Ditto. Thoroughly enjoyed my first graduate class ever!

Undergraduate programs can be cash cows depending on the University. Obviously, private universities such as Syracuse and NYU are expensive ranging from $30,000-$40,000 a year. No doubt this money is used to fund other ventures for the Universities. Other Universities rely on athletics to be their cash cow which then can overshadow academics. In my […]

In the beginning of this semester, Professor Ferguson encouraged us to print out the readings for class instead of bringing in our laptops because he felt that there’s nothing like holding the actual papers in our hands. I feel the same way, however, as your post and McGann’s article demonstrates, we are rapidly moving away […]

“Supplement” was the word I was looking for in my comment on Safaarah’s post. The Sparknotes example is a great way for students to learn how to judge information on the Internet as a whole. It should be treated as an additive to their current knowledge while also using critical thinking to identify pros and […]

The use of video games and Wikipedia should be considered as side educational tools that should be used with caution. To ignore technologies as academic sponsors would be ignorant and detrimental to our student’s relation with our rapidly changing technological world. If students were entirely using Wikipedia as their main source of research t…[Read more]

Teachers should not be willing to allow students to user their own “version” of English in their composition because that would be detrimental to their academic writing. However, they could use journals, as we have discussed before, to write however they choose. The bottom line is that there will always be academic standards, especially concerning […]

Love the underdog take on this. Concerning ELL students, I always remember them being mostly segregated from the rest of the student body when I was a student at my zoned junior high school in Queens. I believe this hinders their development in learning English and as a whole, feeling comfortable and confident in school. […]

Real-world writing assignments are imperative to a student’s progression in their writing skills and understanding of communication in the real world. Standards accompany any form of writing, especially professional emails, memos, press releases, etc. This practice will give students the confidence that they can apply the standards they have…[Read more]

Without standards, there is nothing to measure a student’s skills to either than a vague intuition or feeling about a student’s work. Standards are in place to keep academics structured and gradable. While standards may seem to be “anti teacher”, the teacher should not feel like he or she needs to be trapped in a […]

Nice, thanks for the link.

The finished product is ultimately what the student will be graded and judged on but without the first drafts, the student would get nowhere towards that final draft. While all writing is experimental, it is also meant to be structured, clear and concise for the reader to understand it. Outside of creative writing, if a […]

In my opinion, the amount of time a writer spends on each stage of the writing process has more to do with the writer’s motivation for the work they’re producing rather than their personality. If someone is writing an essay to be accepted into Harvard Law, I’m pretty sure they will spend a majority of […]

Pride is an emotion that can be useful towards getting a student to care about revision. I think an interesting way for teachers to motivate their students to revise thoroughly would be to have the students imagine they are going to turn in their essay to not only their teacher but to someone they hold […]

Interesting comparison between the town school and the city school. I agree with Dean in that the five-paragraph essay is a good introduction to formulaic writing if the student’s decisions aren’t strictly regulated. Clearly, the town school follows that formula. I wonder if the differences in the teaching methods are attributed to the locations,…[Read more]

I felt as though Gabriele Lusser Rico’s “Against Formulaic Writing” was too much of a generalization. He basically surmises that most five-paragraph essays are boring both for the student and teacher and that the student is locked into a cage of paragraphs with no escape. To say that there is no freedom for creativity in […]

http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Topics/Education/Technologys-Promise-to-Education-Reimagining-Textbooks?WT.mc_id=3_13_2012_emergingtechnology_tw&WT.tsrc=Twitter

Sounds good to me.

I agree that it’s worrisome but I believe the value of the personal relationship between teacher and student is too great for technology to entirely occupy the role of the educator.