fall semester, 2013

the way a semester looks from the beginning is not what it looks like from any middle or end or many-months-later vantage point. somewhat amazingly, I have seven of these new semester write-ups to go back and look at now--two from my last year as an undergraduate (the first more comprehensive than the second) and five in a row from my career at Tech. if you'll indulge my time traveling for a moment, I kind of want to look back at some of those forward-looking moments. what was I thinking? was I right? what changed? did any of it matter?

last spring, I was definitely right about how much those three courses overlapped. although perhaps it was that attitude that made the connections all the more palpable. my anticipations regarding assignments and other details shifted of course, as they always must. there were group projects and presentations and last-minute crazinesses all along the way. I miss it back there, sometimes. Purdue is quite marvelous, but I'm new to it, so I can't quite grasp all the marvelous yet.

for the semester before that one, last year, I just realized that I didn't include the internship credit I worked on. ah well. (for Dr. Hawkins, I wrote up my experience at the Press and sent my copyright project in for her review. nothing huge.) Argumentation Theory and Rhetorical Theory last fall both drowned me in questions about where this field has come from and why and how. the questions (the very same questions) will never go away, I don't think. they are questions I have more experience with now, at least.

the year before that I had a few summer adventures and a spring semester full of new, surprising stuff like TEI, semiotics, and paper-making. I took my first online class that spring. at the bottom of it all, there was a fairly strenuous first-time-as-a-grad-student. among all these seemingly discrete chunks of educational time, there have been classes I loved more and some I loved less, professors I got more attached to and others who intimidated me, colleagues I worked with often and some I wished I could've worked with more, and theorists I loved and some I still need to figure out.  

so how does fall semester 2013 look from here, just a few days in?

this is Heavilon Hall, a significant epicenter of my new life. I'm teaching English 106: Introductory Composition. it's different, having one little score of students to meet with three days a week in class, the other two days in conferences. I'm still getting used to the rhythm and pace of it. I think we'll have fun, though.

classes in which I am a student:

English 505 practicum with Dr. Thomas Rickert
this is where all the first-years in the program get to share their teaching woes and learn from each other. we've had a whole week of planning and preparation and now almost a whole week of seeing what it's like in this world. there is going to be lots of bonding. we've already named our cohort using a very clever acronym made from the first letters of our names (trend?): we are The Pasta Jets. don't laugh. deep down you know it'd make an undeniably awesome name for a band. if the PhD thing doesn't work out for us, maybe we'll start one.

English 591 Composition Theory with Dr. Jenny Bay
there is going to be so much reading for 591. friend Kristen warned me that my eyes would bleed. so far it's great stuff though. foundational. important. thought-provoking. it's looking back, in a way, like I did during the first half of this post--what were we thinking back at the beginning of composition studies? were we right? what else can we do with those thoughts? how might they require reshaping? today we'll get to meet Dr. Janice Lauer, who founded the program we're all studying in now. we may take her to the coffeeshop for a chat afterwards, just for fun.

English 680-001 Digital Studio with Dr. Nate Johnson
this tuesday night class comes after a long, long tuesday morning and afternoon, but it's going to be so worth it. our first day, we downloaded this simple little trick to start setting up our own server space. what does that even mean? all I know about servers is that they make the internet work and my genius brother used to have one under his bed. other things I'm going to learn more about here: databases, CakePHP, and bunches on the rhetorical implications of categorization/standardization/coding/etc. way excited.

English 680-003 Institutional Rhetorics with Dr. Patricia Sullivan
some of the readings for this class overlap with Digital Studio's booklist. that's interesting, eh? institutions are everywhere. they make everything on the planet work, in some fashion. who knows where this class will take us? the questions yesterday morning circled around listing institutions and mapping their components along scales of visibility/invisibility, fluidity/solidness, inherited values/idealized values, and other miscellaneous thoughts. the book/article list for Institutional will also make my eyes bleed. pray that I don't go blind.


I was just pondering whether it's harder to be a teacher or a student. they are differently hard... but I think I make a better student. both roles are teaching me something though. and I am going to learn.

separately solemn: fall semester 2020

today begins week three of my first semester teaching at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. I am the newest Assistant Professor of Professional Writing in a department without a degree program. students here can get a minor in Humanities & Communication, but nothing more. since they all want to be pilots or engineers, that's how it is.

I'm teaching two courses, three sections, this semester. one of technical writing and two of business writing. there are 62 students enrolled altogether, which might be the most students I've taught at one time ever.

COM 221: Technical Report Writing
this one is quite reminiscent of the English 421 I taught once at Purdue. for the most part, I've kept this course very similar to the technical writing and technical composition courses I've taught for the last two years. but for our final project, I'm finally going to teach some podcasting stuff. finally. 

COM 222: Business Communications
if Com 221 is the English 421 of ERAU, then Com 222 is the English 420. though the distinctions between professional/business communication and technical communication aren't so very huge, they do exist. it feels like ages since I've focused on the former. so I'm resurrecting some of the projects I taught back in 2016 and 2017, updated a little, with a new textbook to go with them this year. cause-related marketing proposals. very exciting. 

overall, Embry-Riddle feels like a mini-Purdue in many ways: engineering-heavy. mostly white and privileged students. the differences, however-- that it's a much smaller private university, perched on top of a desert-- are significant.

how many college campuses have I spent how many autumns, now? this will be the sixth campus (USU, U of Plymouth, TTU, Purdue, NSULA, and here). I don't feel like counting the autumns themselves just now. someday maybe I'll make a chart.

{ photograph borrowed from this kind user of Flickr }

true autumn weather is a month or so away, still. but regardless of weather, classes have started. and that comes with a particular and lovely feeling.

only... it's different this year. and I don't think it's different just because I'm getting old. 

something like the same old scintillating energy of a college campus in September is here, jolting through brain and body every now and then. but it's so muted. six feet of space (give or take) has diluted it. closed office doors and silent office hallways are smothering it. I didn't know the trademark thrill of any given academic autumn would be so vulnerable to the side effects of separation.

after a summer of moving and reading and blogging and not teaching anything, my teaching muscles need re-building. it might take me longer to find a workable rhythm this semester. 

talking for 4+ hours (thank goodness not completely consecutive hours) in a cloth mask is exhausting

keeping track of two separate classroom cohorts for each section I'm teaching is a little hectic. 

finding my place in a new institution is tricky enough, without such strange circumstances. what with all the reasonable but seemingly unending surveillance and daily temperature checks and stern, scolding emails from administrators and wobbly hopes tossed about on fathoms of uncertainty-- it's so easy to be so panicky. and almost as easy to sweep the panic into a corner and pretend like it's not there at all.

it makes me wonder, again and again, what really matters anyway? 

I'm thankful, for now, for patient and smart students. it's a weird time for all of us. hopefully we still learn a few things that will still matter beyond this semester and next.

fall semester, 2019

ten days into fall semester. it's been a bit of a rough transition from lovely summer travels to four new sets of students and curricula and work routines and everything.

for the official blog record, here's everything I get to teach this fall--

English 1020: Composition & Rhetoric II
an entirely new course for me, more or less. last time I taught anything like this was spring 2013 at Texas Tech University. I'm a much different instructor at a much different institution this time. but I think this class will be fun-- one of our projects involves writing about some of the opinions/controversies on the Change My View subreddit. each student is also choosing a theme to research and write about over the semester. should keep things exciting for us all.

