In the midst of working on my midterm grades, I keep thinking of wonderful ideas I just must pursue--avoiding the discipline of ranking and justifying the ranking. I truly love reading student writing, finding out what students have to say, commenting, inviting revision. I really hate having to give grades. After 24 years of this, you'd think it would be easier, not harder, right?
The latest scheme is the assembling of various instructional materials for our writing classes, to create a textbook of sorts. We have materials and assignments for our PDP program (first-year seminar, seminar for transfer students, second- and third-year reflective conversations, senior reflective essay/portfolio), and some of us share and modify colleagues' first-year writing assignments and classroom activities, and then there are the shared assignments for upper-level courses and the coordination of first-year and second-year writing courses for English majors, not to mention assessment rubrics. And, in this season of choosing textbooks for next fall's courses, I find that the textbooks just never match the ideas I have for classroom activities and writing assignments, so I usually pick several trade paperbacks that sort of work, and I tell people to buy the handbook but I don't much use handbooks myself (with so many materials online). This spring I'm thinking about spending my summer assembling various readings for the activities I want to do, drafting reading guides and activities related to the readings, and, in short, making my own master textbook from which I can draw various materials for an electronic-reserve anthology for each course I teach.
Maybe I should go back to grading, though!
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