The fact that I am unable to do all I would like to do, all I am interested in doing, or all I think I should do is a great disappointment to me.
For example, there is a paper due in two days. It is for publication in a recognized series. I have work in the area already published and would be particularly interested in getting more.
Unfortunately, it is in two days. For the last three weeks I’ve been working on getting my online course up and running, teaching my six writing classes, and getting my grading for those six classes done.
This weekend I have spent two hours grading, but mostly I have used the day for work at my home, which tends to end up last on the long list of things I need to do.
Today, along with helpful members of my family, I got rid of a broken couch and stove. I cleaned out the garage and took a truck full of stuff to the shelter thrift store. My plans for the afternoon/evening include cleaning out three closets and trying to make better use of space.
I don’t have time to write that paper, which has been on my wish list of things to do for over a month. Because, as can happen too often, my teaching gets in the way of my writing.
But if I want to get a job, somewhere, someday, working full-time, I need to keep papers in the pipe.
That means that right now I don’t have time to do that paper, but soon I have to carve out time for the presentation I’m giving next month and to write another paper. I just wish, fruitlessly I know, that I had the superpower of going really fast and getting things done, so that I could write that chapter I already have the notes for.
Please note that he is recommending long blog posts and I am not writing a long blog post and I realize that. It’s just a note to me to come back and think of this later.
I was the first participant (from the participant side) in a webinar through my school. Since we have 50,000 students and a very large high-tech capacity, that’s pretty amazing.
It was an online course about how to teach online.
Most of the things they were teaching I already knew and I didn’t get around to asking my questions, but… I learned some and was able to participate in something new.
Through the course I was able to find out that we have online help 12 hours a day 5 days a week for online teaching questions. That was useful.
I also found out that there are tutorials online. (I had looked for them, but in all the wrong places.)
So, I was slowly making progress with my learning and education, as my class unfolded.
One thing was very clear. If there wasn’t a grade attached to it, no one would do it. So my students totally skipped the email etiquette presentation.
At this webinar I did find out how to let them know I had noticed that. That was very useful.
I finished the class. I had all the folders up. I had all the assignments in the folders up. I even had pictures on some of the assignments and folders. I created a class.
It’s a class I am proud of and one that I think will work out well for my students.
The class started off with a bang. Four women posted the first day, practically the first hour the class was open.
I’ve looked and seen that many people went to the assignment, but few went to the introduction. Maybe I’ll have to give a quiz on that next time.
And it had its glitches. First, I wrote a six paragraph post and it disappeared into thin air. I’m sure that will happen to the students too.
And I still wasn’t sure how to do grades… Plus, there were no classes for teachers scheduled yet for this semester.
I took great solace in the fact that it was up and looked good though. Even if I had to grade everything individually and by hand.
The journal will work to develop a present-minded medieval studies in which contemporary events, issues, ideas, problems, objects, and texts serve as triggers for critical investigations of the Middle Ages. Further, we are concerned to illuminate the deep historical structures–mental, linguistic, social, cultural, aesthetic, religious, political, sexual, and the like–that underlie contemporary thought and life, and therefore, we are also interested in attending to the question of the relation of the medieval to the modern (and vice versa) in different times and places. We want to also demonstrate the important value of medieval studies and the longest possible historical perspectives to the ongoing development of contemporary critical and cultural theories that remain under-historicized. Finally, we will advocate for and support the continuing development, from any and all disciplinary directions, of historicist, materialist, comparatist, and theoretical approaches to the subjects of the Middle Ages.
If you have read the blog long, you know I really wonder/consider what makes a great teacher.
Turns out, someone has been researching that very question. Not in higher education, but I think the answers might flow across the great divide anyway.
The Atlantic has an article on what Teach for America has found makes a great teacher.
Here’s just a peek:
First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.
Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
It gives me motivation and a direction to move in. I hope it does the same for you.
cfp: MLA 2011– Collaborative Session on Rethinking Style in Rhetoric and Composition
full name / name of organization:
Rhetoric Society of America/Division on the Teaching of Writing
contact email:
jjack@email.unc.edu
Title of session: Rethinking Style
Submission requirements: 250 word abstracts.
Deadline for submissions: 1 Mar. 2010
Co-sponsored with the Division on Teaching of Writing.
Although “style” was one of the five canon’s of ancient rhetoric and a key part of rhetorical pedagogy, today many scholars worry that the field has paid less attention to this canon than it might. Drawing on ancient and/or contemporary rhetorical theories, papers should consider how to reinvigorate the study and teaching of style in the field of rhetoric and composition.
The fact that I am unable to do all I would like to do, all I am interested in doing, or all I think I should do is a great disappointment to me.
There’s a new journal out from Palgrave called 