Composition I Course Page

Welcome to your Composition I course site. I'm Mike McGuire, your professor for this course. I'll be using this page to make available to you online resources for our course and to post any materials or handouts that we've used. I'll do my best to keep this up-to-date as we proceed, but I'm making no promises. At the very least, I'll post links to each of your peer's online journals (i.e. blogs), so we can easily jump to them.

Need to contact me?
mcguirem72[at]morainevalley.edu | 708.974.5770 | D115 on campus

Maybe you lost it; maybe you never got; find it here.

• Syllabus (pdf)
• How to Set Up Your Blog
• "The Poison Fish" by Ken MaCrorie (pdf)
• Major Paper 1: Tradition and the Writing of the Past (pdf)
• Binta and the Great Idea: Viewing Guide (pdf)
• Major Paper 2: Appying Freire to Your Own Experience (pdf)
• Major Paper 3: The Pedagogical Arts of the Contact Zone (pdf)
• Combining Sentences to Avoid Sentence-Boundary Errors
• Portfolio Project I: Education, Connections, and Textual Conversations (pdf)

Can't get enough of my cool slides, video clips, and other media I sometimes use in class. Well, you can find the materials below for your repeated viewing pleasure. If you're looking for a particular video clip and don't see it here, it may be embedded in one of the slide presentations. Take a closer look.

on the costs of education

getting started

writers on revision as discovery

binta and the great idea

how do we argue?

questioning tradtion

clips from High School

As part of your learning contract for this course, you agreed to read at least two of the following. They are available here for your convenience. Unless otherwise noted, if the reading is not a link, it is included in your Ways of Reading book.

• “The Seven-Lesson School Teacher” by John Gatto
• “Against School” by John Gatto (pdf)
• “The Costs of Over-emphasizing Achievement” by Alfie Kohn
• “I Won't Learn from You” by Herbert Kohl
• “Commenements and Departures” by Peter Turnley (pdf)
• “School House Crock” by Peter Schrag (pdf)
• "What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?" by Alfie Kohn
• “The Roots of Debate in Education and Hope of Dialogue” by Deborah Tannen
  (from Tannen's book entitled The Argument Culture on reserve in the MVCC library.)
• “The Ethics of Individuality” by Kwame Anthony Appiah
  
• “The Rings of Saturn” by W.G. Sebald
• “The Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez

This section is for tidbits here and there that have come up through the class. Check it out.

student rendering of "bad style"

student rendering of "good style"

Student Online Journals (COM101-040)