Literacy Narrative proposals...

4 September 2026: I spent a big portion of this afternoon reading through my ENGL 101 students' proposals for their literacy narratives. So many good ideas percolating and real depth hiding in some of them. Already, too, evidence of rich and complicated lives.

Lots of work to do--both for them as writers and me as their teacher. But we can do it. 

Time to write means it's time to write...

28 April 2026: This afternoon I've been working on a chapter about reflection, critical thinking, and metacognition for our custom ENGL 101/102 textbook. 

I started work on this months ago, collecting excerpts from student writing over the past two years, diving into the scholarship, and even sketching out an outline. 

I started drafting about three weeks ago. Wrote a heck of an opening paragraph. 

And then it just sat there because I just didn't have the time to do any more. This wasn't a task I could knock out in 30 minute bursts. And I had to devote those 30 minute bursts to other tasks.

Today, though, because I have the time and because those "other tasks" are mostly done, it's time to write and I am hacking away at it. 

It's going by quickly and I am delighted by that, though I know there are at least four more drafts between now and "done." But the grading is almost done--even all caught up for now, with the last batch coming in tomorrow--and I can do this. 

It helps that this is a subject near and dear to my heart--and one that matters for our program's goals and assessment. Wading through over 100 portfolios in January made me realize, "Hmmm, we need something about reflection in the book. Guess I have to write it..."

(And yes, this post is a bit of a break from writing that chapter and yes, it's also a bit of metacognitive writing about metacognitive writing...so I better stop before I get carried away. Back to work...) 

Sunday vibes...

26 October 2025: Quiet Sunday here--and I am grateful for that. After a chill morning and a nice long walk, I am spending it getting some work projects done, but at a relaxed pace. Already worked on a draft of our program recruitment and retention plan. Now moving on to planning both ENGL 101 assessment and an ENGL 102 workshop. 

Still in the midst of this marathon, but like I said, I am grateful for the chance to stay on top of everything without sprinting. 

102 syllabizing (again)...

2 January 2025: Just like last winter break, I have spent much of this break worrying over my ENGL 102 syllabus, which I (foolishly) decided to re-do. I do feel like I made some progress today, though, which is encouraging. 

A long stretch of cold and, at times, snowy weather is settling in. Not good for my mood, but I am also hoping that staying close to home and keeping quiet and cozy will also help motivate me. And for better or worse, I've only got about a week until "go time."

Last 101 class...

4 December 2024: My ENGL 101 class met for the last time as a group today. Their final portfolios are due on Friday and we aren't meeting during the final exam period. They've been an interesting (and, of course, great!) group: quiet, not at all flashy, and making me work for every reaction and engagement--but not in a rude or aggressive way. I don't think I've ever taught a class like them before.

It's also been such a pleasure to see their confidence and abilities grow. 

I told them today that I know I'll remember them and what they taught me. 

Topic sentences...

21 October 2024: "I realize I just threw a bunch of stuff together and called it a paragraph..." --terrific insight from one of my ENGL 101 students as she looked at her draft.

Can you tell we are working on topic sentences? Seriously, though, her realization is so important. And then we talked about why this makes sense when she's drafting--and it's why rewriting and revision is so important. 

More ENGL 101 syllabizing...

16 August 2024: Spent a lot more time working on the 101 syllabus (most the work was just thinking, jotting down ideas, etc.). I think I had a decent breakthrough pretty late in the day--basically flipping the order of the essays. That will require undoing a lot of what I did yesterday, but that's okay in the long run. 

ENGL 101 syllabizing...

15 August 2024: For a bunch of reasons out of my control (frustratingly), I have been unable to work on my ENGL 101 syllabus until I just had to start. I spent a lot of today thinking about the class and working on the syllabus. This Common Reading selection is especially tough to incorporate, but I think I had a breakthrough. Need to sleep on it and still so much more work to do, but I think I can see a way forward.

102 syllabizing...

27 December 2023: Spent some time today working on a new version of my ENGL 102 syllabus. For a bunch of reasons (including having course release time), I haven't taught ENGL 102 in eight years. A more or less complete rewrite is in order and this requires, as I knew it would, quite a bit of work and planning. Still, I am excited to get back to teaching this course (two sections, in fact). There is so much that is energizing about teaching first-year writing--the student population, the way you know it really matters.

So, all of the work and the stress/anziety that I am feeling about this syllabus is worth it. 

"...the beating curricular heart of the university"

2 January 2020: "What would happen if through some magic spell, first-year comp became the beating curricular heart of the university? What if what was best about composition teaching became the pedagogical default instead of the exception? What if we provided better pay for comp instructors, organized courses around different principles and asked students to slow down and reflect?" --Deborah L. Williams, "How First-Year Comp Can Save the World"

A great way to start the new year: a reminder of the power and potential of first-year writing classes!

