Hello Summer/ Fall 2020 PD Participants! And what a year this is!
If you haven’t already, please accept my invitation to join this site. You’ll need to do that in order to post here.
And keep an eye on the site. After our “template site” goes live (that is, the course we’ll be teaching next semester,) I will post a link to it here, along with some info about our first writing task for August.
If you’re teaching in a Learning Community (I am!) don’t worry, it won’t be hard to make this curriculum work with your course. You and I can chat about that.
My email is chall@citytech.cuny.edu, if you should have any questions. And I look forward to seeing you soon!
Hello everyone, sorry for the delay in appearing here–the North Country where I am, has only 63 COVID cases (no deaths), but severe weather, and other difficulties of living where few other people live (including slow internet when “everyone” is on, and no power when major storms come through). My name is Mária (rhymes with “aria”—accent on the first syllable: it’s Hungarian; I answer to “Mar”, which works much better for me than the usual pronunciation (accent on second syllable) of my name. I am an adjunct, teaching since 2008, and at City Tech since 2010; I have been teaching online since 2012: I like it, I am good at it, the courses I have been teaching have been getting better (and more relevant to the students taking them) over time. I am teaching 1101 online right now–a lot of work, but worth it for the 11 of 20 who will complete.
The issue of SWE is difficult for me–which languages/vernaculars get “privileged” and which do not in Composition 1101? “This Ain’t Another Statement” has made me wonder about a lot of things: I have spent a lot of time focusing on grammar, subject-verb agreement, placement of articles, thinking they are tools to bring everyone to the same place at the end of their first semester (as someone whose parents’ first languages are not English), not promoting the language of the oppressor. My thoughts on this are evolving, viz. what I have been doing at City Tech for the past decade.
Initial class assignment: In my online classes, one of the first assignments is for students to post an introduction to themselves, where (in the world) they are taking the course, and something about them that is unique to help others in the class remember them. I also ask them to post an avatar and respond to at least two other students’ posts. Usually this assignment is worth 10 points: 5 pts for the initial post, 1 pt for the avatar, and 2 for the responses. I notice that when they are getting graded, they are much more motivated to participate. Most students respond to more than the minimum 2 required.
Respond to the following questions from Kerry Dirk (approx 300 words): What is a genre of writing you know well? What are the rules of that genre? How did you learn them? I am familiar with fiction, novels, short stories, and writing essays about these types of works. I learned the rules of that genre by trial and error, the more practice the better. Branching out (piggy-backing?–some metaphor) from this, recently (in part due to online teaching), the fiction that I am attempting to create and write about is more visual (television, video games, new media). My ongoing quest is to keep what I teach relevant to students with the goal that they leave the class seeing the world differently than when they came in. To this end, the trial-and-error, write-review-revise method still seems most practicable.