To The Farmers Market

The Troy Waterfront Farmers Market is one of the finest farmers markets I have ever seen, and the first time I had gone was last weekend. This is November. It was inside and it still had at least thirty vendors peddling vegetables, meat, fruit, dairy products, yarn, soaps, breads, wines, and who knows what else I missed. It is held in the Uncle Sam Atrium on Third and Fourth Streets in Troy, New York, and it is a fabulous experience that you should participate in should you get the chance. It meets every Saturday from 10 to 2.

It may seem odd that I bring this Farmers Market up when it seems like it has little to do with TA'ing or teaching English. Well, it is not odd. It does have a purpose. One of the state ELA standards is concerned with students ability to read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction. Another states that, "students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding."

In class today, we talked about an "extra credit" project as well as the final exam. The extra credit project will revolve around the Farmers Market. Students are being asked to attend in one of two groups, the first attending at 11 with The Professor, the other attending at 1 with myself. We are asking students to talk to the farmers and even other patrons. Yes, it is college, but the state standards are still something of importance, and we are covering them with out even trying. On top of this, we are encouraging a college community to integrate with the local community. As this was not a goal of my undergraduate university of study (that I spoke to the former Dean of Students about) - St. Lawrence University - it is something that I feel is deeply important to fostering a higher-learning community.

In regards to the final exam, students will be writing an essay concerning the article from Harper's that I found and shared with The Professor the other day, and another author - probably one we read previously in class. I helped create the final with out even intending to do so. Hooray for collaboration of a sort.

Jude in the Classroom

The other day I posted a list of books that I need for this class that I am undertaking independently. I have some further information about that, but I'll get to it later.

This past vacation I spent a good deal of time reading Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Now I am not done with the book; in fact, I am probably a good quarter of the way done, but I am beginning to really like what Hardy has to say. In the first part the main character - Jude - decided to study on his own and become a scholar; unfortunately, his plans were way-laid by a woman. It was not that he had fallen in love with the woman of mention and decided to marry her, but she wanted to become betrothed and in turn lied to our hero Jude and told him she was pregnant. Jude, being an honourable young man, married for the pregnancy as it was the proper thing to do; however, in the end, it turned out she consciously lied.

Students are not usually big into reading, so it is important that we find novels that fit state guidelines, but at the same time, have qualities that interest them. While Jude the Obscure may be a bit of a difficult text for high schoolers, I think some of the males may take to it as this image of a woman lying about pregnancy, or in fact, becoming pregnant, in order to keep a man from leaving is something they may have seen in their lives.

With that said, I will get back to the first few lines I spewed forth. My list has begun to dwindle. I ordered Jude the Obscure, and The Professor gave me Waugh's The Loved One. Also, I would like to make a special mention of thanks to my friend the Semi-Gleaner who gave me a copy of Forster's A Passage to India which he acquired illegally in Italy. (The publishers of this edition noted on the front cover that it is illegal to re-sell the text anywhere but the United States.) On top of all these texts seemingly falling into my lap, I have the Sixth Edition of Norton's English Literature, which has both Wilde's, and Beckett's works in it.

Thanksgiving Drafts

The students third rough draft is coming up; it's due the Monday after Thanksgiving Break. The due date was supposed to be the Monday before break, but things got pushed back and the students had some work to do over break. Initially, there was some groaning, but I stepped in and told them I had work due on the actual Day of Thanks. Yes, it is an online class and we are at will to get our work done, but none-the-less, there were things due on Thanksgiving.

The students really have three choices for their essays - I will not explain them here. I will, however, go over the main ideas. As this is a sort of environmentally based unit, topics focus on environmental ideas - global warming, war's impact on the environment, animal rights, the food industry, etc. I have made my contributions to the intellectual information that was expelled towards the students, but upon returning to my apartment on that sunny Monday afternoon before Thanksgiving Break, I found something else that would help the students.

I opened my door to find my that my mailbox had sprung open and spewed forth my mail onto the concrete sill-way between my screen and wooden doors. Apparently, my mail box can not hold magazines too well, and there on the floor was the December issue of Harper's. In this month's issue is an article regarding animal rights, and the white mouse that has become so loved in science laboratories all over the world. It raised some interesting points, and it could have been of use to the students, not only for it's content, but also because it was current. I read the article, made sure it was relevant, and e-mailed The Professor who then e-mailed the rest of class. Exciting, eh?

