“Often, maps are created not to reveal exclusion, but to create it.” p. 4/30 I thought the essay Steep Steps was really interesting, especially in terms of how there are rhetorical decisions being made when considering specialization and designing architecture that have real-world implications regarding including or excluding certain types of bodies. I have […]
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Tossing the Pigskin
I read the Dolmage and McRuer excerpts shortly after I watched a rowdy game of Monday Night Football, between the San Francisco 49’s and the Green Bay Packers. For the spectator, the corporeality of a professional football game takes a central position, it practically stiff arms the viewer in the face. Bodies and skulls slam […]
Navigating Respect and Discomfort in the Classroom
During my first class of the quarter, I had a student who showed up to class late, kept an earbud in his ear after I specifically articulated my “zero-tolerance” policy for unauthorized technology in the classroom, left twice to use the restroom, and kept up side chatter for the entirety of the class period. I […]
Respect and Empathy for Cognitive Differences
Often when one hears the word ‘disabled,” their train of thought wanders to a vague picture of a wheelchair, or someone in crutches. However, because of recent events in my family and personal life, whenever I am confronted with the term, I think of invisible, cognitive limitations that can affect all aspects of life. I’m […]
My Deliberate Physicality and The Ways I Don’t Notice My Students
In the last semester of my undergrad, my public rhetorics class had an assignment where we had to do something public and then analyze the rhetorical moves we were making when doing something publicly (it was a little divergent from the definition of a public purposefully, just in case anyone is concerned about the definitely […]
Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose
I don’t have insight at this point into how English 101 is meant to function for Western. It follows a writing across the curriculum model so there must be some notion about preparing students for the rest of college in the administration’s brain. I don’t understand how administrative decisions are made at universities in general, […]
#worstbuildingoncampus
How I imagine the role of English 101 and the community in our department must be nothing like how the students see it/us. I am the most biased observer in this context because I’ve *always* been a writer, reader and lover of all things related to communication and expression. I am well aware that most […]
Who is the classroom for, though?
I think this new question we’re being asked to contemplate is something I don’t necessarily have the bits and pieces to figure out. At the institution I did my undergrad at, there were constant conversations of the way that our version of ENG 101 enhanced the experiences of students and prepared them for work later […]
English 101—An Important Requirement
I believe that English 101 is used by WWU to help incoming students with the (sometimes) difficult transition that is the dichotomy existing between expectations for high school writers and expectations for collegiate writers. When I asked my students to write me a letter at the beginning of class touching upon their writing skills and […]
Is Subversion Even a Thing?
Freshman English is not something I understand. I never took it myself, and now that I’m teaching it, I continue to fumble around in my conceptions of it. In class today, we were talking about the research proposal, looking ahead to the end of the quarter, and one student said, “I thought this was […]
Grammar: The Colonizer’s Guide to Oppression
Laura Lisbeth’s “Strunk and White Set the Standard” moves to scandalously debunk and dethrone the writing handbook, The Elements of Style. Upon hearing that title uttered, I shuddered. It is a book I have wrestled with over the course of my writing career. I read this essay after Elizabeth Wardle’s which argued that there was […]
Chapter Teacher HO!
The two chapters I chose were EXCELLENT ACADEMIC WRITING MUST BE SERIOUS by Michael Theune and ANYONE CAN TEACH WRITING by Seth Kahn. In his chapter, Theune laments that academic writing is so unbearably serious, as dry and dead as the falling leaves outside our classroom. The solution he insists to the inherently boring nature […]
Criticizing Criticism: Finding Fresh Perspectives in Midst of Tired Conventions
Jacob Babb’s America is Facing a Literacy Crisis address the belief (i.e. “Why Johnny Can’t Write” Newsweek article, also referenced in Branson’s First-Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing) that modern Americans are being failed by the education system and are accordingly becoming both ignorant of and resistant to traditional expectations/rules around literacy and composition. […]
Rhetoric, Fallacies & Some Dusty Old Bois
I chose to read Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech by Partricia Roberts-Miller and Students Should Learn About the Logical Fallacies by Daniel Bommarito. I chose these two excerpts largely because their titles track with claims I encountered with varying regularity in my experience studying philosophy as an undergraduate. It behooves a student of philosophy […]
The “Writer” as an Unattainable Identity
After scanning the contents of Bad Ideas About Writing, I decided to explore Holbrook and Hundley’s “Writers are Mythical, Magical, and Damaged.” I’ve spent a considerable amount of time defending my identity as an English major and a person interested in producing creative work, and am often interested in how our society works to rationalize what a […]
They Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage
The chapter “Reading and Writing Are Not Connected” by Ellen Carillo argues that reading and writing are “connected practices… and the best way to teach them is together.” Carillo complains that writing has been separated from reading in unhelpful ways, especially at the college level. The college writing course, she argues, has become a place […]
Revision and Five-Paragraph Essays
I read Laura Giovanelli’s “Strong Writers and Writers Don’t Need Revision,” where she expressed her opinion that all writers require revision, whether or not they are first year college students, or professionals working in their field. Revision is not a weakness, and it is not an indicator of a bad writer; revision is writing. It’s […]
Online Teaching, Standardized Testing, Whose Job Is It Anyway?
