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John asked a while ago for “all the teachers who read this blog to identify the five most important issues or concerns you face when planning a writing course.” I’ve been meaning to post about this for about a week now, but I’ve been distracted by a variety of different things. And besides, it’s a toughie. How do I name just five things? How do I come up with five issues or concerns?

Well, here’s a start:
1) How does the course in question fit into the “big picture” of the program? For example, if the course is first year composition, there are certain “introduction to academic life” sorts of skills and lessons that ought to be in that course. Certainly there are different issues and concerns in fy com than there is in a 300-level writing class or a grad course.

2) What do other people do who teach the course, and what do they expect out of the course? With a course like fy comp, this might come in the form of programmatic guidelines, like these outcomes for the first year writing program at EMU. But I also think it’s useful to talk with colleagues who have taught the course before. Maybe that’s common sense, but I’ve seen a few too many examples where instructors take on new courses and just didn’t do this.

3) Where do I want students to be at the end of the term? When I’m writing up a syllabus, especially for a new course, I usually start at the end of the term and work back toward the beginning. Part of it is simple logistics, but the other part of it is to try and figure out what sorts of things I need to do in the rest of the class to get students to that point.
4) What’s the basic “point” or “argument” I want to make in the class? Maybe this is the sort of thing that you can only do after teaching a class a couple if times, but I like classes to have a point, at least in my own mind. I’m not thinking of anything too complicated, though. For example, I’d describe the point of my fy comp class as “research writing is a process, one best completed in small steps.” Nothing revolutionary, but keeping this point in mind helps me shape the class assignments and activities.
5) How is all going to fit and what will I have to cut? Every time I’ve tried to develop a new class, I always do too much. Knowing that in advance, I try to realize that I can’t do everything I want to do. So the trick then is figuring out what I can afford to get rid of and still be able to do the first four things.

I don’t know if that’s what John was looking for exactly, but….

Update (5/11):
When I checked the stats for this page just now (about 11:30 am), I was surprised to see the number of hits and all from people visiting Inside Higher Ed. What’s up with that, I wondered. And then I noticed that they linked to this post in a little sidebar called “Around the Web.” Go figure.

Anyway, to be fair, it’s important to note that I posted this originally to respond to the call that John Lovas had to the question(s) that he asked on his excellent blog. Also, I know that at least Mike @ Vitia has posted five things to think about, too.

This isn’t in really of celebration of Cinco de Mayo, but it turns out that 5-5-05 is the day when I’ll post a bunch of links, mostly from the May 3 NCTE’s Inbox:

• NCTE comes out against the SAT writing test. Shocking, huh? I agree with the basic sentiment of this press release (and I’d probably agree with the accompanying report), but I do have two reservations. First, testing writing was never meant to be teaching writing. In fact, as one of the other links here suggests, there’s an argument that more testing in writing leads to more teaching of writing. Second, this is a statement that is perhaps a day late and a dollar short. I’m not completely in agreement with Jeff’s critique of this, but it seems to me that the writing administrators at various places ought to have been a bit more forceful about all this earlier.
• On the other hand, maybe the SAT writing test will lead to more writing instruction in high school. That’s the gist of this article. I guess time will tell, right?
• Say, just what is “good writing instruction,” anyway? Well, according to NCTE, this is it in the nutshell. I hadn’t seen this document before; it seems to me that it might be kind of interesting to read closely in a teaching of writing class– perhaps my computers and writing class. I mostly agree with it, but it is interestingly problematic as well. The first paragraph starts out promising enough:

Just as the nature of and expectation for literacy has changed in the past century and a half, so has the nature of writing. Much of that change has been due to technological developments, from pen and paper, to typewriter, to word processor, to networked computer, to design software capable of composing words, images, and sounds. These developments not only expanded the types of texts that writers produce, they also expanded immediate access to a wider variety of readers. With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.

Okay, that’s right up my alley. But then, in a list of 11 principles about what this paragraph means, direct attention to writing technologies (“Composing occurs in different modalities and technologies”) finishes in tenth place. I don’t know if the intent is to rank these items, but it is kind of how it reads.

