First Year Composition FYC

I got up this morning without my clothing pre-planned. I wanted to wear jeans, but those are not professor wear at my university, so I didn’t do that. Instead I wore the one pair of capri pants my husband actually likes, a nice blouse, five inch heels, and a hat. It’s a lace covered fedora and I added a silver satin pin to the side of it. I guess I’ve got a very different view of “casual Friday” than most people.

Certainly I have a different view of it than the frosh who showed up for her 7:40 am meeting in pajamas. But she showed up and it wasn’t lingerie, so I’m good.

Half of the 8 am students apparently started their spring break early. They weren’t there. So everyone who was there got 100 for their in-class work (which was generally very good) and got all the answers to the questions for today’s readings. I’m also thinking a final exam question for extra credit on today’s readings…

After my 8 am class I had three freshman conferences scheduled. Two of the three showed up. That was good, too.

One was surprised that I was surprised he made it. Since he’s missed the last two weeks of class, I think my surprise was reasonable, although perhaps it would have been better not to express it!

After the two conferences concluded, I headed home to see my dad. Then I realized I had not finished grading some papers I thought I had not only graded but recorded. So back I went to work for another two hours.

My spring break plans:
1. Enjoy two days with my dad.
2. Read several new novels.
3. Write the paper for the April conference.
4. Have lunch with a friend in town to celebrate our birthdays.
5. Head out of town to eat and antique with a buddy.
6. Finish the last quarter of the iBook.
7. Go to a steampunk convention.

I think I’ll also try to sleep in at least one day.

I’ve had conferences like mad this week, trying to make sure that my students have got clarity on their first research paper.

Several people turned this “paper” into a paragraph-form annotated bibliography. They had their introduction and then introduced their sources in alphabetical order (with no regard for topic) and spent a paragraph on each.

It never occurred to me to tell them they should not do that.

Has anyone else had students do this?

Or am I just uniquely gifted with students who can figure out weird and crazy ways to do the paper wrong?

As a rhetoric professor, I prefer to teach my students process writing. If they leave my class with an understanding that little by little a great paper can be built, then I am happy. (I would be even happier if they would apply this information, but I can’t make them.)

Last semester I attempted to instill a sense of how important this could be by having the students take a diagnostic essay. Then for the next two weeks we discussed the concepts of rhetoric using this essay assignment. After that, without warning, the students wrote the diagnostic essay again. Most students improved significantly.

This semester the students are coming in for 15-minute conferences after they have done their research and written a solid draft of their paper and before the paper is due, so I can give them specific and immediate feedback. In order to make sure that everyone gets in for a conferences, and so that I don’t have to be at work for 16 hours a day for a week, we don’t meet class this week.

All the students who signed up have come in. Some students, who were having difficulty, have come in twice already.

I think they are getting good help, but I don’t know whether it will make a huge difference. I suppose if I consider what the solid first drafts would have made, that tells me that, yes, the students’ paper have improved significantly.

So far the students also feel like the time to come in and have conferences is helpful, but of course they are exchanging three hours in class for 15 minutes (or 45 minutes for a few where I got long-winded) of conferences. That makes their time commitment much lighter, even though I have a heavier time commitment.

With the conferences, I usually end up doubling the contact time I have with students that week (three to six hours or, for two classes, from six to twelve hours). I do think that the conferences significantly impact their grades, though, so I do feel it is worth it.

Sometimes I wonder if they ever think of getting their papers done early and having a professor look them over… They occasionally do, because I have students send me papers for other classes and ask if I have time to give them some feedback. I had that happen just last week, as a matter of fact.

Today I was thinking about a time when I was grading an excellent student’s essay. This was an assignment designed to not be plagiarizable. (I’m a PhD in English. I am the most qualified person to make up new words, don’t you think?)

This was the evaluation essay.

For this essay, the students took the commercial analysis they did as a group and wrote an evaluation of the commercial individually.

They had to discuss the commercial’s success or effectiveness in reaching the target audience and with the commercial’s argument, but other than that, they could choose their focus.

The evaluation essay, coming at the end of the semester when many other papers are due, was designed to be an easy assignment, as it built on four weeks’ worth of work the students had already done with their group.

But when I hit “ideologies of primitivism” in the paper, I knew this was probably not my student’s work. We haven’t discussed primitivism in class. So I searched for it, along with the commercial’s name, and found it right away. It’s a group post created for a different class.

I was so disappointed. Academic integrity fail.

