'Twas the Night Before Classes

*yawn*

I've been busy with the last minute business of preparing for a new semester. I've completely revamped my syllabus to include more readings and lots more informal writing. Last semester my students had to do four major papers and 8 short writes. This semester they are doing four major papers, 8 short writes, 6 journal entries, one grammar group presentation, one blog entry, responding to the other blog entries, and a partridge in a pear tree!

Suck it up, kiddies, and sharpen your pencils.

I'm most excited about the composition blog. It's something new that I'm trying to help encourage those students who hate to speak up in class as well as hopefully capitalizing on this generation's ease with the internet. I'm allowing the writing to be very informal, and I'll likely give out the prompts, but I'm curious to see how this will play out. It's probably not going to be too spontaneous, as anything that you *have* to do generally turns out to be non-spontaneous. But we'll see.

I'm going to let them have avatars and screen names if they want. I'm going to moderate the whole thing so that civility is maintained and so that random internet trolls can't come and abuse my babies. I may even link it to this blog so you all can watch them attempt to learn.

I'm trying to think of a catchy title for it. I'd love your suggestions...

-- Virgil