What Do I Want?

You'd think as an instructor for a course, I'd be defining the goals for my students, but you'd be wrong--well, partially.  Sure, I have objectives that I hope are met by the end of the semester, but I also have some personal goals for the course.  They are as simple as wanting to grow as an instructor and gain valuable pedagogical experience to making the class interesting.  Here, in no particular order, are the things I'd like to accomplish by the end of the semester (with regards to Comp II):

• Linking content:  I'd like to keep exploring the best ways to link content (science, in this case) to writing, and I hope to see how well this helps students in their writing and when they leave my class.
• Technology:  I hope to keep playing with technology in the classroom and see how it can enhance my teaching and help make the material more engaging.
• Research:  I may extend the work I'm doing in this course for my own dissertation--kinda scary, but I have to start thinking about what I want to research and write extensively about!
• Evaluation:  I want to explore better ways to evaluate writing that actually helps students learn to write better.  I commented heavily on papers last semester, and while I think that my comments helped some of the students, I worried that it overwhelmed others.  So, this semester, I'm going to try a bit more hands-off approach to commenting; my goal is to provide helpful comments, but not to completely mark all over students' papers in an attempt to make them write how I think they should write.  I think I'm going to try evaluating papers electronically, providing comments using Track Changes in MS Word.

That's just a brief handful of my goals for the course.  I hope that you all (my student-readers) enjoy the course and material as much as I have and use your blogs to play around with ideas and practicing writing.