• Leave it to someone outside of comp/rhet to offer some “common sense” about using machines to grade writing. See this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, “Teachers look to computers to critique student essays.” The article is mostly about U of Missouri Sociologist Ed Brent and some software he uses to critique student writing. A lot of the article rehashes the same old problems of machine grading, but I thought a quote from Brent sort of summed up my (perhaps naive) take on the whole thing: “I don’t think we want to replace humans,” Brent said. “But we want to do the fun stuff, the challenging stuff. And the computer can do the tedious but necessary stuff.”

It’s National Teacher Day. Go figure.

I’ve been pretty swamped the last couple days because I had to write a proposal for the 2006 CCCCs (and while the NCTE software/site for all this is a bit clunky and/or unclear, I think I sent stuff off successfully), because I’m trying to get back into my textbook project, and also because I’m teaching a section of first year composition this spring term. (For the non-EMU-types: the term that runs from January to the end of April is known here as “winter,” the first half of summer school is called “spring,” and the second half of the summer school is called “summer”).

It is as both fy comp teacher and fy comp textbook writer I’ve been interested in a whole series of posts by Collin, Will at Weblogg-ed, Alex Reid, Derek at Earth Wide Moth, and I’m sure a bunch of other folks about this essay by Jon Udell called “The New Freshman Comp.” Let me sum this all up in a super-duper simplistic and dangerously reductitive fashion: we ought teach writing like we teach (and learn and understand and practice) technology, we need to get beyond composition as simple “words in a row” literacy, and we need to teach and practice with the tools that students actually use to communicate and interact with media: video tools, sound tools, PhotoShop,etc., along with more traditional writing tools like MS Word or what-have-you. Oh yeah– screencasting is pretty cool.

Now, I agree with all of this and all of the above quoted posts, more or less. I’d argue that this has pretty much been the underlying philosophy of about 75% of the presentations at the computers and writing conference for at least the past 15 years. I think screencasting has a lot of instructional potential, and yes Jenny, I think there is a place for podcasting in writing classes, too. In fact, I’m going to give that (and probably screencasting) a try for an online class I’m going to be teaching in the fall.

I’ve been teaching students how to make web pages for over 10 years now, I’ve been using emailing lists and other technologies for longer, and I keep trying to learn new tricks. This spring, one of my experiments is to use blog writing as a way for students to keep “research journals” about their on-going projects. The mantra in the 300-level class I teach all the time is “writing is a technology, writing is a technology.”

And actually, I think that a lot of other more “traditional” comp/rhet folks are coming around to this position, too. Collin says “Our emphasis on writing, and this despite the work of some really smart people, is really an emphasis on writing in the narrowest scriptural sense. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard otherwise sensible people fall back on the excuse that creating a web page isn’t really writing…” Yeah, I think those types still exist. But at the same time, the level of acceptance or even practice of more sophisticated technologies in writing classes across the board is so much higher than it was just a few years ago.

So, I agree, I agree, I agree.

But…

I have some problems with all this, too.

• I don’t want to put on that “bona-fide expert with my PhD and experience and publications and junk” hat, but I don’t know if Jon Udell necessarily has the ethos to tell me how to change teaching freshman comp. For one thing, it sounds like Udell’s teaching experience involves work at an ivy league school, the kind of place where they don’t have a lot of regard for the need for freshman comp. Which leads to…
• … my second point: at the first year level and in a class like freshman composition at EMU, I have students who have some serious problems with good ol’ fashioned words-in-a-row literacy. I’m talking about students who are “basic” writers, or who have basic writer-like sorts of problems with things like making paragraphs, writing complete sentences, orality in their written prose, etc., etc., etc.. What it boils down to is a lot of the students at EMU in entry-level writing classes are woefully unprepared for the experience. They didn’t have the same kind of successes in high school and earlier experiences as the kind of student who attends an ivy league school.

  These students need to work on these kinds of skills, and I guess I want to make a claim that is perhaps seen as common sense by everyone outside of the computers and writing community: students need to have a pretty good handle on words in a row (aka “print”) literacy before you can get much out of the sorts of literacy skills that comes with screencasting, podcasting, flash, etc.

  It’s not that they can’t learn more about writing with these things; obviously, they can. The problem is one of time and priorities. If I have to include time in a first year composition class to teach students how to make web pages or to allow them to work on web pages, then that is time I can’t use to discuss readings, to do peer reviews, to talk about revision strategies, or to do any number of other “more basic writing” activities.

