Category: teaching

After Reading Always Apprentices

Initial Thoughts:

I thought I’d like this book because I often like texts that come from The Believer. As I started to read, I thought the book was going to stink due to idle banter. There are some not-good conversations in here. When I didn’t connect with a conversation, I skipped ahead to the next one. I ended up reading well over half of the interviews printed in this book.  As someone who thrives when in conversation with others, I jotted down a lot of ideas I have for my own work, texts I want to take a look at, and ideas for teaching.

Three Golden Lines:

  • Lawrence Schiller on choosing a topic for writing about: “First, find a story that has depth and general appeal.”
  • Gary Lutz: “Ideally, as I see things, every sentence should bestow a fresh verbal bounty on the reader. A writer needs to give in every sentence-a writer is someone who is forever bearing gifts.”
  • Victor LaValle “Fear is a powerful motivator in human behavior, for bad and for good.”

Something to remember for an upcoming trip:  Norman Mailer is buried in Provincetown.

To check out as a result of reading:

  • Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song. Note the Lawrence Schiller connection.
  • My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
  • The Complete and Collected Work of V.S. Pritchett
  • Joan Didion’s Blue Nights
  • Bruce Jay Friedman
  • Requiem for a Dream

Always Apprentices Bill Torgerson, The Believer, St. John's University

Something I’ve been thinking about for teaching:

For the fall of 2013, I want to start the class on what we’ll call “Intellectual Browsing.” I’ve been dis-satisfied with the way my requirement that the students include articles from the library databases has often caused student writing to veer off course according to what articles they find. The direction of their writing shifts only because of what they are able to find and not because of what they have decided. The articles that are found drives the paper rather than the students’ interest or curiosity.

I have in mind a new sort of research paper, one called “Intellectual Browsing.” Students can browse journals in the library, books in the library, check out Google or Amazon books, and take a trip to the local bookstore. Then they can “report back” and get some practice or experience using MLA format while also hopefully firing some intellectual curiosity. The book/film project we have been doing can follow this stage of intellectual browsing.

I thought I’d like this book because I often like texts that come from The Believer. As I started to read, I thought it was going to really stink. There are some not-good conversations in here. When I didn’t connect with a conversation, I skipped ahead to the next. This made the book good reading for me. I read over half the interviews in the book. As someone who thrives when in conversation with others, I jotted down a lot of ideas I have for my own work, texts I want to take a look at, and ideas for teaching.

Citation information:

Vendela, Vida, Ross Simonini, and Sheila Heti. Always Apprentices: The Believer Presents Twenty-Two Conversations Between Writers. San Francisco: Believer Books, 2013. Print.

 

Talking College Writing and Twitter with Emily Simnitt

Welcome to Torg Stories February 6, 2013 Edition.

I talk with Boise State University composition instructor Emily Simnitt . I met Emily at the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) annual conference in Las Vegas during November of 2012. We did separate presentations related to Twitter and the teaching of writing. Emily is a doctoral student in English, Composition, and Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

http://html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/2209612/height/325/width/325/theme/legacy/direction/no/autoplay/no/autonext/no/thumbnail/yes/preload/no/no_addthis/no/

In this conversation we talk about teaching college writing and how we incorporate Twitter into our pedagogy.

Connect with other writing teachers via Twitter on Wednesday nights at 9:00 EST. Use the hashtag #FYCchat

Connect with Emily on Twitter @EmilySimnitt and me @BillTorg

Tweet the Super Bowl with Me?

Hashtags: #torgchat #superbowl

I’ve started using Twitter in my writing courses at St. John’s University. I thought it might be a fun introduction for some of the students to tweet the Super Bowl as a class. That got me thinking that some of you might like to join me too.  Here’s my invitation to the students:

I invite you to tweet the first half of the Super Bowl with me. How would you do that? Do you know what a hashtag is? It looks like this:

#

To tweet along with me, add this hashtag that we use in class:  #torgchat  You just type that hashtag into any of your tweets.

Keeping track of tweets can be tricky. I’m going to use a website called “Tweetchat”  Just click on the link and read. It’s not too hard to use. If you use Tweetchat, you won’t have to keep typing the hashtag.

In order to get other Super Bowl tweets, I’ll add some more hashtags. Here are likely some popular ones:

  • #superbowl
  • #ravens
  • #niners

There will also be some hashtags that arise because of what we see. If you know about the Jets’ season, then you might know this one:

#buttfumble

buttfumble

image from Macleans.ca

You don’t have to like football. We can tweet about commercials and music too.

If you decide to join us, please be respectful. Don’t forget, you are responsible for your tweets.  Behave yourself.  Have a great weekend!

Have questions? Leave a comment and I’ll write you back.

