One Week Down

Thank goodness for diagnostic essays, which I read in the span of seven straight hours on Thursday night. Aside from the stress of 1. having only received all twenty on Thursday at noon, and 2. the looming deadline over my head of assessing which students were in the wrong class or in need of a lab, the essays really did give me a sense of writing capabilities, style, and register issues.

I chose the subject of advice, which is very much like a personal essay because nineteen of my students just graduated from high school. Though I may have missed out on gauging reading comprehension, the students seemed relaxed enough to show a little of their personalities. Some were actually enjoyable to read, especially the one entitled "I plan to graduate sober and without an STD."

During classtime, and because I really want to create an atmosphere of relaxed encouragement (perhaps I'm being too much of a hippie here), I had the students get into groups of twos and present each side of an argument. My topics included

• Chris Brown & Rhianna: will he beat her again?
• Michael Jackson: king of pop or pedophile we're better off forgetting?
• Iraq: should we stay or should we go?
• Health Care: burden of the state or of the people?

I asked the students to add any arguments the couples had left out and tried to highlight how their examples made ideas seem clearer. Then I showed the Sinead O'Connor video of her ripping up a picture of the pope and dismissed class.

I'm going to show the follow up concert at the beginning of Tuesday's class--the one of Sinead at the Bob Dylan anniversary concert where she's booed off the stage. I'm hoping that Tuesday will be ripe with questions about the performance so I can talk about rhetoric (which I love to talk about) along with getting in a few points about registers, implicit arguments, etc...

In all, I am enjoying the experience of teaching, though I often have moments of doubt and wonder if I'm 'doing this right,' but my heart is definitely into learning through teaching.

On another note, I have made time to write and found that whereas before my schedule was completely jammed with crap and I needed a few hours before I would even attempt to try to think about writing, I just take my half hour windows and do it. We'll see how that pans out...