English 3230: Technical Composition
this is my seventh section of this course. oddly, I've only got the one Monday-Wednesday-Friday section for this semester. 15 students, 15 weeks left. I've switched up a lot of things for this time around (including our textbook), so it's been more work to prep for this time around. ah well. we're doing our team project first, then instructions, then resumes, etc. hopefully plenty of useful learning happens.

English 3610: Intro to Digital Cultures
this is the undergraduate version of my graduate course, Engl 6560, last spring. different readings, a lot more hands-on things in our face-to-face classroom. yesterday I had students compare/contrast working in Google Docs vs. Word Online vs. Graphite. in future weeks I want to have us play around with wikis, twine, glitch, twitter threads, terms of service, interface design, maps, social media, and maybe some of these activities too. 
 
English 5220: Technical Writing
this year, I'm teaching this graduate course to 9 students instead of just 2. it's my one online class this semester, and it should be great. we're using Solving Problems in Technical Communication as our main textbook, and we also get to read (or listen to) all this great stuff:

• Johnson, Tom. Simplifying Complexity, Intro https://idratherbewriting.com/simplifying-complexity/
• Nordquist, Richard. “Technical Writing” https://www.thoughtco.com/technical-writing-1692530
• Giordano, Connie. “What is Technical Writing” https://techwhirl.com/what-is-technical-writing
• O’Hara, Frederick. “A Brief History of Technical Communication”
• Rutter, Russell. “History, Rhetoric, and Humanism: Toward a More Comprehensive Definition of Technical Communication”
• Durack, Katherine. “Gender, Technology, and the History of Technical Communication”
• Jones, Natasha, Moore, Kristen, & Walton, Rebecca. “Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication”
• 10-minute Tech Comm Podcast, “Dr. Emily January Petersen on How Women Technical Communicators Get Undervalued.” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/uah-technical-writing/10minute-tech-comm/e/54413468 
• Allen, Jo. “The Case Against Defining Technical Writing”
• 10-minute Tech Comm Podcast, “Katherine Spivey on Plain Language” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/uah-technical-writing/10minute-tech-comm/e/katherine-spivey-on-plain-language-42062936
• Johnson, Tom. “Plain Language Ruined My Delight in Language”
• Johnson, Tom. “The variety of tools tech comm professionals use” https://idratherbewriting.com/2016/08/21/survey-of-tech-writing-tools-among-professionals/ 
• section from https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/index.html
• Markel, M. “Ethics and Technical Communication: A Case for Foundational Approaches”
• Rabil, Richard. “Order Out of Chaos: Patterns of Organization for Writing on the Job” https://alistapart.com/article/order-out-of-chaos-patterns-of-organization-for-writing-on-the-job/  
• 10-minute Tech Comm Podcast, “Dr. Kirk St. Amant on User Experience in International Contexts” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/uah-technical-writing/10minute-tech-comm/e/52583945 
• 10-minute Tech Comm Podcast, “Amruta Ranade on Learning New Technology” https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/uah-technical-writing/10minute-tech-comm/e/55624504
• Wilson, G. & Wolford, R. “The Technical Communicator as (Post-Postmodern) Discourse Worker”

most of these are the same readings as last year, but I added that final one after discovering it this summer, and several of the podcasts are new additions also.

ten days done, most of four whole months left to go... 

spring semester, 2016

this, if all goes according to the sketchy plans I have sketched in collaboration with the English department and my advisor, will be my last semester of coursework. the last time I sit in a classroom as a graduate student.

it feels like a very different semester already. an edge. a transition.

the season and the weather seem to echo this. or at least that is the way I am going to write about it all.

today it is raining in spurts, like a chilly and unkempt spring. Tuesday's snow is long since melted. it'll be back this weekend. the universe is giving us yo-yo-ing seasons, somewhat drab all the way through, with occasional bright sunset smudges.

the trees are bare. my apartment windows open onto more distant views than they did in summer and fall. at night, more and more streetlights perpetually leak into my bedroom under the edges of the blinds. I notice the faces of buildings I have never seen from such an angle before. expanses of roads and curb and green up the hill peek out between branches. it's the same neighborhood. but different. a few days ago it was all white and grey, snow and shadow. today it's still grey, but more slick and shine, a little warmer, and soggy.

this semester feels different too, barer than others have been and yo-yo-ing in its own way. class on Mondays, teaching on Tuesdays, alternate thusly for the rest of the week. research meetings and office hours, writing time, scraps of reading, planning, list-making.

English 631 World Englishes, with Dr. Margie Berns
this is my linguistics requirement. it's been a long time since I took a class that met more than once or twice a week. World Englishes is a one-hour thrice-weekly seminar. short, but interesting. and full of students from other programs, too. it should be pretty chill and relatively basic, for my last bit of coursework ever. I am already pondering project ideas. various Englishes as used in online volunteer communities... or various Englishes as they are negotiated/tolerated in social media somehow.

English 699 Research Hours, with Dr. Patricia Sullivan
not a class, really, but a placeholder to make the registrar's office happy. the credits I earn here are up to me to direct. this is time to plan the rest of my graduate career and start writing a prospectus. what will it all be about? to help me figure that out, I'm revisiting some of my previous projects and pondering the feedback professors have given me. I feel like I'm off to a slow start, but maybe that's okay. everyone says not to compare yourself to your colleagues. so I won't. some of them have their dissertation projects outlined and their committees chosen already. I do not. but I will, eventually.

English 421 Technical Writing
I get to teach a new professional writing class this semester. my students seem pretty cool so far. they have plenty of experience to share and our discussion yesterday went pretty well. texting vs email vs. facebook, and how you figure out the best way to communicate (or not) using all these options.

I look forward to figuring out the rhythms of the next sixteen weeks. so many kinds of work-- teaching, researching, scholaring. there will be grading and analyzing and writing and reading. I need to think about making a reading list for myself. put deadlines on calendars. two more years isn't that long.

another spring semester

so far, this corner of the world has felt abnormally like spring for the past eight weeks, save for two days of snow-dust several weeks ago. everyone is dreading how dry and fire-prone the whole area is going to be through the summer. let us hope we have a few good monsoons in store at some point. please?

eight weeks since classes started means that half the semester is over by now. but I can still blog about a new semester even when it's halfway over, right? why not?

there isn't much to say. this semester is basically a repeat of two years' ago's with only minor updates. one section of Technical Report Writing (this time with extra usability and UX flavoring), one section of The Art and History of Podcasts (quite a bit improved since my first semester teaching it), and plenty of other academic work on top of the usual teaching: meetings galore, emails that should not be so draining to read and write and manage, various professional development adventures, research and writing of my own in small snippets.

