Another day

and I finally finished Reclaiming the Imagination. After a month. Egads. Now, I pick up the pace and actually make progress on the dissertation. Actually, I must create my syllabus for ENG 225. I’m really excited about teaching this course–it’s an advanced composition class and I get to design the course completely, but I’m a little nervous about that. This is my first go at creating a course syllabus without collaborating with other people or relying on Writing Program guidelines. I have created “dream courses” for seminars before, but I’ll actually be teaching this one. And soon. August 25th soon.

I hope to create a course that will lead to some more research for my dissertation: I want to focus on what the genre of the essay is/can do for writers and also focus on the invention practices of my students somehow. I’ve been looking at syllabi from previous 225 classes, and nobody’s really done anything like this, so I do feel like I’m inching out on a limb here, especially since I want to interview students in this upcoming class for my diss. Ack.   I have some assignment ideas, but I worry that I am in too much of a “first-year writing class” mentality (I’ll be dealing with sophomore-senior students from a variety of majors) and that I am actually completely incapable of creating valuable (and fun) assignments. I guess I should read through the texts I ordered for this class and figure it all out. Those texts are Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and The Story and a collection called The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata. I really like the texts; I also need to figure out other, supplemental kinds of readings (how much style stuff to include? from what books? what about rhetorical theory?) and put it all together into some kind of coherent set of documents.