Fall term begins

Two days of teaching come and gone. Wow, is it fun! I have somewhere around 20 students—I can’t be sure of an exact tally yet; everything is weird during the first week of school, with students adding and dropping classes. It takes a couple of weeks for things to settle.

But I have a wonderful group of students! They are creative, good writers, and engaged in the class. During the term the students will write 3 formal essays, each going through a peer-workshop process and each undergoing at least 2 revisions. They’re also doing lots of reading--from the class text and from a short story collection—and are generating reader-response essays from those readings. There are other short essays, and lots of in-class work on invention, writing styles, craft terms, composition, revision, etc. Pretty much what you’d expect from a class called “Intro to College Writing,” I guess.

My own “as a student” classes are going well, too. Here they are:

** ‘Teaching College Writing’ (meets for 1 hour/2x each week/ 2 credits)

** ‘Graduate Seminar: The American Enlightenment’ (2 hrs/2x/4c)

** ‘Writing About People’ (2 hrs/2x/4c)

** ‘Contemporary Composition Theory’ (1.25 hrs/3x/4c)

The class I’m teaching meets 2x/week for 2 hours each time.

The above should explain why you probably won’t be seeing daily entries in this blog!

Now…. I’d like you all to do a three-minute free-write on the relative merits of blogs. Please post your writings here.