Childcare at conferences

Super quick post:

Peskowitz on childcare at conference.

I'm going to a conference next week, and they sent out an email to participants offering to organize cooperative childcare. If you want to have care for your children, then you sign up for a couple of hours to work in the childcare area. Those who use the service also provide the service. That could be a great way to provide help to parents who need to bring their kids along, but it also has the potential to fail due to lack of participation. If only a few participants want childcare, then only a few people will be covering hours. Having one contact person organize it helps. The more often these kinds of services are offered, the more often people will consider taking their kids along to conferences, making it easier for everybody to make the parent/career thing work. I took RB with me once, but I also brought my husband along and she was still small enough to strap to my chest. I'm going to a big conference for several days in May and I would not consider bringing her with me now. We're still figuring out how everything is going to work--I'm sure I'll have a lot on that in the next two months.

more anxiety

I just agreed to a phone conference with the absent advisor next week. I hate being on the phone, but I have got to have a live conversation. I'm afraid that bringing in other committee members at this stage will only complicate things further. So now I have telephone anxiety.

Diss anxiety welling up

Got an email from my absent advisor (been on leave all year) on my little pieces of diss proposal. He is offering to talk on the phone, but for some reason I don't feel like that would work better than email. I need face time. In the email he's directing me away from something I had begun to feel comfortable with--his word was "bored"--back to something much harder to think about and write about. He's right. Hence the anxiety. I feel like I am never going to write this proposal. Because I'm afraid of it. I need face time. My other committee members are great, but I haven't decided whether to go to one of them yet. Or which one to go to. Sometimes I think that going to too many people at this point might make things worse. Or it could get me back in motion. I told my friend yesterday that I had lost momentum. He asked if I'd hit a wall. Not so much a wall--more like mud. Thick, heavy mud.

I think I'll listen to Nickel Creek today. Maybe I won't cry.

I have family visiting this weekend. I have to clean my house. When am I supposed to do that before tomorrow night? Maybe I'll just have a dirty house. They'll still love me.

What timing!

Newsweek cover story is on user-generated websites. I love it.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/

MySpace and performing identities

Okay, so I think I've passed through all the stages of response to MySpace now and I have an opinion. When you sign up, you list all of the schools that you attended and you are networked with those people. That's a useful starting place, especially in such a youth-oreinted network. I looked up people from my high school and immediately noticed that there were a lot of really young people on the network and a lot fewer people my age and older (still, there were several people I knew who were close to my age). Then I looked up my undergrad university and found a lot of people. I typed in some key words that brought up people I knew and was actually a bit disturbed by the results. As I looked up the people I knew when I was, say, twenty years old, they appeared to be exactly the same as they were then--not much evidence of maturing, "settling down," rethinking priorities, generally growing up. Because I am so aware of the fairly unlimited access to this site, I set up my profile in a way that was really pretty professional. No real personal information, vague updates on my career and family. Then I invited some people to be my "friends." One person whom I hadn't seen since I was an undergrad responded with a friendly but vulgar greeting that is now publicly displayed on my profile page. Less than twenty-four hours and already a dirty message. I would not have been surprised at vulgarity coming from this person when we were in college together, but I was a bit surprised at her public display of it as an adult--a professional--a parent.

This is interesting to me in my thinking on performing identities. This medium is very youthful. Most of the people on it are teenagers and college students. Plus, all of the people that I knew had "Friends" lists composed of people they knew from college and probably had not seen much since. (I'm getting to a point)

This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend about using maiden names. If you know someone before she is married, then she gets married and changes her name when you no longer see each other regularly, then you tend to call that person by her maiden name still. I think it's more than just habit--that other person with a different name is not really a part of your world.

I'm also connecting it to an experience I had recently while on the phone with my college roommate. We lived together as undergrads, and we have kept in touch, but we have not really seen each other or been a part of each other's lives in several years. So when I was on the phone and my daughter showed up at my feet calling, "Mommy!" I had a wierd sense of a collision of worlds--I was snapped quickly back from that old college relationship to my present, very different identity.

