Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers

Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers

Great Comp Quotes

Comp Quotes to Live By: What are we finding out? One point is becoming clear is that writing is an act of discovery for both skilled and unskilled writers; most writers have only a partial notion of what they want to say when they begin to write, and their ideas develop in the process of writing…. Another truth is that usually the writing process is not linear, moving smoothly in one direction from start to finish. It is messy, recursive, convoluted, and uneven. Writers write, plan, revise, anticipate, and review throughout the writing process, moving back and forth among the different operations involved in writing without any apparent plan. No practicing writer will be surprised at these findings: nevertheless, they seriously contradict the traditional paradigm that has dominated textbooks for years... (Maxine Hairston, p. 12, "Winds of Change")

To sum up: Writing is a complex act, integrally related to learning and knowing, and performs a variety of functions. It is not a discrete clearly definable skill learned once and for all; moreover, both in school and at work, writing is seldom the product of isolated individuals but rather and seldom obviously, the outcome of continuing collaboration, of interactions that involve other people and other texts. Writing practices are closely linked to their sociocultural contexts, and writing strategies vary with individual and situation. (Worlds Apart, Dias et al. p. 10)

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence." -- Robert Frost --

The most valuable political act any teacher can perform is not to impose particular political views but to teach students to see the words that society tries to inject into them unseen. (Wayne Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher, p. 154)

"The teacher of writing, first of all, must be a person for whom the student wants to write." (Donald Murray)

George Cambell: rhetoric is the attempt to "to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions, or to influence the will."

In the end, however, the underlying philosophical assumptions still seem less significant to me than the way in which a writing teacher answers this question: should a writing course be organized around production or consumption? It is around this very basic question that (at least) two paths diverge, and how a teacher chooses usually makes all the difference. (Lad Tobin, "Process Pedagogy", p 15 in A Guide to Composition Pedagogy)

Everyone teaches the process of writing, but everyone does not teach the same process. The test of one's competence as a composition instructor [...] resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the process being taught. (James Berlin, "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories", p. 777 in College English, Dec. 1982)

Resources for Planning an FYW Curriculum

Resources for Planning an FYW Curriculum:

Melzer (book)
Beaufort (college writing and beyond)
Driscoll (transfer article)
Yancey et al (transfer book)
Wardle

Genre Analysis: The College Essay

See: Students and Money,in Their Own Words

Summer Reading (2015)

The following essays/articles were taken from the WPA thread, "Best essays in our field for new writing instructors"

• Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" 
• Don Daiker's "Learning to Praise" 
• Peter Elbow's "Embracing Contraries" (and the aforementioned "Ranking, Liking") 
• Michelle Tremmel's "What to Make of the Five-Paragraph Theme" TETYC 39.1 
• Margrethe Ahlschwede's "Writing to Save the World," from Moore & O'Neill's Practice in Context 
• Wendy Bishop's "Steal this Assignment: The Radical Revision" from the same volume 
• Kathi Yancey's "Reflection and the Writing Course" from Reflection in the Writing Classroom 
• Robert Brooke's "Underlife in the Writing Classroom" 
• Dawn Skorczewski's “From Playing the Role to Being Yourself” 
• Barbara Fister's "Why the Research Paper isn't Working" 
• Ferris & Roberts' "Error Feedback in L2 Writing Classes"
• Mike Rose's "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University"
• Nancy Welch's "Sideshadowing Teacher Response"
• Peggy O'Neill: "From the Writing Process to the Responding Sequence." 
• "Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan" by June Jordan, here
• Villanueva, Victor "Memoria Is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color"
• Brannon and Knoblauch"s "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response."
• Min Lu's "Professing Multiculturalism"
• The New London Group's "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies"
• Joseph Harris's "Revision as a Critical Practice" here
• The introduction to Corbett and Connors, *Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student.
• "From a High-Tech to a Low-Tech Writing Classroom: You Can't Go Home Again" here
• Audience addressed/Audience invoked (Lunsford/Ede)
• Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells, "Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions"
• Heilker’s “Twenty Years in: An Essay in Two Parts” paired with Adam Banks’s 2015 CCCC address, “Funk, Flight, and Freedom.”
• Jerry Farber’s “Teaching and Presence” (2008)

