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The Year in the Rear-view Mirror
It’s that time of year again, and the Brittain Fellows are reflecting on the year in the rear-view mirror. The value of reflecting on the work we have done is something we emphasize to our students, and yet it is something we often fail to do ourselves. Yet we can all benefit from sitting down to ask ourselves questions like: What went well this semester? What didn’t? What will I do differently next time? What have I learned? As Karen Head, the director of Georgia Tech’s Communication Center, mentioned in her recent interview for TECHStyle, reflecting on the same questions as our students and then comparing our answers can be extremely insightful – do the students see our successes and failures the same way? Does their understanding of the goals and outcomes of the course align with our own? Reflection, however, should not just cover our teaching, but our achievements in scholarship, our progress on large projects, our work-life balance, and whether we are staying focused on our larger priorities and goals.
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Feature
Being a teacher can be incredibly rewarding. I feel fortunate to work in an environment where I can focus on becoming a better teacher and collaborate with other progressive pedagogues (couldn’t resist that). It is easy to get caught up in the prepping and marking and research and committee meetings and all the other aspects
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Triviality as History in Political Campaign Ads
In the last unit of my course on copia, we’ve been looking at early modern pamphlets alongside 20- and 21st-century political campaign commercials. Oddly enough, students seem to enjoy the pamphlets more than the videos. The latter they’ve been quick to dismiss as simple-minded, pathos-driven exaggerations. They’re less eager to judge the pamphlets that, in their own heyday, were dismissed as “small, insignificant, ephemeral, disposable, untrustworthy, unruly, noisy, deceitful, poorly printed, addictive, a waste of time” (from Joad Raymond’s Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, 10). It’s been more difficult for students to see how materials so loaded with elaborate, expressive and dexterous prose could be considered as insignificant and disposable as, well, this.
Myth in the Classroom (or the column formerly known as such)
After a longer-than-anticipated hiatus, I return to discuss something relatively far afield from myth. Instead, I want to share an assignment that my students recently completed, because it was relatively painless for me to teach and grade and relatively productive at getting students to learn the difficult skill of close reading.
I often tell (read: nag; cajole; harangue) my students to pay attention to all of the little details of language, to notice how the most seemingly insignificant choices that the author makes have significant effects on the text’s meaning. I’ve found in the past that teaching close reading with poetry is often the best approach, since poetry (at least good poetry) is able to jam as much meaning as possible into the smallest amount of space. So I often begin my courses with poetry and a discussion of close reading: what it is, why it’s beneficial—even to aspiring engineers. (Being able to discern the tone that their email is conveying if they write it in ALL CAPS, for example, is a useful skill for them to have.)
Teachable Moments
Thinking outside the box by playing inside the box: Games as texts and teaching tools On April 26, 1478, as part of a plot against the Medici, conspirators attempted to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano in the Duomo at high mass. Giuliano died but Lorenzo escaped. The reverberations of this daring plot, known as the Pazzi conspiracy after the family who spearheaded the assassination attempt, profoundly
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Digital Humanities
Digital Mapping in the Composition Classroom In early January, I made the trek to Seattle for the 2012 MLA convention. I was excited to be there, not only because Seattle is a very cool town, but because I was participating in an “electronic roundtable” devoted to digital pedagogy along with some very cool people. The roundtable, entitled “Building Digital Humanities in
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Publications
Jennifer Holley Prose Poem Published Jennifer Holley’s prose poem, “First Words,” appears in the recent edition of Indiana English, the journal of the Indiana Council of Teachers of English. The poem about learning penmanship appears in a special issue on “Nurturing Reflective Writers.”
Reflections
Looking Back, Looking Forward As the editor of TECHstyle this year, I’ve exhorted my colleagues on a regular basis to “bang out a post – it only takes 15 minutes”! Yet here I sit, mulling on this “end-of-the-year” reflection post and I find I have nowhere to start and no idea how to write it. Do I reflect on
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