Welcome!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?

As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).

Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!

--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100



Wednesday, October 13, 2010

"A vision of students today"

In the video text "A vision of Students Today" they really show how students today are becoming lost in the classroom. At the beginning of the video the cameraman sweeps over empty seats in a classroom. It then turns to the seats filled with students who look drained and weary. The cameraman then turns toward the crowd of students as certain students hold up signs of facts from a students daily life. The key question that the students are answering for the audience watching this movie is: what is it like being a student today? All of the signs held up are answering this key question. The signs held up are chilling and quite disturbing; some say "my class average size is 115" what I felt from reading that first fact is I felt like the student felt lost and forgotten as do the other students who continue on to say that only 18% of her teachers know her name. Some students talk about how school is wasting time and money; for example some students held up sign about buying books that they will only open twice or another one where a student holds up a computer that says he buys hundred dollar books that he will never open. They don't say this but what I get from this is that they aren't learning what they want to so it seems like a waste of their time and the teachers.
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