The Latest

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I did a great job for the first half of the year writing consistently in this blog. I set a goal to get to it four to five times a week in order to beat my best year of writing consistently (200 posts in 2008) and do way better than last year (only 45 posts in all of 2013), but then I fell off---I am not sure why. My life didn't get busier--it got slower. I am more productive when I have a lot to do and sloth-like when I have less to do. But I will try to get to the blog more often. It's like if someone told me I had to do it, I would, but since I'm the only one paying attention, I let it slide.

My Penn degree arrived in the mail yesterday.  I am not even quite certain what the degree is MLA? LPS? MRS? It's a Master's in liberal studies of some kind. It was not inexpensive to get, even though since I worked at Penn, much of the coursework was covered by my benefits. But the way that goes is you can take a limited number of classes per year, so if you don't want to spend ten years toward a degree, you end up covering some of the costs to expedite the process. But Penn has been generous with me as a student and as an employee, and I got some writing done there, and so I have no complaints.



The other cool thing that's in the works is that I will be teaching a comp course at Rider in the fall. I met yesterday with the director of the rhetoric program and the head of the English department and got a ton of suggestions for course books. I lugged them home to go through them this weekend. I'm  intimidated and excited to get back to teaching. I love it, and I know it can be all-consuming. Unless you're the kind of teacher who coasts and structures the class so that the students present or it's half about workshops, you have to prep for your lesson plan all the time. The class I'm teaching is an introduction to writing, so I will need to spend time talking about thesis statements and argumentation and paragraph development.

Here are the books that were suggested. Let me know if you think of others, particularly if there are any grammar books you like:




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