paper writing

Like Rebecca, I'm having a kind of weird time writing my paper. I'm having trouble with my own assignment because I had not reached some fairly important conclusions (such as, how controversial do I want to make my class?) and I'm still not sure what I think. Since I've in large part ripped off this assignment from my own composition class many years ago I'm tempted to turn in the paper that I wrote for that class. I won't do that, of course, but it's hard for me to see beyond my first conception of this assignment.

One thing that would help me focus my assignments, I guess, would be to give the class a "theme." Jennifer and I were talking about this during last class and I'm not sure how it works. I thought that Jesse Adolph's class focus was very helpful and really challenged his students to think in different ways. It was easy to see his students advance in the complexity of their thoughts from the beginning of the semester to the end (at least from my perspective as a tutor in the WL). I would like to challenge my students, and I would like to give the class some kind of unifying theme. I'm just not sure how to start. And certainly some themes work better than others, judging by student reaction in the writing lab.

Back to the paper. On another level, of course, it's sort of easy to write this essay if I pretend that it's not my own assignment. It's kind of soothing in a way; after seeing lots of freshman papers every day in the writing lab I'm kind of jealous of their short papers and focused assignments. If I try to write it as myself as I was as an undergraduate I think it'll go pretty easily, though I may be embarrassed by the results. Who knows.

On a final note, I hope that we talk about the Elbow essay in class this week because I thought it raised some really important questions that I'd like to hear debated. I especially enjoyed his critique of agreement in grade norming.