Teaching Composition
good course so far
This summer I’m teaching English 015 as part of LEAP, which allows incoming first-year students to take two general education classes together as a cohort, or a “pride” as they call it. Generally LEAP teachers work together to build some cohesion between the two courses, and I’m lucky in that my class is paired with [...]
notes from the interblags: post RSA edition
Yesterday concluded the RSA Summer Institute, held here at Penn State. Participants from around the country came to discuss rhetoric in either a week-long seminar or a weekend workshop (or for some, both). I was in the Queering Rhetorical Studies workshop, which was a fantastic experience. I walked away with new connections, friends, and colleagues, [...]
a book report on peter rabbit
via Rosa at the Blogora, here’s an amazing Charlie Brown video about the stresses of writing:
PS. I love Linus.
“whopper virgins”
From Feminist Philosophers, Here is a 7+ minute video that shows a taste test conducted by Americans in regions of the world where people have never eaten a hamburger. They conducted an experiment to see if these “whopper virgins” would like the Burger King Whopper or the McDonald’s Big Mac better.
This video might be useful [...]
definitions: marriage
Tomorrow in class we’re talking about definitions. In particular, there are four ways you might define a term in an essay: formal (like a dictionary) extended, historical, negative (what it’s not), and stipulative (”for the sake of this essay, I will define…”). I thought the following examples would help.
Jon Stewart uses a historical definition:
Keith Olbermann [...]
584: Weekly Position Paper #9: The Ethos of GTAs: Credibility Appeals vs. Pedagogical Openness
Ethos is a term that Krista Ratcliffe employs in Rhetorical Listening both in order to understand how whiteness functions in our society and in order to help teachers understand how they can plan for a course that prepares students to listen rhetorically. In order to maintain stasis, whiteness often reduces ethos to a rugged-individualist ethical [...]
notes from the interblags: racism, transphobia, marginalia
• via Dennis, BooMan on explicit racism in this election. An excerpt:
Anytime they poll the American people about racism, blacks say there is more of it than whites. The raw racism on display this election season is probably more educational for whites than for blacks, who have had a more accurate picture of reality all [...]
Some post-Watson thoughts
I’m in a coffee shop in Louisville, thinking about the conference, what I learned, and what I missed. I’m bummed that I got into town Thursday afternoon, in time to miss some cool talks Thursday that I wanted to see. After riding the city bus to my hotel, and then riding the wrong city bus [...]
Balance (1990): Cause and Effect
Andrea, a fellow graduate student, passed this 1990 short animation along (it won an Oscar for the best animated short in 1990). It might be useful to show in class to lead to discussions of cause and effect.
Of course, we have “simple” cause and effect at the beginning, related to physics. But then, a whole [...]
narrative, “Fast Car,” clichés, and the purpose(s) of first year composition
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a week now. My students are working on personal narratives, ones in which they need to analyze the events and support a thesis. Additionally, they need to think about it rhetorically: who is their audience (beyond me; I know, a typical composition contrivance) and what is their [...]