So, on a social networking platform like MySpace that is connecting people who knew each other "back then" but have no "real life" interaction, I see people behaving in the ways that they would have "back then." There's a sense of returning to past identities and fulfilling past expectations of behavior. I don't feel like I get a sense of who these people are now (I think every word in the last sentence deserves to be in "scare quotes"). Also, because the majority of users are young, they kind of set the standard for how the space is used.

How does the "virtual space" of an eletronic community shape how people interact with each other? This is, of course, the big question that encompasses a whole lot of other questions, but that is what I have taken from my brief activity in MySpace.

Facebook, I think, poses different questions in the same vein. Here are two brief comments on Facebook: The ways that people organize themselves into groups on this site are really hilarious sometimes. Do you know that there is a space on the profile page to put in your dorm and room number? Let's just send an engraved invitation to all potential stalkers.

MySpace and Facebook and blogs, oh my!

So intellectual curiosity (I promise it had nothing to do with avoiding the diss proposal--really) sent me to MySpace and Facebook yesterday. First response--"I am way too old for this." Later that night--"I do not have time for this." This morning--"Holy crap--I feel myself being sucked into the MySpace vortex!" AH!!!!

Reading for exams

I just read a post from New Kid on dissertation process and found it helpful--one of my hopes for this blog (I seem to be doing this a lot lately--expressing what I hope to gain by blogging--wierd--I wonder why I'm doing that) was that I would find people who were blogging through their dissertation process and learn from them as I begin my dissertation. I like the idea of public accountability--I think I'll start posting progress, too. Here's an update: still did not write the dissertation proposal. I did write a good solid page along with an extended email to my currently absent advisor. Still, not a real proposal.

So to contribute to the blogging of Ph.D.-in-progress, here's what I have learned while studying for my prelim exams. Disclaimer: I have yet to take exams. Success of this method is not proven. I set a schedule for myself at the outset, allowing reasonable revision of that schedule, but not extreme deviance from the plan. I started out with this schedule: read four items per week. Very reasonable. Very bad way of scheduling. I fell behind and now have to read five to seven items per week to finish. At the semester break I revised my schedule into something that works much better. I have an accountability date set about every three weeks, at which I will have read X number of items. That allows for some weeks with slower progress without the guilt--guilt can be paralyzing! Also, the reality is that every item is not created equal, so when I have spent a few days on one particularly difficult or long piece, I can follow it the next week with a string of easy one-a-day pieces a meet my goal by the accountability date. I have my list posted on my wall in my office with a tally of my progress. This helps by creating a small amount of public accountability, but I have found that the most beneficial part has been that I can see my progress. Because I am not writing and producing completed pieces of scholarly writing at the rate I did in coursework, I feel often as if I am accomplishing nothing. When that hits me, I tally up the books on the list and have a tangible sense of progress. I have factored into my schedule time to work on an article I want to submit for publication and, more importantly, time to work on my diss proposal. This is where things aren't working--the diss proposal is not happening. That's another post.

This method has worked to keep me on task and on schedule as far as how many items I have read. My method of reading and note-taking is a different story. I don't so much have one (but I often pretend I do when important people ask me about it). More on that later, too.

Any comments about reading for prelim exams would be appreciated. I'm not ready for comments about diss proposal. I'm too depressed about it today.

Rare opportunity to redeem myself

I'm feeling some triumph right now. I'm taking a class in which advanced doctoral students workshop scholarly articles that we hope to submit for publication, and our articles have been sent to faculty members for reader's reports. I just got my report back, and the response was great. The professor said right out that the paper deserves to be published and offered some very useful suggestions for revision--minor revision that does not require a total reworking of my piece.

