This blog is full of Beans!

Like most of you who have blogged so far (even though the syllabus says we don't have to...I'm a fool for peer pressure), I like the idea of front-loading the course. What's more, I think it makes a huge deal of sense for English 1000 with its emphasis on process. Presumably our students are going to develop better writing skills as the semester progresses, so if we force them (yes, Claire, I also like the compulsion factor) to do tough work early on, they will get into the habit of a rigorous work ethic. I remember that one of the most horrifying days of my undergrad career was the first day in a Shakespeare course when the professor expected us to explicate a sonnet and to explain the linguistic roots of Elizabethan English vocabulary words. The second day, half of the class was gone. I stuck it out and today I am an official English Dork. (But to be fair, those people who dropped the class probably took another one that lead them to gainful employment. My bad.)

Maybe cracking down in the first few weeks wouldn't do the trick, but I'm pretty sure if we all demand a lot from our students (C&D's concept of assigning responsibility), they will put in the work. Nothing motivates a kid like realizing that s/he can't just slide by in a class scraping together extra credit points. Honestly though... how many students in the WL have we seen that don't care about their classes because the instructors expect them to do *all* the work without explaining how or why to do it? If the concepts and significance of a topic are explained, the students will be interested. If the concepts are entirely abstract, grounded in "literature of a past generation," and don't seem applicable to the students' lives, forget it.

So I guess this gets at Bean's point of designing good assignments. Well, duh. But that's a lot easier said than done, darling Bean. And obviously all the strategies I'm expounding on here (or at least trying to) are very idealistic and seem like common sense. Maybe it's just that I'd rather be thinking about anything other than seminar papers right now, but I'm feeling particularly excited about where my class is going to go. And I want to talk about it and listen to what everybody else is doing (um, *hello*, syllabus parties!).

Or maybe it's all the caffeine giving me heart arrhythmia.