Burke reading

Hi everyone,

Okay, here's the plan, which formulated while Lindsay and I were talking about her action research poster for tomorrow:

I would love for you to read the entire Burke book. However, I'm also realizing we're up against a time crunch for finishing contract hours. The book is set up so that you can read it straight through according to the academic year, but you can also read it according to issues that the new teacher asks questions about. So what I would like you to do is choose 5-7 issues within the book that most call to you (they're broken down within the table of contents) and then read the letters exchange that deals with them. For posting on this blog, I would like you to respond to why you chose those issues and what you learned from the letters you read about those issues. How did they help you? Or if they didn't, why not? What advice would you have additionally hoped to receive if this advice wasn't entirely helpful?

Timeline: All your contract hours work must be completed by April 25th, so I would like you to have posted by the end of the day April 22nd. When I say end of the day, I mean posted before it becomes April 23rd, so you have until midnight. Whatever isn't posted by then won't be considered when I look at the "grading" I need to do to give you credit for your contract hours.

And speaking of "grading," here's how it will work: basically, I'll give you full credit for completing all the postings. If you're missing postings, you lose credit proportionally-- so if you only did one of the three required postings, you only get one-third of the credit. Not exactly rocket science, but it works.

Happy reading! I do wish in retrospect that we'd been able to meet in person. I'd hoped the blog would encourage online discussion, but it really didn't work as I'd wanted it to. I think it's too easy to put the blog off to "later" when there are so many face to face demands. Face to face would have been much better for this reading group. But we tried . . .