Here's where redemption comes in--I admire this professor, he's respected in his field (not precisely my field but closely related), and I took his class a few semesters ago. I did not perform well in that class. A lot of factors came together that semester that meant that, well, my heart just wasn't in that particular class at that particular time. I was swimming in mediocrity, fulfilling the minimum requirements and writing a barely decent seminar paper. Since then, that class has been nagging at me. It really bothered me that I did not give my best work and that the professor had formed a low opinion of my abilities. In reality, he probably hasn't thought about me since, and I did get a B in the class, but it still feels like failure. Now he has read my best work--something I am especially proud of--and he has recognized its value. I feel redeemed. It probably shouldn't matter that much to me, but it does, and now it's okay.

My paper doesn't get workshopped until late April, I have a major conference in May, and my exams are in June, so it won't get sent out until the summer. But I'm excited about putting myself out there for the first time. And as much as I understand the risk of rejection, I feel so invested in this piece and so confident that it deserves to be published, I don't think I will take it well if it gets rejected. But I'll just have to deal with that when it comes. We'll see.

Audience and blogging, Part 2

I think that blogging is going to make be a better teacher. The way I have experienced a developing sense of audience on this blog has given me some new insight into writing processes. My whole concept of audience in the past has been static--pre-defined--and I didn't even realize it.

When I started this blog I had never read a blog before. It felt similar to journaling--talking to myself, really, but as someone who journaled for years I appreciate the value of that. But as I read others' blogs and started joining conversations, I got a new sense of what this could be. Not a platform for me to purge my thoughts but an actually community with an active exchange of ideas. I named the blog "Mommy, Ph.D." with an idea of what I wanted to talk about and the persona I wanted to construct. I was amazed at how many others were doing the same--talking about women's issues, the politics of motherhood, the world of academia, the expereince of graduate school--sometimes separately but very often all at the same time. Why hadn't I seen this before?!

Then I added the tracker (Thanks, Amy!) and checked it faithfully. People were reading my blog! By the end of the first week, PEOPLE were reading my blog! I can honestly say I was shocked. Seeing who was surfing in from where, what search terms led them to me, what messages got comments, what messages got a ton of readers but not necessarily a lot of comments--all of that helped me understand what kind of audience I had, what I could have, what I should be writing about, what people want to read about. Being in this process is paying off in ways I anticipated--learning enough to teach blogs, exploring pedagogical potential--and ways I did not expect--(I started another list here, but it did not satisfy me, so I will leave this space undefined). And it's fun!

Audience and blogging, Part 1

Geeky Mom and New Kid have posts today on audience, something I've been thinking about since I started this blog.

A few weeks ago at a gradaute student colloquium some questions about audience in the composition classroom came up (and I have added some of my own to this list). How do writers in Freshman Composition imagine their audience? Is the instructor the only audience they take seriously? How does the concept of audience change when they know that their peers will read their essays? Does their writing change when that situation is added? Do they seriously consider their peers a real part of their audience, or do they see peer review as just a preliminary exercise before the real audience--the instructor--reads the paper?

Here's one that's important to me right now: Do students have a different perception of audience when the peer reviews happen in person than when the peer reviews are electronic? What about if those electronic reviews are anonymous? What about in a web-based class when they have never actually seen any of the other students in their class?

Here is where I see the amazing potential for blogs as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace in composition classes. (In part two of this post, I will address my own experience considering audience as a blogger.) Blogging is informal, even when its purpose is academic, and that can free students from a lot of anxieties associated with "the paper"--and quite literally with PAPER--it doesn't seem quite so daunting when it's not going to be printed and handed in. But as people read and comment on each other's blogs, they begin to develop a sense of who their talking to and what they want to say and don't want to say in the presense of those people. I have not put this into play in my class yet, but I have been examining my own sense of audience and the way that my blog is developing to get a sense of what my students might experience.

