Woohoo! I remembered to blog for once!

                Well, um… I am not entirely sure where to start. I guess I’ll say that I did thoroughly enjoy the class; it was a very fun semester. I don’t remember if you said that you were trying to become a full time teacher or if it is just a grad student thing to have to teach English 103. But, if you do want to become a full time teacher, keep up the good work. If not, well, that’s a shame; you could be a good one. I definitely enjoyed this class more than most of the other English classes I’ve taken, and it is probably the only class I took this semester where everyone knew everyone’s names and talked like good friends. As much as I love a good lecture, this class was a welcome departure to liven up my weeks. It did not hurt that the class work was not terribly difficult. Writing has not, is not, and never will be my strong suit. As such, I have a tendency to struggle quite badly through most English classes, but most writing assignments we had in this class were relevant and interesting enough that it was easy to get into writing about them. Plus one for Ms. Britenburg (have I spelled it right yet?). Granted while the work was not very hard, it was copious. I do not think I had more than two Sundays this semester where I was not procrastinating, trying to start writing the draft of something that was due that Monday. Granted, I could have used my time more wisely and not done every assignment at nine o’clock the morning of the due date, but… well… no.

                I thought that, all in all, you did a solid job teaching English 103. I only really have one complaint; that being, there was a severe lack of direction on the major projects, especially the final one. I understand that part of creating a composition assignment is leaving it open ended for the students to get creative with it. However, there is a balance that has to be met between, leaving space for creative minds and making sure everyone is clear on what is expected. I am going to use the final project as an example because it was the greatest offender. For the first week of that project our entire group had literally no idea whatsoever as to what we were going to do for our project because, frankly, we did not know what the project was. All we knew was make an argument, use pictures over words, and 3000 words. That was literally all you would give us; we need more direction than that.

                I don’t want to end on that because you are genuinely a good teacher and you taught a good class. Also I have thirty words left. I think that you have a natural talent for interacting with students and have a solid command over the English language. As such, with a little work, you could make a damn good English teacher. You’re already a lot better than what I normally expect from a grad student teaching the course.