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- How do you grade my writing?
- Why do we have to present during class?
- Why do students work collaboratively?
- Why do we have to read boring books?
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How do you grade my writing?
Writing is a process. I will give students opportunity to revise their
writing. I will grade the student's writing process rather than focusing on
a final product.
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Why do we have to present during class?
The final project for all Bosque students is the Senior Thesis. Students
will be expected to present complicated topics to well educated audiences.
This process not only allows students to look at text from various angles, it
also gives them practice with presentation and discussion skills they will
need in college and beyond.
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Why do students work collaboratively?
In the work community, people work on teams. Writers do not write alone.
There are always audiences. Limiting a student's work to a teacher's eyes
cuts writers off from more appropriate audiences. TV shows, plays, and now,
fiction is written by teams. As long as each member produces to the best of
his/her ability, teams can reach higher levels of excellence than individual
contributors.
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Why do we have to read boring books?
There are two sorts of literature; there is entertainment fiction and
literature. On one side there is the “trash novel” a smutty tale filled with
flat characters blowing up bridges, on the other, there is some of the books
we’ll be reading this semester—canonic literature—and yes, some of those seem
boring. This is mostly due to the fact that they are written for an entirely
different audience. The older texts took for granted readers spending most
of their quality leisure time reading. They didn’t have audiences with TVs,
play stations, ipods, cell phones, or automobiles. This multimedia
experience not only keeps you busy but also gives you access to information
historical readers didn’t have. If a writer describes the Mohave Desert, you
already have a good idea what he’s talking about. You’ve seen snakes
slithering up sand dunes on TV. But back in the day, people only understood
where they lived. Back then, people living in the countryside of England
couldn’t imagine the coal smog of Charles Dickens’ London. Dickens had to
describe it—and he took his time doing it. But this is why literature gives
us special access to the past. It describes in every detail from the mind of
a person in history. So be patient with setting, description, and political
incorrectness. Allow yourself time to look around in your books—think of it
as time travel.
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