first week second day

I feel that things are going pretty well this week. Today, I went through the class roster and tried to remember a few names. I am one of the worst people I know when it comes to remembering the names of people (students or otherwise). I am always surprised when, well over half-way through a semester, some guy in the back raises his hand and I realize that I have no idea who he is. That can be very dissapointing, but I have come to terms with it. I warn my students that I am terrible with names and that it may take me the entire semester to get everyone's name and face connected.

Both of my sections seemed to feel that our readings in chapter one were "a lot of review". This raises an interesting question in my mind. How much should we listen to students when they claim that they "already know" what we are doing? I don't know the answer. However, I did change my plan a little bit after hearing that.

Normally, what I do if I am going over readings in the book is to make my way, more or less, from the beginning of the assigned reading to the end. If all is going according to plan, I have done the readings myself ahead of time (duh) and I have underlined or made notes on every item that I want to talk about. So anyway, I planned to talk in pretty fair detail about "the writing process" but after a short time I really did feel as if I was being too rudimentary for them. Maybe it didn't even have anything to do with what the students said. I have often in the past started a lesson only to find that it doesn't quite feel right. Typically, then something else will present itself to my mind, which is what happened today as well.

I spent a short time floundering about and then I came to the section on getting ideas for what to write about. You know the kind of thing, brainstorming and such. Well, one of the listed items in this section was titled "ask questions about your subject". I had forgotten this (I went over this section last spring and made notes in it at that time) Well, anyway, last spring I had written the word "topoi" over this item. So, instead of going over the stuff in the book, I was able to teach them what is essentially the same thing by teaching them about the topoi. I had the class choose a subject at random and answer four questions 1. what is it? 2. What is its value? 3. What are its causes and consequences? and 4. what is to be done about it.

It worked quite well and I am really happy about the whole thing. In particular, there was one student in each section who came up with a silly answer. for example when the class chose "the ocean" as a general subject, one student answered with "it's a song by Led Zeppelin." We all laughed, but I was able to show them how it would be a good idea to keep it on the board because a more general interest kind of thing like that might be good for the introduction of an essay. Ha!

Welcome to the Fycomp Reflection Experiment

My name is Matt Fouts and I am currently a TA in the English department at Northern Illinois University. The purpose of this blog is to keep a running record of my reflections concerning my composition classes for a semester. It is my hope that a continuing reflection will produce, in its wholeness, something that is valuable in the realm of teaching composition, or at least valuable to my own teaching.

I came up with the idea for creating this blog after reading an article stressing the importance of reflection in the teaching of composition. I don't now remember the name of the article and I have currently lost the book in which it was reprinted. (Any regular readers of this blog will quickly learn that I am disorganized and often lose things.) Anyways, the point of the article was that reflection, while important for the person who is reflecting, is also important as a tool for other composition teachers. I guess the idea is that it is a written version of the kind of idea sharing that occurs within any first year composition office.

My goal is to write a reflection of some kind for every day that I teach during the fall semester of 2007. During that time, I invite anybody interested to read the blog and comment if they like. At the end of the semseter, I will read through the blog again and make a determination as to the value of the project.