Classes I'll Be Teaching

During the March term at Westwood's Denver South campus, I'll be teaching HUM 400, Creative and Critical Thinking. I've taught the course on campus before, but never online or in a hybrid format, as I will be this time. When I've taught the class in the past, I've selected a controversial topic for the class to examine and then required each student to follow the process on his/her own and write a paper about it. I'm thinking of using global warming as the topic this coming term.

I like to show 12 Angry Men (the original black-and-white movie, not a remake) in classes when we discuss critical thinking.

For Red Rocks, I'm currently scheduled to teach one section each of ENG 030 and 060 (developmental classes) this summer and one each of ENG 030 and 131 this fall. The section of ENG 131, Technical Writing I, will be hybrid, which will be an interesting experience. I developed and taught a technical writing class for Westwood College Online in addition to teaching it "on ground."

The Red Rocks English Department (along with some others) had a book fair on Friday where faculty could exam publishers' offerings. Choosing textbooks will be hard because there are so many options.

Just for future reference, I'm going to include the course descriptions for the Red Rocks classes here. I got them from the Colorado Community College Common Courses page.

ENG 030, Basic Writing Skills--Focuses on sentence and basic paragraph structure and development. Enables the student to review and improve grammar, usage, and punctuation skills while employing critical thinking strategies and the writing process to respond to a wide variety of writing situations.

ENG 060, Writing Fundamentals--Focuses on paragraph structure and development and introduces the formal essay. Enables the student to review and improve grammar, usage, and punctuation skills while employing critical thinking strategies and the writing process to respond to a wide variety of writing situations.

ENG 131, Technical Writing I--Develops skills one can apply to a variety of technical documents. Focuses on principles for organizing, writing, and revising clear, readable documents for industry, business, and government.

Another Haiku

The Comet

Solar-wind-blown hair
frames the crater-marked face drawn
always toward her sun.


I'm not entirely happy with it, but I've had this idea in my mind for some time.

My First Haiku

--at least it's the first one I remember writing. Yesterday I mentioned to someone that, having grown up in Missouri, one of the things I missed here in Colorado is fireflies. It occurred to me later that fireflies would be a good subject for a haiku:


Fireflies

flitting, flickering
in the darkness, delighting
enchanted children


I liked the idea of linking the words in the lines with alliteration, though the alliterating sound should be on stressed syllables, which it isn't in delighting in the second line.

Technical Writing and Web 2.0

The theme for the January issue of Intercom was technical writing and Web 2.0. The best articles were "Writing and Web 2.0," "Podcasting: A New Layer of Communication," and "Using Wikis."

In "Writing and Web 2.0," Keith Hoffman discussed social networking, AJAX-based web sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS, as well as web-based word processing. There are several items in his list of "Suggested Readings" that I'd like to look at.

The authors of "Using Wikis," Brenda Huettner and Char James-Tanny, along with M. Katherine Brown, have used a wiki, It's a Wiki Wacky World, to write a book titled Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools. I bought a copy of their book, along with copies of Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration by Jane Klobas, which I've already read, and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Change Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

These should be useful for the formal report assignment I'm planning for my technical writing class.

I decided that to find time to read these books and others related to my work, I had to stop reading the murder mysteries I was getting from the library.

Handouts for RRCC Classes

I finally got smart and moved the Word files with handouts I've created for my Red Rocks classes to folders at Box.net. I had been uploading them to the WebCT course shells, but that meant I had to create each folder and upload each file for ENG 090 three times, once for each section. With the folders at Box.net, I only have to do it once for all three sections. I also had trouble opening the files from WebCT; I'm hoping it will be easier this way.

Writing versus Literature and Humanities

I finally realized (duh!) this week that I'd much rather teach literature and humanities courses than writing classes. Of course, that's what most of my classes are in. I'm working on my c.v. so, hopefully, I can apply to some other colleges or universities to teach more classes in those areas.

I also wouldn't mind teaching some poetry-writing classes, though I probably need to do more poetry writing myself. All that I've done recently has been lyrics for political songs, and I did that more than a year and a half ago.

The other day, I did write another poem that is less political. I was going to make all the lines end in a rhyme with weary, but I decided to break that up:


Snow Weary

skies dreary
eyes bleary--
kids cheery
snowballs forming

still leery
of “theory,”
my query:
global warming?


I do like the way the title rhymes with most of the lines as well as the way I used punctuation but no verbs.

I'm going to have to start carrying a notebook with me so I can do some writing when I have the time--or the inspiration.