First of all, I must confess that I am still thrown off by the fact that we started the semester on a Thursday, so "Day 2" was during Week 2, and days 4 and 5 comprise Week 3. There. I'm over it.
Task list for Week 3:
* workshop summaries Tuesday, hand in Thursday
* Discuss Henrietta Lacks
* Issue v Information Questions
* Intro to Discourse Communities/ Academic Disciplines
*Intro to Stasis Theory
*Linked Papers Overview
* Three Topics Memo
*Kuo
*Beliefs About Writing
Okay. The first three items were to have happened Tuesday (Day 4), the rest on Thursday. Not so much. First of all, remember when I asked what had I missed regarding preparation for the summary? How about the distinctions between summarizing and paraphrasing, whether or not to incorporate direct quotation in a 250-word summary, and whether or not to include in-text citations? Hmmm. Yep, that would have been helpful. On top of that, we had not even remotely discussed workshop expectations, though that did not seem to be as much of a hindrance.
We started Tuesday with the standard workshop day freewrite: what questions do you have about your drafts? What do you want specific feedback on? I often ask, for the first workshop, about their anxieties/ hopes for the workshop, too, but I didn't this time. Then, I brought up the two student sample summaries I had posted on ELMS last week and we went over those together, looking at what did and did not work--good thing to do right before they start to look at each other's drafts. I emphasized three things to look for in the workshop:
1) Rhetorical Context. Is it clear within the first couple of sentences? Who is the author/ title/ publication, authorial purpose, etc?
2) Main idea. What is the main idea the author is dealing with? Thesis? Central question?
3) Active verbs. What is the author doing? Not just saying (subject)--doing? Don't write "Tannen writes..." That tells us nothing. Is she asserting? Arguing? Deriding? Suggesting?
4) Funky stuff. Mark unclear areas with a question mark (ideas not clear); circle or underline weird wording.
Count off to 7, then find your people ("Fives? Fives over here...) and group up. Go.
In my first class, everyone read everyone's complete summaries, so each student read four summaries. That took too long, so in my second two classes, we did it so that A would read B's first summary and C's second summary, B would read C's first summary and A's second summary, and C would read A's first summary and B's second summary. (The assignment is to write two summaries, one of Deborah Tannen's "Agonism in the Academy: Surviving the Argument Culture" and one of Gabriel's "Plagiarism Lines Blur in the Digital Age.") That seemed to work out pretty well. They read, marked up the drafts, and talked over them carefully with each other. I walked around. They stayed on task. After the freewrite (five minutes) and the samples (15 min) and the logistics of getting into groups (5 min), they had about half an hour to read and respond to each other's drafts. That brought us up to 60 minutes of a 75 minute class. Add in some overall reminders about formatting and remember that we have reading to do for HW as well as this assignment, and that was class.
Tuesday was fine. It was a fine class. Practical, useful (one can only hope), and straightforward. This left everything else: Henrietta Lacks, Kuo, Stasis Theory, Discourse Communities, Linked Papers Overview, and 3 Topics Memo to be handled in Thursday's 75 minute class period. Mm-hmmm. Stay tuned for my recap of Day 5: Epic Fail.
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