Buy Me Books

I have confidence that most English majors, or English teachers find solace in libraries and bookstores. More so bookstores than libraries, as the bookstore allows for ownership. They allow the buyer to purchase a ticket to a world unknown.

There's two types of book stores - chain bookstores, and private bookstores. In the private bookstores there is a quiet resemblant of the silence in a library. A silence allowing the books to do the talking. The calling out to a new audience delicately tip toeing through lengths of shelves that need a ladder to reach the top. A book gives us direct insight to the author's mind; an intimate relationship unattainable any other way, and a bookstore is full of hundreds of these relationships waiting to bloom.

Unfortuatnely, as a college student, new or used books are too expensive and instead we must turn to websites like Amazon.com. It is no bookstore, but it suffices. The other day I mentioned that I spoke with The Professor about the class I will be taking with her. We ended up putting a tentative book list together. It is as follows (they're all links):

Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
Oscar Wilde - "The Importance of Being Earnest"
Samuel Beckett - Endgame
E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
Evelyn Waugh - The Loved One
W.Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence
John Fowles - The Magus
Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Zadie Smith - White Teeth

It's British Lit, and while I've read the classics - "The Rape of the Lock", Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein - but I'm looking forward to reading some more current stuff, and some other classics.

If you have money and don't know what to do with it, buy me the cheapest books on this list.

Because Writing Is Just Not Enough

On Wednesday and Thursday nights I devoted myself to a cause: writing fifteen pages. Fifteen pages isn't really all that much; I've written more, but this paper was of a different style. I am used to writing creatively for fifteen pages, or analyzing a text for fifteen pages, but this paper I was not ready for. It was a literature review, and there is something about writing a document that is almost entirely referenced that makes me feel incredibly less accomplished than if I had written fifteen pages of my ideas.

I finished the paper Thursday night, and was ready to spend Friday relaxing watching television letting my brain turn to mush. That was not what I ended up doing. I met with The Professor Friday afternoon to discuss a class that I will be taking with her independently, and as the discussion wound down we decided to go get some coffee and grade the students' third reflection paper. We each had ten, and she finished a bit before me, but had other work to do so I wasn't left alone. It took me three hours or so to grade them. This may seem like a long time to grade ten papers of two pages in length - and it probably is - but I'm getting better. Earlier in the semester it would have taken me much longer, and this time I did it in one sitting.

The students' papers were still riddled with errors that we've discussed in class - run-ons, citations, possessives, etc. - but the grades were higher, and it is evident that the students writing has improved from the beginning of the semester. On top of this, at the beginning I was apprehensive about grading, but this is changing. I'm not the most assertive person in respect to judging people, and I'm not always so sure if I'm grading too hard, or not hard enough, but The Professor read two papers that I also read, and we both gave them the same grades within a plus or minus.

In the end, grading papers was probably better than wasting away on the couch with radiation shooting at me from the wall. And, believe it or not, it was relaxing. By the way, that isn't a picture of me.

Group/Individual Help

The Professor was better today. She handed the classes Final Paper Number Two back to them with comments and marks - lots of marks. Most of the marks were typical proofreading marks, but she introduced two new marks that she wanted students to work with. The marks were placed along the left margin of particular lines - a check if the Professor found a particular point to be exceptionally strong, and a dash if the Professor found some sort of error - usually grammatical.

Students were to look over their papers and notice the checks and dashes. They then got in groups of two and attempted to figure out why the dashes were in place. While this was going on, the Professor and I milled about making sure groups were on task as well as making sure that students were correcting and finding the proper issues denoted by the dashes. Inevitably, some students had more marks than others. Some students found themselves attempting to fix every other line of their paper, while others found themselves searching for dashes to correct.

The most common mistakes I saw surrounded the inclusion of quotes. Many students failed to properly introduce a quote and ended up with redundant statements that needed to be fixed. Others simply dropped the quote in the paper with out any sort of introduction, or synthesis of the quote. The Professor and I have discussed these issues before, and some of the students are getting it; others are not. Another huge problem with quotes was citation. Now, I am no APA pro. I spent most of my college days using Chicago, or MLA, and consequently I do not know the finer points of APA by heart. However, I do know how to properly cite a quote. I have a general rule, and it may not always be correct, but it is ninety-five percent of the time. If you can't figure out what to include in your parenthesis look at your works cited. What belongs in the parenthesis is probably the first thing you see in the citation for that article. One thing I saw a lot of, and I'm not incredibly sure where students learned it or why they are doing it, but they have been inserting complete url's as a citation. Not okay.

