As the 2013-2014 academic year approaches, I find myself in a situation that is somewhat odd: I’m charged with teaching an advanced composition course to students in the Oxford, MS area, but I’m doing so in an online environment while I work from home in Chattanooga, TN. Creating a sense of community is one of my first goals in a […]
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what […]
To prepare to write this blog post, I thought I would read through some of last year’s entries to get a sense of how I could contribute something that would build on that earlier writing. One post that stood out to me while reading was Jeanine Rauch’s post focused on teachable moments, and I thought that I would continue that […]
I teach three sections of ninth grade English at Lamar School in Meridian. I love teaching freshmen; they are so unsure of this whole high school thing and are, for the most part, pretty eager to please. Translation: the perfect guinea pigs for me! Our school, like most, stresses writing. The students begin writing in kindergarten and literally journal […]
For the past third of my career teaching composition, I’ve been trying to recreate the flow of the first two thirds. I think that finally I have a clue about how to do this from reading Peter Elbow’s recent book Vernacular Eloquence. The title is a play on Dante’s treatise Vulgaris Eloquence, a defense of the use of everyday Latin. […]