• Last but far from least, what we’re also talking about here is an access gap. I’ve written about this before, including as a response to Collin’s post on his blog. We don’t teach any sections of first year writing in a computer lab, and while I can assume freshmen will have some basic computer skills (word processing, email, basic web surfing, etc.) and will have access to a basic computer to practice these skills, I can’t assume much more than that.

  I don’t want to harp/whine about the access thing too much because, as Jeff Rice has pointed out before, this “lack of access” argument too often becomes an excuse/cop-out for not doing anything new. But I’ve got to say that when folks at other schools talk about all the cool stuff they can do with technology in their first year composition classes, well, I get jealous.

Of course, my ranting here is really just about first year composition. In junior and senior-level classes, I’m much more able to do what Udell et all are suggesting. Another story.

Back at the beginning of April, I posted about my goals of losing weight by being on the “non-diet diet.” So, how’d I do? Well, so-so. For a variety of different reasons, I had more troubles than I would have preferred staying with my goals of exercising, not eating empty calories, and not eating too much. Still, I did lose three or four pounds, which isn’t too bad for not trying too hard.

My basic goals are pretty simple and modest, I think: I’d like to lose about five or six more pounds by the end of June and total of about 10 or 12 pounds by the end of August. If I can do that, then I’ll be at the weight I was last summer when we went to Hawaii, which was my weight lowpoint when I was being dedicated to the South Beach Diet. And then in the fall, when I have work schedule that will literally allow me to go to the gym every single day and when I will have few excuses for getting into much better shape, I’d like to lose a lot more.

At the same time, I’ve noticed a series of articles in the paper lately that make me think that is perhaps best to not worry so much about the weight and to worry more about the exercise. For example, there was a piece in last Sunday’s paper about the fact that lots of people who regularly exercise are still pretty fat. There were these reports that people who are overweight but who are otherwise practicing healthy habits (exercising, not smoking, eating healthy food, etc.) live longer than people who have a BMI of “normal.” And I also saw one study that confirmed what I’ve believed all along: it’s the people who are really REALLY fat (that is, folks 90 pounds or more overweight) who are the ones most at risk for various obesity related diseases.

Now, I’m not going to kid myself into thinking that all of this means I don’t need to lose any weight at all; that’s clearly not true. But given that the BMI calculator puts my “ideal weight” as somewhere around 135-140 pounds, a ridiculous weight I haven’t been at since I was in junior high and a weight I am highly unlikely to return to as I make the last lap of my 30s, it does make me feel better about my long-term “ideal weight,” which will put me in the merely “overweight” category.

My friend Chris sent me a link to this article, “Munch Masterpieces Destroyed?” which appeared in a Norwegian web publication called Aftenposten. In the nutshell, the article suggests that, according to one source, the people who took Munch’s paintings “The Scream” and “Madonna” burned them to destroy the evidence. As the subject line of my friend’s email put it, “this would suck.”

Still, it wouldn’t suck quite as bad as it could suck. For one thing, the newspaper article suggests that the source of this information isn’t terribly reliable; I kind of get the impression it’s the Matt Drudge of Norway who is saying the paintings have been burned. For another, Munch actually painted a couple of different versions of “The Scream” (which is also frequently enough translated as “The Cry,” too). I mean, there is the Scream, but there are other screams out there.

And besides all that, isn’t the current cultural value of the “The Scream” kind of tied to all the sort of weird re-presentations of it, the blow-up dolls, the mousepads, posters, etc?

Okay, maybe that’s a reach. Just trying to look on the bright side, which is kind of hard to do when talking about the artwork of Edvard Munch.

I’ve been spending this weekend recovering from the term just ended, preparing a proposal for the upcoming CCCCs in Chicago, and planning a section of first year composition I start teaching on Monday. And to tell the truth, because I’ve spent more time “recovering” from the last time (e.g., not doing the other things I have to do by Monday), I think I’ll probably be getting to work this afternoon and put The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy off to another day. Just as well; I’ve heard kind of so-so reviews that make me think it’s worth a rental.

Anyway, through the course of web surfing this weekend, I came across two different yet related web items having to do with the conflicts between privacy and ubiquitous-computing. Via Johndan’s blog, I came across an article called “All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing,” which was written by Adam Greenfield and published at site called Boxes and Arrows. Greenfield is a computer expert writing to other computer experts, and while the technical capabilities for “ubi-comp” is progressing rapidly, the ethical and privacy implications of all this hasn’t worked out quite as fast.

