Programmatic Survey
Last week, I sent an email to everyone teaching in the UWP, asking you to complete a survey about key programmatic issues. The survey closes this Friday, November 10th at midnight. If you haven’t already taken the survey, I would greatly appreciate your feedback. As a reminder, if you complete the survey, four respondents will be randomly chosen for $100 stipends.
Distinguished Student Writing
If you have papers from 1105 and/or 1106 that are exceptional in some way, please encourage students to submit them via Hokieswrite: https://hokieswrite.com/distinguished-writing/. These projects are great resources as model papers, particularly for our newer teachers, so please encourage your students to submit their work.
Teaching Blogs
Before the pandemic, Hokieswrite previously had an area where we featured blogs from our instructors/GTAs. We are resuming this practice, with our first entry being an amazing piece by Amanda Marzolf entitled “This Body of Mine: On Being Fat in the Writing Classroom.” To introduce this piece, Amanda states that “I have found teaching in Whittemore Hall this semester distracting and uncomfortable. As I try navigating the room while interacting with my students, I can only think of my body and the space it occupies. With that singular situation in mind, I began trying to process what I have experienced as a fat person in the writing classroom. What’s bloomed is a personal narrative where I intimately explore body image and fatness in past (my upbringing) and present (teaching). This post is very much a catharsis, hopefully as much for you as it is for me.”
It would be great to have approximately two blogs posted each semester, so if you have a teaching idea or concern you’ve been thinking about or a lesson plan that was a big hit—or a big miss—and you wanted to write through it/about it, please let me know. These do not have to be very long, and they can be as formal or informal as you like.
Brown Bag Speaker Series
As a final reminder, our informal roundtable on AI in the classroom is today at 12:15 in Shanks 370/380. We hope to see you there!