Shifting gears

I'm posting now instead of when I'm done with work for the day: Paul is taking me out for a birthday dinner tonight (Happy 53rd to me!), and I wanted to be sure to get a blog entry in--but I also want to work up to the last moment before we take off instead of trying to figure out how much work I can do, stopping to blog, maybe trying to restart again.... Paul teaches late tonight, so I have a good amount of time, and I want to make the most of it.

Now that I've got the flames of the promo folder contained, I'm turning my attention back to all those student assignments that have been silting up. I'm interested to discover that I am looking forward to them; just the few days of doing something completely different with my brain has cleared things out nicely. I feel I can approach reading journals and papers in a better frame of mind. I'm sorry to keep everyone waiting so long to get papers back in particular--and I won't mark as much as I usually would; the quality and extent of marking is a lot less important right now than just getting the blasted things returned, so students know where they stand. I also realized, as I was beginning to shuffle stacks of stuff, that somewhere I have a pile of reading journals for 229--and I have no clue where. I'm hoping they're at home in the huge mound of stuff on the big table in the living room. I also was less than amused to realize that I had left one entire classful of revisions (and freewrite assignments) here last Tuesday: I thought that enormous pile at home was everything, but oops, not. So I am back to a kind of triage, but it feels less harried and tense to me at the moment.

Had a pretty good 101 class today. I started by showing students how to access library databases and how various search terms would work--and oh, god, was that boring for them. I have to find a better way to get that across. I am happy to be able to show them the process on the computer in real time (instead of having to draw it on the board, which was the case up until very recently), but I've got to figure out a way to make it interactive. I wonder if I can reserve time in a computer lab the next time, so students can run it themselves...? I'll have to mull that over. But that part didn't take too long, fortunately, and once I put them in groups to discuss the reading they'd done (originally as homework for last Thursday's class), they did a fine job. We had a pretty good discussion--though I admit I handed them more than I usually do.

The reading was Ray Oldenburg's 1989 "The Problem of Place in America," in which he discusses the need for what he calls "the third place"--not work, not home, but a place that provides a needed balance for those aspects of our lives. I generally try to get them to dig out the qualities of the third place, but they were getting distracted by the idea of ways to relax or relieve stress--and granted, that's one thing the third place is supposed to provide, but they forgot that it is a place, not an activity (and not somewhere else: a cruise or trip to Italy is not a "third place"). It is always a struggle to get them to understand the very specific requirements for a place to "count" as a third place, so finally I just laid it out: the third place has to be 1) community based, 2) available for regular, unscheduled socializing, and 3) available for all members of the community, regardless of age, physical fitness, or economic status. Boom: they got it. I didn't have to struggle to get them to figure out why the mall, or the gym, or church won't work. And they could see that some of their communities have something like a third place--and some don't. We're in the process of discussing the fact that Long Island suburbia is, for the most part, very different from the kind of suburban sprawl more prevalent in the rest of the nation (and that sprawl is the problem being addressed by the essays we're reading at the moment). I can see them perking up: "wow, no more shit about trees and birdies and breezes in my hair!" (That sounds like the trees and birdies are also in my hair. In that case, no wonder they're not interested. Sounds distinctly uncomfortable.)

In any event, we'll see how all this flies tomorrow. And next class (Wednesday/Thursday), they're supposed to come in with working thesis statements--and I'm going to steal from Matt (whom I observed a while back) and have them rework their attempts on the fly, in their groups. I have to remember to dig out his handout so I can steal the questions he uses for them to evaluate whether a thesis statement works or not. He's got the language down in clear and focused fashion, and we know I'm bad at that--plus, not having codified this in writing for myself before, I'm liable to leave out something important. This is yet another benefit of working with smart colleagues. Not only can I have cool conversations with them, I can raid ideas with wild abandon. I'd guess that a good majority of my lessons were raided and adapted from someone else's. I'm a mental magpie: I'll steal any sparkly idea.

And the sparkly idea of the moment is for me to look at the reading journals I just collected from 229 so I can give 'em back on Wednesday for students to use in our class discussion. That went well today, too: a nice combo of group work and work with the whole class. All in all, a gratifying day, a gift from the cosmos for my birthday.