I enjoy this teaching career, such as it has become for me, because it involves so much learning. or at least I always used to think so and say so. am I still learning anything? am I still enchanted by the process of stretching my brain in new directions, of finding little corners of wonder amongst all the mundanity of things, like it seems I always used to be? well yes. mostly yes. students and colleagues say things all the time that make me think new thoughts and appreciate new things. their questions and my questions often join forces in pretty excellent ways. it's fun.

novelty seems rarer, these days, though. there is a lot of sameness, and it feels far too easy to let the sameness subsume everything else. do older brains prefer more sameness, I wonder? or does accumulation of experience just mean that any novelty we find is easier to handwave away as not-really-that-interesting-after-all-actually-kind-of-just-like-that-other-thing-I-already-know-about? or maybe our comprehensive eyesight starts to fade somehow, rendering us less able to appreciate shining novelty even when it's just as plentiful as ever?

I'm not sure. 

what is new and notable for me lately?

with enough time and energy, and given a wide ranging definition of "notable," I could list so many things. an onslaught of information from news and social media and instant messages. knee-jerk reactions and opinions and maybes in response to all of it. the absurd loveliness of a few calm, rich summery days in February. bundles of anticipation accompanying sprouts and buds and new greenery underneath dried leaves. earlier sunrises and later sunsets. a recent trip for work to Albuquerque, including a not-for-work visit to this cute new fiber arts shop. (I bought 300g of a wool/viscose blend called "crumpet tweed." awesome name, eh?)

also, 'tis the season for (a perhaps ridiculous amount of) excitement about the tournament of books. it starts next week!

I've read only four of this year's contestants (which is four more than I usually manage to read before the opening rounds): 

The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

James, by Percival Everett

The Wedding People, by Alison Espach

and Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

I read them in that order, because that is the order in which the library served them to me--three in nice new hardcovers and one (The Wedding People) as a short and sweet audiobook. now that I've finished Beautyland, I really need to relisten to the So Many Damn Books episode about it. 

do I have a favourite? do I hope one of these four wins? it's hard to say. James and Beautyland have the most depth, I think; I read them both quickly and could see myself reading them again someday. the other two were excellently enchanting to me though, and both The Wedding People and The Book of Love delighted me with their neat and just-twisty-enough plots. 

but I don't like to make predictions. if I fill out a tournament bracket in the next six days it will be as random as anything might be, and I will not be attached at all to the idea of my random picks matching up with the true official judgements.

let's just see what happens next.

spring semester, 2014

it is not springtime. there are two soggy, slushy inches of snow piled up outside--which, granted, is ten less than there were ten days ago during the cold-snap of the century. though I do prefer rain, I find the snow rather beautiful and soothing in its own way, so I don't complain. the seemingly misnamed semester will inch along to spring in due course. and when that happens, finals and stress will no doubt prevent me from enjoying it as thoroughly as I could, but for now... well for now, the semester is glowing with warm, cozy pillows full of insight and excitement. this might be the best January ever.

German 603 German for Reading Knowledge with Claudia Mueller-Green  
I love this class already. it's different. there are only four students aside from myself. we all gather close around the instructor's small table and do our best to keep our sketchy German near the fronts of our brains. it's not necessarily a full language course, though we've told Claudia we do want to work on our pronunciation and listening as much as on our reading. all we really need though is enough familiarity to translate any academic German nonsense we might come across, with the use of a dictionary if necessary. we've started small--yesterday we worked through translating a simple summary of Johann Sebastian Bach's life. next week we'll be talking about Brecht and Kafka. after that, we'll schedule out a few more substantial projects. Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein. if we are especially brave, perhaps some Friedrich Nietzsche. for now, our little textbook gives us handy vocabulary lists and grammar tables. I need to brush up on betrachten, gebrauchen, and ungefähr. ich muss mehr üben.

English 680 Rhetoric, Games, and Play with Dr. Samantha Blackmon
this is going to be quite an odd class too. Dr. Sam says they made her put "rhetoric" first in the course title, to give it more academic clout. games seem to be one of this program's big fascinations. Sam Blackmon has been running this gaming podcast for three years now, she says. there's a gaming lair on the second floor, soundproofed and hidden away behind an unassuming office door. I wasn't sure how I'd fit in with all the much more devout gamers among my colleagues, but so far so good, for this class at least. some of my scribbly notes from our first set of readings include phrases like "imagining unrealizable desires" "emancipation from situational constraints" and:

play = imagination + action
imagination = play - action

I'm finding myself very intrigued by the term "play" and all the many meanings we give it. games. sport. drama. music. it's everywhere. a handful quotes from Huizinga's Homo Ludens are going to populate my everything notebook for a good few days, I think.

English 505 practicum with Dr. Richard Johnson-Sheehan
composition. pedagogy. what do these things mean? what are we going to do about them?  this is part two (or part B?) of last semester's 505 class, but since Thomas is now on sabbatical we get to have Rick as a mentor. Rick is a pragmatist, so we are most likely going to read all the same old composition theory and talk about how we can forage useful teaching ideas from it and use our understandings of the past to make ourselves look good when we go out looking for academic jobs someday.

English 622 Classical Rhetoric with Dr. Richard Johnson-Sheehan 
almost two years ago I took a broader version of this, one that spanned all time and tried to cover everyone from Gorgias and Isocrates to Michel Foucault and Stanley Fish in one very short semester. this slightly less ambitious course will stop with the Renaissance. a bit more time to spend with the ancients. again, Rick insists he is a pragmatist, so he wants us to pillage the old western canon of rhetoric for whatever we find most helpful. these Greeks and Romans may seem thousands of years out of date, but some of their tricks still work. some of their perspectives on language and humanity are still pretty useful and even brilliant. this may or may not be because nothing ever changes and scholar after scholar will be perpetually doomed to make essentially the same (re)discoveries about life, the universe, and everything that everyone else made piece by piece before her.

and of course on top of these there is good old English 106. I've been looking forward to new students and new plans. teaching still isn't easy for me, but I am more and more realizing how important it is. I'm not quite sure why it's so important, but I'm going to stick with that answer for now--that teaching these little undergrads how to communicate and how to think is something important.

summer semesters

I haven't been in summer school since middle school when I took gym to get that P.E. credit out of the way. but this summer, partly to keep my assistantship and partly for a few random other reasons, I have had the pleasure of taking two rather nice classes. the first came on the heels of spring semester, during the three week seminar/break period they call the "maymester," and the second came directly on the heels of the first. at Tech they split summer into a semester I and a semester II, just to give students lots of room for accessing whatever their choice of academic torment. it's very complicated, but somehow it's turned out that I've technically been in classes non-stop since January. when fall semester gets here I am not going to have much trouble transitioning back into school-mode, am I?

anyway. now that the summer is 81.2% over, I'm going to write here about my two classes.

Geography of Eastern Europe with Dr. Jones (and her TA Brittany Walker)
this was my excuse for wandering around Europe a few months ago. we can blame Kolby for suggesting it and Dr. Jones for giving me a thoroughly convincing spiel when I sat down in her office to find out more. it was a marvelous trip, and it did have its educational moments, I promise. there were seven of us, plus Dr. Jones, and we all started a class blog. we learned about architecture, and maps, and history. I can now say 'thank you' in Hungarian, Romanian, and German. I have some Slovak written down somewhere and two memory cards full of photographs.
one of our projects for the class was a photo essay centered on something tourists don't usually pay much attention to. I chose the undersides of awnings for mine. here, for your enjoyment, are four of my awning pictures, one from each country.

should I give out a prize for anyone who wants to guess which is from which? call them white, orange, green, and crumbling and match each with either Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Austria. and then suggest some nice but not outrageously extravagant prize you'd like to win (hmm.... hand-drawn postcards? a set of crochet slippers? personalized poem? lessons on how to properly use a semi-colon? ignore these options if none of them suit you), and I'll think about it.

