Learning to "Crack the Whip"

By far the most wonderful thing I've discovered so far is that my door DOES stay open! I just have to lift on the handle while pushing it. See ya lateh, trash can! Also, I've found that if I sit in the corner of the Writing Center and look really busy and a little grumpy, people *will* leave me alone long enough to grade papers.

As far as teaching goes, I've discovered (like Cheyney) that prep and grading are much harder and more time consuming than I imagined. I've learned that I'm really not very good at (how do you say?) cracking the whip. It seems like a pretty fine line between trying to encourage them in their efforts and laying down the law about what is expected. I'm almost tempted to draw little smiley faces at the tops of their papers and write "Good Job!" when I feel like they've made an effort, even if it's not exactly measuring up to the work of some of the better writers.

I'm also discovering how difficult it is to play devil's advocate (as Emily wrote) -- you'd think it would be pretty simple to argue the opposite point of view, but it's turning out to be harder than it seems. I really struggled on Friday, and wasn't getting much of a response from my class. I'd really like to try Cheyney's idea of making *them* take the other side of the issue and try to argue it convincingly.

One thing that worked well for me last week was breaking the class up into three groups, assigning each group a different discussion question, and asking them to form an opinion on the question and back it up with some examples from the text. I usually hear from the same three or four people in class, so this was a chance for others to join in the discussion in a less-intimidating format. It also gave them an opportunity to practice supporting their claims with examples from the reading, since this is something that seems to be lacking from their writing.

Like Cheyney, I was discouraged after last week's reading responses, so I spent about twenty minutes in class last Monday on the main issues. It seemed like only my fabulous nontrad in the front row was even listening. But so far, the responses I've read this weekend have been 100 times better than last week's. So that's encouraging -- let's hope it translates over to their essay writing next week!