After addressing questions from earlier in the session, discussion turned to concerns of argumentation and returned to concerns of sourcing before speaking to assignments.
Class met as scheduled, beginning at 1800 US Central Time in a co-sat session focused on Room 105 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster listed 31 students, one less than at the previous regular meeting; nine attended on-site or live online. Student participation was reasonably good.
No students attended the most recent office hour; the next office hour will be Monday, 15 April 2019, at 1800 US Central Time.
Students are reminded about the following upcoming assignments, due through Canvas before the end of day, US Central Time, on 14 April 2019:
Discussion Thread: Preparing the Persuasive Speech
After addressing questions from the previous class meeting, discussion turned to concerns of visuals (including accessibility) and sourcing (including parsing sources) before turning to upcoming assignments.
Class met as scheduled, beginning at 1800 US Central Time in a co-sat session focused on Room 105 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster listed 32 students, unchanged from last week; ten attended on-site or live online. Student participation was somewhat subdued.
Students will please note that the regular class meeting for next week, 4 April 2019, will not take place normally. There will be an amended activity available.
No students had attended the most recent office hour; the next office hour will be Monday, 1 April 2019, at 1800 US Central Time.
Students are reminded about the following upcoming assignments, due through Canvas before the end of day, US Central Time, on 31 March 2019:
Discussion Thread: Brainstorming for Your Informative Speech
After addressing questions from the previous class meeting, discussion turned to concerns of audience analysis and understanding, working from examples to note how audiences might be successfully addressed. Class then treated various figurations of language before moving on to discuss upcoming assignments.
Class met as scheduled, beginning at 1800 US Central Time in a co-sat session focused on Room 105 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster listed 32 students, a decline of one from last week; ten attended on-site or live online. Student participation was quite good.
No students had attended the most recent office hour; the next office hour will be Monday, 25 March 2019, at 1800 US Central Time.
Students are reminded about the following upcoming assignments, due through Canvas before the end of day, US Central Time, on 24 March 2019:
Discussion Thread: Peer Review of the Self-Introduction Speech
After addressing questions from the previous class meeting, discussion turned to concerns of the communication environment and various patterns of argumentation. Reminders about upcoming work followed, and time to practice impromptu speeches and to work on assignments was offered.
Class met as scheduled, beginning at 1800 US Central Time in a co-sat session focused on Room 105 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster listed 33 students, a decline of one from last week; nine attended on-site or live online. Student participation was reasonably good.
One student had attended the most recent office hour; the next office hour will be Monday, 18 March 2019, at 1800 US Central Time.
Students are reminded about the following upcoming assignments, due through Canvas before the end of day, US Central Time, on 17 March 2019:
Discussion Thread: Preparing for the First Speech
Self-Introduction Speech
Reflection on the Self-Introduction Speech (as a Word document)
Continuing a practice I most recently iterated at the end of the November 2018 session at DeVry University, and following closely the patterns established in previous practice, comments below offer impressions of class performance among students enrolled in my section of ENGL 062: Introduction to Reading and Writing during the January 2019 session at that institution. After a brief outline of the course and selected statistics about it, impressions and implications for further teaching are discussed.
Students enrolled in ENGL 062 during the January 2019 session were asked to complete a number of assignments in quick succession. Many, and the weightiest, were weekly written assignments leading to several short works; others included a series of quizzes and reading activities, as well as ongoing online discussion. Those assignments and their prescribed point-values are below, with relative weights shown in the figure below:
Homework assignments were assessed by means of rubrics provided by the institution. Discussion was assessed through an instructor-developed rubric. Quizzes and reading exercises were assessed as standardized testing conducted as part of University-wide course requirements.
The section met in Room 114 at the San Antonio Metro Campus on Mondays at 6pm, US Central Time, with online office hours generally being held Thursdays at 6pm, US Central Time. Specific grade data, as well as attendance data, are not being reported due to the small size of the class; there are not enough students for their information to be presented in aggregate.
I note that attrition seems to have affected the section. No student attended all class meetings, and assignments were not submitted that should have been. Given the small size of the class, however, I do not know how representative the results can be taken to be. I am not pleased with them, however, so I shall have to look for ways to do better in succeeding sessions–and I am already being assigned to teach more.
I continue to be glad to have the opportunity to have taught. Although it is not my primary professional focus anymore, it remains a good thing to do. Contributions to help me keep doing it are welcome.
For the first class meeting of the session, discussion gave a basic introduction to the course before reviewing the course syllabus and relevant policies. Class then turned to an aggregate activity: designing a rubric to apply to speeches. Reminders about upcoming work followed.
Class met as scheduled, beginning at 1800 in a co-sat session focused on Room 105 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster listed 34 students; eight attended on-site or live online. Student participation was reasonably good.
An online office hour was held at 1800 on Monday, 4 March 2019. No students attended. The next is scheduled for 1800 on Monday, 11 March 2019.