Earlier in the weekend, I came across this flash video about ordering pizza in the future from the ACLU, which more or less depicts a logical extreme example of the kind of thing that ubiquitous-computing would make possible. (BTW, I am apparently quite behind the curve in catching up on this ACLU pizza meme).

Both of these pieces are interesting and kind of alarming, too. At the same time, I kind of feel like that this might be a bit further into the future than is being implied. Frankly, I have a hard time getting the place I order pizza from to bring me something with the right ingredients in a timely fashion.

Gee, with finals week and all, I totally missed Tuesday’s story in the Ann Arbor News that EMU Board of Regents member Philip Incarnati is now the former chairman of the board. To quote from the opening paragraphs of the article:

Citing increased responsibilities at work, Eastern Michigan University Board of Regents Chairman Philip Incarnati has decided to step down as board chairman.

Incarnati, who led the board during the approval and construction of the controversial University House project, will remain a regent until his term ends in 2010.

In a letter to board members Monday, he cited an increasing workload as chairman and chief executive officer of McLaren Health Care Corp. of Flint as his chief reason for resigning.

Huh. Well, if you believe all that, I have a president’s house to sell you.

Anyway, I think today’s Ann Arbor News editorial sums up my thoughts on the whole matter. To quote:

Incarnati’s stone-cold contempt for public accountability dragged the painful episode out much longer than was needed, and his silence (except for a written statement to other board members) continues as he nestles into a spot out of the limelight.

Ideally, Incarnati should have given up his seat on the board as well as his leadership post. But his script continues the face-saving that was so important as Kirkpatrick left campus, armed with an agreement that the regents would not criticize him. And, in return, he would be mum about them.

This afternoon, I wrapped up the grading for my last class of the term, Writing Research, Theory and Practice. I have to say was one the best teaching experiences I’ve had in a long long time. This is the graduate course our MA students take toward the end of their program of study as they are preparing to work on their MA project or thesis.

For reasons that are too complicated to explain, I only had five students. Usually, I don’t like classes that are this small, but this was a great group. I thought the way I put this class together worked out too, and I’ll probably do something similar when (or if, I suppose) I teach this course again in a year or so. But to be honest, what really made the difference is we met at Bombadill’s, which is a cafe/coffee shop in downtown Ypsilanti. It’s a great place, and meeting there beat the hell out of meeting in Pray-Harrold, which is one of the worst academic buildings on the planet.

Anyway, I won’t be blaring Alice Cooper out the window anytime soon because I start teaching in spring term (which is what they call the first half of summer school around here) on Monday, May 2. I don’t know who planned this schedule, but I really think that everyone needs more than one week between terms. But I digress.

But it is still the end of the year– the school year, that is– nonetheless. Here’s a brief reflection on it:

• Things got off to a rocky start in late August with “fun” with the EMU-AAUP, for which I was once the web site manager, and a faculty strike that lasted about 7 hours. Incidentally, the union’s web site hasn’t been updated since January.
• This election thing back in November that didn’t turn out quite the way I’d hoped.
• I went to MLA, and really REALLY enjoyed the eating in Philly.
• I tried and failed to use WebCT (we’ll see about eCollege, the software I’ll be working with to teach an online class in the Fall).
• I really thought I was going to end up moving away from EMU, but I’m glad to say that my wife and I are staying.
• I had a great time at the CCCCs in San Francisco, though I didn’t eat as well as I did in Philadelphia.
• Realizing that I will likely be here for the next 30 or so years, I decided to move books into my office at EMU. I had some books before, but I had a lot more toys and miscellaneous hunks of junk. I’m hoping to post a new photo of my school digs soon.

This summer promises to be busy with teaching and a big push on finally wrapping up a long-standing textbook project (keep various things crossed). But in the short-term, I think I’m going to try to plow through The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before the movie opening on Friday.

A colleague of mine with a real job alerted me to a book called Integrated HTML and CSS: A Smarter, Faster Way to Learn by Virginia Debolt that he said looks interesting. The description on amazon.com makes it sound pretty cool too; maybe if I end up teaching a version of Writing for the World Wide Web next year….