This year is the first time in years that I have not had a freshman composition class on my teaching load, as part of a one-time development and renewal release from the class. As a writer and an English professor, naturally this is a course I enjoy and would dare say I'm good at teaching (since I've been doing it almost annually since 1992!). But after over ten years of teaching basic writing skills, it's actually a very welcome -- and renewing -- release, as I'm freed up to teach other courses in my specialization instead. We've just wrapped up Final's Week as Seton Hill U, and I've really had a dream term: a course in Poetry Writing and a course in the Art of Film. Next term it's Fiction Writing, Literary Criticism, and a new course I'm designing as a "Publication Workshop." All of these subjects are dear to me and it should go without saying that though the workload is as high as ever, I'm a very happy teacher this year.

But I keep thinking about freshman comp. It's hard not to, when I see my colleagues, literally, hunched behind their desks surrounded by portfolios of writing or pushing a shopping cart filled with binders down the hallway like a sooty worker heading back into the mineshaft. But I've also been rethinking my composition course design for the past few weeks, looking over the textbook (which is going into a new edition) and even attending faculty meetings about the course that I am not required to attend.

I must be crazy, right?

Well, only a little bit. Freshman comp is, like it or not, a crucial component of who I am and what I do. I kind of miss my role as usher as students trasition from high school into adult education. I miss opening new eyes before they get exhausted and jaded by their college experience. And now, when teaching upperclass students who still don't know how to write a thesis statement, it makes me want to teach them how to do so all the more.

Besides, at Seton Hill full time English faculty do not have the luxury of only teaching upper division courses in the major -- all of us, virtually, teach the freshman "Seminar in Thinking and Writing." (And our school is REALLY in the minority in this regard. One source reports that only 7% of the freshman composition courses in this country are taught by full time faculty!) Although I sometimes wonder whether my PhD could be put to better use by teaching the more advanced courses, our students and our relatively small campus -- and ultimately, all of our upper division courses -- are probably better off for having full time faculty with an investment in the college teaching the new freshman how to not only write but how to become a college-minded scholar.

I've got all sorts of new ideas now for when I approach the seminar again. But one thing I think I can do -- as a media scholar -- is make better use of video media in the course. One element of the course I'm considering altering is the way I have students give oral reports. Our Freshman Seminar is a two-term sequence and usually I videotape a formal "presentation of your research" speech the students give to the class in the fall and a less formal "storytelling with a theme" presentation they give in the spring...and then they write a comparison contrast paper on the two taped speeches, among other things. But as I perused an article by S. Alan Silliker in the Journal of Excellence in Teaching this morning, I read of an interesting experiment a teacher tried in having students videotape their speeches OUTSIDE of class in small groups and then later playing the tape to the class as a whole. This seemed to generate positive energy among the students and decreased the fear of public speaking that some have. I think I might try to integrate this technique next year, when I return to the composition fold, while at the same time continuing to have students get acclimated to speaking to a "crowd" through traditional means. I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this technique before...I usually pride myself on creatively approaching the class (you have to be creative if you don't want to bore yourself to tears teaching the same principle material year after year). So I think this "release" from teaching the freshman seminar has benefited me in this manner, in addition to battling teacher burnout. I can only imagine what a sabbatical would do! ;-)

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