Since the summer of 2020, I’ve been working on a book titled Pedagogical Evolution: From Hard-Ass to Hippie . Here’s its description:  This fragmented book – containing emails, old journal entries, recent journal entries, tweets, other social media posts, and current thoughts – showcases an evolution of a teacher's mind/body/soul from harsh policies and rules into compassion and the extension of grace (to students as well as herself).  *Other projects still in the works (with plans to publish them by mid-December): newly remixed OER for both English 110 and Intro to Creative Writing.

Hello humans: I've decided to let the schedule speak for itself these last few weeks we have together, so please refer to the schedule linked in Blackboard for what we'll be doing in class.

And more things to think about:  "Student centered classrooms focus on the needs and abilities of students (rather than the adults) and on topics that are relevant to the students’ lives, needs, and interests. Students are perceived as customers and stakeholders. In this type of classroom, students themselves are actively engaged in creating, understanding, and connecting to knowledge and learning. In student-centered environments, there is a higher motivation to learn as students feel they have a real stake in their own learning. Instead of the teacher being the sole, infallible source of information (the sage on the stage…), the teacher shares control of the classroom and students are allowed to explore, experiment, and discover on their own. Their diverse thoughts and perspectives are a necessary input to every class. In a student centered environment, students are given choices and are included in the decision-making processes of the classroom. The focus in these classrooms...

Transcript: Alexa Bach "PSA. Your students saying "ain't", "finna", etc. are cultural. Instead of "correcting" them, talk to them about code switching and how amazingly SMART they are for being able to codeswitch between the two. "Valuing your students' identities means valuing the way they speak."

“Children want to write. They want to write the first day they attend school. This is no accident. Before they went to school they marked up walls, pavements, newspapers with crayons, chalk, pens or pencils… anything that makes a mark. The child mark says, 'I AM.' 'No, you aren’t,' say most school approaches to the teaching of writing. We underestimate the urge because of a lack of understanding of the writing process and what children do in order to control it. Instead, we take the control away from children and place unnecessary road blocks in the way of their intentions. Then we say, 'They don’t want to write. How can we motivate them?'"  Posted on my old teaching blog 1/9/2007.

//HERE is just ANOTHER reason YOU SHOULD BE BLOGGING, people! Last night, I went to my personal blog and dinked around... skimmed the early months of the year to see what I was doing at the beginning of 2007. Wow. I have come along way (baby?). In fact, I hadn't remembered that I purchased my iMac this year (feels like I've had it for forever) or that I went to the GTAO conference at NDSU and had a blast. That was this year! See! It RECORDS my thoughts, my goings-on... what would I do without MY BLOGS ? I have no idea. It's like how most people feel about their cell phone; what did I ever do before having blogs ? Those memories are far, far away now. Lost in the caves of my neurons .//

Today, Monday, we finished up Unit 10 by watching a TED Talk. I briefly mentioned how students could find their genres for LP4 by typing: "climate change" + blog into a Google search. Visit our Research chapter for more tips on using symbols to find things. For Monday's class, look at your classmates' ugly presentations and let me know whose was the worst. Continue to work on your LP4, too!

On Monday/Tuesday, we'll work on Group 4 and Large Project 2. I will conduct a teeny demonstration at the beginning of class on how to find studies or surveys for your research (surprise! you need to use the + symbol just like last week with the interviews). Monday is the last in-class LP2 workday for MW classes. Wednesday classes don't meet due to advising.   The 8am TR class will have two workdays this week. Everyone should have a draft before next week's Peer Workshop activity!

National Novel Writing Month is underway. The goal is to hit 50k words by the end of November, and that means shooting for around 1600 each day. Well, I threw down 1730 this morning on my project, all before 8am. So, it's a good start, yes, and we'll see if I can continue it.  Dana Anderson - a colleague & friend - and I did NaNoWriMo in 2017; that's when I purchased my gold MacBook as an incentive, and that laptop is still working just fine. I published the book I created back then (on Amazon), and Dana is still tinkering with hers. I think she's attempting NaNoWriMo again with me this year, but she's got a different project in mind.  I think teachers of writing should definitely write (even if they don't publish) in order to show their students the importance of WRITING PRACTICE.