I’ve been meaning to post about my first couple of weeks of teaching (we started two weeks ago Wednesday), but the whole adjusting into a new place/position, three courses/three new preps, and working on revisions has pretty much got me focused on keeping afloat while trying to make sure I eat 2-3 meals and get roughly 6 hours of sleep every 24 hours or so. (A new goal is to try to spend less than 12 hours/day on campus on week days and less than 8 hours/day on the weekend. Today I was only there for 11 hours, although I did bring a few more hours of work home with me.)

First, there’s the New Media and Online Design course, which Tony Atkins was originally scheduled to teach. It’s a senior seminar for the professional writing students, and since I had little idea what to expect from them in terms of knowledge and experience, I decided to have a plan for the first few weeks and play it by ear. Turns out that was a good call because most haven’t made web sites before, let alone work with digital audio or video. And here I was thinking I was going to need to figure out how to trouble shoot Flash and Director… We started class with McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage and are currently discussing Ong’s “Wired for Sound” and “Digitization Ancient and Modern.” Our next reading is going to be Wysocki’s “The Multiple Media of Texts.” Meanwhile, we’re starting our first major assignment, Progymnasmata 2.0: Remediating a Fable, which I hope is really cool. I hope the students enjoy it as much as I enjoyed planning it.

I’m also teaching the second semester of composition, which is actually a second-year course here, titled College Reading and Writing II. The assignments are more proscribed than I’m used to, but there’s still plenty of freedom in course design. The first assignment, “The Playlist Narrative/Analysis,” I modified from an assignment Tony Atkins used this past summer after listening to Geof Sirc’s Computers and Writing keynote address. My modified version is also inspired by Sirc’s talk (I was there, too) and Dan Anderson‘s various assignments and theorizing of the playlist. We’re at the peer review stage for this assignment and we’re about to shift into the preliminary stages of the second essay, which means we’ve begun reading Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You as well as i-claim and They Say/I Say. We’ll be using the later two to analyze Johnson’s book. We’ll then read McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message, and the second essay will be a rhetorical analysis of how Johnson and McLuhan present their arguments. The third paper will recreate the complicating plagiarism assignment I used last semester, and the fourth will be a researched essay dealing with some aspect of media and its effects.

Finally, there is The Rhetorical Theory to 1900 class, which I think is going well. It’s a small class, but they’re engaged. I did decide to go with Craig Smith’s Rhetoric and Human Consciousness as our textbook, with student presentations coming out of Conley’s Rhetoric in the European Tradition. We’ll also be reading various primary texts, although there’s going to be an emphasis on Classical rhetoric. They are going to get more medieval rhetoric from me than they might get otherwise, including a text out of the Carruthers and Ziolkowski The Medieval Craft of Memory anthology. Probably Hugh of St. Victor’s The Three Best Memory Aids for Learning, but maybe Albertus Magnus’ Commentary on Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection or Thomas Bradwardine’s On Acquiring a Trained Memory.

The oddest thing for me is the overlap among the three courses. In the past, when I’ve taught more than one class, it’s either been two sections of the same course or a composition course and a literature course. This term, I’ve got three courses in which I found myself defining rhetoric, but for very different purposes and very different contexts, with very different readings leading up to those definitions. Likewise, today, in two different courses I was discussing orality-literacy studies issues, and even when there was overlap, it was for different purposes based upon different reasons. In the history of rhetoric class, in which we were discussing the emergence of rhetoric from myth and narrative, I drew from Ong’s discussion of mythos and logos in Ch. 10 (“Logos and Digitization”) of his unpublished Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization (LAH). Then, in the next class period, I discussed with the New Media class Ong’s published essay “Digitization Ancient and Modern,” a section of which comes out of LAH‘s Ch. 10, and which is in itself a spin-off of LAH. I didn’t plan to draw from LAH in both classes (or my own presentation “Ong’s Digital Turn“), but I did because it fit.