Cover Letter

To Dean Griffith:

The enthusiasm for education that you exhibited makes me want to keep learning.

The kindness and care that you showed me, makes me want to pass it on.

You will be sorely missed but may your light live on.

I am grateful for having known you.  You helped make me a better person.

Rhode-Elise St. Jacques

Professor Peele

ENGL B5700 Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric

Portfolio Cover Letter

May 19, 2015

In this e-portfolio, the reader will find the all of the work I completed this semester in English B5700 Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric arranged from recent to last.  This arrangement is so readers can find the assignments without much difficulty.  I chose this platform because I found it accessible and easy to navigate.  I did not, however, foresee the limitations.  Blogger does not allow for easy inclusion of my classmates’ and professor’s comments.  However because it is a fairly comprehensible platform, I am pleased to have chosen it.

When I signed up for Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric, I knew the work would be challenging, but as a prospective teacher of writing, I believed that the information I would learn would be valuable.  Therefore, I enrolled expecting that by the end of the course, the information I would have learned would affect my teaching practice. 

Every week in this class, I have practiced critical reading of scholarship and research on the subject of composition and rhetoric, and I wrote essays that apply to those theories in order to analyze the published texts and offer my observations.  One of my favorite readings this semester was Sara Webb-Sunderhaus’s “A Family Affair: Competing Sponsors of Literacy in Appalachian Students’ Lives.”  This article helped me view my students holistically and understand that there are various factors that affect their performance in the classroom including their relationships with family members who at times inhibit their success in the classroom.  The article talked about a student who had to lose a year of school due to illness and another whose marital issues made it difficult for her to continue her schooling.

Webb-Sunderhaus’s article made me see that, as stated in my Blackboard response:

Though we may want to do whatever it takes to help our students, as teachers, our resources may be limited.  We cannot provide marital rescue nor can we provide cures for diseases.  But we can encourage our students in other ways.

Those other ways include leading them to the proper resources.  The article reminded me of the times when in college, certain familial difficulties, such as my mother’s health and my family’s overall financial constraints, made being able to focus in school a challenge.  Though my professors were unable to fix my personal problems, they were able to lead me to resources, such as to the department of student affairs, where I was able to get the help that I needed.

One of the best aspects about English B5700 was using digital literacies for classroom discussions.  These allowed me much deeper understanding of the reading materials.  For our eight blog post, I had difficulty replying because I was not sure I understood the readings for that week.  On the discussion board I posted, “my reason for not having a traditional response today is that I do not understand the reading.  I have a lot of questions.” 

It was difficult for me to admit my confusion because I felt that I was not participating in the discussion.  One classmate appeased me by admitting that she, too, had not quite understood the readings.  The professor answered my questions and that made me feel somewhat better because I realized that my limited understanding of the readings was accurate.  Though having to respond to the readings every week was at times challenging, the discussions that our responses generated were very helpful to me this semester.

The course required that students conduct independent research on any topic involving language and literacy.  I chose to research the best pedagogical practices for teaching English to speakers of other languages.  This project allowed me to acquire a strong knowledge base of contemporary English Second Language theory.  I was also required to write a twenty-page report of my findings.  In this report, I listed the theories of English language instruction that I learned.  Some of the different methods include adding music to the adult ESL classroom, taking adult ELLs (English language learners) on field trips in order to help them acquire vocabulary and better acclimate in their new culture and allowing ELLs to choose from a variety of writing prompts so they will be more likely to perform well on tests.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned which helped me gain a deeper understanding of my goals as a teacher is how to grade student papers. Throughout the semester, we discussed evaluating student papers for content and valuing process and not just product.

For our tenth post, I shared that I had recently graded papers for a freshman composition course in which the students mostly earned Cs.  They were very upset and I felt terrible.  That was a pivotal week for me because though I stuck to my decisions, having been given an assessment rubric from which to base my evaluations, I realized that the system is broken.  Students are expected to deliver in an area they were not taught.  I know that when I become an instructor, I will have to grade for grammar, but I believe that I will not penalize my students for what I have not taught them and do my best to set them up for success.

Overall, Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric was a worthy class.  I hope that the lessons that I learned will serve me as continue on my path to adult education.