Thursday, June 14, 2012

Summer 2012 Writing Course: Syllabus


I've spent my blogging time this morning polishing the syllabus for my summer writing course, so I'm going to inflict the result upon my sharp-eyed readers, who will catch my errors and politely point them out:

Syllabus
Ewha Writing Intensive School
Horace Jeffery Hodges

We will meet four days (M-Th) per week from 9 to 12 each day for four weeks, with two short breaks every day dividing each class time into three sessions, 1) Discussion, 2) Lesson on Writing Skills, and 3) In-Class Writing Practice, as shown below:

Time: 9 am-12 pm. (4 days a week: Total 4 weeks)
Daily Schedule
9:00-10:00
Discussion
Analysis of Writing Samples: Excerpts from Magazines, Journals, Books and so on.
10:00-11:00
Lesson on Writing Skills
Lessons on the Mechanics of Writing: Grammar/Syntax/Structure/Organization/Style/Coherence/Analysis of Student Writings.
11:00-12:00
In-Class Writing Practice
Application of Lessons:
 Outline and Draft Creation/Format Styles/Peer Editing/Instructor Feedback/Review of Student Writings.
(Short breaks between class sessions)

We will not rigidly adhere to this schedule, but remain flexible enough to meet students' needs.

Week 1: Sentences and Paragraphs

Week 2: Entire Essay

Week 3: Entire Essay with Citations and Bibliography

Week 4: Entire Essay with Citations and Bibliography

The aim of the course will be to work on a research paper with either MLA style or APA style. Googling "OWL Purdue" will introduce you to these styles.

Materials for Course:

There will be no textbook, but handouts will be provided. You will need to bring a laptop computer to class each day (keep the batteries charged) since we will work every day on writing. From each student, I will need a Gmail address (or other non-Korean address) because Korean email companies reject my emails as spam.

My Qualifications:

If I'm allowed to exaggerate, I've been teaching writing for 38 years! At seventeen, I was once asked by my high school English teacher to grade and correct the essays for his tenth grade class. My career perhaps started then, but I didn't work as grader and corrector of essays again until my senior year at Baylor University, when I was twenty-one and worked for two semesters doing that. I left Baylor with a BA in English literature, but studied history at UC Berkeley for my MA and PhD. As a graduate student, I taught undergraduates from the time I was 23 until I finished my doctorate, and I've been teaching writing courses regularly ever since.

I've tried to find time to write a bit myself, and I've published over thirty articles in the humanities (using MLA, APA, and CMS styles), around twenty-five poems, and about five short stories. In my pursuit of graduate and postdoctoral studies on various scholarships, e.g., Fulbright, Friedrich Naumann, and Golda Meir fellowships, I have also done a lot of writing, primarily academic pieces. I have worked editing my wife's translations of Korean literature on grants offered by the Korea Literature Translation Institute, along with other editing work for various scholarly journals, all of which entails a lot of rewriting other people's work. Finally, I have worked for the Daesan Foundation as a judge of Korean literature in English translation, which requires me to offer some editorial remarks about translations that need some touching up.

Those are my qualifications, I reckon . . .
There it is, my summer syllabus in all its chartered glory, laid out for your critiques, dear readers!

Labels: ,

2 Comments:

At 4:06 AM, Blogger Kevin Kim said...

Nicely done. However, you mention short breaks but don't schedule them into your work day. Assuming you'd like to give the kids 10-minute breaks and still wish to end at noon, how about:

9:00-9:53 (53mn)

10:03- 10:56 (53mn)

11:06-12:00 (54mn)

Or, if you don't like starting at oddly numbered times, you could extend the classes a bit past noon:

9:00-10:00 (60mn)

10:10- 11:10 (60mn)

11:20-12:20 (60mn)

You could also make the above into 5-minute breaks and finish at 12:10 every day:

9:00-10:00 (60mn)

10:05- 11:05 (60mn)

11:10-12:10 (60mn)

Was denken Sie?

 
At 4:17 AM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

I haven't decided yet. Partly, this depends on what the students prefer. I also need first to find out what's officially expected.

Thanks for doing some heavy lifting for me. I needed to think about this.

Jeffery Hodges

* * *

 

Post a Comment

<< Home