Mad Experiments with Seating Arrangements

The students in my composition courses probably think I’m crazy. Today, I came to class twenty minutes early so I could re-arrange the tables. At the D’Angelo Center (DAC) at St. John’s University, we have these tables with wheels on them. My vision for the seating arrangement is that we’ll be in small groups of five. Here we are today:

St. John's University, Composition

each morning we come in and set up this arrangement

Some of the classrooms in the DAC are large, and last semester I had a class where no students sat in the first two rows of tables. The students filled the far corners of the room. This put them as far away as possible from me and also from the students who had chosen to sit in the opposite corner. This was bad for team chemistry. Right, I just called the students in my composition courses a team. That’s often how I think of them. I’m building a community of writers, and sitting in opposite corners doesn’t help us get to know each other and work together.

The plan for this semester is for me to do as little talking as possible, at least when it comes to lecture in front of the class. Lecture beyond anything ten minutes in length is a pedagogy that is dead to me. When I’m talking, when anyone is talking at students, they aren’t hearing much. When students arrive to the class, they arrange the desks and then I tell them briefly what the plan is for the day. Next, we write for ten minutes.

Today’s topic: Tell me the story of you and technology.

I’m finding that what used to be good for between classes is now better done in class together. Writing is an example of this. I don’t think my students often have quiet time, where their phones are off and they aren’t on a computer, to experience time thinking and writing.  I hope to get them started on something in class so that they’ll have something to work with once they leave the class.

After writing, the rest of the class time is spent in a small group working on a project. Students share drafts of what they found during a Twitter activity. They post Google Doc drafts of writing to their ePortfolios. They listen to each other read. They write each other comments using Google Docs. They evaluate texts and talk about what good writing might be for them. I’m very excited about the way classes have gone so far this semester. I’m sensing a lot of good energy.

 

Feedback and Revision are the Problem

Responding to student writing can be the toughest part of teaching First Year Writing / College Composition. This semester I spent a lot of time writing comments on paper-based texts. I got most of the students to hang on to my comments so they could turn them in with revisions. I do what I can to ask questions and give the students the sort of feedback that leaves them in charge of the draft. However, sometimes something is just wrong. For example, students sometimes italicize quotes. I feel pretty irritated when I give feedback along the lines of don’t italicize the quotes and then I get the revision and all the quotes are still formatted incorrectly. Yes, there are more important issues related to the students’ work, but I’m just giving you one example of how I spend a lot of time writing feedback that gets ignored.  There’s a lot more that I could write here, but what I want is a way to track drafts. The problems I’m writing about today are related to giving feedback to student texts and following the revisions that students do.

There is so much paperwork involved in saving drafts with my handwritten comments, and I think those comments aren’t doing as much good as they could. AND, I will still be faced with reading final DIGITAL portfolios with no access to previous drafts.

I could take you through all that I have tried and thought about that doesn’t work very well, but why would you want to read about that?

My online students do most of their writing on a blog. It’s a pain to either keep track of my thoughts until the end of their post or scroll down to the comments section every time I have a thought. A former professor of mine named Sam Watson used to type his students a letter after reading their work. There’s a lot pedagogically sound about this I think, but many students need examples such as how to write a transition or handle a quote.

I see quite a few possibilities for how I might navigate these problems but none of these solutions has everything I want.

The website Book Country has a way to give feedback that I like:

Book Country, feedback, College Composition, English, Language Arts

 

From what I understand, Book Country is a Penguin community where those who read and write genre fiction can come together and respond to each other’s work. I cut off the name of the writer’s work I copied here. I hope if you’re from Penguin and come across this, you’re glad I’m sharing your community with readers. If not, I’m happy to take this screen shot down.

What I really like about the Book Country set up are the boxes on the right. I can read the text and just write comments off to the side. I think there is also the potential for the writer (or possibly the teacher) to customize what kind of feedback they are asking for. This could put the writer more in control of the text, or if you prefer, you could think about those boxes in terms of a rubric or objectives.

Here’s two ideas I’m considering:

  • We use Digication ePortfolios at St. John’s.  I could have students upload a file to their portfolio. I could download the file to my computer and give feedback via the Word commenting feature. When I give feedback that way, I’m careful to save feedback as a pdf file so the student doesn’t just leave some of what I’ve written in the draft.  The student would upload revisions and we’d both have access to all the drafts. I’m not crazy-excited about all that uploading and saving or all the drafts I might have open on my computer screen at the end of the semester as I try to track what the student has done in the way of revision.
  • There’s Google Drive, used to be Google Docs.  I could access the student’s writing via a link. I type in comments/feedback, but then what happens? Can the students comment there too? Do we have to do our commenting off to the side? Will we be able to track drafts? How complicated is that?

I want to navigate the cycle of write, comment, revise, and collect to be managed digitally next semester. Can you give me some feedback on my ideas? Do you have a great system I need to learn about?