Overloaded

Ok, so my barrage of posts right before the first round was due seems to have left me a little bit dry.

In my time away I've been very overwhelmed with schoolwork. Apparently it's not recommended to take both 125A and 125B in the same semester. I did not know this before, and I completely understand it now. Though, it would be a lot easier to handle without a certain selection of any of my other classes right now.

It's got me thinking about high school, and how teachers semi-coordinate their assignment schedules in high school to avoid overloading students with too many big projects all due at once. While I appreciated the efforts while in school and having less homework to ignore at any one time, I'm now wondering if it does some harm as a manner of college prep.

For the students who actually did their homework and got used to a sort of even work load, how are they supposed to deal with midterms and essays all being due within two weeks? Especially for those who are working full time and dealing with other things that high schoolers often don't have to think about at all.

I do like the idea, but think that maybe it should be done in moderation, maybe only in the first half of the year. That way, student can get a taste of the insanity that they're going to be facing in only a few more years. Every high school is a college prep school now, right?

It's all in the phrasing.

I’m a bit of a hippie. I will fully and openly admit that. I try to reuse anything I can and use fewer resources whenever possible. I’m not actually that good at this whole green living thing, but I’ve got some good Catholic guilt going on whenever I don’t bring my reusable bags to the grocery store, or take a shower that’s longer than necessary. So, even though I may not be so great and example of living green, I do try to contribute where I can. That includes simply not taking a bag if I’ve bought something that I can carry without it.

Along with that, I encourage others to do the same.

I work at a music store and a lot of customers buy only one or two items at a time, definitely a reasonable amount to carry without assistance for most people, especially those with a decent sized purse. More as a means to cut costs (because Dimple is cheap) we don’t automatically give every customer a bag with their purchases. The practices that each of us use to find out if a customer wants a bag vary a bit.

I’ve recently heard a lot of, “Do you want a bag for this?” When I ask a customer, my question is whether or not they, “need” a bag. Just that one little word difference is a whole different message. I don’t know how many customers are swayed by the one little word, but I hope that enough of them are.

With words having such a significant meaning, I can only imagine what one could really do with a full essay. Let’s hope that I find a magic way to communicate that to some teenagers within the next couple of years!

Motivation Such and Aggravation

This will be my first post in that blog for my class as soon as I can come up with a name for it I like.

You know that technology is having a huge impact on school when one can turn a simple journal assignment into a blog only to motivate themselves to complete it more thoroughly and in a timely fashion.

Such is this blog. For what looks to be quite an exciting course, I must keep a journal of thoughts related to writing and the teaching of writing. With the help of Google Analytics, I will be able to motivate myself to keep writing so as to keep some sort of audience interested. On that note, I have my first self-created prompt for this journal…

How on earth am I actually going to ever get a student motivated to write before the eve of the assigned due date?



Having been one of those students, I know exactly the thought process of the ones who are more than capable of doing any mundane task assigned, but not coming anywhere near caring enough to do them. In the first meeting of my American Gothic course today I was reminded of Professor Sweet’s practice of short quizzes on the assigned reading material and it got me thinking about applying something like this to writing.

Because I had her for American Lit a year ago, I know that Prof. Sweet’s quizzes are very simple ones, only really intended to motivate and reward keeping up with the reading assignments. As much as I hated them at the beginning of the last course, I came to love the easy credit for just doing what I should have found my own motivation to do.

I’d already attended Writing and the Young Writer when thinking about these American Gothic quizzes, and thought that if there was a way to modify this practice for writing, one might just be able to show high school and middle school students the benefit of staying ahead of their writing from the beginning. But just how would I ever be able to do that? I guess I have a few years until I’m in a classroom, and I have lots of teachers to learn from until then, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about it for the moment. If I can figure out a reasonable way though, I can’t wait to try and actually get students motivated.

I love how much better my writing is now that I start my writing earlier and have a chance to edit it. I wasn’t ready to admit that I needed that in high school though, and I’m sure I’ll run into plenty of students who feel the same way. I also feel as though I was able to scrape by and get B’s on papers that I pulled out of my ass the night before, so what real incentive did I have to start earlier?

Thinking about it in those terms has me remembering just last spring and my Advanced Composition course with Professor Dunstan. That’s actually where I finally found the drive to truly edit and give myself time to write. Dunstan was able to get me to see the light by having us turn in papers that were due at the end of the class around mid-terms, and giving us what our grades would be if we turned in that paper. Even the one that I had a solid B in then wasn’t enough for me when I still had the time to improve it. The notes that he’d made, made it very easy for me to spot what I didn’t like in my own writing and edit it to be more clear and definite.

I think before I write again I’ll pull out my old syllabus from that course and see if I can’t draw more inspiration from that, or in my current course with Dunstan!