Back to School

As you may have noticed, I took a complete hiatus from this blog. I didn't really mean to just quit posting over the summer, but that's exactly what happened! I'm a bad, bad blogger.

Fall semester begins Monday so I will begin posting more regularly again. In the meantime, I am excited to report an update on ENGL 2320: Travel Literature. I was nervous it would not be run this term, but it currently has 16 students! The readings will include works from early explorers, the era of The Grand Tour, and then move quickly towards modern works starting with Kerouac. I've also included contemporary works like Bill Bryson, Mike Horn, and Jon Krakauer.

A new project I am working on is teaching ENGL 1102 as a hybrid course. So in seven weeks, with only 4 face-to-face meetings, our students will complete a semester's worth of learning. The course blog and wiki will still remain as key components of that course as places for journaling and collaborative projects.

Another projects on the radar include publishing the next edition of Prairie Fire, our student anthology.

Overall, it looks like it will be a very busy semester!

The Road to Hell....

Talk about good intentions. After my last post, I was ready to buckle down and get some serious grading done. And then life throws a curveball (I'm mixing my cliches now). Alas, I tried to grade a batch of essays this morning and it took 2 hours to grade 9 of them! Needless to say, but I'm going to say it anyway, I did not get them done before class as I had planned.

Today was a mix of catching up on smaller grading projects (blogs, discussion boards, etc), emails (200 to read, respond to, delete), and administrative tasks (order summer books, fill out requests for travel funds, submit other required paperwork). I did a lot today and yet I feel as if I accomplished little. I did enjoy reading the posts from the accelerated class again though. I feel there are some good efforts at offering some specific details in these posts, which are only required to be around 200-250 words.

Today I bought The Kite Runner DVD. I also picked up three books that caught my eye:

Best Friends
Veil of Roses
Three Cups of Tea

Then, of course, the books that I had hoped would arrive over spring break finally arrived (stupid super saver shipping--never again!):

The Road to Oxiana
Methods for Teaching Travel Literature and Writing
Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World
Salon.com's Wanderlust

Now when will I have time to read these?! Book orders for fall are due SOON!

Sluggish and lazy

Yep. Spring break is nice. I've played a couple video games (Oblivion mostly), slept in, stayed up late, and eating at normal times. I have pretty much reveled in running pants and t-shirts; no teacher costumes!

I've read and read and read. Trashy novels, academic texts, lots of stuff online.

I did some productive stuff:

• read and annotated sources for my wiki research
• Attended an event where one of my former BSU instructors, Will Weaver, spoke about the adaptation of his short story "A Gravestone Made of Wheat" into a film (Sweet Land).
• stayed at my folks' place with daughter
• worked on the wiki
• read blogs
• thought about lesson plans for next week
• and other random bits

This weekend I'll go back to the folks' so I'm doing my part to stimulate the economy. I'm thinkin' that if gas prices do not drop this summer, that will put the kabosh on the road trips unless I get a rent a hybrid car, which would still be cheaper than driving my Jeep.

Sweet!

http://peoplereading.blogspot.com/

Midterms

This week is midterms. Next week is Spring Break. They couldn't have planned that better!

Last year for Spring Break, I took a ten day trip to London, which, of course, I blogged (shameless self-promotion, I know). This spring break I will be grading a major essay from each class. I will also be working on the ENGL 1102 wiki. I need a lesson plan to encourage continued content development and to introduce linking and refactoring the pages; however, I also need the students to fix current errors in grammar, documentation of sources, etc).

Other plans:
I need to plan advertising for the Travel Lit course for fall. If enough students do not register, it will not fly. It's tough to invest all the time and energy constructing a course and spending hours on creating flyers and such only to have it canceled over the summer.

What I really want to do is hit the road.

Flu

By now, most of you know I've cancelled classes for most of this week due to the flu. Next week, each of my classes will be getting some sort of revised calendar to address the assignments for this week. I'm also playing catch up with my email, slowly.

Other than that, I hope you are all taking your vitamins and Airborne and such. :)

Note: scrap the Airborne plans.

