you can teach them in a short amount of time, and when you are emphasizing values more than measured improvement. Looking at the “Invention-Arrangement-Presentation” model, I’d argue you can foster a lot of short-term improvement with arrangement, but for invention [ideas, creativity] and presentation [command of language, technical polish] the best thing you can do is convince them to commit to a chart of long-term improvement. I think generally, the best thing you can do for them is inspire them to value the values, so to speak, of the course after the course is over. You might differentiate “Matriculation Values” [hard skills] from “Life Values” [soft skills].
In his essay “Resisting Entropy” Professor Geoffrey Sirc cites “the enormously rich possibilities of language” as one value you should work to instill in them. Language is a communication tool, a deciphering tool, a tool of creative expression, and really hard, if not impossible, to master in the written form, for all of us. I try to emphasize valuing language enough to always be working on it.
So what to teach them? What values? In a review of two books on teaching writing by Professors Jody Shipka and Mary Soliday that appeared in College English, Professor Anne Beaufort advocates “socially-situated” writing, and an emphasis on “forms of communication,” and “problem-solving.” Sirc mentions leading students to contemplate “engagement in all the many communities” of their lives.
I often find myself struggling to do two things, 1. tap into their rich potentiality, and 2. prep them for writing-intensive courses. How much of each to do? Too far in one direction, you’re praising them for their creativity but not necessarily preparing them for the rest of their college careers. Too far in the other direction, and you’re boring, dull, retrograde. Academic to a fault, and possibly asserting a “white-is-the-norm” criteria that distances them from their own language in ways that encourage them to devalue that language, that heritage, that identity.
Here’s what I think they need, in the most reducible way I can put it:
– Inspiration to value reading, writing, language, creativity, and imagination for all the days of their lives
– Fluency in skills fundamental to excelling in writing-intensive college courses, and life beyond the college-intensive writing course
– For you to be nice
Before ending, let me ask a series of questions:
– Why does this assignment exist?
– Why does this course unit exist?
– Why does this course exist?
– Why does first-year writing exist?
– Why does the English Department exist?
– Why does the division of Arts & Sciences [or whatever your school calls it] exist?
– Why does this college exist?
– Why does college in general exist?
– Why does education exist?
The better an understanding one has of these things, perhaps, the better one might be able to ground assignments in course objectives and get them across to students in ways that are convincing. Curricularly. You’ll probably do better on job interviews too. And grant proposals.