Grad student stuff

My second week as an official graduate student has come to an end. I have to admit, it's gone by pretty quickly, so I'm a bit anxious to start making some goals to make sure I'm focusing my efforts toward the things that I really want to accomplish. For now, I'm glad to report that I feel I have a pretty good rapport with my students, and I don' think I've screwed up anything too major as far as keeping up with my own classes. (As you can see, I have some high standards for myself...)

It's very exciting, actually, to be where we need to be now. I'm seeing more and more the ways that the masters program at Utah State is the right place for me. My classes are easing me nicely into working, thinking, and feeling like a graduate student. I have the opportunity to teach freshman and to get to know professors closely, which would be more difficult at any school that also had PhD students in need of those same experience and taking priority over masters students. I feel like I'm able to have good, solid ideas in my reading here, and I also have classmates and professors that are quite capable of challenging those ideas, adding to my observations, and helping me see things in new and different ways.

One of the most interesting things I'm studying is some of the research on composition teaching--a lot of which applies to all teaching. For instance, I've been reading about grading papers and how most grading simply stifles students' confidence and doesn't actually help them to learn. It's as if the teacher encourages them to think for themselves, but then once they get their graded paper back, they figure out that what the teacher really wants is for students to think like them. So, working on my students' first papers this week, I've been trying to figure out how exactly to comment on their work in a way that will encourage them to keep writing and yet justify the grade I've given them.

Anyway, I'm excited to keep moving forward with my grad school experiences. I'll try to let everyone know how things are going as they go.