The OED Assignment

Few freshmen have used their college library databases enough to appreciate the joys of the online Oxford English Dictionary. Every semester I assign a fun homework project in which each student has to pick one difficult word that they don't already know the definition for and look that up through the school's portal for the OED. The students share these words (with their definitions and year they were first seen in print) with the class. We write these words on the board and then try to construct one sentence using all of them.


It's a fun and quick class time activity that encourages the use of the library's databases, appreciation for English words and their history, group work, and sentence construction.


Here are the two sentences we constructed this semester. (The first class is much smaller than the second, so that sentence is shorter.)





After a mumpsimus absquatulated with my skinking selcouth phone, I pandiculated into a juxtaposition of taxonomy.





My Quixotic fere, through enlightened self-interest, maligned an insidious plethora of ostentatiousness requiring dastardly bacteriotherapy and a magirical unguent that prorepted into an interbation of lifelong jejunes which made him trepidatious of effrontery. 

Skype - Student/Teacher Conferences of the “Future”!

At the beginning of the fall semester, 2011, I was dealing with a scheduling conflict that was going to require that I drive 45 minutes (each way) one extra day of class just to hold office hours where my students may or may not have actually visited me. As an adjunct, my office would have been a cramped room with other adjuncts present (not an ideal place for a student to voice serious concerns).  I had considered making the long, gas burning journey on an extra day every week just to sit in the coffee shop in the library and spend even more of my meager salary sipping overpriced coffee while wishing that my students cared as much about their college careers as I did.

It just didn’t make sense.  Why waste so much time, money, and gasoline while actually helping no one?

I needed to re-think my responsibilities as their teacher. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that although the “Office Hours” requirement is very much needed, the way we conduct our office hours needs to change. I needed to find a better way to interact one-on-one with my students.

Although students SHOULD prefer human interaction, it’s not our job to change what technological evolution is causing. Our job is to teach the material, to follow guidelines, and to mentor students into their next classes.

Here is a video explaining what happened when I skyped with my students:

New Project Ideas

A new semester has started and I'm already thinking of projects that inform and improve my teaching. The first project will deal with my basic writing classes at Nashville State. I would like to actually rethink the way we are teaching remedial courses from refreshers to being ESL based. I'll have details later after I do some initial research, but I am starting to feel that we need to redo the course as if it is a NEW language altogether. The second project will be based on using Skype for student-teacher conferences at MTSU. I feel that students are more comfortable with video chat than actual human interaction - especially when it comes to communicating with a teacher. Of course, I'll start with a little research before I continue.