Each semester I try to make my classes less plagiarizable and I still get experiences like this one. It is so frustrating, especially when it comes from a student who has been strong in the class previously. For some reason, when it is a weak student I find it less frustrating. I guess I figure they don’t want to fail and they have figured out their work isn’t up to par, so they go looking for work that is up to par.

Which also reminds me of the time that I had a student handing in consistently D level work and, after the fourth essay, I discovered all of them were plagiarized. Made me revise my syllabus once again–to allow for requirement to turn in previous assignments a second time. For a while I just collected all the essays from the semester during the final exam.

In my first year composition course, first semester, my students do a group project. This project is a digital presentation (video, new media, multimedia presentation). They are supposed to analyze a commercial rhetorically: audience, argument, appeals. They may also analyze the commercial using the conceptual elements (design, play, empathy, meaning, narrative, symphony [big picture], and innovation).

This has been a very successful assignment and students really like it.

Note: My university is very technology enhanced. That is part of the focus of the university. We have an entire learning studio with audio rooms, video rooms, cameras, video cameras, and computers with editing software that the students can use. We also have at least four full-time workers in those rooms available to help students with projects.

The assignment set up
To introduce this assignment, I use TCE’s Analyzing Videos post. This post was designed to look at non-professional videos or those which were not commercials, but some of the ideas are relevant. Some of them are not, however, so I may revise this idea next semester.

After we discuss the post, we watch a university-created video. I divide the class into three large groups to discuss the three “points” the video covers. Students are supposed to look for where each of the adjectives that describe our university are used and where examples of those adjectival meanings are presented in the video. They are also supposed to look for misleading, false, or inaccurate information. (The students’ experiences of the university are not monolithic. Some students find issues with the video that others vehemently disagree with.)

After we watch the video as a class, I give the students time in their groups to discuss it. Then the groups report to the class on their findings.

Usually each class has someone mention an aspect of the video which is clearly a public relations slant. (Videos taken in front of “the only flowers on campus” or some such.) We discuss that and talk about whether and to what degree that is appropriate/inappropriate for the venue of “university-created video on how wonderful university is”–so basically on a commercial for the university.

The whole-class practice
Then in class we watch several commercials. Among them have been: Dove Evolution
Dove Beauty Pressure
Chrysler’s Imported from Detroit
Budweiser’s 9/11 Commercial, though the 9/11/11 version is a better quality video.
Klondike’s Five Seconds to Glory

Since I’ve done this before, I am able to also show them several examples of student drafts of commercial analyses, but they don’t really need them. Last year’s videos were not significantly different in quality for the first draft from this year’s. (But this year I had drafts and last year the first draft was the final version.)

We talk about the target audience and how we can identify them as the target and about their expected response to the commercial and our reasons for thinking that.

These audiences can be identified by many different elements, which can include gender, social class, educational levels, professions, hobbies, geographic location, and political or religious ideology.

We talk about unintended audiences and how they might react to the commercial. (Some of these are positive and some are negative.)

We talk about the argument the commercial is making and how it makes it.

We talk about ethos, pathos, and logos in the commercial.

We talk about unexpected elements or surprises and how that impacts the video.

We talk about the images within the video and where they came from and what they are and the symbolism the commercial is creating/using with those images.

We talk about use of color, camera angles, and fashion.

Then the students begin their own commercial analysis, which culminates in a digital presentation.

I have evolved a very involved, but simple process, based on experience and conference presentations from other people on the same or similar ideas.

Choosing leaders
Ask students who has experience with technology.

I start by asking folks to self-identify if they have created a project with iMovie or Movie Maker (though we are an Apple-centric campus) or Final Cut Pro or some other video software. If I have six or more students who raise their hands, I stop and announce that they are the group leaders.

If I don’t have that many, I continue with other technology experience questions.

Next I ask who has created a Prezi or a PowerPoint or Keynote with sound.

Finally I ask about people who have worked with Photoshop or Lightroom.

Usually by this point I have the number of group leaders I need.

I tell the class that those folks (who raise their hands again at this point) are the group leaders and ask everyone to self-group.

Groups begin
I only allow groups of three to four students. This means that a class of twenty-five (the maximum for our fyc courses) will have six to eight groups.

All students choose three commercials to watch on YouTube or equivalent.

I get emails with the links for the individual’s commercials. The email includes a one paragraph per commercial discussion of the commercial’s content and why the student chose that one as one of their top three.

They then send links to “their” commercials to all others in their group.