History and Theories of Composition with Dr. Rice
this is a much more rigorous class, I must say. we meet online every Thursday evening and discuss how all the theoretical developments over the last thirty or so years might help us be better writing teachers. it's cool stuff, for the most part. my classmates are from all over the place, and they do all-over-the-place things. science stuff, editing and publishing stuff, high school english stuff, and aerospace stuff. we are a diverse bunch. our conversations get pretty interesting. I love it most when we get asking questions about what all these words we throw around mean. what is "composition" or "voice" or "literacy" or "plagiarism" or "error," really? and for this class I also have a blog. supposedly, this summer educational jaunt will prepare me for teaching two sections of ENGL 1301 in the fall. I hope it does. it won't erase the sheen of terror that has been painted around the very thought of being a grown-up instructor named Ms. Chesley to several dozen college freshman... but hopefully it will give me a sharp enough razor to scrape through the fear. wish me luck.

spring semester 2012

classes will have been in session for one week tomorrow. it feels like ages. I'm already being chewed on by the demands of the semester-- readings, projects, readings, projects... it's extraordinary. it's beautiful. I am the luckiest grad student ever. the next four months are pretty much going to rock.

Instructional Development and Design, with Dr. Baehr
we have a humongous, fat textbook for this class, called E-Learning by Design. our focus is online and electronic learning environments and how those environments/experiences can be designed effectively. so far we've discussed various learning styles, recent technological developments, and some socioeconomic considerations that influence a designer's approach to creating online pedagogical resources. I'm really hoping we get into some hands-on projects soon. eventually we will get to create our own video tutorial. and our final project is supposed to be an extensive e-learning resource website of some kind. any suggestions for good tutorial subjects? anything you've always wanted to learn?

History of the Book, with Dr. Hawkins
this one feels a lot like a continuation of last semester's Bibliography. there are a few similarities, but a different focus. and no Dr. Snead, which makes me a little bit sad. but it's going to be a fun class. we talked this afternoon about what sorts of projects and presentations and activities we hope to include over the next few weeks. book binding. quill pens. paper making. manuscript. letterpress. typography. half of our textbooks are full of awesome pictures. the other half are fascinating discourse by people like Peter Shillingsburg. I love it.

Visual Rhetoric, with Dr. Kimball
my first online class. our virtual meeting tonight was quite cool. I scribbled down fascinating notes, questions, little doodles of a pipe. we talked about zoos as art galleries, and art galleries as zoos. frames, and frames framing other frames, and how easy it is to forget about the frame and let the representations of reality become reality. visual stimuli are so easy to assimilate and adjust to. Dr. Kimball (side note: Dr. Kimball is Dr. Hawkins's husband.) called our near-effortless adjustments "becoming naturalized citizens of the scopic regime." and that all of a sudden reminds me of this podcast about the design of banks. I feel like the questions behind the images I see in the world everywhere--who created it, when, why, how, and under what circumstances--all those questions add such an awesome mystery to every piece of visual information I’ll ever come across for the rest of my life.

beyond classes, I've started working two full-time days and one half-day at the Press, which is a different feeling than my shorter shifts last semester, but just as awesome. I've been doing a lot of copyright registration, tagging stuff for CIP, a little bit of image-wrangling, and a little bit of proofing/checking corrections. you all should go check out the 2012 Spring catalogue {pdf}. all but one of those seven brand new titles has had my lowly editorial assistant fingers in it at various points over the last few months. that's a cool feeling, no matter how lowly I might be.

spring semester, 2023 + attendant miscellany

there's not been much of anything new in my courses for several semesters now... but at long last, this spring, I am teaching a very brand new course-- brand new both to me and to everyone:

HU 145: Themes in Humanities (the art and history of podcasts) 

HU 145 is a sort of catch-all lower-level Humanities credit, required of all students so we can make sure our pilots and engineers have some well-roundedness about them. I have specifically themed my version of this course around "the art and history of podcasts," because why the heck not. it has been so, so fun to plan for this little 100-level intro course. nothing like it has ever been taught on this campus. and maybe nothing like it has been taught anywhere, since I have been making it all up as I go.  

the welcome note / course description I wrote for students / the course catelog goes more or less like this:

This semester, we will explore podcasts and other audio productions from a critical perspective. We will practice our listening skills while examining the conventions of radio and audio production, analyzing the styles and genres of specific productions, and thinking carefully about the cultural contexts in which audio media circulate ideas and contribute to public (or not so public) discourse. Tracing similarities and differences across the history of recorded sound, we will discuss how audio media has been used to record historical events and stories, to foster fandoms and communities, and to shape or re-shape human cultures.

alongside two sections of that awesomeness, I've got one good old standard section of COM 221: Technical Report Writing. 

my students all seem pretty cool so far. it's early in the semester-- we're all still getting to know each other. I trust that learning is happening, little by little, in all of our spongey curious brains.

--

relatively unrelatedly, I'm gonna toss some recent photo bits in this post. do enjoy the randomness.

foggy winter morning, not long ago

weaving, upside down

red toenails, contemplative pug puppy

the sun and the sky and the mountains somewhere down near Tuscon

blooming orchid. light-starved succulents.

my first Tunisian crochet project: a shawlette of ruffles. (this is the yarn-- isn't it lovely?)

fall semester, 2012

here we are again, in the delightful throes of another autumn, another wonderland of academic adventuring. don't be jealous. you can go to grad school next year, if you want. and if you don't want, you can find a library and read some Aristotle or Ong on your own. I promise it's interesting stuff. check out Ong's Orality and Literacy, and then we can talk about it for a few hours sometime. really. I would love to.

my classes this semester are crazy-similar. they even have one textbook in common--a fat green anthology called The Rhetorical Tradition.

Theories of Argumentation with Dr. Booher (and Dr. Carter)
this is just what it sounds like. we're arguing about arguments: what they are, how they're made, what they're supposed to do, by what methods, and why these things might be worth studying. so much interesting debate. hopefully we don't have too much fun pulling apart the nature of reality, value, truth, knowledge... the ways we argue and the ways we analyze arguments betray the ways we see the world and what we esteem important. is there anything under that beyond inexplicable, irrational, personal human preference? I don't know.

Rhetorical Theory with Dr. Baake (and Dr. Booher)
similar arguments happen in this course. how do our perceptions shape our methods of communication, persuasion, influence, life, everything? should we be diligently chasing some universal objective essence, or just situating our poor selves within whatever context seems most useful at the moment? what're the best terms to use for talking about all of this, and where do those come from? are they good enough? what kinds of responsibilities do we have as rhetoricians? says who? why? there is a ton of theory already lying around (see that fat green anthology sprawled open on my bedroom floor, for some examples), but has any of it really answered these questions? will it ever? if not, why are we wasting our time?

