This week marks two years since I started teaching blended versions of first-year composition. Yesterday, on the first day of the semester, I found myself in the same building and room as one of my very first blended classes two years ago. Back then, I didn't know if the blended design would work. I didn't even know how it would work, really, and tried to say as much to my new students. "So, we're basically guinea pigs," I remember one of them saying. "Mmm...I prefer 'pioneers,'" I had replied.
Two years ago, I also started working with UTAs--undergraduate teaching assistants. I didn't know how that would work, either. I remember entering my first class: I walked over to the computer, across the room from the door, set down my bags, removed my coat. I turned around and watched as my TA assumed her seat at the table in front of the chalkboard, facing the students. I froze, taken aback at how comfortable she seemed as she set up her laptop; she looked as though she had been TAing as long as I had been teaching. It hadn't occurred to me that E would park herself there, where I normally set out my books, notebooks, and syllabi. I had never shared the class with anyone. Would this work?
In the second class, in the adjacent room that I returned to yesterday, C, my next TA entered just before classes started. She sat down in the front row uncertainly. I silently invited her to the front, behind the table, like E had done two hours prior. Within just two hours, this now felt normal.
Yesterday, I met with my fifteenth TA that I have worked with in just these two short years. This time, I met her in my office in the adjacent building and we walked over together. This time, I had prepared S, telling her that she would sit at that table, telling her that I would hand her the roster when students introduced themselves, telling her that I would direct certain questions to her when students asked them and that I would frequently ask her to chime in when I explained to students how this wildly different class would unfold. Our new students were no longer guinea pigs or pioneers; rather, they were the lucky recipients of two years of dramatic changes, radical redesign, and endless experimentation. Unlike E and C, S had not only taken a blended class with me--just one year ago--she had also taken it with a TA. S knew exactly what it was like to take this class, to work with a TA and myself, to work in AdobeConnect, to sit in a brick and mortar classroom just once per week.
I continue to hyper-analyze every single lesson plan, bouncing it off of or, more frequently, designing it with "Team Lyra," my current team of TAs. I will never stop experimenting with every lesson plan, every set of homework, every detail of our course website. The first couple of weeks of class, devoted to defining "Academic Writing" and "Academic Habits of Mind," reading critically and summarizing effectively, has been the same for two years, but each semester, I make adjustments.
Tonight, for example, students aren't just reading two sample summaries; they're also consulting a "Reading Guide" explaining what a good summary should do and what to look for. Prior to this semester, it hadn't occurred to me to prepare them for the subsequent class discussion with a guide, an oversight that is almost laughable. How could I expect students to know what to look for in a summary when the whole point of this opening module is to teach them how to summarize at the college level? For two years, I've assigned the summaries and conducted the in-class discussion, and students have stared blankly, knowing that the samples are lacking something but not knowing precisely what: rhetorical context, the difference between what the author being summarized is saying and doing, and the author's "aims, methods, and materials"(Joseph Harris). I explain all of this in class, but by then, students have struggled more than necessary. Why not give them some help in advance? That way, the discussion will be richer, more focused, and more purposeful. Students won't walk in (or log in, rather) tomorrow confused (or, at least, not as confused as they have been). In theory, they'll be prepared to compare the sample summaries with the actual text (Trip Gabriels' now famous 2010 NYT "Plagiarism Lines Blur in the Digital Age" article) and identify why the summaries fall short.
This is my hypothesis, anyway. I'll let you know how it works out!
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