At the end of each College Writing II course I ask the students to write "Dear Professor Mendham" letters, where they imagine they are one of their future instructors writing to me about the students abilities and readiness for future courses. This last group exercise done in class asks the students to reflect on what they've learned over the course of the term, which I think is always an important step in consolidating and preserving the benefits of a learning experience. Additionally, students seem to to deep reserves of comic genius in the last 45 minutes of a course. Here are the two letters my Spring '08 students wrote:
Dear Professor Mendham, The students in my history class that came from your College Writing II class far exceed the other students in their writing skills. They may not know their history, or what a pioneer is, or that Hitler was not the cause of World War I, however, their reports on the Emancipation Proclamation were better written than the document itself! In the future, could you possibly include a tad of history in your curriculum? Plus, their research skills make me look like a 5th grader. Sincerely, Professor Pearl H. Arbor
Dear Professor Mendham, I have a few of your past College Writing II students enrolled in my Playa 101 course. I am concerned that with their exceptional knowledge of proper grammar they will have problems with hollaring back. When I talk to them about skilz I did not expect them to come back with punctuation. It is apparent that your College Writing II student will fail my class miserably, due to your teaching of proper format. Regrets, Professor Ben Dover PS: Fahizzle my dizzle!
For today's reading response, I asked students to record a phone message of two or three sentences describing what they thought the individual's responsibility to his or her community is, and what they thought society's responsibility to the community was. The answers have been wonderful, succinct, nuggets about civic and social duty.
Jeff outlines the responsibilities of the individual to contribute to the well being of the community, and the community's responsibility to provide law enforcement, maintain roads, and provide quality education for everyone.
Patricia suggests that it's the individual's responsibility to help the community as best he can--for example, paying taxes and volunteering--and the community's responsibility to provide things like food, heat, or a wheelchair ramp if the individual can't provide them for himself.
Dawn argues that everyone should be a committed member of society, from brain surgeons and nuclear physicists down to the ordinary person, and that society's responsibility is to make sure that every single individual is taken care of.
Hank believes that the individual's responsibility is to be an integral part of the of group and to contribute to the greater good of the community, and so far as they are able, not to be a liability or a burden. The community's responsibility is to protect the individual's Constitutional rights, and contribute to the greater good of the individual.
Linda believes the individual's responsibility is to be fair to all other individuals and not discriminate, and that society's responsibility is the same--to not look down on people with less money, for example, as so often happens.
Linda framed her response neatly in a way that focuses on mutual support. The individual's responsibility to his or her community is to encourage and support the community's members, help their neighbors, and to be proactive in the community. The community's responsibility is to encourage members to take responsibility for their actions and to support themselves.
Bonnie says the individual's responsibility to community is to be as self-sufficient as possible, and to help others while being honorable and ethical. Society's responsibility is to be trustworthy and dependable in upholding the duties entrusted to them.
I have a short 10-question survey I am asking students to answer. This is optional and does not affect your standing in the course. I'll use the results of the survey in designing future courses and in an article I plan to write about online writing in College Writing I and II at Franklin Pierce. To recompense you for your time completing the survey (5 to 10 minutes), you can be entered in a drawing for a small Mystery Prize or several consolation prizes if you enter your name in the final question. If completing the survey online is not convenient for you, you may complete it on paper in class Wednesday. If you plan to complete it online, please do so before 5:30 Wednesday so I can enter you in the drawing and distribute prizes. Click here to take survey
I'll post any phone messages that I get far enough in advance of class time here on the blog. If you'd like to listen to them hot off the press, go to our Gabcast channel http://www.gabcast.com/index.php?a=episodes&id=12483
Hi all: For your last group in-class project you're going to write letter from a fictional future professor to Tracy about the skills and knowledge you've gained from CWII. If you want to see some examples, see this previous blog post: http://biggerclassroom.blogspot.com/2007/10/what-youll-learn-in-college-writing-ii.html.
Hi all: I asked Linda to review Spying on the Home Front, and share her thoughts so that other students would know whether it would be useful and interesting to view themselves. Here's her response. (Thanks, Linda!)
Here is what I got out of this. I hope others will watch it.I finally got it to work.
I watched Spying on the Home Front- Frontline
It was very interesting in the fact that no American is safe and secure as far as the fact that they can be spied on from the government and not even know. In December 2003, the Las Vegas New Year's celebration was almost cancelled because there was word that there could be a terrorist attack. Every record for Las Vegas casinos, hotels, airlines and rental car agencies was looked at from the FBI for the 2 weeks prior to New Year's. The celebration went on and a lot of people's privacy was invaded. People don't even realize that they are affected by this. Choice Point and Lexus Nexus are 2 ways of getting information on anyone and there is nothing anyone can do about it. They are privately owned companies so the Privacy Act does not apply to them. It's a scary thought to think that anyone can get your personal information. There was a lot of evasion of questions from authorities when asked questions by Frontline right up to Alberto Gonzalez, who at the time was Attorney General. Most questions when asked were answered by the comment, "I'm not a liberty to say" or "That's classified or confidential" or "I don't have permission". I find this very disconcerting because what are they trying to hide from us? What is going to happen in the future? Are we going to give up our rights so that we can have more security? There should be a happy medium. I think that everyone should watch this so that they know exactly what is or is not going on with our government. They say they are trying to protect us, but at what expense?
