WELCOME

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversation Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!


--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100

Monday, January 3, 2011

Mary's Intro

Hey Everybody! In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a writing instructor at WCC and some of you are taking my Eng 100 class! I have been teaching language and writing for quite some time and I would like to share with you here some of my favorite teaching experiences: When I was an undergraduate student I studied abroad in Quito, Ecuador and taught English to elementary school students there. At the time, I didn't speak Spanish very well and had never taught a class before. Most of my students were indigenous who spoke Quechua first, Spanish second and they were adorable, but absolutely full of energy! Needless to say, I did not have much "control" over my classroom. I remember (fondly now) one day when I tried to make them all sit quietly in their desks, but instead they all at once opted to run screaming and laughing around the classroom, arms in the air, tearing paper off the walls!!! But after a few weeks they became more attentive (my Spanish was improving?) and I learned to love teaching from them and I have never stopped. I still miss my little energized bunch...

Since then, I've taught English in Guatemala, Spanish in the states, high school science at an inner city school in Minneapolis, MN, reading and writing at a bilingual elementary school in Minneapolis, and college writing at Western Washington University (more stories to come from other experiences:). This is my second year teaching at WCC and I seriously love this school. I think my new students will make some good memories (except I do hope you don't go destroying the classroom:).
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