Another big problem that seemed to be found in over half the papers was students using the forbidden comma splice, or using incomplete sentences - sentence fragments. Apparently my lesson on the comma splice didn't strike the hearts of all of them.

Plagiarism Vs. Paraphrasing

I awoke this morning in my apartment and thought I was sleeping in a tent. I have no insulation in my ceiling, or my walls. It was cold. It was ten o'clock when my phone rang with The Professor on the other end explaining to me her battle with a sinus infection, and asking me to take the class on today. Her requests were simple:

1.) Go over plagiarism and paraphrasing. Apparently some of the students had difficulty paraphrasing in their final draft of paper number two. Instead of paraphrasing, they changed a few words and subsequently plagiarized. In the world of literature, plagiarism is not a more-or-less topic, you either have plagiarized, or you have not.

2.) Students were to hand in their third reflection piece today, and I was to go over their paraphrasing in those papers with them.

They were not heavy tasks for me to accomplish, and I feel I got them done appropriately. I began by getting students to give the class their definitions of paraphrasing and many of them explained that paraphrasing is simply not using a piece of text word for word. I sort of cringed at this. Unfortunately, I think this is what we teach students. More often then not, students think plagiarism is using an exact copy of part of a text; they don't seem to grasp the fact that in order to really paraphrase, they need to put the entire quote in their own words.

I put a quote on the board from the Funk article that students read for class the previous class and had them attempt to paraphrase it. The students that opted to share their paraphrasing had completed the task correctly, but I'm not sure of the students that didn't opt to share. The ones that share clearly have a grasp as they have the confidence to share with the class.

I then decided to explain to them how to go about paraphrasing. It is not the quickest technique, but it pretty much guarantees you won't exactly plagiarize. When we look at a quote, we need to glean the facts from it. If we can figure out the bare-bones facts that we are interested in we can do away with the quote and the language the author used. We then take these facts and put them into our own words, and make the connection using our own language. At this point, you should have a statement that doesn't mirror that of the original quote, but still contains the main ideas. Of course we need to reread the original quote and make sure ours is not the same, and even more importantly, we need to remember to cite. The ideas are not ours and therefore need a citation.

I also had the class exchange papers and read through them looking for paraphrasing/plagiarism as well as other grammar issues we had discussed in class - run-ons, comma splices, in-text citations, and comma usage. While this may not be full bore peer-editing, it is a beginning, and will eventually allow students to edit their own work more efficiently.

Belief Pusher-Man

When I first told you a bit about myself, I failed to mention that I was an Environmental Studies - English Major. You may be wondering what exactly that is, and I will give you this brief answer. Environmental Literature. You can figure the rest out from there if you care so much. Anyway, the third unit of the class I'm TA'ing recently began and the readings, and ideas are ones close to my heart.

Recently the students read an article from Harper's by McKenzie Funk. They read a piece from Aldo Leopold - one of my favorites - and for Monday they will be reading a piece from Leslie Marmon Silko. All of these pieces are of interest to myself, and so when the students ask questions, or look to me for answers it's extremely difficult for me to give a clear unbiased answer. I find myself interjecting my own agenda about global warming or animal rights. I take into account all the texts I've read concerning environmental ethics. While it is a teachers job to encourage students to think - this may be accomplished by throwing your passion into what you do - it is important not to be so one sided as to not see the other. If we do not acknowledge or teach both sides of a point we are doing nothing but brainwashing. Yes, it would be nice if all of our students decided to believe in our individual system of beliefs, but believing requires understanding all sides and choosing the one best suited for you.

In reflection, I guess I shouldn't have said that the US Government doesn't care or acknowledge global warming because when the Arctic is substantially melted in fifteen to twenty years, the US will expand it's control of natural resources, and will be the proud new owners of over half a trillion dollars of petroleum. Oops.

Jobby Jobs

I will have a job next year, and not one beeping groceries. A real job where I teach secondary level students in English Language Arts. If I don't, then I might just have to go back to Asia. Perhaps Taiwan this time.

