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.
Related material
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.
"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.
In my last post, I mentioned "another difference" between films like Divergent and other political thrillers, and I've been trying to come up with a good way of explaining it. Thanks to a classmate who is working on a different film (one of the Harry Potters), I have a good quotation from a source she found, a book called Fellowship in a Ring: A Guide for Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Groups, by librarian Neil Hollands, who says that "Some of the best political fiction written is speculative fiction. By devising political and sociological systems in alternate worlds or by hypothesizing alternative events in our own world, authors can create a fictional laboratory in which to explore any political question" (233). Yeah, what he said.
When I was trying to think of how to put this, I kept coming back to how Divergent and other stories like it work is by setting up a kind of closed system. It almost makes Hollands seem to be referring to Divergent, which is, after all, about a social experiment gone bad.