Back to Rewriting

30 April 2019: As this semester wraps up, I find myself looking towards the summer session and the (online!) section of Advanced Composition I'll be teaching in just a few weeks. Like the first time I taught the class (in 2011!), I am using Joseph Harris's Rewriting. There's a new-ish edition and I've been (re)reading it this morning. Once again, I am so charmed by his voice in this piece, particularly the way he frames the rhetorical act: charitable, gracious, fair, even hopeful. Just one example, from the Introduction: "For while the point of academic writing is never merely to explain what someone else has said, to respond to others you need also to offer an accurate account of their work. Effective use begins in generous understanding" (5).

I mean, isn't that also just good advice for talking, working, and living with others?

Assessing portfolios...

3 February 2019: Because one of my colleagues is on sabbatical this semester, I am covering her position, serving as an interim director of first-year writing and rhetoric. That means I also have to do the assessment of last semester's ENGL 101 classes. I am only about 15 portfolios (out of about 100+) into the (virtual) pile, but as always when I do something like this, one thought keeps coming to mind: it is so hard to teach first-year writing and we are so lucky to have great instructors doing this work for us at Shepherd.

I'll take it?

7 December 2016:

I will confess to never getting into the Harry Potter world, but this comment from an ENGL 101 student's portfolio reflection letter, is a good thing, right? It made me laugh.

"Not good enough Cs"

26 September 2016: It's early in the day, but it is also promising to be a very busy day, so I am going to post this very good column now and call it today's good thing. It picks up on something that always bugs me when people discuss higher education problems in big generalities or dismiss entire generations with labels like "millennials." Students and their lives are complicated and one-size-fits-all answers and explanations rarely work. This isn't to say it's not worthy trying--of course it is. But we need to think more carefully and beware pat solutions.

ENGL 101 syllabizing...

31 July 2016: As July comes to an end (too soon!), I spent a large part of today working on the last of my four syllabi that I need to get ready for the new semester. As always, that's the ENGL 101 syllabus. Without fail, it requires the most time and work and thought. But I must say, working on it today--updating assignments, re-tooling essay prompts--got me excited for the semester and for this first-year class.

End of the semester tallies

Although I've said before that you never want to do the actual math, here we go:

Total pages of end-of-the-semester term papers I've graded so far: Approximately 680 (!). But hey, these are 680 graded pages. On to the exams!

Still waiting to be done:
32 ENGL 204 exams (not too bad--these go kind of quickly)
20 ENGL 312 exams (these are essay exams, so they'll take awhile; each is about 6-8 pages)
16 ENGL 101 final papers (being dropped off by students as I write this, these are mercifully short--about 2 pages each, and because of such a high rate of attrition this semester in ENGL 101, I only have 16)

Already completed: 17 ENGL 377 portfolios.

Interestingly, so far the soundtrack to this season's end-of-the-semester grading has been Broadway. Yesterday was Evita and The Secret Garden. Today has been kind of eclectic: Rent, followed by Man of La Mancha, which I haven't listened to in years. It's amazing how much I remember.

Acknowledgments

Just a brief post to sing the praises of Joseph Harris' Rewriting, the book we're using in my Advanced Composition class. The students (and I) have enjoyed this book quite a bit. It's so very practical and still theoretical and mercifully jargon-free. Harris has such a lovely, non-cynical, charitable view of writing. It's quite refreshing.

We've just covered Chapter 4, "Taking an Approach," which Harris calls "at once generous and critical," in which "you adopt, extend, and rework the driving questions and concerns of another writer" (7). One of my favorite suggestions from this chapter is that students consider adding an "acknowledgments" section to their papers:

"I advise students to form the habit of writing a note of acknowledgments at the end of an essay, and in such notes not only to name the people they wish to thank but the specify what they want to thank them for. The classmates who talked through your ideas with you, the colleague who recommended a certain book, the professor whose lecture suggested a useful perspective, the librarian who helped you locate key texts, the roommate who assisted with proofreading, the tech person who showed you how to scan images into documents, the organization that provided support for your research, the friends and family who put up with you when you could think and talk about nothing else but what you were writing--all of these people merit your thanks. Writing is real labor. It requires real time and resources to research, read, draft, revise, and prepare the final copy of a text. And this material work of writing, of the making of texts, almost always involves the help of others" (95).

Isn't that a great idea? We talked about it in class, and I am considering making an acknowledgment section an optional (for some credit) part of their final papers (although it won't count towards the required length).

Anyway, I've just completed grading my students' weekly responses and was excited to see at least one student putting Harris' idea into action, as she wrote an acknowledgment section for her paper, noting specifically "everyone in the class who helped me hash out all my questions on the blog, especially those who responded to my [entry]. To [Classmate 1 and Classmate 2] who always make me happy and excited to talk about my ideas, and to Dr. H, who gave me not only this cool idea, but also gives us to the best forum to find our voices." Yeah, moments like that--where it all seems to come together--really make me remember how much this job rocks.

So here's my own acknowledgment: thanks to Joseph Harris for writing Rewriting. What a great book!

Work Cited

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts. Logan: Utah State UP, 2006. Print.

