Day 6
First, day 5 has been misplaced. I spent time with Lisa instead of writing about it and now I don’t really remember anything about it. Oops. On the other hand, she and I had an awesome labor day weekend. She flew up from Okie land on Thursday and stayed through Monday. We spent some time exploring Columbus and doing the things everyone said we HAD to do (including the Greek festival and Gallery hop) We also went to this giant mall called Easton. Twice. Not that, as grad students, we can afford decent food, let alone anything in that mall! We did have an excellent time. I would like to blame this on her, but it wasn’t her fault (don’t click if you’re super squeamish). I just fell in the shower for no reason.
Today we spent the morning talking about feedback. Scott Dewitt used Nancy Sommers’ 1982 article on responding to student writing to discuss giving feedback. We did not talk about assessment and aren’t going to until Friday. I did appreciate the feedback pointers–that’s something I never feel quite confident about and I think it’s because by the time I finally get around to giving written feedback I’m always pressured for time and so therefore don’t take the time to do a first read without a pen or the seven minutes per page. It’s more like, set the kitchen time for 10 minutes. When it dings, finish up real quick and move on. That comes from the days of teaching three courses (75 students total) when I was adjuncting. Since I’m only teaching one class (but 24 students–sadly not the 19 at OU) I’m hoping to really start reading student work early and giving myself enough time to respond effectively.
This afternoon Scott continued introducing the second assignment in the sequence, the visual remix. He asked us to do a low-tech (think crayons, scissors and glue sticks) remix of an army ad that Nan Johnson used the other day when she came to speak. My group took the basic layout of the ad (a progression or timeline with an image on the right and some text at the bottom) and reworked that layout for an ad to young women using the same timeline to make a commentary on the interests of young middle class white women as opposed to the audience we saw the original ad aiming for. Anyway, it was a pretty fun activity. Tomorrow we’re learning photoshop.
