Last semester, in a seminar on Charles Dickens, I assigned students to update a Wikipedia page for a Dickens character. I briefly discussed the assignment on this blog in December, putting my own assignment in the context of other professors who have used Wikipedia in their classes in various ways. The exercise worked well for
One of the great things about being a new professor is the opportunity to teach a variety of new classes: graduate students usually teach only introductory or composition classes. But new courses of course means new syllabi. This week I’m putting together a syllabus for a summer course, and I realize that when designing a
In my experience, most students understand that a paper for an English class is not the same as a text message. But do they understand that writing for a college class is not the same as writing for a high school class (or a standardized test)? This semester I’m teaching a literature course for non-majors,