Investment
All of us in this class are either current or future teachers, the leaders of classrooms. I will treat you as such. Class discussions for UWP 104D require a significant investment of your energy and attention. Because your classmates will learn your name, and because they will rely on you to respond to and evaluate their ideas, their pedagogical principles, and their writing, and because I will call on you nearly every time we meet, I will expect you to participate eagerly. Students who come prepared and enthusiastic to all classes will earn the highest participation marks. If you plan neither to keep up with the reading and writing assignments, nor to participate in class discussion, I encourage you to enroll in a different class.
Authority
In this class I will not only impart information to you–such as the rules of composition and grammar and logic–but I will also lead and push you through explorations of critical thinking and discovery. These processes will open doors for you, so that you will not only wield language with more facility and expertise, but so that you will also discover the excitement of clear communication, of sudden comprehension, and of the applicability of academic discoveries to your experience as a teacher and thinker.
This experience, the experience you bring to the classroom, makes you an authority on your own life, ideas, and opinions. The first two essays you write for UWP104D will depend upon the authority you have already earned through this experience and from your thoughtful responses to that experience; later essays will depend more on your growing expertise with form, paragraph, sentence, and word-choice, as well as with the topics in education you consider important, and that you have researched in books and online databases.
Pay close attention to the essays we read, all by established authors whose words are chosen carefully, whose ideas connect to one another meaningfully, whose final products never depend upon lazy idioms or conversational sloppiness. Learn from the precision of these essayists’ use of diction. While I encourage you to fill your writing journals with comfortable communications, future employers and graduate schools will require appropriately formal diction. Note that the essayists in our book rarely “write like they talk.”
Position Papers
Each of you will write a two-page position paper in which you support with detailed and engaging evidence an assertion about an assigned essay from our class syllabus.
Your essay should not summarize an essay the class will already have read; rather, you should assert something interesting and not immediately obvious about the essay, relying on the authority of your own discoveries from having reread the essay a number of times, or relying on the authority of some outside relevant research that you might have done on an essay’s topic, author, setting, or related controversies. The best responses often reflect upon the applicability of an author’s theories of teaching on your own classroom experience. Essays without specific evidence, usually autobiographical, will not engage your reader. Determine what narratives or factual details you would like to provide. Have ready 26 copies of the creatively-titled and proofread essay before class begins on the day assigned.
As with any essay, bland restatement of known facts, dependence on vague diction, and repeated evidence of inadequate revision will cause the readers of this essay to lose interest. Write a paper that you will enjoy reading before the class, and that we will enjoy hearing (not only because of the quality of your ideas and words, but because of the quality of your presentation). Practice reading your essay out loud to your family or roommates before you share it with the class.
At the beginning of each class I will choose a respondent for that day’s position paper(s). The respondent will begin the class discussion, either by responding intelligently to issues raised by the position paper, or by sharing thoughts or reactions discovered during the previous night’s reading.
On Position Papers and the Pace of UWP104D
The purpose of UWP104D is to increase your practice and mastery of expository writing, as well as to support your work as a public speaker, classroom leader, collaborator, and reflective thinker. The essays we read this quarter will help you directly and indirectly with all these accomplishments, but “coverage” of the topics raised in our readings will not be our driving force or goal. I will always emphasize your steady improvement as a writer over, say, your recall of an assigned essay’s title or argument. As a result, and because my classes take advantage of “teachable moments” when they provide additional opportunities for you to improve your written and oral communication skills, in each of the 16 or so sections of UWP104D that I have taught in the last 16 years or so we have fallen “behind schedule” with position papers. I fully expect this to be the case this quarter, and I will ask for your patience as we adjust the rolling “due dates” of the position papers that you share with your classmates and me so that we can continue to focus on our first priorities in this writing class.
