December 3, 2022

To my 1101 Students

What a semester. My congratulations to those of you who stuck it out. It's been a few years since I taught this course, and in traditional fashion for me, I think I overworked you. My apologies on that. Like a bad manager at Hardee’s, I feel like you should be working all the time, and I think I just put too much on you.

The purpose of ENGL 1101 is to teach you to be college writers. That is: to write competent essays for the college classroom. I think that if I just keep this in mind when designing future sections of 1101, we all would be much better off. While I still think the LitWiki assignment has particular merit in these times, it might have been too much. Here’s my feedback for the overall project:

“ Folks, first off, I want to congratulate you on what you managed to achieve for the wiki assignment. By mostly just in-class writing, you created a firm foundation for later editors to build on. The article remains unfinished, nor has it been touched for a month, so I take that as an indication that this assignment might have been too much. Part of my justification for assigning it was to bring more practical, online writing into a class that is pretty traditional. I truly didn't know what to expect out of this assignment, and I think just looking what you were able to accomplish, I think you did a pretty good job. 

Your grade below considers the project as a whole and your contributions to the project. In general, if you participated regularly and consistently, you passed. ”

Likewise, perhaps the journal was too much? The idea was to have you practice writing about texts each week. Perhaps this could be done in-class in the future, with more targeted prompts that emphasized critical analyses of the assigned readings and led more directly to formal essays. I think many of you weren’t sure what to write, even after our classroom discussions about the material.

Fear not: if you made a concerted effort on all the assignments, you should pass the course. I believe this is most of you who stuck it out. Please enjoy your long holiday. Perhaps I’ll see some of you next semester in 1102.