Essentials of College Rhetoric with . . . me
I'm teaching two sections of this beautiful monster: English 1301-65 and English 1301-69. Sixty-seven little undergraduates file into my classroom on Thursdays and stare at me while I do my best to explain why on earth rhetoric is important to them and their futures. it's been fun so far, and I'm sure it's going to teach me a ton about why on earth rhetoric is important. getting to know sixty-seven undergraduates and helping them navigate their first college writing class will hopefully not kill me. I might even love it. and then....

I'll run away to get a PhD somewhere so I can teach rhetoric and writing to roomsful of undergraduates for ever and ever. maybe? this idea seems absolutely enchanting. but we ought to be wary of enchantment, oughtn't we? at any rate, we will see how one semester of the teaching gig goes. wish me luck.

professor-ing, spring 2019

there were at least a dozen robins out in our backyard a minute ago, chirping away and pecking things out of the damp dirt.

I didn't notice when they left and I don't know where they've gone now. to someone else's backyard? some other patch of damp ground?

I'm working from home today, with the window in the den half-open and a dish of homemade granola (too crumbly to be bars, but I tried) on the table next to me.
 
there are revisions to focus on, but mainly I've been writing emails to send and posting comments on the blog for my graduate course.

did I write last semester about all the courses I was teaching? it looks like I did not-- not specifically anyway. not the way I've done for all my many semesters as a student. I'll make up for it now.

English 3230: Technical Composition
I taught two sections of this last fall as well, and I'll be teaching 3 sections this semester. Two are face-to-face, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we've almost reached the end of our first major project. Our next project will be a service-learning/community-engagement project built around a partnership with our university library. who knows if it will spark for my students the kind of gushy enthusiasm I felt about my first service-learning project way back in 2005/2006... but I'm excited about it anyway.

English 6560: Digital Cultures - Theory & Practice
this is my online graduate course, in which four delightful graduate students are enrolled. we are discussing various aspects of and scholarship and theorizings about digital culture over at https://engl6560.hcommons.org/ and meeting for video conferences every other week to discuss further. I'm enjoying it quite a lot and can't wait to see what kinds of projects these students come up with for the rest of the semester.

I have more new and exciting courses (undergraduate and graduate) lined up ahead of me for the next few terms. most of them are technical-writing-related, though I also get to adapt the digital cultures course for undergraduates next fall. I'll get to teach an advanced tech writing and editing sometime in 2020...  lots to look forward to.

being a teacher and not simultaneously a student is pretty much a million times better than doing both at once. teaching is still difficult, but I think I'm somehow slightly more sure of myself now that I have a different focus. my own scholarship has not been set aside, of course (in fact, I should be working on article revisions instead of blogging, probably), but rather than having all the pressure of three reading lists for grad classes + seminar papers to draft + my own scholarship to advance + teaching, it all feels more manageable and spacious and steady.

fall semester, 2024

the word semester shows up in at least 130 of my past blogposts, which is a little more than 10% of all the posts I've thus far posted. considering that this little blog has always been roughly half focused on various academic and intellectual pursuits, this makes plenty of sense. semesters are like seasons.

the word itself is not even 200 years old, the etymology dictionary tells me: "...semenstris 'of six months, lasting six months, half-yearly, semi-annual,' from assimilated form of sex 'six' (see six) + mensis "month" (see moon (n.)). The word, and the idea, were picked up in the U.S., where the German higher education system served as a model."

apparently the Latin-y adjective forms semestral and semestrial are a few centuries older. interesting. 

anyway, I'm glad our semesters are not a full six months long these days. four months is plenty. 

and for these upcoming four months, I'm teaching three batches of students, including a few repeats from past semesters. the longer I hang out at this institution, the more that will keep happening I suppose.

COM 221: Technical Report Writing
counting the two sections I have this semester, I've taught practically a million versions of this course (okay, 15 total sections. that is still a lot). it's becoming a bit of a struggle to not get completely burnt out and bored of it, but I'm doing my best to keep it interesting for me. we're only in week 3, so I'm still getting to know the vibe of the students. we'll have some fun together I hope though.

HU 356: Audio Production & Podcasting
this one is going to be interesting no matter what-- it's a brand new class, only recently outlined and designed and proposed by me for our catch-all Humanities & Communication department. I am pretty excited to see how this goes. so far I'm having students practice various little audio recording tasks, then we'll level up to remixing all those clips into some fun story-arc, before finally moving on to pitching and workshoping individual podcast projects. the students all have great ideas so far. (wish me luck persuading the one who simply wants to copy Mr. Rogan's insufferably long-winded (at least it is to me) format into doing something at least slightly more inventive.)

what else? I signed up for a weaving class next month. some family is visiting next week. we have some more camping planned for during fall break. we're having a brand new screen door installed sometime soon. and our Monday evening D&D group is on the brink of moving up to level 8. in November, our crazy puppy will turn 1 year old.

at some point we should work on the mish-mash garden projects and other household tasks that need doing. and eventually figure out our holiday plans. 

or maybe we let go of shoulds for a while and enjoy the almost-autum while it's here.

and spring semester 2024

eleven years ago, back at the very beginning of my academic career, I trekked 6 hours west from Lubbock, Texas, in my very old leper of a car (the paint was all but totally peeled way from its poor hood), to attend my first ever academic conference in Albuquerque.

this week I'm gonna trek 6 hours east and attend the same conference, this time in a rental car, with way more academic experience, an institutional credit card for travel-related purchases, and a significantly different research agenda. I'll be presenting this Saturday all about how I designed and get to teach a fun little class on podcasts. 

 {the title slide, so far anway}

 

and I'll get to see some of my old professors from USU. very excited for that bit. 

it'll be fun, hopefully. I hope I'll meet some other cool new interesting fellow scholars along the way, too. we shall see, given how sunny and warm it looks to be in Albuquerque this weekend, how much of the conference I actually sit through.

in the more normal weeks of this semester, I'm teaching a couple sections of technical writing. the same old basic tech writing course, only slightly different every time by virtue of new students and a new me and a new world.

besides teaching, I'm also working on a book chapter about podcast transcripts and leading various faculty from various other programs through a series of mushy but important assessment adventures. friend Caroline and I are still working on soliciting content for a new issue of the campus literary arts magazine (the second since we took charge of it last year). maybe we'll have an official reading event at the library with the creative writing class-- fingers crossed. 

it's all nearly haflway over, this set of 16 work weeks called spring semester. at the moment the halfway point feels encouraging. time ticks onward. work gets accomplished. knowledge is made and shared and reinforced. skills are modeled, practiced, learned, forgotten, re-learned.

in other news, I'm also finally getting to see some work from the past year come out in official publication! perhaps the coolest online academic journal of all, Kairos, made space for my multimedia oral history-ish interview piece all about two colleagues who recently retired.

and then colleagues and I have a co-authored piece in the most recent issue of Programmatic Perspectives (the differently cool but still very awesome journal from the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication). some awesome Purdue colleagues have an article in the same issue, which is quite cool to see. 

time ticks onward. I've been here 4 years. 2 more until hopefully they give me tenure. 

in the meantime, age and experience accumulate. some days I feel older and other days not at all. 

next January, in the auspicious year of 2025, it'll be 20 years since I started this blog for a class. how will we celebrate that, I wonder?

tally marks

it is the time of year (the academic year, anyway) where because it has become so bewilderingly difficult to split your time among the three different twenty-page-ish essays you're supposed to be working on, you sit down and write meandering blogposts instead.

and it is that time of the year (academic or not) when you start to look backwards, piercingly, searching for evidence that you've learned and grown and become at least a few tiny inches closer to whoever it is you're trying to be.

there are two weeks left of classes. this time, still autumn, still warm enough for rain, still pre-holiday, seems a very good, deep, pregnant (as in with possibility and ideas, not with literal human offspring, though maybe fall is a good time for that too?) time of year.

