An Interesting Way of Teaching

English: David Sedaris at WBUR studios in June 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's 4:05am, and I still can't sleep, so I decided to do my reading for this blog.  I read David Sedaris's essay, "Me Talk Pretty One Day," and something about it hit home.  Not what the title suggests -- although I feel the same way about Spanish that he does about French (I took three years of Spanish in high school, and I'm too embarrassed about my lack of fluency to say more than thank you and hello to a native speaker).  

What got me about his narrative was the teacher he had in France.  When I was in fourth grade, this kid in my class -- I think his name was Bobby -- used to get fed up by about 1 o'clock every day and start trying to irritate our teacher, whom I will call Mr. Smith, since I can't remember his name either.  Anyway, one day we're all sitting there, an hour after lunch, with the sun beating in on us through the windows, and Bobby starts humming.  I think it was the song from Titanic.  He kept stopping just before the end of the verse and starting again.

Mr. Smith told him to knock it off, and he would, for a few minutes, but then it started up again.  Unlike Sedaris's French teacher, Mr. Smith was usually pretty calm, even when Bobby would do much more annoying things (spitballs, etc.), but this day he had had enough, and he hurled an eraser at him.  I think he might have done some pitching before this, because it hit Bobby square in the face and bounced back about ten feet.  It was a whiteboard eraser, and it left a greasy black oblong in the middle of Bobby's face.  Again unlike the French teacher, Mr. Smith looked kind of surprised that he had done that, and he was probably going to apologize, but the whole class started cheering and applauding.  

I'm guessing that Bobby decided not to complain about it because he could tell that he would get no support from the rest of us if he did.  He cleaned up his act after that, so I guess he really did learn something in that class, even if it wasn't that week's vocabulary list.

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• He Has A Point... (thylacosmilus.blogspot.com)

Getting a jump on English 101--and alligators!

My class doesn't start until tomorrow, but I looked at the course page on Blackboard and got the first two assignments.  Project 1 is to set up a blog and post 30 100-word entries by the end of the term, so I'm (obviously!) tackling it first.  One of the prompts for this week asks about Project 2, which is a narrative essay about something that happened to me before I was twelve years old.

I think I've already made my decision about what experience to write about, but I can't be sure it'll work until after we talk about the assignment in class.  When I was about 6 years old my parents took us (my sister, brother, and 16-year-old aunt) on a road trip to Miami.  One of the places we went to was a sort of reptile zoo, and my aunt fainted when she saw that a foot-long chunk of an alligator's tail was lying inside the exhibit.  Ever since then, we've been giving her a hard time about it every time we see her.  I think this will work because I've never forgotten it.  All I have to do now is figure out what it means to me.

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Video- Alligator fight.  It's not very exciting, but you can see that the end of the tail is a favorite target when alligators attack each other.

When a student loses steam

"Dr. Toffee" sums up Rhonda's fall 2014 semester:

Those of us who teach first year composition are (sadly) very familiar with students who find themselves in over their heads.  The nature of a writing class is grounded in near constant writing, and it takes a while for some students to get up to speed.  This last term that happened to Rhonda.  Between her family situation, her job, and her courseload, she had a lot to handle.  The biggest problem she faced as a student was time management.  She tried to complete the major projects, but often forgot about Project 1:  her blog.  By the end of the term, she found that there was no way that she could catch up and complete the last two projects plus the required number of blog entries.  She came to my office hours two weeks before the final, looking for some kind of a solution, but (as you can imagine) it was too late for that.  If she had come to see me even a couple of weeks earlier, I'm fairly certain that we could have worked it out, but she just waited too long.  She had to drop the course.

Rhonda's problems have had an impact on me-- from now on, I'll be checking in on my students' blogs more often over the semester, and I'm thinking about requiring them to come to my office hours at least once during the first 8 weeks of the term.  We'll see how this works out.

As a final note for those who follow this blog, you should know that Rhonda will be taking 101 this spring (doing the whole 2014-2015 school year in reverse).

Related articles:

"10 Common Problems Students Face During College" - the comments here are also useful.

"What are the Biggest Issues Facing Community Colleges Today? New Study has Answers."  This article from the Community College Review discusses the issue of college readiness.