What is more important to many of them right now is Facebook and that is a very quick--and much needed--lesson in the importance of understanding audience. Stories are popping up everywhere about bad things happening to people based on what they have posted on Facebook and MySpace--people get wierd calls from strangers, lose job interviews, get expelled from school--because they imagine an audience of only selected friends and like-minded people when in reality their audience consists of their parents, employers, teachers, and their friendly neighborhood stalker. Here's an article on the topic from USA Today that a colleague brought to my attention recently.

I have so many questions--I'm really excited about the pedagogical potential of blogs, and the issue of audience is where I think the big payoff is going to be.

On Spring Break, Mommy Wars, and Barry Hannah

Ah...Spring Break. I love it. And now it's over. A lot of people use it for a way to work 24/7 with the regular responsibilities on hold for a while, but not me. I use it to recharge. Of course, the hard part is getting back into the swing of things.

I had a great stint as a stay-at-home mom this week. It was such fun--much easier than the same situation last summer. That was hard and exhausting because of RB's age--just learning to walk and eagerly searching for choking hazards. This time was fun, fun, fun, and when I got tired, we watched Bambi.

I am disturbed by The Mommy Wars and such ideas that are getting huge attention right now. It seems to be based on the idea that stay-at-home moms and work-outside-the-home moms have drastically different values and nothing in common at all. That they just naturally hate each other. The thing is, people are very sensitive about their parenting choices, and when other people make very different choices, it's hard to be objective and not take it as criticism--If her way is so right, goes the nagging paranoid thought, does she think my way is so wrong? I really think it's based on something we all share as mothers--we want to be good parents and make choices that will ultimately benefit our children. I am encouraged by the new book The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars by Miriam Peskowitz--she asserts that the division and resentment between SAHM and WOHM is not at all inevitable and that there is quite a bit of common ground there--that larger cultural assumptions about motherhood are the problem for all the (very problematic) categories of mothers. Unfortunately, my prelim exams are coming up and I can't read it right now. It's on the list for the fall (I am booked (ha--a pun!) solid through August, but maybe I'll sneak it in early).

One last note on my reading over Spring Break (okay--it wasn't a total vacation)--I officially do not like Barry Hannah. I was all ready to love him based on what I've read about him--comparisons to O'Connor, Faulkner, Mark Twain--what impressvie company! I read Airships and was physically repulsed by his images and turned off by his sentence structure. I'm all for Southern Gothic--in fact, I am passionately in love with Flannery O'Connor--but this was gratuitously grotesque. This was not just indifference, which is my typical reaction to bad wrtiting. I don't think I can call it bad writing, really. Instead, I felt an active abhorrence--a desire to get this book away from me immediately. It does have powerful images and word choice--but not in a good way.

P.S. I did not write my diss proposal. Sigh.

Edit: Guess what! Peskowitz has a blog.

leave of absense

I'm taking a short leave of absense from the blog--I estimate about two weeks. I am trying to write a dissertation proposal and then I'm traveling, so I won't have the time. I am thinking about the direction of the blog and will come back with some minor changes and lots of things to say. I've developed a small readership that I truly appreciate, and I hope that you'll be here when I come back!

Meanwhile, although I can't commit the time for a new post right now, I hope you'll visit Vegankid's Blog Against Sexism Day site.

Blog Against Sexism Day is Tomorrow

Vegankid is hosting Blog Against Sexism Day tomorrow. I don't know what I'll come up with--I've got a lot of work to do--but the least I can do is direct you to her blog, which will feature the URLs of many others blogging against sexism. To give due credit, I got the link from Geeky Mom, whose blog is always worth a look.