I wanted to make some kind of list of accomplishments. but deciding what to put on it seems kind of daunting and of course arbitrary. what have I actually done since I came to Indiana? so much. not all of it sounds all that interesting, but it filled in all the space between the end of July and now. somewhere in all those seventeen weeks, I have...

· slept probably around 820 hours or so
· spent something like 2347 minutes making phone calls
· paid four months' worth of rent
· acquired some furniture
· skipped my high school reunion, somewhat regretfully
· checked out thirteen books from the Purdue Library
· written twenty-one blogposts, not counting sunday scribbles, the ten here, or these five over there
· watched two or three sunrises
· sent 241 emails from my purdue.edu account (+ received 1062)
· visited Chicago twice
· learned a few new words, like "meliorist," "belletristic," and "imbricate"
· observed three of my fellow English 106 instructors
· gotten rid of three pairs of shoes
· started compiling a file of every single thing I've ever composed
· become weirdly fascinated with vegans and veganism
· complained plenty about the awful complexity of the cakephp framework
· baked three pumpkin pies + two pavlovas
· composed 376 twitterings
· biked to campus six whole times.
· spent 46 hours, one every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday teaching
· failed to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving
· rearranged all my furniture once
· jotted down 6557 words of scattered teaching notes and ideas
· started listening to more podcasts (this one is usually very good and makes me want to be a journalist or an editor. this one is ironically neat to listen to on Sunday mornings.)
· read four ebooks
· taken many walks

...and who knows how much else. throw in some conversation, some climbing of stairs, some flossing, a bit of staring off into space. I'm surely leaving out oodles of detail. I must, or we'd all die of tedium.

does this list paint anything like the kind of picture I thought my first semester here would paint for me? is the self reflected by these fairly random activities anything like the self I think I am?

today in Composition Theory, Dr. Jenny Bay reassured us that no matter how stressful this end-of-semester tunnel may seem, nothing about it--not the grades, not the teaching foibles--nothing will matter very much in the very grand scheme of our lives or the universe. if we fail at academia (which is unlikely, but...), we have other skills. there are other roads.

at the edges of the tiny bud of relief that sprouted in response, there was also a question: is there really a grand scheme?

if there isn't, perhaps everything I've accomplished (if you can call these things accomplishments) this semester matters even less.

if there is, it's probably an amorphous, easily revisable scheme anyway. I can always look back and say I meant to do everything that way. I must have, right? otherwise how did it get done?

spring semester, 2015

I have spent much (but not enough) of this long, mostly-pleasant weekend sitting by this window, trying to focus on reading stuff for classes.

classes of which there are only three, which compared to last semester is almost going to be a springtime walk in a very nicely-landscaped park. maybe.

English 626: Postmodernism And Issues In Composition Studies with Dr. Salvo
since I arrived at Purdue and made my tangly, random brain known to my colleagues and professors here, everyone has been telling me that I will love this course. pretty sure they are right.

German 212 Intermediate German Conversation with Dr. Claudia Mueller-Green
this one-hour-per-week adventure is my fun class of the semester. on our first day, Claudia spoke nothing but German to us. ich verstehe vielleicht....80% or so? enough to manage, I think. wish me luck getting better and better. ich muss mehr üben.

English 625 Empirical Research In Writing with Dr. Pat Sullivan 
I'm excited for this class too, because miraculously I already have ideas about where I want to focus my research, and how I might approach our final project proposal. that's a weird and awesome feeling.

other things I wanted to get done with this lovely Monday off that I am running out of time for now: 

grade/respond to student posts and short writings

watch the latest Downton Abbey

take a walk or bike ride

decide between potential new apartments

write to Yvonne

write to Nic

at least I'll have time for this one:

post this blogpost

2015 is here, still all new-feeling. gradually we'll get to see both how it changes my life and how it doesn't. 

a review of my classes

Since I'm sure you're all very interested...
I'll go in chronological order, okay? Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then Tuesday, Thursday classes.

Document Design and Graphics, with Dr. Shook

Dr. Shook is a very amusing professor. He has us thinking about the purposes of documents, the difference between noise and information, and why artsy, decorative junk gets in the way.
I'm not sure how I feel about all this, since I tend to like artsy, decorative junk. But it should be a cool class, involving a lot of hands-on experience with designing documents.

Humanities - Ancient Civilization and Religion

This class does not match any of my other classes. 1. It's not English. 2. It's not 4000 level or higher. 3. It is full of Freshmen.
None of those make it a bad class... but I definitely do not find it as exciting as english 5400, for example. I'm not really into history, so I'm only taking this because I have to. It's dull, full of notetaking, quizzes, and all that other stuff I thought I left behind me when I went to England.

Professional Editing

So far this class is less interesting than I had hoped. We went over copyediting marks today. I learned those in highschool. But hey, I have to take it, and it'll probably teach me stuff. That's what school is for, right? learning to learn, etc.

Modern Rhetorical Theory, with Professor Keith Grant-Davie

I've already spoken about this class and its content a little bit. I love it. Keith Grant-Davie is one of my favourite professors (and I don't say that purely because of his cool accent). The way he inspires and instigates dialogues about every subject he brings up in class is awesome. That is the way I wish all of my classes were--intelligent people talking about complex topics, discussing them, analyzing them...it's great.

Specialized Documents, with Dr. Kelli Cargile-Cook

This is the class I'm most excited about. Kelli (it's either that or calling her Dr. Cargile-Cook, and given that choice, I think we will all call her Kelli) came in yesterday and told us we had no planned assignments, but that we had to come up with a complete reconception of the University's English Department website. For real. Not for pretend class project thing. For Real.
And next semester the English 5410 class will get to build it (of course I plan to take it next semester. I wouldn't miss that chance for anything). All this semester we get to plan out our own schedule, work out our own goals, and at the end we'll present our proposals to the Department Chair and one group's design will be chosen to be made into the new website. It might be silly of me to be so excited about this, but I think it's the coolest thing ever.

moments and years

I missed the chance to commemorate the true birthday of this little blog, last Monday. but today, January 19, 2025, marks exactly 20 years since the first actual, fully-fledged post: a response to our first key reading assignment about webdesign and such.

what a different world. such a different place it was. or maybe twenty years ago wasn't so very different, and it only seems so because I and my perspective have changed so much since then. 

what happens if I stitch together a few snippets from all the blogged Januaries of each year since 2005? what new montage will spill into this digital page in between them all?