When looking through the table of contents, the selection that caught my eye was “Anyone can teach an Online Writing Course” by Beth Hewett. I’ve read a book by Hewett before, so I was curious to think about Online Writing Instruction (OWI) in relation to the teaching of an online class instead of my experiences […]
Reflections on Limiting Feedback to Students and Normalizing Failure
The two additional chapters I read were: “When Responding to Student Writing, More is Better” by Muriel Harris and “Failure is Not An Option” by Allison D. Carr. The piece by Harris discusses the expectations surrounding extensive written comments in response to their writing and the conviction that students learn from these comments. Harris argues […]
Workshop/Clubhouse
My classroom is a workshop in the sense that everyday is a test-site for collaboration, experimentation, and creative guesswork. Like any well-used workshop space, there are attempts at figuring out the utility of our new tools with mixed results; some of the activities are successful and some utterly flop. When I’m “back at the drawing […]
The Classroom Environment
From past experiences participating in political demonstrations and rallies, I have noticed that there are some (loose) similarities between the classroom environment and the atmosphere and archetypal participants of group protests. Firstly, an underlying question exists within both categories—what are we doing here? At a rally, people gather to incite change, to inform the public […]
Ecosystem: Growth and Value
I initially tried to write this based on an already existing ecosystem— think of the inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest old growth forests, or something equally elaborative. But then, as I have a tendency to do, I decided that would be too hard, and too much research. So here I am. I’ll start with my […]
Fish Tank Social System
Side note: The first thing this prompt made me think of was an article I read in my undergrad called, “The Ecology of Writing” by Marilyn Cooper. I don’t remember much about it besides it relating to this in a small way for me. I don’t know much about ecosystems, or science in general, as […]
An Open Experiment: Honing in on the learning process
I expected a lot more attention being focused on the nitty-gritty details. I think, for better of for worse, I had made the false assumption that English 101 would be geared towards creative writing and not this focus on the much more broad idea of literacy in general. I assumed that time would be spent […]
Illuminating the Path Towards An Ease with Teaching
When I told my friends that I would be teaching English 101, I alluded to it being absurd or ironic as I joked with them, “I don’t know English.” Having moved to Chandigarh, India when I was ten years old and subsequently completing 6th through 10th grade in India, I returned to the States with […]
Working With Apathetic Students
My students came into English 101 with preconceived notions of what the course would focus on, what projects they would be asked to complete, and that they were not “good writers.” I think they were surprised to discover that the course is designed to not only strengthen their writing and critical thinking skills, but that […]
Feeling Incompetent
When I got the news of my TAship, I immediately ran to my current and former professors for advice. Even as an undergraduate at Western, I was still terrified to teach, and voiced my concerns to current English 101 instructors. Their advice was all the same— “enjoy the summer and don’t worry about it. At […]
In and Out of Time
Some of the following strategies, though moderately time-intensive the first time you try them, produce materials that can be reused for years. (Bean 291) My first thought in response to this prompt centered on the video art installation “The Clock” by Christian Marclay. “The Clock” is a video timepiece. Synchronized to real time, it runs […]
Few Expectations
I became close with many faculty members at Montana State University, where I did my undergrad, and many of them would tell me some of what I could expect from teaching or going to graduate school after I’d officially been accepted to Western. In the months leading up to actually starting the quarter, my mentors […]