Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Getting Into Difficulty

I'm teaching my senior seminar on ecocriticism and really dead guys, in large part because I want to understand ecocriticism way better.

It's working for me, anyway.

We've started the semester by reading some introductions to texts, and some essays.  I'm having the students write about a couple of key words for each class meeting.  I sort of thought of the assignment and worked it out as I was putting together the course, and I'm really liking it.  I think they find it useful to think hard and purposefully about a difficult or problematic term, and then to try to explain it in writing.

One of the three essays for today was really dense and hard, and they just hadn't engaged it deeply, so we spent some time sort of outlining, trying to get at the flow, and then the argument.

It would have been a much better discussion if they'd done that work at home, but now they know how to do it, right?

Tired.  Long day with classes and meetings today, but tomorrow should give me some catch up opportunities.  I hope.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous4:40 PM

    A full 20 min of my in-class exercise today was spent showing people how to FIND FILES on their computer that they'd downloaded. My students used to know this kind of thing. How to use find, for example, or how to right click for "open containing folder" or what have you. The students who knew how to do this already finished the exercise early. Other students didn't finish. I think I'm going to have to allocate more time for this exercise in the future even though computers have gotten so much faster than when I first started doing it.

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