Teaching Journal #11

For Monday, we read Heilker and Yergeau’s “Autism and Rhetoric” in Readings on Writing as well as the Chapter 5 Introduction in Writing About Writing. Not having assigned homework on the Chapter 5 Introduction, I correctly suspected that many of my students did not read it closely, or even at all. To combat this, I read the rather short introduction aloud to the class and discussed what we would be covering in this next unit and what they should take from the readings. I think this was important to do, because if students don’t read the introductions to the various chapters in WAW as I assign them, they could have questions about how the readings are important for the class, why they have to read them, or how the readings relate to them and their writing.

 

Monday’s lesson plan was pretty straightforward. My students were able, through group analysis of the “Peter Speaks” and “Melanie Speaks” sections, to grasp the construct that autistic behaviors can be read as rhetorical tools of that specific language or discourse community.

 

In the interest of keeping students on task for Project 3, I have been dedicating about 5-10 minutes at the end of each class to ask students about their projects. I find this to hold students a little more responsible for the process work of the paper, and helps to keep them on track. For Monday, I went around the room and asked each student to share with the class what primary research they conducted over the weekend.

 

Wednesday’s class posed an interesting teaching challenge as we covered Victor Villanueva’s “Memoria Is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color” in Readings on Writing. From the beginning of the class, my students expressed a great deal of confusion about what Villanueva was even arguing. When I questioned why they found the article so difficult, they said that he used so much of the work of other authors, they easily lost sight of Villanueva’s own words. I ended up having to start the class by lecturing on Villanueva’s argument for the importance of memory in writing, specifically for writers of color. I pointed out relevant passages in Villanueva’s own words to help my students understand.

 

I then tried to illustrate for my students how Villanueva used various genres of writing from other scholars to illustrate his points. They accepted my argument, but maintained their stance that Villanueva did not rely enough on his own material in this article. This led to a very interesting discussion of academic writing as a genre, an analysis of the style of other articles we’ve read, and a throwback discussion of writing conventions.

 

Friday was a workshop day. I scheduled us in a computer classroom so everyone could follow along with the “Athens Music Community” paper I posted on BlackBoard. I had assigned the students to read the essay beforehand, but I figured if they had the paper in front of them even those who negelected to read it could follow along and make some sort of contribution to the discussion. I made a deal with my students beforehand, that, as long as they all agreed to participate in class discussion (and even—gasp—expect to be called on) I would not assign them any written homework to turn in on Friday. A good deal of my students participated, but I did not hesitate to call on those who did not. As a result, I had to put on my stern teacher hat for a moment and call out a couple of students who were visible disengaged (not following along with where we were in the paper, chair pushed away from the computer, etc.) I haven’t really had much trouble with authority in the classroom thus far, but I am a little worried these last few weeks might be a trial. I am going to continue to hold students accountable for homework and class discussion without adopting an accusatory tone. I usually play it off with a joke, which seems to cut down on potential hostility between the students and me.