Week Three: Types of Assignments for FYC

Based on your teaching philosophy (which may change over time), what are types of assignments which you would include in a FYC syllabus?

Due to my belief that teaching should always involve an interaction between students and their instructors, rather than a time teachers devote to cramming information down uninterested students’ throats, I believe that it is necessary to have students engage with texts and with writing each class period.  Through a variety of writing and reading assignments and exercises, students learn to recognize their strengths and weaknesses within their own writing, which helps them avoid making the same mistakes in the future.  I do, however, believe that these assignments need to be carefully selected and molded to the specific class and their abilities to perform within the discipline of composition and rhetoric.  Activities of this nature that would prove to be the most beneficial would need to have a specific focus and learning outcome that the student could both perceive and attain through careful work.  These assignments need to be explained in class, with their purposes delineated (when necessary) and with examples that might guide the students while working.  I do acknowledge, in some cases, that it might be better to avoid providing an example, as doing so might limit the students’ potential.

            A type of assignment that would serve as a useful tool in the teaching of FYC might be, what I’ll term, a “Verb-Identifying” assignment.  Many students are not aware that strong, active verbs are indicative of strong writing.  By providing excerpts from a persuasive piece, a critical analysis, and a creative writing piece (say, a poem) and then having students identify the verbs within the excerpts, the subjects of the sentence, and the tenses of the verbs, students would understand the importance of utilizing strong, specific verbs in their writing.  This assignment would give students the opportunity to interact directly with a variety of different texts, and it would even be more beneficial if expanded past verb identification and were to include transition words and phrases as well. 

            Another assignment I think it would be useful for students to engage in is one in which students are provided with samples of writing that all exhibit a range of differing tones. They should then be asked to read the samples (which each should be 3-5 pages in length), after which they have to state the tone that they author (or speaker) adopts in his/her piece.  Following identification of the tone, students should be required to identify the audience of the piece and to indicate why the tone might have been used as it was.  Students should also identify certain rhetorical choices that the author makes in employing that specific tone and how those choices invoke the tone.  This activity would teach students how to identify an audience within a text, along with teaching them how to identify rhetorical choices; by focusing closely upon these devices within a few texts, students will hopefully begin to understand how authors employ rhetoric, which might aid them in their own writing. 

            Finally, I feel that the students should engage in some sort of writing activity a few times a week that will allow them, following their time spent in class, to trace the progress of their writing skills.  I think requiring two or three weekly blog posts would cause students to practice their skills throughout the week, allowing them to continually work on the craft.  Although I do not think that the blog prompts should be too prescriptive, I think they should set appropriate boundaries for the students. Each should include a minimum word count of 300 words, to ensure that students have to take the time to consider HOW they will craft a response of that length.  I also think that each post should have a different “theme” to it.  One post should be a thoughtful response to an assigned reading that other students might benefit from reading; a second post might be a persuasive piece, or an ad, in which students attempt to persuade the reader of something (which the student might choose as long as it is appropriate for the classroom).  The third blog should be open for the students to choose what genre of entry to submit.  This assignment would engage students in writing frequently, and would allow peers to interact with less restraints, which might work to benefit learning outcomes on a classroom, rather than individual, level.