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THINGS HAVE CHANGED:

Since I am no longer a professor in the classroom, this blog is changing focus. (I may at some future date change platforms, too, but not yet). I am now (as of May 2019) playing around with the idea of using this blog as a place to talk about the struggles of writing creatively. Those of you who have been following (or dipping in periodically) know that I've already been doing a little of that, but now the change is official. I don't write every day--yet--so I won't post to the blog every day--yet. But please do check in from time to time, if you're interested in this new phase in my life.


Hi! And you are...?

I am interested to see the fluctuation in my readers--but I don't know who is reading the blog, how you found it, and why you find it interesting. I'd love to hear from you! Please feel free to use the "comment" box at the end of any particular post to let me know what brought you to this page--and what keeps you coming back for more (if you do).





Friday, January 20, 2017

Quandary...

I'm working on the online version of Nature in Lit, and I've hit a pedagogic snag. In most weeks, there are two separate discussion boards--sometimes three or four. Initially, I was asking students to 1) Do their own initial post of approx. 250 words, 2) comment approx. 100 words on two other students' posts, and 3) do a follow up to their own initial post (either a response to someone else's comment or simply their own further ideas), also about 100 words--and I wanted them to do that for each discussion board. But I think that's too much. I think it's better to keep their own initial posts--no matter how many boards they have to respond to--at 250 words, but either require fewer words in the comments/follow-ups or make the requirement for comments/follow-ups a weekly requirement, rather than for each individual discussion board.

The problem is, I really do want them to have a "discussion" about each reading. I can group things by the same author, but--for example--I want them to read an extract from William Bartram's Travels and an extract from Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology the same week they also read extracts from de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer and his Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. I can put the extracts from De Crevecoeur's two pieces together, but I really feel students should respond to Bartram and Wilson separately...

Quandary. Mulling.

Clearly it's time to lie down and read something that has nothing to do with work.

2 comments:

  1. May we all live more like Byrd's North Carolinians than like his Virginians....or, God knows, like 18th C New Englanders.

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  2. PS: I tried lying down and curling up with Brechts "The Caucasian Chalk Circle," but alas! It drew me back to the rivalries of NCC and the politics of the USA..BF

    ReplyDelete