Blog Update

I've been browsing through the class blogs recently. Some posts are really short. The 1101 students are opening up more in the blog than they do in class :)

The 1102 students have some interesting ideas about their short story readings. Soon we'll be entering the Poetry Zone.

I'm also starting to think more seriously about the Travel Literature course I'll offer this fall. I need to start advertising it soon, and putting together a reading list. The first thing students ask when they inquire about the course is "What are you going to read?" It is quite a difficult task to narrow the list.

I also need to start thinking about getting ready to solicit manuscripts for Prairie Fire anthology again.

CCs in the news

Obama on the importance of community colleges.

Slowing down

I haven't posted in almost a week because I'm taking a class where I am learning more about the finer aspects of blogging. As a result, much of my blogging time is directed towards class assignments and practicing in my new blog.

This morning, though, I am prepping for ENGL 1101 and grading for 1102 (all three).

Just an observation

My 1102 student ROCKED their group discussions on "A Rose for Emily." There were really thorough responses as each group answered questions focused on historical, feminist, psychoanalytic, and formalist "lenses" to discuss the story. I think this activity was useful in that it drove home the point that literature can be interpreted differently and that there are multiple views to consider. It also helped alleviate some of the confusion that usually accompanies a more complex story.

The students were very funny about discussing "The Storm." I'll just say that the reactions to the story and the ensuing discussion were mixed.

Today's task: review thesis statments with 1101 and begin pre-writing activities for their first essay.

Other news: MSCTC has linked to the class blogs in a beta version of the newly designed website. How exciting! Can't wait to show the students!

Finally: How cold can it get??? I saw that it is -50 in western ND! I bundled McKenna up so she looked like the character from A Christmas Story. She turns beet red at the lightest breeze, poor thing.

Ugh.

Today in my 1101 class, the lesson did not go so well. They were bored. How can I spice up thesis statements and an overview of the writing process? Maybe I don't talk about it at all...it will show up in the course after all. Maybe I just needed more than five hours of sleep to convey excitement about narrowing a topic and devising a controlling idea.

Maybe the students were as tired. Many didn't seem to enjoy the Anne Lamott excerpts about shitty first drafts, a piece usually guaranteed to induce quite a few chuckles. Hmmm...hopefully just an off day.

Regardless, I've noted for next time: more group work/hands-on activities for teaching narrowing and thesis statements.

Digital Dorothy

On this day in 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote:

"The green paths down the hill-sides are channels for streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running bewteen the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams. The garden, mimic of spring, is gay with flowers. The purple-starred hepatica spreads itself in the sun, and the clustering snow-drops put forth their white heads, at first upright, ribbed with green, and like a rosebud when completely opened, hanging their heads downwards, but slowly lenthening their slender stems. The slanting woods of an unvarying brown, showing the light through the thin net-work of their upper boughs. Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the tree show in the light like the columns of a ruin."

Spring is dead-ahead. Must remember that when its 40 below here.

Wordsworth, Dorothy. "Journal, Written at Alfoxden in 1978." English Romantic Writers. 2nd ed. Ed. David Perkins. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

Yoga and Vertigo

Yoga has recently received much attention in the Fargo Forum (a lot of it negative because so many believe it is inseparable from mysticism), so when my colleague sent an email inviting me to participate in a free Yoga session on campus Friday, I was all over it. I went with a really open mind because, despite numerous opportunities to read about it, I never cared to learn what Yoga might include beyond the poses.

I really enjoyed the meditation and focus-on-breathing aspect of Yoga. Some of the movements baffle me. This is not a new experience. I've dropped out of aerobics classes and hated nearly every moment of any non-machine related regime because I don't get the whole "breath in now while simultaneously bending in half" because that is when I want to breath out! I also can't interpret "pull your navel to your spine" chatter or instructions for other complicated procedures that contort my body. I don't GET it.

I tried everything though. I kept waiting for my back and neck to hurt (Past injury. Hit by drunk driver in AZ. Enough said), but instead, I really felt both energized and calm afterwards. I'll go again!

