Thanks to you all for expressing yourselves. I did receive your comments just recently, and we'll make the most of our time now-on. My first commitment is to ALL of my students, and I encourage you to express your concerns or questions. I think our first step from now on will be to ask questions first within the group then give them to the class if questions don't get answers. Naturally within my class there will always be questions, just as a result of the subject manner. I will educate all of you in ways that I think will help your writing, but the nature of writing is relative, and until you begin writing, you're unable to produce writing (if that makes sense). As a result, there won't be specific answers to questions in class always. In the humanities, we shy away from prescriptive methodologies of teaching--meaning, I can't tell you exactly what to do to write "a good paper." I can, however, give you tools and parameters to begin exploring this idea on your own and give you useful feedback with the writing you do.
Further, I ask you as students to trust my lecture and explanations, and assume that I have timed this class appropriately to give you time to write your papers and have arranged class appropriately to address future questions within lectures about the subject matter.
Feel free to come into my office hours, call me, speak to me privately, or e-mail me if you have any concerns or questions. I lecture as a service--my focus is on the students, but I would like to be fair to all students by spending equal time with each. If you feel that you need extra help beyond what I can offer in office hours, e-mail responses, or lecture, I have other tools offered by either the Online Writing Center or SMART where you can get additional help.
Again, I sincerely appreciate all of you letting me know how you're feeling in class, and I will make every effort to make some positive changes in the way we're "doing business." I do value what all of you have to say, and I'm excited to begin having more fun exercises.
Regards,
Charlotte
I completely trust your decisions and methods of teaching. However, I do believe that class on Mondays and Wednesdays are supposed to be lectures. To my knowledge, a lecture is supposed to be teachers informing students, and not students taking over the class. If a teacher brings up a controversial topic to show an example of how to complete the logic in the statement, it is common respect to the teacher and the fellow students to not argue about the example given in class. For the sake of the class, the students’ time and money, I hope that the way class is going changes for the better.
Posted by: Megan at September 23, 2004 08:47 PMI think everything will be on the up-and-up now. Mondays and Wednesdays are lecture days, and we will also bring in some more discussion and group work with that. This class for the most part is moving very fast, so I'll be adding in some more about classical rhetoric, and hopefully we'll be able to talk about controversies, too. After all, this class is a civic service class, so we should learn to talk about controversies intelligently and respectfully, right? :)
Posted by: Charlotte at September 24, 2004 11:43 AM