In order to provide you with your money's worth of educational experiences in College Writing II, I will be providing you with two options for deeper discussion of Nikolai Gogol's classic story "The Overcoat."
Option A: Answer two discussion questions about "The Overcoat" (which will be posted on the blog) using the Comments link, and then respond to one of the comments that someone else has left to one of the discussion questions.
Option B: Use the write a "Five Minute Paper" and respond to a classmate's 5 Minute Paper.
Whichever option you choose, please complete your initial response by midnight on Saturday, December 15th, and and reply to a classmate's response by noon on Monday, December 17th.
Do you believe that AkakiiAkakievich is made a better man by the experience of saving for and finally acquiring his new overcoat, or is he made worse by it?
Please respond with a reply of three or four sentences, explaining in what way he is made better or worse, and support your answer with evidence from the book.
Click on the Comments link below (next to "Posted by Tracy Mendham at 8:29 AM") to answer.
Although "The Overcoat" can be read as a tale of perfect poetic justice, for the moment let's look at the story as a tragedy. Please say which you think is the greater failure in "The Overcoat":Is it the story of an individual's (Akakii's) failure to meet the needs and requirements of his community, or the community's failure to meet the needs of the individual? Please write a reply of three or four sentences in which you argue for either individual or societal failure, supporting your position with evidence from the text.
Please click on the Comments link below, and spend five minutes writing your response to the following question: What does "The Overcoat show us about the world as it really exists?" Write in roughly the form of an introduction paragraph for an essay you could write about the topic. Write the best answer you can in five minutes, and submit your answer. Then, read your classmates' responses to the exercise, and complete a three minute peer review of one of their five minute papers, borrowing from any of the styles of peer review we have used in class. [This was originally going to be a chatroom, but the chat tool seemed to be losing the responses, learned after the tragic loss of a five-minute paper. I'll make another post with the chatroom in case anyone wants to experiment.]
This is the chatroom that doesn't seem to be working correctly, but I'll leave this post up in case it's only my own computer that's hinky and not the Meebo Chatroom service. Use at your own risk! Please click in the chatroom box below, and spend five minutes writing your response to the following question: What does "The Overcoat show us about the world as it really exists?" Write in roughly the form of an introduction paragraph for an essay you could write about the topic. Write the best answer you can in five minutes, and then hit the Enter key to submit your answer. Then, read your classmates' responses to the exercise, and complete a three minute peer review of one of their five minute papers, borrowing from any of the styles of peer review we have used in class.
If you're hooked on Orwell or just want more context for the reading, the full text of his novel 1984, (of which "The Principles of Newspeak" is an appendix) can be read at http://www.orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/. An excerpt from Chapter One:
It was always at night — the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vapourized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother —
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.
I reviewed the podcasts from your "Ultimate Discourse" responses again as I evaluated journals, and took the opportunity to add tags and descriptions to them. Here they are again:
Nate applies Doctorow's claim that fiction tells us "without shame what people do with their bodies and think with their minds" to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code
Linda applies Doctorow's statement that readers experience what the character experience ("This is the way it is, it will say, this is what it feels like,") to Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook.
Hank applies two of Doctorow's statements to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Doctorow notes that "The fiction writer...understands the homage a modern up-to-date world of nonfiction specialists pays to his craft--even as it isolates him and tells him he is a liar," and that "Weather reports on television are constructed with exact attention to conflict (high-pressure areas clashing with lows)."
Linda relates James Patterson's The Honeymoon to EL Doctorow's assertion that fiction "distributes the suffering. It says we must compose ourselves in our stories in order to exist."
For this week's journal assignment, I've asked students to leave voice messages on our Gabcast channel relating the story of their choice to the qualities and powers EL Doctorow attributes to fiction in the essay "Ultimate Discourse." Here are the voice messages so far:
You're going to be writing an essay about the novel The Namesake, which means that you'll be writing a literary analysis. Completely unfamiliar with the idea or practice of literary analysis? Check out this PowerPoint from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University (their site is a great source of information about college writing). http://owl.english.purdue.edu/workshops/pp/litanalysis.ppt
Hey everyone, only a week until The Namesake comes out on DVD. I had a chance to preview the movie and it's pretty good. There's a website for the the film at http://www.foxsearchlight.com/thenamesake/. It includes videos of the movie trailers.
Hi, College Writing II students. I checked to see if the audiobook download service, Audible.com was running a free offer. They're not, but they are running a special where you can subscribe to get one book a month for $7.49 a month for the first 3 months (after which it goes up to $14.95 a month). They sell both Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat."
For those who might still be looking for additional examples of reality TV, I was at the Keene Public Library earlier tonight and noticed that there are several PBS series available: 1900 House, 1940 House, and Manor House are all available on VHS. According to the library catalog Frontier House is also available. I returned Colonial House on DVD to the library, so that also is there for those who need it. By the way, if you are a full time student in Keene (at Franklin Pierce Keene that means two or more classes) you are entitled to a library card. If anyone knows of other shows available in your local public library or video rental place, feel free to leave a comment here to let others know.
I'd like to welcome this term's College Writing II students to the course and to our blog. Remember that you can post messages here too if you sign up on Blogger to be a contributor to this blog. Also, I've updated my academic web page at http://academics.keene.edu/tmendham/FPC.htm, and if you need a copy of the syllabus, calendar, or instructions for Essay 1, you can get them there.
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.