I tried my best to pull from sections nearest to the 13th and 19th of the month (a thing much easier to do from the posts before 2014ish, when the apex of graduate school + its aftermath slowed down my writing here so much).

what I notice amongst these snippets and what you notice will be different, I imagine. I notice the unending pulse of learning and academia. books and thoughts chasing each other in circles. comments about the weather seem to sit neatly in the background with questions of identity and all its tangly unspooling. these words always have been for me more than anything. does all this pontificating from past amelia still sound like useful advice? mostly yes, I think. but I would say that, wouldn't I?

2006

the fact that energy is behind it all is somehow unifying. simple

...

linguistic structures will be a low-key class. it is full of people i don't see in my other classes. the other english majors. non tech writing people: the lit majors, the teaching majors. it's weird.

2007

get used to the fear and the doubt. get used to being faced with new facets of your own ignorance. get used to the pain. embrace humility. you can't always feel in control.

but really, how comforting is that?

I don't know. I'd take humility over false confidence anyday. but then the humble rarely get much respect.

2008-2009 (a pause.)

2010

the world is big.

there's a lot going on in it. even in this mostly empty house, there's me sitting at the table, typing, stretching a bit of CSS out over a half-built website skeleton, scribbling a few what-ifs, listening to Radiohead. and I made banana nut muffins this morning.

2011

in the beginning, this blog was just a place for all my first impressions--all my doubts and worries about the usefulness or meaningfulness of all the stuff I was learning. after that semester, I decided to keep blogging--mainly about writing (Starcustard and random short stories), school (rhetoric, more webdesign, and Isotope), and life (philosophical thoughts about my job, vague complaints about boys, and so forth). and so it continued. I'm still here. I still blog.

...

what do those stories say about me?

I'm thinking about all the texture of my life. all the patterned and patternless history I've collected so far. telling stories is one way to remember it. and on the other hand... telling and retelling and re-remembering these stories is one way to completely revise the past. after a few months or years, it becomes easy to bend the details. to emphasize the funny parts. to leave out the things that make you look like a bit of an idiot.

how I envision myself is pretty complicated, I guess. perspective is weirdly limited like that.

2012

 

which we am I talking about, anyway? and when? and where? 

2013

it may not make any huge difference in the long run, but even so, the ultimate pointlessness of things should not be dragged up as an excuse for us to stay in bed all day. at least not more than once or twice a year, anyway, right?

2014

this seemingly misnamed semester will inch along to spring in due course. and when that happens, finals and stress will no doubt prevent me from enjoying it as thoroughly as I could, but for now... well for now, the semester is glowing with warm, cozy pillows full of insight and excitement. this might be the best January ever.

2015

I have spent much (but not enough) of this long, mostly-pleasant weekend sitting by the window, trying to focus on readings for classes. 

.... 2015 is here, still all new-feeling. gradually we'll get to see both how it changes my life and how it doesn't.

2016

today it is raining in spurts, like a chilly and unkempt spring. Tuesday's snow is long since melted. it'll be back this weekend. the universe is giving us yo-yo-ing seasons, somewhat drab all the way through, with occasional bright sunset smudges.

the trees are bare. my apartment windows open onto more distant views than they did in summer and fall. at night, more and more streetlights perpetually leak into my bedroom under the edges of the blinds. I notice the faces of buildings I have never seen from such an angle before.

2017

it's empowering to reflect on the background structure of your whole life. to actively participate and acknowledge your role in either accepting/reinforcing or resisting/revising the culture you swim in. and that seems important. that's what it takes to make all of that power and structure more open-book, more readable, more transparent and less like a vice.

2018

if I had the brainpower on this Friday evening to make some additional academicalish comments on how these beautifully-commentated marble races and our fascination with them could link up interestingly with some of the tenets of object-oriented ontology, I would. but I don't know all that much about object-oriented ontology myself, and should probably not let it distract me much more than the Marblelympics already have from writing up nicely finished dissertation chapters about digital ethnography and distributed commons-based peer-production and what that all may mean for technical communication and human culture and such.

2019

and then the speaker said something about facebook hopefully having a major role in someday establishing some kind of global online government. after that, according to my notes, I typed out this:

"eeeeek."

does the world want and need to be connected by a central online platform, really? is the capitalist interest that facebook has in being the medium by which everyone is connected anything we can trust?

2020

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

2021

and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the 40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all humans-in-progress.)

2022

why does this small saga of knitting woe and triumph deserve documentation in this little blog of mine? I don't know if there's an answer, other than my typical interest in capturing bits of experience and emotion in as vivid and accurate description as I can. I like to write these vignettes of where and when and how, with all the metaphor and adjectives they need to vibrate satisfyingly from my imagination to yours.

2023

I trust that learning is happening, little by little, in all of our spongey-curious brains.

2024

January, perhaps fittingly, seems so very long. all the transitions it spans-- all the shifting, deepening of the dark season, the post-holiday recoveries, the shiny new beginnings of a calendar year and of an academic semester-- all of that is a lot for 31 average winter days.

I don't know if it really did feel longer for me this year, or if I'm only saying that because it seems like an appropriate thing to sigh into this semi-bleak and impermanent world.

- - -

and now what? do I still blog? 

time will tell. if you'll indulge me, I have one more excerpt, this time from May of 2014, when so much of me was so unsettled and rearranging itself and I clung to my love of writing as if nothing else mattered:

from time to time I wonder what it is I'm trying to do here. does it matter what I'm trying to do here? I write. our reasons for enjoying things are seemingly inarticulable. is there irony in that? I claim that words can make everything better. is that true even when the words crumble into meaninglessness as they fail at encompassing feelings? do I mean that even crumbled words are worth something?

yes. crumbled and halfhearted attempts at capturing it all still beats blank silence. I know only so much stuff fits into one life. there are only so many live possibilities. this is the way it needs to be, I guess. but the way everything is carved up now isn't how it'll always need to be carved. our crumbled communications don't stand still; they change.

.... and even if I can't really say I know exactly what writing means, I can try to explain what I like about my practice of it.

I like the pausing and sifting through potential descriptions and the shuffling of parts of speech. I like the dancing of clauses and punctuation and space. I like the starts and stops and backtracking, the meandering fragments that stretch so subtly for their finish. I like the way these little symbols can twist and mold intangible thoughts into a dozen differently shaded shapes. I like unknotting a tangly draft, picking out the pieces that don't belong and pulling away each piece that does, tidying it all into a hopefully-clean curl of interesting prose. sometimes I save the scraps for later. sometimes I can't. .... I write for the writing's sake. I sketch and wonder and experience plenty of other things for the same reason. they don't have to be means to some other end, these creative processes. maybe all the best things are their own ends, or at least neatly wrapped around something like one.

after twenty years, does this blog count as art? as an end in itself?

doesn't matter. it's here. I'm here. for now.

reflections on teaching online

the online summer class I've been teaching ended last Friday, when all the last final projects got turned in. as of five seconds ago, all the grades are tallied and posted and submitted. hurrah! two weeks til fall classes start...

did any sort of learning happen over those 8 weeks of summer term? on my end, definitely yes. I hadn't taught online before. during the spring and beginning of the summer I attended conference panels galore about online writing instruction. my wonderful mentor Kelli Cargile Cook spoke about the best practices she's developed and studied over her career. friend David Grover from Texas Tech presented on his dissertation research--all about how underprepared graduate students are when they get the chance to teach writing online. at Computers & Writing, I met the brilliant and generous people behind the OWI community website. so many awesome resources and inspirations. it was terrifying, but encouraging.

