The Pace

While there is plenty of room in this blog for discourse about iPods and fingerprinting, the raison d'etre for this blog is reflecting on teaching the class "Writing in Electronic Environments."

Last semester, I blogged alongside my students, answering all of the questions I asked them to answer. Since my current students have not started blogging yet, I'm using my blog to put myself out there with a few "anticipation posts" -- a chance for my students to see behind the teaching, if you will.

I've been thinking about last semester's class. They complained that I went too fast, that they did not have enough time to prepare each writing assignment. When I redesigned my syllabus for this semester, I built in a lot of invention activities before each writing assignment. And now, I think my students feel the class is moving too slowly on the first assignment: the Technology Literacy Autobiography.

We are doing a little bit of writing each day -- talking about technology in general and moving towards talking about writing technologies. From a couple of questions - one in class and one out - I get the sense that they want to hurry up and write this paper. However, I'm not changing my game plan. Not because I think teachers should stick to the pre-planned schedule and never change (quite the opposite, actually), but because I think students are still very much in the process of discovering what they want to write.

They have a few ideas about technology and their own histories, some of them even have some great ideas about literacy and technology already. But I want to keep the pace slow so that they can discover all of the possible means of addressing this assignment before they commit to a single approach.

I'm never bored as a teacher for a whole bunch of reasons -- one of them is the continual process of figuring out the best pace for the class.