By the end of that, each student has watched at least nine commercials and could have watched twelve. (Though many watch a lot more than that looking for “good” ones.)

I actually don’t tell them what kind of commercials to look for. They just pick ones they remember, most often. Some few, who don’t watch any commercials, probably Google “good commercials” to find the ones they choose.

Then, after everyone has watched the commercials, the group has to decide which one they will work on together. I have never been around when they chose these, so I assume that someone who is very verbal and/or bull-headed could get his/her choice picked by sheer dent of argument, but most people seem happy with their group’s commercial. I think this is because there are so many good commercials out there that the students can choose from.

Then I get a group email with the name of the group and a link to the commercial the group chose. (I teach email etiquette and I sometimes grade these.)

After that the groups begin work.

Parameters of the digital presentation assignment
I tell the students that they must have images, text, and audio in their digital presentations.

The presentations must be no shorter than three minutes and no longer than five.

Though they can use clips from the commercial, they may not include the entire commercial in their analysis. (We watch the commercial before we watch each presentation.)

They may also use clips from other commercials for the same product. (I have had students do this to show lack of gender and/or age bias, even if the particular commercial they are examining is focused on a very specific target audience.)

The time limit does NOT include any filler. So, for example, if they have a thirty-second sword fight in the video for no purpose other than to get to three minutes, I will not consider the video to be long enough. (They get the point.)

They must AT LEAST cover the target audience of the commercial, but they can cover just about any other thing they wish to.

The groups need a script. (This is because otherwise some groups will simply ad lib and the work is not as strong.)

The digital presentation quality rubric
Digital Presentation Rubric

On this rubric, I have very little about the topic. That is because we have been discussing it all the time. I also try to remember (sometimes I succeed) to give them the Digital Presentation Peer Review handout in email, so that they can see what might go into their work.

Digital Presentation Peer Review

Creation process
The groups get together outside of class to work on the project.

While the students are working on the group projects out of class, in class we are beginning the visual rhetoric essay. All the requirements for that assignment are done in class–except for choosing an artifact.

Many of the aspects we talk about for this essay also can be applied to the commercial analysis. Students may use any part of this information in their analyses as well.

We read a chapter from our textbook related to analyzing images. The students are given an extra credit option of creating good notes from the chapter. (Usually over half the students do that assignment, perhaps because it relates to over a quarter of their final grade.)

I use this handout as the note-taking outline for a lecture on the topic of examining art.
How to look at art

After two weeks on the group projects, I ask for individual emails telling me what the group has done as a whole and for a synopsis of how individuals have participated in the work.

This allows me to intervene in a group if needed and/or to substantiate a group’s need to “vote someone off the island.” (I do tell them at the beginning that if someone is not contributing, they can be ousted from the group. I have had one group do this. I have also had one person remove herself from a group. Each of those people created their own digital presentation.)

Peer reviews
In the third week, students bring a mobile device (computer or iPad) with their video uploaded. Then I rearrange the groups so that no two people from the same commercial analysis group are watching the same digital presentation and have three to four people peer review each video.

All the students who watch a video are supposed to fill out their own review sheet, so that the group has multiple perspectives on their work.

This is the peer review sheet the students use.
Digital Presentation Peer Review

This does several things:
1. Lets students see if they are on track or really off.
2. Lets students see good examples and ways they can improve their video.
3. Gets the groups several different perspectives on their video.
4. Gives students confidence that they know what they are doing.

Group conferences/Teacher review
Then I have group conferences for the next two class periods. The entire group comes by my office with their digital presentation and I do an on-spot critique.

These are during class so that all members of the group are able to attend my review of their work. I allot twenty minutes to these meetings.

Note: This has not been perfect. One group had done a decent job on part of the assignment but not the other. I could not think of any way to tell them to fix it besides “do it all over.” I just don’t think that fast. So next year, I will ask for a flash drive with their commercial analysis on it and watch each one BEFORE the conferences, so that I can have some time to determine what to tell them.

Making it a big deal
The first year, we simply watched the videos in class. They are very amazing and fun. But I realized I wanted to make a bigger “deal” out of the presentations, so I decided to create a premiere event.

Premiere Event
I reserve a room on campus (not a classroom) where more than one class can come and I can serve food. The room I reserve on our campus has space for multiple round tables, where folks can eat, and space for a “movie theater” type set up in front of the projection screen. It is not perfect, as the screen is centered on the wall, but the projector is not, so about 1/5 of the image is not on the screen. For space issues, though, it is the best.