Hopefully, this real job of mine will be in the City. Yes, New York City. Today at work, I was beeping some news papers, and I noticed the New York Post was running an article on NYC schools, and the new "report card" that the city put out on schools. There was also an article in the New York Times. At first it sounds fine and dandy, but like much of the school ranking going on with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), it leaves some margin for error. A large margin.

One of my main concerns with these reports is that there is substantial weight put on student improvement. NCLB tests at particular grade levels every year, and measures improvement on these scores. Two different groups of students are being tested. The tests done in NYC were given to the same group of students as they progressed through the school. So if the fourth graders were given a test, they were also given a test in fifth grade and this progress was measured. Progress is good, but one of the problems we see with both of these ranking systems is that the schools on top don't get that fair shake they so deserve. If a student gets a ninety-five this year, I'm going to go ahead and wager they won't do so well next year. If a student gets a sixty-five this year, chances are with a little intervention they'll do better next year. So even if your sixty-five student improved ten points, they wouldn't be doing as well as your ninety-five student that declined ten points, but the school with the improvement gets a better ranking. Consequently, I'm not really sure how much we can glean from these types of reports.

Anyway, if you're interested, the website to see the "report cards" on the 1,224 city schools that got ranked it's here:

NYC School Progress Reports

The link takes you to a page where the results are in a downloadable xls file.

Gleaning

The other day, the Professor was out and I had to begin students in on the third unit by showing them the video The Gleaners and I. An interesting video I suppose, but way too long. Whoever edited this video needs to go back to school and re-learn how to edit. While I was showing it, the projector got too hot and shut off. I was sitting at my desk, enjoying the video while perusing the crowd of students making sure no one was using this as nap time when the video cut out. I had no idea how long I would have to wait for it to properly cool off, I did not have anything really for the students to do, and I knew I could not just let them go. I got up to the front of the class, and about half of them looked at me with those tilted faces and coy smiles assuming I was going to let them go. I was not.

I began to talk about the video. Gleaning. It was something - in this video - of the late 1800's and early 1900's. Poor people would go into farm fields after they had been picked over by the machines and pick up any left over product they could possibly eat. Some of the students found this to be slightly awkward. The whole idea of picking up left-over food and using it as your own. I went further into gleaning, and spoke about the individuals that wander around markets after their culmination and pluck any left-over food from the ground.

This last idea really irked some students. They found it "disgusting". However, a few of the students looked on in silence with a look on their face that explained to me that while maybe they were not forced to scrounge food out of the trash to survive as children, they know what it is to not have.

As I continued talking about gleaning I realized that this gleaning of food was foreign to the students and they needed something real life, so I began coming up with examples. The first example I used was my grandparents. My grandparents go to Florida every winter and like most grandparents mine are cheap. A good deal is a good deal and should be taken. I think Florida caters to this. Anyway, for five dollars - or so I have been told - you can get a five gallon bucket and go through a tomato field that the machines have already been through and pick up any tomatoes still there. God bless capitalism, eh? Pay for something that would otherwise rot and go to waste.

After the first example, the students still seemed a bit distant and did not seem to care too much. The second example got them. At least it got most of them:

"I have a friend who is unemployed. He lives at home and has no steady source of income. He makes money on the internet, on Ebay. You know those "trash pick-up days" when everyone throws their junk into big piles for the town to come pick up?" I got some nods of agreement but mostly looks of confusion. "Well, my buddy goes around and picks up stuff that is getting thrown out and could be re-sellable, like bicycles, or gym equipment. He makes some decent money this way. It's gleaning."

With this last example the students all seemed to nod in understanding. Whether they understood what I was saying, or they were finally understanding that they were going to sit in their desks and listen to me blabber while the projector cooled down, I am not sure. I continued to ramble on for a bit and somehow - although, I cannot recall now - I got talking about the Irish Potato Famine, and the lesser known Southern Corn Blight of the 1970's, and then the film started back up.

We finished the film today. The Professor was there and the students acted no differently. All incredibly unenthused about the video, and still slightly disturbed by this idea of "urban gleaning" in markets and along street sides. Maybe we should have watched a few episodes of Sanford and Son instead, but the library probably does not have the DVD's in their possession.