Thursday recap

There is a big stack of stuff to mark in the living room, and I will go in there and get rolling in a little bit here, but I wanted to report my continued surprise and delight with my 101 class. They struggled with the Norris essay, but ultimately they got the important stuff out of it. There was one young woman (urban, black, feisty) who began by being angry with the essay; she didn't understand how Norris could feel as she does about the Dakotas--a common student reaction--but she was genuinely angry about it. I finally said to her, "It makes sense that you don't understand this, but why are you angry about it? Look into that, see if you can figure out what makes you mad." Finally we got to the realization that she was angry because she didn't understand: she felt that this was something completely alien and yet the author was trying to show her something she didn't get. Once we identified the anger as coming from frustration and the sense of missing something--of being left out of a secret, in a sense--the student suddenly found she could dig into the words of the piece and determine what Norris was saying. She did great in the overall class discussion; they all did great. A few of them even made very smart connections to the Lopez essay--without any prompting from me. Their reading journals are on the top of that stack of assignments, so I'm almost looking forward to marking them: it will be interesting to see how much of that thinking got onto the forms. Not a lot, I'm guessing, but I hope I can see the places where I can help focus or redirect or frame their understanding, which I can only do if they show me what they do--and don't--understand.

The 102 class went pretty well, too. After two days, that one is more of a blur, which suggests A) that nothing wildly important happened, positive or negative and 2) that by the time that one rolled around, I was pretty crunchy and consequently without much grey matter to hold memories.

I'm trying a new assignment this semester--have I mentioned this? (Christ, my memory utterly sucks)--which is for students to bring in draft introductory paragraphs, including a thesis, before they turn in the first version of their papers. For one thing, I'm sick of spending the conference week saying to every single student "You need a stronger thesis," so I want to be able to say that to them before they do the damned papers. For another, I want them to understand process--and that coming up with even a draft thesis requires "prewriting"--which is actually writing, it's just not the writing one ultimately turns in. Process, process, process. I'm going to hammer that this semester. They don't want to believe it: they still want to believe they can write a paper in one pass--and that there is something wrong with them if they can't. If I can make a few cracks in that edifice, I'll be content.

But I am very aware of the procrastinatory nature of this post: those assignments are not marking themselves (nor are the cats marking them, the useless animals). So off I go.