Thursday, January 27, 2011

19 inches of snow. University only cancelled classes before 11:30 and as I teach after 1:30 I had to get to work. I did cancel the office hours in the late morning. So the day felt a bit surreal with no traffic and the whole world being white and clear.

( Some pictures of our snow )

In the morning I read and commented on a few close reading assignments. Many talked around the issue without clearly defining anything and many just paraphrased the whole two paragraphs and thought that it was analysis. Sigh. Run-ons also continue to be a problem. I was happy to see that one of my students from Basic Comp had the clearest paragraph that actually answered the assignment question and set up what the debate was in the fair use paragraphs. I was very proud of him. He definitely can write his ideas better now and I’d like to think that I had a little bit to do with it.

The classes went alright. We went over what makes a good paper, the structure of it. And the grading criteria. Then I actually made them take a piece of paper and draw a line on it, writing out how Jenkins would answer the assignment question and then how they would. I wanted them to make sure that the answer was not identical since that would not make a string thesis. I still know they will go for simple. My goal this semester is to get them to complicate their argument just a little bit.

First two minutes of today’s “Community” were so funny I couldn’t stop laughing. I need to rewatch it tomorrow. Good episode of Bones too. ( Bones )

Yemen joins the growing list of countries rioting against their governments .