Feminism and breastfeeding

After I wrote my post early today, a friend directed me to a new article by Jacqueline H. Wolf in the most recent issue of Signs, titled “What Feminists Can Do for Breastfeeding and What Breastfeeding Can Do for Feminists.” This is a great article that makes different but well taken points from the article I cite below. The emphasis of this article is not the questionable research methods leading to widespread breastfeeding advocacy but the interesting fact that although breastfeeding advocacy and ostensible support for breastfeeding is so pervasive on paper, the reality is that numbers of women actually breastfeeding in the United States remain low. This, Jacqueline Wolf argues, is due to a lack of actual support for breastfeeding women. This is a problem that deserves attention, and feminists should be heading up the charge to support women who choose to breastfeed. First, I want to elaborate a bit further on the argument in the previous post, and then I will whole-heartedly agree with some of what Wolf says.

Wolf cites many of the well-known studies that declare breastfeeding’s benefits for mother and child, and she makes the important point that long-term breastfeeding (about a year) is often necessary for those benefits to be seen. There still remains the problem of responsible science (which Wolf does acknowledge). Yes, children who are breastfed often have fewer health problems and grow to become healthier adults, but it is also true that (as mentioned below) women who choose to breastfeed based on health benefits are likely to make many other health-conscious choices for their children, all of which work together to contribute to a child’s health. Also, statistically women of higher socioeconomic status and higher education are more likely to breastfeed—those factors also contribute to a person’s physical and emotional health. To make truly informed choices, women need to be aware of these variables.

To agree with Wolf’s larger argument, feminists do need to act to help create more support for women who are breastfeeding or want to breastfeed. More lactation consultants should be available, and insurance companies should cover those services for new mothers. Pediatricians should support and encourage the decisions of mothers to breastfeed and should help women to understand the realities of “supply and demand” milk production. Many women believe inaccurately that they have low milk supplies (a real but actually pretty rare condition) and feel as if they can’t breastfeed because doctors fail to adequately explain to them the physiology of breastfeeding and the many methods of increasing milk production. Employers should recognize the importance of a woman’s choice to breastfeed and should make workplaces conducive to breastfeeding and pumping mothers, offering options like on-site daycare, pumping rooms, flexible hours, and paid maternity leave to support breastfeeding mothers. (Problems exist with the ways these policies are used already, though, as more women than men take advantage of part-time work and family leave, reinforcing gender polarity—it’s happening in European countries with such national policies.) Also, as legislation already protects women’s rights to breastfeed in public, changes in cultural attitudes need to follow so that women can actually feel comfortable nursing their children when the need arises without being ridiculed or kicked out of public places.

Finally, the formula companies who say “Breast is best” while they pass out free samples of formula to expectant mothers, should not have as much financial, and as a result, political sway as they do.

Whew—that’s as much as I can handle today. I’m sure there is more to come as this topic is of undeniable personal and social importance. Thanks so much to the women of iVillage who are reading and commenting on this topic here and on the message board.

What I have to say about breastfeeding

This post was inevitable on a board dedicated to issues of motherhood, so I am going to get to it right now. This past fall I met an amazing woman doing research on the politics of breastfeeding and when I heard a talk she gave and read some articles that her website directed me to, I felt a wave of gratitude and motivation to share my story. My first thought specifically was, I wish someone had told me this before my daughter was born. I'm not going to rehearse her arguments here, but her thesis is that many claims about the medical benefits of breastfeeding are based on irresponsible research practices, and the reluctance to criticize them is based on a politics of "hyper-maternalism." Her most important argument, I think, is that in the research that finds benefits to breastfeeding over formula feeding, researchers fail to control for some pretty obvious variables--specifically, if a woman chooses to breastfeed her child based on health benefits, she is most likely to make many other parenting choices based on health benefits. What I want to do here is to tell my story and to express why I felt so grateful for this professor's research, which I think every mother needs to hear.