Then I send an invitation to the Premiere Event to the students. We have Gmail on campus and the little icons dress up the invitations. I include BOTH classes invitations in one email, because I give extra credit to students who come to both events.

At the Premiere Event, I provide snacks.

Note: It is good to tell the students there will be food. Otherwise, they’ve already eaten and don’t want any. That is a pain when you have carried the stuff across campus!

Students eat and enjoy some time together around the tables.

Premiere peer reviews
Then I move everyone to the movie theater seating, where the Premiere Peer Review sheets are waiting.
Premiere peer review

I have asked students for different information at each premiere.

Usually I ask the students to label the commercial by title of the commercial and then take a few notes. These can include: whether the students’ names are included in the video, whether they have a Works Cited at the end, the audio and image quality of the video, and the strongest idea/point/section of the video. Sometimes I just ask them to put a star, minus, equal sign for (yes, no, and kind of).

Students rank presenations
After we have watched all the presentations, I ask the students to rate the top two commercial analyses–not including their own.

I have done different things with these ratings.

The first year, I graded the digital presentations on a 90 point scale. Then I gave each additional points based on what percentage of the class ranked their video in the top two.

This year I gave 10 points for each #1 and 5 points for each #2 and put the total scores in the homework average as a single extra credit slot. (I also–without telling them–gave all the presentations that were turned in 20 points. That way no one felt totally rejected.)

This was a little unfair as one class had 25 students, and six visiting students, and the other had 16 students, with four additional students. I haven’t really figured out a simple way to fix that problem.

My perspective on the assignment
Students do well with this assignment. They enjoy it.

I enjoy the results.

I don’t handle everything in this class. I don’t discuss group dynamics. I don’t teach them how to use the technology. (Though I do alert them to the resources available for that on campus.) I don’t teach them how to write scripts or edit videos. So far none of these lacks appears to have doomed anyone to a poor grade.

My colleagues sometimes think that digital presentations are outside our scope of practice. I explain that it is a composition and that students are supposed to be learning to write/create compositions that they can use in other classes. I think this counts.

My colleagues sometimes think that students are “automatically” great at visual rhetoric analysis and that none of the preparation work I do is necessary. None of those colleagues have taught a digital presentation, so I ignore that.

Potential issues with commercials
I do tell the students that they need to do research to make sure that the commercial they choose is a legitimate commercial and/or what the commercial’s background is. My first year’s groups had two problems.

One with Nolan’s Cheddar Cheese and another with Stop the Bullets; Kill the Gun.

The groups covering these two commercials did a good job of analyzing audience and pinpointing potential problems. HOWEVER, neither of them did any research on the commercial.

The Nolan Cheddar Cheese commercial is actually a résumé item for an animatronics creator. Oops.

And the Stop the Bullets commercial is, as they thought, British, but not really an ad to convince voting age people to pass anti-gun laws. The British have very strict anti-gun laws already in place. (Some information in very positive approach can be found here and a newspaper account here.)

In my linguistics class this past spring we discussed the disappearing apostrophe. Based on its lack of proper implementation in projected songs at church, announcements, and billboards, as well as in multiple iterations of student papers, I posited an official termination of the apostrophe to show possession within fifty years. Perhaps, had English a college (governing board which decides what is correct) like many other languages do, it would disappear sooner.

Based on the number of missing possessive markers in the last two paper sets I have graded in all my freshman and sophomore papers, the fifty years may have been too generous of a timeline.

Even after direction from me on where to go to learn about possessives (but not actual instruction as I forgot I had planned it), students failed to wield apostrophes or only threw them helter-skelter into their papers wherever an -s ending appeared.

41 minutes video introducing…

Recommended by a friend, but I haven’t watched it yet.

Organize the paper so your teacher doesn’t have to think.

The less your professor has to think about your paper, the faster they will grade it and the better your grade will be. This is true up to (and sometimes including) even if you have a world-changing idea that only needs to be read to be understood.

Write a thesis. Put a sentence in the first or second paragraph (your introduction) that says what you are going to talk about throughout your entire paper. Draw a map for the instructor in one sentence.
Worst example: I am going to talk about digital media.
Bad example: I am going to talk about the how conceptual elements of design, play, and meaning, and not just narrative, are essential for digital media.
Good example: While narrative is a widely recognized component of digital media, the conceptual elements of design, play, and meaning are also essential for digital media to succeed.

