Emotional Bodies

  “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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]