Students are reminded about the following upcoming assignments, due through Canvas before the end of day, US Central Time, on 10 March 2019:
Discussion Threads: Course Introductions and Preparing for the Session
Communication Anxiety Report and Analysis (submit as an APA-formatted Word document)
For the final class meeting of the session, there would have a brief reminder of an administrative note from last week before a short question-and-answer period. The remainder of class time would have been given to student work on the week’s written assignment, a reflective and planning postscript.
The class met as scheduled, at 1800 in Room 114 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster showed three students enrolled, unchanged from last week. None attended.
The office hour that would normally be held on 28 February 2019 is cancelled.
Students are reminded that the postscript is due before the end of day Saturday, 2 March 2019. The session closes at that time, so no work can be accepted afterwards.
Reflective comments on the session are forthcoming.
For the final sample of the session, I’ll be drafting the kind of postscript that students in the class are asked to compose. They are prompted to look back at their self-assessed strengths and weaknesses in reading and writing, then to articulate in one paragraph how they plan to overcome those challenges that presented themselves during the session before, in another paragraph, noting how they mean to continue to improve upon their performances as they move forward through classes. Students are asked to submit those reflections in an APA-formatted document. Consequently, I’ll be doing much the same.
It seems apt. Image from Pinterest.
To begin my own work on the exercise, I once again set up an APA-formatted document in double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman type, with one-inch margins on letter-sized paper. I constructed my title page and stubbed out my main text as appropriate, inserting running head and pagination as needed. And I then pulled up my own self-assessment from the first week of the session, which I reproduce here from the online discussion:
To offer an example:
What do I do well as a reader?
Through dint of practice, I read swiftly and deeply. That is, I can make my way through texts quickly, and I both retain much of what I read and assess it against / integrate it into what I already know relatively easily.
What do I do well as a writer?
I write regularly and often, working to address multiple audiences through multiple venues–and I think I do well at it.
What could I improve upon as a reader?
I could read more than I do. The past few years have not seen me with as many books in hand as I ought to have–and certainly not so many as I used to have.
What could I improve upon as a writer?
I could also write more than I do, sending what I write to publication venues that might reject me and would offer more honest critique than I often get.
I look forward to your responses.
With that list before me, I considered how I had worked to address the challenges I’d identified, drafting a narrative report of that work as my first paragraph of response and making sure to include explicit reference to my earlier words to help my readers understand my topic of discussion.
The second paragraph required a bit of adjustment; I’m not enrolled in any future classes, and I am not likely to become so. (I toy with the idea of going after an MBA, but that’s a later concern–if it ever becomes one.) But the fact that I am not in any formal education at this point does not mean that I cannot look for ways to improve my performance further, and reflecting on that allowed me to draft materials for the second requested paragraph.
The materials composed, I worked to make the writing more accessible to my expected primary audience, again acknowledging a consistent issue in my work. Once it was at a place I felt comfortable giving it to that audience, I reviewed my work for alignment with the orthographical standards at work in the course. Finding no deviations, I rendered the document into an accessible format once again, which I present here as what I hope will be of useful service to my students and others: G. Elliott Wk 8 Sample Assignment Response.
I have been offered a class for the March 2019 Session, a section of SPCH 275: Public Speaking, and I’ve accepted the assignment. It’s a class I’ve taught before, though it seems to have changed a bit for the upcoming term–in part because of an institutional push towards larger student-counts in each section that has me balancing on-site and online lecture. So it will be something of a challenge to teach it this time around.
I hope it goes better than this. Image from Giphy.com.
I’ve not looked at the course in detail yet, but I expect that I will not need to develop specific examples of student work for it as I have done in my recent writing classes. For one, students are likely to be more familiar with speeches and oral communication than with formal writing. For another, I tend to lecture, perhaps more than I ought to, and those lectures are themselves iterations of public speaking. The examples are already provided by the nature of the course itself. (I will reserve the right to change that, though, since I might well find more targeted work to be of advantage.)
The on-site portion of the class is set to meet Thursdays at 6pm in the VCC at the San Antonio campus, beginning 3 March 2019 and running through 27 April; office hours will be online on Mondays at 6pm, US Central Time. I do have some travel and other concerns that will need to be accommodated, but I have every expectation that things will work out well as I have another appreciated chance to do what I have been trained to do.
After making an administrative note–student evaluations are open–discussion addressed questions from last week and earlier classes, as well as about previous work. It then moved to concerns of student writing and workshopping student papers before noting upcoming assignments, as below.
The class met as scheduled, at 1800 in Room 114 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster showed three students enrolled, unchanged from last week. Two attended; student participation was reasonably good.
An online office hour will be held online on Thursday, 21 February 2019, at 1800.
Students are reminded that the following assignments are due before the end of day (Mountain Standard Time) on 17 February 2019:
Discussion Threads: Active Reading and Polishing Your Essay (3 posts/thread, rubric online)
Elliott RWI 