Two very surreal moments in two days: a friend let me us her mat during the Yoga session. I was supposed to be facing downward (the movement is to stupefyingly complex to describe here), and when I caught sight of the bubbled pattern of the mat, I had a moment of, I guess, vertigo. The pattern was swimming before my eyes and kept shifting as I looked upon it. I could not tell how close I was to the mat and was in serious jeopardy of smacking my nose into the floor. I had to break out of the pose to get my bearings. Ugh. A similar thing happened today after playing Guitar Hero III. I stopped the game, looked at my carpet, and it became a rolling, shifting sea right in front of me. I knew better than to get up. I looked at the TV instead. It grew! This is so weird and hard to describe, but it's like those crazy camera shots in movies, where a character stand still and the camera zooms up to him/her, but all the background seems to shrink as the character gets bigger. Can't think of an example now...will add one when I can.

Update: It is called, fittingly, the vertigo shot. Here are some examples from Youtube.

First Week

I have one class today and the first week is wrapped up. What an energizing week! Both 1102 classes were engaging, discussing and debating ideas about Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour." When I asked students to write their initial responses to Monica Ware's "Mislaid Plans" and Linda Pastan's "Jump Cabling" they were mixed--some got it. Some didn't. Nearly all responded, though, and went beyond plot summary. Many even talked about ironies or imagery. This reaffirms my decision to move from focusing on analysis and terms and to focus on the experience of lit and student's experiences as it relates to their readings instead.

I'm very excited that several students in the land-based class have read The Kite Runner. They are excited to read it again. A possible movie trip is in the works.

So this week: I met with 2 different ENGL1102 classes twice, met with 1101 twice, and have been communicating via email and discussion boards with the online ENGL 1102 students, who are really diving in to the introductions and making connections.

Some of my blogs have hits from outside of class! Yay!

On the home front: Tonight there is a family skate at Horace Mann. We'll try to bring McKenna to get more practice with her new skates.

First Day!

The first day of class is over! I had two classes today: both are ENGL 1102s, but one is at the Higher Ed Center and one is on campus. Both classes seemed filled with eager students; I'm looking forward to reading their first journal entries to see what they thought of Monica Ware's "Mislaid Plans" and Linda Pastan's "Jump Cabling."

There were many very positive reactions to The Kite Runner as an alternative to Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I worry that the reading is too light, but the discussions may be more productive as a result.

My online students are already busy--some have taken the first two quizzes (one on the syllabus, one for practice) and posted their introduction. When they mail me their diagnostic essay, they will have pretty much completed Unit 1!

Tomorrow I get to meet my ENGL1101 class, but I have to wait until January 31st to meet the other ENGL 1101 class (blended/accelerated class).

See What I Stumbled Upon

Flickr Tag Search

I stumbled onto this neat tag search engine in a visual format. This makes it very easy to find photos related to interests; I searched for images of Westminster Abbey and it found over 9,000 images. I do wonder, though, about the ease of searching photos. It seems this would often be used to steal others photos. However, I was hoping to find images from INSIDE Westminster Abbey, since photography is forbidden.

Musicovery : interactive webRadio

Musicovery : interactive webRadio lets me click on a mood or dance tempo and it webs musical interests. Sort of like Pandora?

Mr. Picassohead

A virtual Mr. Potato Head with Picasso-styling. A silly time waster.

Sites to visit

I have started in on my magazine bin. I had numerous issues of Parents magazine, Real Simple, and O to read.

Sites for kids (thanks to Real Simple Magazine--fall 2007):

http://www.jacksonpollock.org/
www.sfpg.com/animation/litebrite.html
http://www.virtual-bubblewrap.com/popnow.shtml
www.redkid.net/generator/trophy
http://www.addletters.com
http://www.howmanyofme.com/

I also checked out this site for trading:
http://www.zunafish.com/

and I've been a member for awhile at
http://www.paperbackswap.com/

Zunafish is intriguing, though, because of the videogames.