Yesterday was a good teaching day. I got to campus, and as I entered the Humanities building, a student from Spring was coming out. She stopped to tell me how much she missed me and the English 102 class that she took with me. We talked about the possibility of her taking my Advanced Creative Writing class in the spring. I was glad to know that her experience with me was a happy one.
My English 100 classes went well. This week, both in those classes and English 101, we've experimented with a different kind of peer editing. We had a check list to make sure the work had all the required elements, so we did the first few readings checking for those. Then we read each essay but didn't comment on them. This approach allowed students to read more essays and to see how they worked or didn't. We talked about which approaches made essays easier to follow (headings, for example). In each class, students read every single essay, since they didn't have to take time to write comments.
My Creative Writing class was on a field trip of sorts.
Yesterday was the pumpkin patch that was right outside the building where we meet.
So we went out to paint pumpkins and to see if we could find ideas and inspiration for next week's writing. I plan to bring in this blog post of my own and this classic piece about decorative gourd season from McSweeney's.
I don't always have earrings that match my teaching plan for a class, but yesterday I did.
I bought these candy corn earrings from a pre-teen entrepreneur at a Mills River farmer's market in the summer, and I was happy to have more than one occasion this fall to wear them (the other will be Halloween).
I don't know if we'll create writing that we wouldn't have had without the trip to the pumpkin patch, but I'm happy that we'll have a chance to see.
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