Before I even got pregnant, I decided to breastfeed my child. I read article after article, book after book, took a class, visited a lactation consultant, all of which further convinced me of my choice. I expected a struggle because I had never even seen a woman breastfeed, and I had no one to go to for help and advice. And I was right-it was hard at first, but I found assistance at my doctor's office and in online communities that helped get me through that learning process. Things were going great! I knew that I was protecting my daughter from ear infections, allergies, and respiratory illnesses, and that her I.Q. would be 8 points higher because of my magic milk! At four months old, she had her first ear infection. By the time she was one year old that number had reached seven or eight or nine--I lost count! At six months old, she was hospitalized with pneumonia for three days, and I was terrified. It's the hardest thing I've gone through as a parent, watching my child struggle to breathe. Breastfeeding, I believed (and still do in a lot of ways) , was the most important parenting choice that I had made, and I was wholly committed to it. When I worked I pumped faithfully so that my daughter never had a drop of formula. My understanding of myself as a parent was wrapped up inextricably in breastfeeding, so that every time my child gained weight it was my personal achievement. And every time she got sick, it was my personal failure. I wasn't doing it right--maybe because I was pumping--she needed more time at my breast. Maybe I wasn't eating the proper foods myself--it's hard to work and care for an infant and also take care of myself at the same time. Why was she sick with exactly the illnesses that my milk was supposed to protect her from? The feelings are still so strong that I feel myself tearing up as I type this.

As I sat in the hospital room with my little baby hooked up to machines, I felt duped. I wanted to yell, "All of you told me this wasn't going to happen! I am doing everything I was told to do! What am I doing wrong?" I finally came to the understanding that breastfeeding was not the guarantee that literature on the subject promised, and that it was not the most important part of caring for my child. There were so many other things that I did for her that were also essential to her health and development. And it was not my fault that she was sick. I had to rethink all my reasons for breastfeeding and decide whether or not to continue.

I realized that when I removed the anxiety and the frustration of watching her get sick over and over, I really loved feeding her. When my baby was at my breast, we were the only two people in the world, and the love and connection between us was profound and unbreakable. I loved nursing my child. So I decided to continue, but for totally different reasons than when I started. I had learned to enjoy the experience of nursing and the bonding that came with it, with the anxiety of preventing illness removed. Her health became a separate concern, and I no longer felt as if I had failed her somehow.

So what I want to say to other mothers and those who want to be mothers is that breastfeeding is wonderful and rewarding. If I have another child, I will breastfeed him or her, too. But it is not a guarantee against illness. It is not essential to being a good mother. If you choose to bottle-feed, you are not a bad mother and should not feel guilty. And if you choose to breastfeed, you should understand that the science is not perfect--in fact, it is definitely flawed in a lot of ways. The decision should be one that is satisfying to the mother and the child and should not be based on guilt or unreasonable expectations.

Edited to add:
For reading on this issue, see Jules Law, "The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labor," Signs 25.2 (Winter 2000): 407-450.

Reflections on academic(s) blogging

So I’ve seen things called “memes” floating around in the blogosphere, and this one caught my attention because it is specifically regarding pseudonymity and academic(s) blogging. Here are a couple from ABDmom and Anastasia. These blogs introduce interesting questions that we academic bloggers have to think about, questions that are at the forefront of my mind as I try to establish my blog and consider its purpose.

I am attempting to preserve a fair amount of anonymity and un-Google-ability, but I keep outing myself as a blogger, sometimes even sharing my URL with people I know. I’ve told people about my blog because I’m excited about its prospects and what I will learn through this process, but I have received mixed responses. Some people are supportive and interested and want to discuss it with me (and these people usually turn out to be bloggers themselves!) and others have had negative responses. Blogs are still very questionable, mostly because a lot of people are doing really stupid things on their blogs. It seems as if in the academic world just having a blog, regardless of its content, can be detrimental to your reputation. Journaling doesn’t seem to carry the same stigma, probably because it doesn’t have the same kind of exhibitionist tinge to it.

So what am I doing here, really? Besides the weak guise of preparing to address blogging issues in my future Tech Writing class. I’m not (usually) trying to waste time. I do have an intellectual interest in electronic communities and self-fashioning. And I have a general interest in technology. But I also feel like there is a place for the things I have to say and there are people who want to read them. As I suspected I would, I immediately found a large network of academic moms blogging for themselves and each other.

