Hello everyone! As promised, I am shaking up our tidy blog pattern to get your take on your PAA unit and generate some ideas for the op ed unit. What were your most/least successful teaching days? My least successful day was the day we discussed paraphrasing. I feel like the activity was good (they paraphrased a chunk of text from a source, and a partner evaluated it according to similarity of sentence structure, word choice and meaning to the original text), but I had a difficult time facilitating discussion afterwards. How did you conduct your paraphrasing class? Did you have one?
I think my most successful adaptation was when I had my students prove working knowledge of their topic by speaking in front of the class for a minute. I am going to expand this idea next semester by giving them a little bit of prep time and scheduling them to present for three minutes. They will be required to discuss at least one solid source and tell a personal story (relate it to themselves in some way). After they present, I will allow the class to ask questions and give the presenter feedback. This way, the students in the audience can work on generating good feedback, the presentor will have to really begin to think and research his/her topic, he/she will begin to think about audience and good questions will be generated all around. What do you think?
Also, I would love to hear of any great examples/plans for the next unit. I know that I want my students to attend one of EVST's sustainability lectures.
Having someone summarize their paper to an audience is a great way of checking for holes in an argument, and it guides students toward rhetorical self-awareness. It should work well for the Op-Ed too, but I suspect it would take 3 class meetings to get everyone through a Q & A--at least in my class.
ReplyDeleteMy worst day was the library day. I expected to get through too much and scheduled the visit too early. Few had a researchable question that day. My solution was to let them try out searches while I mini-conferenced questions one-on-one. I didn't get through everyone; those waiting didn't have enough direction to know what they ought to be doing until I got to them; and, the idea of passing around an attendance sheet failed.
My best day was the working with sources/quotes lesson. They responded to three quotes (two of which I invented):
"Some have misfortunes; others obsessions. Which are worse off?"
-Emil Cioran
"The University is doing everything it can to protect its responsible students from assault." - George Schmennison
"Montana was 5° cooler on average this year compared to last year. Global Warming is a myth."
- Robert Koster
We discussed how their reactions to these quotes might help guide them to integrating them well in papers. For example, when the first quote left many students scratching their heads, we spoke about the importance of preparing a reader for a quote and of interpreting it in a paper. Some students picked up on the word "responsible" in the second quote and were aghast at the implications of the fictional university president's word choice. But someone imagined a context which exculpated Schmennison. So, we then talked about how to provide a reader with context, how to fairly represent sources. Lastly, everyone laughed at Koster. We talked about vetting sources. Who is Koster? Can you justify his opinion as that of an expert in your paper? One student pointed out how his description of climate change as "global warming" created a false context in which to interpret the data he presented. I wanted the quotes to generate a field of useful observations--none of them illustrate just one point about quoting.
Hi all.
ReplyDeleteI'll pitch in on my best day/activity for the previous unit. I think my best day was early on, when we adapted a couple of the exercises that are mentioned in the CW and used them to develop workable questions/topics for the PAA. At the beginning of class, I took out an apple (Ballenger uses a lemon - I only had an apple), and said "Alright, we're going to pass this apple around the room. It's like a talking stone - you can only talk when you have the apple. And we're going to come up with as many questions as we can about this apple." So we passed it around and around, and generated about 100 questions, from the mundane "How far did this apple travel to get here?" "What does this apple taste like?" to the more abstract, "What does the smell of this apple make me think of?" "Who was Johnny Appleseed, really?" and "When did they first start saying 'an apple a day...'?"
So then I got back my battered apple, and asked them to take out a sheet of paper, and write their tentative topic/question at the top. They then began passing the paper around the room, each writing an additional question or observation on each others' papers, about the topic written at the top. By the time their paper made it back around to them, they had 23 additional ways to think about their original questions. The most surprising thing about this was that they really got into it, and really gave each other incredible feedback. They understood the progression from the apple exercise to their own work, and took it seriously. Several people based their papers on questions that arose during this exercise.
As for the upcoming op-ed unit, I'd just like to mention a really great source of local/regional op-eds, which is High Country News (hcn.org). They usually have some really well-written, insightful opinion pieces, which are generally about the length that our students will be aiming for.