Explanation of the differences, in case you want to know (if not, skip down to the next point):
1.The worst example only gives a general topic, not the points that will be covered. That means two very bad things.
First, the professor knows you haven’t thought this through enough to be able to say what you are going to cover in the essay.
Second, it lets the teacher decide what should be in the paper. Then, when you don’t have that particular thing (random or not) that the instructor expects, BAM! your grade drops.
You MUST identify the turns in the discussion. It helps your professor know where you are going and keeps them on the road with you rather than somewhere else or way ahead of you. If you are driving to Atlanta from New York City in a caravan, folks need to know what stops you will make along the way in case they get lost. The thesis provides that.
2. The bad example announces the topic. “I am going to talk about” or “This essay will be about” or “In this essay we will cover” are examples of announcements. They signal to a professor that you haven’t thought through your idea enough to know how to write a thesis about it. If YOU haven’t thought through the idea enough, they know they will have to think about it. When the instructor has to stop and think in your writing, has to pull over and look at the map again and then figure out where your directions were off, then they will not grade your paper as high.
3. The bad example starts with what a digital work should do (have design, play, and meaning), rather than what the professor knows best, what digital work does.
Digital work tells a story. This post tells you (the first character) how to get an A by explaining how your instructor (the second character) looks at your paper; it is a digital narrative. It uses the design concept of a map and giving directions as an analogy for how that works. There are playful elements included in that it encourages you to keep your professor from thinking and talks about writing as if it were a road trip. It also has meaning, because following the word map created by this post will save your professor extra work and thereby give you a better grade.
4. The bad example ends with what the digital project clearly does, tell a story, rather than beginning there. You don’t want your professor to get lost and then discover the ending of the path out of the forest is something they know a lot better than you do. So START with the part that makes the most sense to your audience (in this case, the grading instructor). That makes them agree with you. “Yes, yes, narrative is essential,” they will concur and then, when you tell them something different it should also do, they are more likely to agree with you because they are ALREADY agreeing with you.
5. Both the bad and the good example give a clear map. But the good example gives the map without stating the obvious of “Here is a map…”
6. Also, the good example begins with the point the teacher will feel most comfortable with and then moves them away from their home base of information on to other conceptual elements.
7. The good example tells the professor that you have thought through your paper before you wrote it. (Make sure to check what you wrote against what you said you would write. If someone gave you directions to an ice cream shop and you arrived at a tire store following their directions, they would be rightfully upset with you. That’s your professor following your thesis and discovering you wrote a paper that was different from the thesis.)
8. The good example tells the professor something they already know (writing is about story) and then introduces things they may not know (design, play, and meaning are also important).

Follow your thesis sentence as a map for writing your paper.
Using the good example above, either your introduction or your first paragraph/s after the introduction should be about narrative and how everyone understands that is necessary.

Then the second paragraph set should be about design. The third about play. The fourth about meaning. Then you need a conclusion.

This allows your teacher to follow your writing, even if they are tired, because, should they get lost, they will go back to your thesis and trace their way back to where they got lost by re-reading your thesis. If you have followed your thesis, then they know where they should be and when they find that this is where they are, they have a favorable impression of your organization and are more likely to attribute problems to their reading than to your writing. (Always a good attribution from a student perspective.)

A Washington Post writer, Jay Mathews, argues that students should spend their week writing a single essay and the teacher should give each one ten minutes’ of personal face-to-face feedback. He supports his argument with anecdotes of folks who say they have done it and that it works well.

My first thought on this was, how much time are we talking? One of my friends is a high school English teacher. She has 180 students. If all of them did this, she would need 30 hours a week, which IS less than she has in class, without any time for transition, to do this. And, because of the nature of the experience, she would need some privacy with the student, which means that for 30 of her 36 class hours she would need to be out of class. Who watches the class while the feedback is going on? Every class would need an experienced aide who could keep the class on focus.

Of course, that might simply be because I am a contrarian.

I agree that feedback is very helpful. To do this in my fyc classes would require me to spend 6 hours a week outside of class with my students. (I have 40.) That assumes they would show up for these meetings….

However, it does give me an interesting idea for flipping an fyc course.

What if the explanations of assignments and small, simple steps were done at home, via podcasts and homework? Then, in class, the focus would be on the writing experience. But it would assume that within each class someone would come in with a full draft already prepared to discuss with them and I still wouldn’t be able to finish it in a week’s time of class.

However, the one-on-one editing advice, is an interesting place to start thinking about flipping an fyc course. Would it work? I don’t know. But it might be worth experimenting with, even if it is on a single paper.