I was arguably more prepared (on paper, anyhow) for this course than for anything else I've ever taught in my life. most other things I've ever taught involved sticky notes with tentative 6-point outlines and thoughts, all scribbled down mere hours before the lesson. sticky notes don't work for online classes, though. instead, there were dozens of PDFs, a screencast video introduction, a website thing, bits of Blackboard fiddling, many many emails, and many Slack messages.

the slick, fancy Slack messaging app suggested itself as an especially appropriate online teaching tool for professional writing. I'd been hearing about the app on all the podcast advertisements, and I figured my bundle of Business Writing students could benefit from some exposure to it. with help from friend Michael, I poked around and tested things out and got everything set up just how I needed it for the various sections and projects of the class. hosting the whole class within Slack was disorienting for students at first, but most of them caught on quickly and enjoyed the interface. we didn't have quite as much fun as this Zach Whalen fellow seemed to have with his students on Slack, but ah well.

as the course got busier and summer ticked itself relentlessly into the past, I found myself wishing I could be sure my students were reading the announcements I made and the updates I posted. is there such a tracking device? my search just now brought me to this detailed list of Slack shortcuts and tips. there is a way to see who has logged in to Slack-- I'll have to explore that option next semester. it may or may not tell me who has read which channels. this piece might be something to share with students as they set up their Slack accounts for my class--hopefully they'd find it helpful. I need to remember the "reminder" function and the "pin file" function, for important information that students might lose track of too easily. the user-name policy also sounds pretty useful-- one way to maintain a sense of professionalism.

benefits a face-to-face class include students seeing each other and talking to each other a lot more, instead of merely performing for me and my syllabus of requirements. I'm not sure how well my students got to know each other. I did create an "off-topic" channel and let students have it to themselves (I checked now that class is over to find 4 lonely little posts there). our Slack space stayed very to-the-point and business-oriented, a place where work got submitted and readings got "discussed" within minimum wordcounts and with little dialogue. next semester, I'll have to incentivize more student-to-student communication and discussion. this boils down to an odd form of pandering bribery and forced-ness, which my soul squirms and recoils about just a little. I like to think that as an undergraduate student I would have been utterly happy to talk to my fellow students of my own accord (very not true). who needs incentives for that? but that's my vaguely-more-enlightened and far-less-shy gradstudent self talking.

my course was 99% asynchronous, and I so wished that I could have all 17 of my students in one channel at the same time. more focused, immediate discussion could have been way more useful. all the best online courses I've ever taken have included a synchronous Skype or chat-room element. but the way online courses are marketed in this program means students sign up expecting to work at their own paces and not expecting to show up to be counted at any particular time. because of that, I didn't feel like I could design a course with much, if any, synchronous discussion time in it at all. this summer, I asked students to sign up for one-on-one video conferences, so at least there'd be a sliver of synchronous discussion. this worked pretty well. for next semester, I may consider assigning small-group conference meetings, perhaps to discuss peer review work more directly. the institutional constraint here is a challenge to work around. perhaps it deserves to be brought up with my supervisors and program directors. we'll see.

this weekend I talked with a few potential community partners about linking my fall Business Writing assignments to their local, real-world business contexts and needs. it's lovely to know people who run small, local businesses in this lovely college town. wish me luck getting myself organized to incorporate some of those ideas for the next batch of scattered, disembodied online students.

I, pedagogue (spring semester, 2021)

back in the day, I thought I'd never want to teach. and then I realized that in some ways, everything everyone does can involve a layer of teaching somehow. even if it's a very subtle one.

even still, for these past seven years of wading deeper and deeper into teaching college writing classes of various kinds, the real practice of teaching (with all the planning and record-keeping and decision-making and performing and grading and authority-wielding it typically requires) has not often been my favorite part of academia. it's fine. but it's hard. and I never feel very good at it, so it simply can't be as naturally rewarding as all the other corners of academia where I feel far more skilled.

for better or for worse, my two full-time assistant professor jobs so far have been quite teachingcentric. twelve credit hours of teaching every semester, plus a few during summer semesters, until this year. dozens and dozens of students show up in August or January or June for whichever iteration of professional writing I'm teaching this time, working and sharing and hopefully learning, and then they disappear again.

this year, I have one course release for being brand new in town. it gives me a chance to get used to things a bit.

they also gave all the new faculty a copy of the book What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. a few colleagues and I read through it together last fall semester and talked about ways to apply the findings in our own classrooms.

the book and our little faculty discussion group made me think much more intensely about my teaching than I've cared to thus far. it also gave me some concrete hope that maybe I can become better at this thing I don't feel very expert in at all. 

so. what am I trying to do a little better this spring? what have I begun to internalize from Bain's research?

possibly more things than I can articulate very well in a little blogpost. but here are a few:

> talk about your own learning journey with students. model or reenact the kinds of transformation you hope that they will undergo as a result of your class.

> trust students and treat them like whole humans with a million shifting priorities, just like you. this is something I already knew and practice decently, I think. but I took particular comfort in it this past year. my course is a small droplet in the ocean of everything these students are trying to learn and become. if my teaching isn't perfect, they probably won't notice or remember for too long.

> ask students big, meaningful, authentic questions--the kinds of questions that professionals in your field will ask and try to answer. (this is particularly tricky in writing because writing, for most people, in most important contexts, isn't very often about itself. its actual subject is the everything else that we write and communicate about.)

I think I do pretty well being authentic and open and compassionate as a teacher. but I have been guilty in the past of assuming students could never be all that interested in the big questions that I study. we don't have time for that, do we? especially at a fancy aeronautical university where nobody is an English major and everyone mainly wants to design or build or test or fly airplanes and other such contraptions-- how could any of those students care about a communications course?

but if Bain is to be believed, the enthusiasm of a teacher combined with the sparks of a big, meaningful question can draw students in, motivate them a little, even if they didn't think they'd care very much about a communications course. 

and I can be good at questions, surely. 

especially big ones! like: how do you know what anyone means? how do you know what anyone else thinks you mean? how people really ever understand each other enough to make good things happen in the world? and what does it mean to read? to write? or to do those things effectively?

the trick now becomes figuring out how much time to spend getting philosophical about definitions inbetween all the more "practical" work of practicing reading and writing and revising and all that. I still think students learn most from doing things, more than they can from reading about things or discussing them or whatnot.

but anyway, I added this little linguistics video to my list of assigned readings. I opened the first day of class reading from Celeste Headlee's book We Need to Talk, which recounts the tragedy of an ineffective conversation in an airplane cockpit. in technical writing we spent the first day exploring informal crowdsourced technical descriptions on Reddit.

and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the 40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all humans-in-progress.)

maybe I'll go back and give the Pedagogue podcast another chance, too, now that I feel more hopeful and less grumbly about this whole teaching business.