According to legend, the Athenian orator, Demosthenes, overcome a speech impediment and a weak delivery through a practice of filling his mouth with stones and speaking through them. One might argue that Demosthenes was ahead of the curve in his use of technology. Others might suggest that my example is perverse, since 1.) the stones impede his natural ability to speak, and 2.) they were removed when he spoke in public.

It’s just past midterm and my students in first-year rhetoric and writing (RHE 306) have just submitted Learning Record portfolios. I adopted the Learning Record model as developed by UT’s own Peg Syverson, outlined at http://www.learningrecord.org.

I think virtually every newcomer to collegiate teaching realizes early on, with varying degrees of dismay, that “teaching” and “parenting” are closely related functions.  I find my students often find it hard to think outside of a kind of parental relationship: they are legitimately shocked when I tell them, for example, that I don’t care why they missed class, or that their C (or B, or A-, even) is neither a reflection of my personal feelings about them nor assigned punitively but rather my best assessment of their performance on an assignment ruled against some form of index.  B

I recently had a conversation with a couple of other instructors at UT about what to do when you've realized you've made a mistake about a student's grade, especially what to do if you've assigned a grade that is lower than what the student actually deserves.

Oftentimes, as younger or less experienced instructors, we have a tendency to believe that we cannot change a student's grade for the better because then they'll always question our grading practices, and then we'll have to deal with lessened authority in the classroom and constant requests for grade changes.

In my RHE 309S: Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing course at UT Austin, my students are spending the semester studying communities of their choice. The first paper asked students to "map" their community, charting the people, places, events, social practices, and issues that help the community define and organize itself while also examining arguments made about the community. This assignment resembles one of our main first-year writing assignments which asks students to map the arguments made in response to a specific critical situation or issue.