Teach in China

Date:    Mon, 27 Apr 2015 12:37:51 -0400
From:    Marcy Bauman <marcybee@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Teach in China this summer

Hi, everyone,

Are you interested in a short-term teaching experience in China?  For the
past 7 years, I've led a group of teachers to the Harbin Institute of
Technology (recently ranked #20 in the world on US News and World Report's
top engineering colleges), where we teach a three-week intensive English
conversation program to the school's Honors students.

This is a low-stress, high-impact teaching environment.  There are no exams
or grades; students have a relatively high degree of English speaking
proficiency, and so we spend most of our time engaging in cultural
dialogues. Harbin is a northern city with moderate (for China) summers -
temperatures are usually in the 80s.

Dates for 2015 have not yet been finalized, but the program will take place
during July (and possibly early August).

HIT provides:

* Round-trip airfare (reimbursed; you have to front the ticket)
* Lodging (with a/c and internet connectivity)
* A teaching stipend

Teachers provide:

* a valid passport with at least 6 months remaining on it.
* a visa (HIT provides necessary paperwork; visas cost about $150)
* 25-30 hours of instruction per week in a team-teaching environment.

If you have a Masters' degree, some experience with overseas travel, some
ESL experience, and a desire to have a truly AWESOME summer, then please
send me a letter of interest and a CV.

Thanks very much!

Best,
Marcy

Stats on RIC

Last Friday, Dr. Tom Schmeling and I testified in front of the RI House Finance Committee Sub-Committee on Education about how Rhode Island College students are suffering because of poor state funding for Higher Education.  Testimony from students about how difficult it is to pay for College, and how their lives have been impacted by working more than students at any New England peer institution, would be influential.  This factors strongly into Performance Based Funding, because the institutions of public higher education in the state will be evaluated by how many of our students graduate in 4 and 6 years, and yet in many cases work requirements (made necessary by difficulty paying tuition and making ends meet) limit students’ ability to complete 15 credits a semester (which is the norm required to graduate in 4 years.)

I quote here from Dr. Schmeling’s testimony last Friday:

"Since FY2008, Rhode Island’s educational appropriations per full-time equivalent student declined 24%, measured in constant dollars (SHEF p.32). 

In support for public higher education, Rhode Island ranks:

• 44th in the nation in educational appropriations per full time student 2014 (SHEF p.39).
• 46th in higher education funding per capita (SHEF p.46).
• 46th in higher education funding per $1000 personal income (SHEF p.46).
• 48th in the percentage of state revenue allocated to higher education.

As a result of declining state support, tuition at Rhode Island institutions of higher learning has risen 34.6% since 2008 .

• We are 45th in net tuition burden as a percent of total public higher education revenue. That is, we ask our students to bear more of the cost of their education than all but five states (p.33)
• Rhode Island is one of only six states where the student tuition burden is more than twice the amount of support provided by the state (p.33)
• In short, across multiple measures of state financial commitment to higher education, Rhode Island is consistently at the bottom of the heap. For those of us who believe that investment in public higher education is a key source of economic mobility for our citizens and of economic growth for the state, it is both disturbing and embarrassing to find that Rhode Island has sunk so low in state rankings on education funding.

These cuts have a clear impact on our students’ ability to complete a college education. For instance, significantly more RIC students have to work off campus to make tuition than at other New England Public Colleges. 31% of RIC seniors work thirty or more hours per week at off-campus jobs, a rate which is about 50% higher than for students at other New England Colleges . Students who must spend so much time working to pay for college cannot devote the time needed to achieve academic excellence. They have a harder time completing a degree in four, five or even six years, and they are more likely to drop out."

Dr. Schmeling is using the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's State Higher Education Finance Report (SHEF).