What You'll Learn in College Writing II

In recent College Writing II classes, I asked students to reflect on what they learned in the class and to imagine how future instructors would perceive and describe my students' abilities. Here are six imaginative and humorous letters.

• Dear Professor Mendham (Poetry Interrogation)
• Dear Professor Mendham (Concord)
• Dear Professor Mendham (Accounting)
• Dear Professor Mendham (Embalming)
• Dear Professor Mendham (Reason and Romanticism)
• Dear Professor Mendham (Rocket Science)

Letters to Next Year's Class

At the end of each College Writing I class at Franklin Pierce, I ask students to write letters to future CWI students, sharing their experience and advice as college writing experts. Here are the two letters that my students wrote tonight.
________________________________________

Dear You Who Should Have Known Better:
Classroom atmosphere and expectations:

• Turn up
• Speak up-join in
• Bring your stuff--try reading it first
• Turn off cell phones (no texting)
• Apparently no sleeping
• Do the assignments (even if it's crap)
• Do not turn in crap for instructor draft
• Tracy expects you to be 100% here

Balancing act:

• DON'T take two classes
• Do not expect to have a social life
• Expect to put in 12-16 hours on essays
• Do NOT Wait until the night before
• Don't review Dawn's papers EVER! (pay someone else to do it or give it to
  Nate)
• Two classes are too hard--brain drain, no sleep, Red Sox in the World
  Series.
• Do not take class through the Super Bowl

Good luck!!

Cliff L, Hank & Dawn B, Chance

_____________________________

If I Knew Then What I Know Now:

If I knew then what I know now then it would be how much time to plan for, for assignments. I would definitely work ahead and try not to fall behind. I would spend more time on assignments. I would spend more time on final drafts.

How much time outside of class do you think a new student should expect to spend on their assignments?

For homework reading assignments you should expect 45 minutes to an hour for readings and journal entries. I would spend 8 to 16 hours for essays. Definitely do not take two classes unless you don't have a job or family.

Nick, Linda, Nate, Beth

________________________________________________
You can read the letters from the October '05 class on the old IC 105 blog at http://ic105.blogspot.com/2006/10/letter-to-next-years-college-writing-i_25.html. Read additional CWI "Letters to Next Year's Class" letters at my academic website at http://academics.keene.edu/tmendham/FPC.htm.

• Dear You Poor Schmucks
• Dear Future Student
• A Balancing Act
• From DB, JW, ME, JB, AR, RS, ZT

Poetry Assignment Podcasts

For the last session of College Writing I, students were asked to read four lines of a poem they liked and to explain why they liked it. Here are the last Fall 2007 College Writing I podcasts. Thanks for a great term, everyone!
Bigger Classroom #18 - Linda's Poem Selection

Linda chose Theodore Roethke's "The Waking" for this assignment



Bigger Classroom #19 - Hank's Poetry Excerpt

Hank chose the poem "A Dream" by Edgar Allen Poe for this assignment. The full text of the poem can be read at the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online website: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1622.html



Bigger Classroom #20 - Dawn's Message

Dawn chose the poem "Progressive Health" by Carl Dennis. It's a real "carpe diem" gem, and you can read the work in full at the Poetry Out Loud website of the National Recitation Project: http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems/poem.html?id=30396



Bigger Classroom #21 - Nate's Message

Nate chose a poem excerpt, "Make a memory with your children..." for the assignment. I believe the work is unpublished and by a writer Nate knows personally.



Bigger Classroom #22 - Beth's Message

For the poem excerpt assignment, Beth chose "Letter to the Dead" by Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna. (It can be found in The Conscious Reader 567-568)



Bigger Classroom #23 - Nick's Poem Selection

Nick chose the poem, "The Rose That Grew from Concrete" by Tupac Shakur.

"I'm Like a Bird"

Some background info for our reading, Nick Hornby's "I'm Like a Bird":

• Nelly Furtado's music video for "I'm Like a Bird" can be viewed at YouTube.
• I know you're not "afraid of looking like you don't know who Foucault is" (Hornby 338), but that doesn't mean it's not worth finding out. GLBTQ.com, an encyclopedia of gay and lesbian culture, has an entry on Michel Foucault, who is an important philosopher 20th century philosopher. (File this under "small world:" one of the editors of GLBTQ.com is Arnie Kantrowitz.)
• Dave Eggers has shown up in two of our readings, Hornby and Rebecca Mead's "You've Got Blog." You can read an excerpt of his autobiographical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at BookBrowse, and learn more about Eggers at Wikipedia.
• The Wikipedia entry on Hornby has lots of information and links as well.

Bring laptops if convenient

For those of you that have laptops, tonight (Monday 10/22) would be a day to bring to them to class.

Commenting on a Blog to Rebecca Mead's "You've Got Blog"

The purpose of this online writing exercise is to challenge you to work actively with the reading (Rebecca Mead's "You've Got Blog"), and to give you practice using the technology which is the subject of Mead's article.
1) Please read the question below and formulate a thoughtful answer.
The Conscious Reader directs us to:

Respond to Mead's comment that blogs create "a world in which the personal lives of participants have become part of the public domain." What is the value, if any, of putting personal information online for strangers to read? Would you be comfortable with compromising your own privacy by writing an intimate blog? (Shrodes 317)

2) Click on the Comments link at the bottom of this post and type your answer into the window that appears. You can click the Show Original Post link so that these directions are visible in front of you as you write. Sign it with your initials.
3) When you're done writing, either choose to respond as an anonymous user, or if you have a blogger account you can sign in. Click the Publish Your Comment button.
4) Read your classmates' comments as they appear on the page.

Arnie Kantrowitz

If you were intrigued by Arnie Kantrowitz' story in our reading for today, "Growing Up Gay" (Shrodes 578-581), you can read a short interview and other excerpts from his autobiography, Under the Rainbow, at http://www.echonyc.com/~stone/Features/RainbowIntro.html.

Podcasts on Significant Experiences

As an pre-writing exercise for a narrative essay they'll be writing, I asked my College Writing I students to describe a significant experience they'd had in the last year or two, one that they'd learned from or been changed by. Here are their messages. Each could be the foundation of a great narrative essay (in my humble opinion).

Bigger Classroom #13 - Hank's Message
Hank reflects on his daughter's birth


Bigger Classroom #14 - Dawn's Message
Dawn reflects on the big four-oh


Bigger Classroom #15 - Nate's Message
Nate reflects on jury duty and the new perspective it gave him on how we interpret news reports about alleged crime.


Bigger Classroom #16 - Linda's Message
Linda talks about having a loved one serve in Iraq


Bigger Classroom #17 - Cliff's Message
Cliff talks about adapting to a change in corporate culture at C&S


The podcasts can also be downloaded as MP3 files at http://www.gabcast.com/index.php?a=episodes&id=12483 .

Please try the chat room

This is a place where students can chat with each other. Please try it out by typing a sentence into the Type Here line. This will be available for you to come back to if you want to talk to others online.