I do not want this to be a place for me to complain about the hoops of grad school or the juggling act that is the life of a career mom. That’s boring and I already have plenty of that IRL. I don’t intend to write about anything that could potentially damage my career. I’m writing as if everyone I know is reading this. So the purpose of my anonymity is really just the Google-ability factor.

I think that academics have a lot to gain from blogging and virtual communities. We work in the realm of ideas, and the possibilities for trying out and developing our thoughts and building an intellectual community that is diverse and always accessible seem to be limitless. That's what I hope for in this blog. And maybe some advice on potty training.

Supportive (and effective!) teaching strategies

Anastasia has a great post today about teaching strategies, specifically how to get students to respond and participate in class. She is responding to a teaching seminar in which the speakers encouraged what I consider to be a hostile, or at the very least stressful, classroom environment in which the teacher puts students on the spot, motivating them through fear of humiliation. I have experienced classes like this and I, like Anastasia, am very much opposed to this strategy.

The teaching strategies that I have developed in my four years of experience at a college level have (and that I am, of course, always re-evaluating and adapting) have been based on a student-centered classroom, light on lecture, heavy on real teacher-student, student-student, and student-text (in lit classes) interaction. And I have actually won a "Bravery in Teaching" award at my university based on these strategies. I believe the way I teach calls for bravery (well, any teaching calls for bravery) because I rely heavily on my students' fulfilling their responsibilities. I am always prepared to shift gears in case of emergency, but I have found that emphasizing the students' responsibility to the class as a whole has motivated them to prepare and participate because I earnestly believe in all my idealism that they feel invested in the class and in their own learning experience.

All this is very abstract, and I don't want to get into a long description of how I teach--maybe I'll do a series of installments on this topic, which is very important to me and I know to many of you who read this. I will offer here just a couple of examples to illustrate what I'm talking about.

First, I think that a major problem is students feeling insecure about talking in front of the class and even about talking to the teacher--they are afraid of looking not-smart--I know this because I am also afraid of looking not-smart! I have tried to assuage some of these fears by asking students to prepare questions or discussion points, often in the form of very short and informal writing assignments--like reading journals. If students have prepared some coherent thoughts before class, they are much more comfortable offering those up to the group. I also like to divide the class up for small group discussions that culminate in a larger group session. When they talk things out in a groups of four or five, it always leads to fruitful discussion when we bring the class together, and I can direct that larger discussion toward the major points that I think they need to understand.

My favorite writing assignments, and based on my evaluations, my students' favorites, as well, are wide-open response papers. I tinker with the title of these projects all the time, but I have not yet found a title that satisfies me. The best way I can describe it is, "Here's what I care about that I didn't get to say already." I require several of these over the course of a semester, and they always get better as the semester goes on and students feel more comfortable expressing themselves. The only requirement is that they demonstrate thoughtful interaction with a text. They usually do this by writing papers about, as I said, the things they were thinking and didn't say in class, but others have produced impressive creative and artistic projects in other media. Some students have given their projects to me to keep after the semester is over, and I love sharing them with other teachers. These projects do not weigh heavily on their grade, and I emphasize that I do not intend for them to spend hours and hours preparing them, but they appreciate the opportunity they have to communicate what is important to them, as opposed to what I deem important in the class. That enthusiasm, I believe, carries over into our everyday classroom activities.

I have taken great pride in drawing out students who hesitate to participate through methods that are student-friendly and non-threatening. Kudos to Anastasia for bringing this issue directly to her students and letting them tell her what works for them.

Edited to clarify: There's a difference between "challenging" and "threatening"--I want my classroom to be non-threatening but I also want my students to feel challenged and to step out of their comfort zones. I feel that fear of humiliation is not the best way toward that goal. I have found that once a student feels comfortable joining the conversation in the first place, it is much easier to engage that student in new and challenging discussion.