As a way of introducing my research and writing students to visual thinking and graphic narration (the main topics of my version of this class), I asked them to draw the difference between two first days of school: elementary vs. college. They dove right in. Me, too. Here’s my drawing.
Archive for the ‘Teaching Writing’ Category
First Days
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Student & Parent
Friday, July 16th, 2010 
Here’s a drawing in response to Anton Chekhov’s story “A Classical Student.” While the title of the story suggests that the focus will be on the student, I believe it’s actually on the parent who has no faith in her child’s chances of success. In response to her son’s announcement that he has failed his exam, the mother responds, “I knew it would be so! I had a presentiment of it” (121). The state and the media put so much emphasis on (faith in) the power of the school to inculcate learning and forget the role of the family in modeling and supporting learning.
Lost His Tongue
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Here is a drawing in response to “The Silent Readers” in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. In this chapter, Manguel recounts the change in reading habits from the earliest readers in our history who performed the text they encountered out loud to later readers who read silently. This transformation in our thinking about what happens when we read (from vocalizing to internalized silent reading) doesn’t account for how many readers learn to read (by being read aloud to by parents and older siblings), but it does account for the troubles some readers encounter when they fail to “hear” what they are reading, left mute facing the silent page.
Visual Thinking, Teaching, and Learning Conference
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010Here is a link to a slideshow of some photos taken at the 2010 AEPL Summer Conference at the YMCA of the Rockies that I organized this year.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lemusgro/sets/72157624310963802/show/
And one of my drawings from the conference in response to Michael Hancock’s session on comics.
Writer’s Chiasmus
Thursday, May 27th, 2010I blogged this over at my other site, but it fits just as easily over here as well.
It Depends T-Shirt
Thursday, May 13th, 2010Here are photos I took today of the It Depends t-shirt that students in my English grammar class made for themselves and for me to celebrate the end of our class together.
Here they are taking the final.
I had a habit of answering their questions about grammatical correctness with “it depends”—that is, answering with an emphasis on the rhetorical nature of written communication.
“Questions are good things” is my class mantra. Many students are so afraid of asking questions. Why is that? I also told them that while “grammar ain’t sexy,” they already know more than they know they know.
It also makes me happy to think that this t-shirt reflects their ability to think of the English classroom as a place to play and learn, even in that dreaded grammar class.
Teacher Education
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010February 24, 2010.
Into the Webosphere and Beyond!
Friday, February 5th, 2010February 5, 2010.
My first illustration in an online literary magazine today. Here’s the link to the magazine and my illustration: http://www.narwhalmagazine.com/lists/sentence-types.
Here’s the image:
Writing Palettes
Thursday, February 4th, 2010February 4, 2010.
Here are four writing palettes. The notion of writing palettes (that is, thinking of the options we have when writing as analogous to the options artists have when painting) comes from Harry Noden’s Image Grammar. The first three palettes below were taken from the Killgallons’ Grammar for High School, a text I’m teaching this semester in my English Grammar class at ASU. The fourth palette on sentences I created some time ago.
Illustrating Sentences
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Tuesday, February 2, 2010.
Here below is a version of a drawing I made on the board today in the English Grammar class I’m teaching this spring. Students read chapter 2 in Kolln and Gray’s Rhetorical Grammar, but I found that the discussion and explanation of the 7 sentence patterns needed further clarification with a drawing that mapped out how these sentence patterns are distinguished by 4 verb types and by their complements and/or objects.