101 Syllabizing: done!

I just submitted my syllabus to the copy center today, so it's (more or less) set now. Here's what we're doing: a paper on the all-campus read, a paper on the Little Albert study, a paper on this study on teacher expectations and the Pygmalion effect, and a paper/group presentations on social psychology. Each group will be assigned one of the following famous psychological study to research and present to the class: the Milgram experiment, the Stanford Prison experiment, the Kitty Genovese case, and Solomon Asch's study on opinions and social pressure.

I've only written the first paper assignment, but know (more or less) what the second and third will be, too. I'm still kicking around ideas for the last paper and group presentations, but at least the topics are set, and that feels good.

One class down...two to go. Well, technically three, but I am teaching two sections of the same class, so it feels a lot more like "two to go."

101 Syllabizing, continued...

This morning finds me still working on my ENGL 101 syllabus. I'm making my way through the Forty Studies that Changed Psychology, paying special attention to those Erin marked with a check in the table of contents. I start reading about one called "The Nature of Love," by H. F. Harlow. (The book actually summarizes the studies and then discusses their influence--it doesn't directly reproduce the original articles.) About a page into it, I realize what study this is: the one with monkeys and fake mothers. Can't do it. Even thinking about this study makes me depressed. Seriously. I told Erin this when we talked about it, but I guess she thought I was joking.

Moving on...

101 Syllabizing...

I've got three new course preps for this coming semester: ENGL 377: Peer Tutoring and Composition Theory, ENGL 301: Introduction to Literary Study (the pre-requisite for all upper-division English classes), and ENGL 101: Written English.

Now, yeah, I've taught ENGL 101 before (lots of times), but I am shaking it up this time, using an entirely new textbook and writing new assignments. Like last year, my 101 class is part of a "learning community" with a section of Psychology 101. Last year, all I really did to link the two classes was have them talk about what was going on in PSYC 101, especially when each student took a turn leading in-class writing. We also spent some time talking about the paper they wrote for their psychology class. But really, that was about it. When my colleague and I decided to link our classes again, I decided to do better. I hope this will lead to all the goals at the heart of the learning community mission: connections between coursework in different classes, better critical thinking, and a higher retention rate for enrolled students.

So here's what I am doing: throwing out the old textbook, which is a good book (and edited by a former colleague!), but didn't allow for readily apparent connections to their psychology coursework. The old book is the required text for all 101 classes, but I can get around that rule because of the learning community. (I see it as my subtly subversive way of beginning to challenge the "required text" idea for everyone.)

For alternative class texts, I was really inspired by an article the students brought in one day about "Little Albert" and the famous experiment about conditioning. Now I gotta say, I had never heard of Little Albert or the experiment, but I was instantly intrigued. And it was one of the best discussions we had all semester. "We should be writing about that!" I thought. Why not, I wondered, just use a series of articles like that one--or a series of readings about famous psychological topics/studies--and base most of the course assignments on those? So that's what I've been working on...finding those articles/topics. For years, I've been saying that I really want to teach a composition class using less than ten readings, since I don't believe you need a big old (or even little old) reader to teach writing.

Fortunately, my teaching partner (also named Heidi) is pretty awesome and very into the idea. She pointed me towards Forty Studies that Changed Psychology, which I've been working my way through. Equally fortunate, Erin, my younger sister, is also a psychologist, so she looked through that book and pointed me towards some studies she thought students would be drawn to.

I also ordered They Say/I Say as our main writing textbook and was especially glad that I did so after my friend Aaron said how much he liked it. It's a slim little book--and almost completely focused on practical moves that good writers make. (I ordered a handbook, too, the one the whole department uses, and one that I have a soft spot for since it was the one I bought my first semester at Roanoke and used all four years--and through much of graduate school.)

My big problem/challenge now is coming up with the actual writing assignments. I think, for instance, that we'll spend some serious time talking about Little Albert, the Milgram experiment, the Kitty Genovese murder, and the Stanford Prison Experiment, but for the life of me, I can't think of freshman-level assignments about them. There's also one that Erin told me about involving false memories--I can't think of the name right now--that should also be good. Basically, I need four or five decent prompts (for essays ranging from about 3 pages to about 7) that freshman can handle.

I tried to find some inspiration from online videos...

Check out this footage of poor Little Albert. Again, maybe most people know about this study, but it was new to me. My students (lovable little jerks...) were like, "You don't know who Little Albert is?" As if they knew before they took the freakin' class. Anyway, the video...



By the way, H.P. Beck and G. Irons' 2009 article, "Finding Little Albert: A Journey to John B. Watson's Infant Laboratory" (American Psychologist 64. 7:  605-614) is one of the most intense pieces I've read all summer--it had me on the edge of my seat! I am thinking I'll base an essay prompt on it...what that prompt will be, though, I have no idea.

Then there's the Milgram Experiment, also quite depressing... I know the students will eat this stuff up, but again, what kind of essay assignments can I base on it? Anyway, here's the first clip (1 out of 3) from a recent recreation of the experiment.



And here's a link to some original footage...again, no idea how to connect this to essay prompts. Maybe sleeping on it will help.

More to come, I am sure, but for now, if you've got any great essay prompt ideas, feel free to share them!