hybrids

Next semester I'm teaching a new kind of course, and I'm excited about it for all sorts of reasons (this would be my one "outside Wayne" course, not that I'm not excited about Comp... but this is special). Anyway, it's what's called a "hybrid" class which is really good for me for a few reasons.

Hybrid courses meet half time in person and half time online (sometimes they are called blended courses). That means that they meet half as often, and even though I'll be at that school every week anyway for meetings and sometimes even up in Flint for curriculum junk, I won't be actively lecturing every week which is good.

But what I think is really cool about this particular class is that it is about Grammar--the style guide appropriate to the office, in this case--and that usually it's just a memorization class. Students memorize a bunch of off the wall homonyms and learn comma rules and abbreviation rules for the office. That's it. Memorization. Most boring lectures EVER.

But for the hybrid I'm required to give them lots of extra reading and work for the days we don't meet, and they are required to participate in discussion online or they fail. To me this means that I can bring in lots of issues and have them talk about things like Standard English and why we learn grammar and other such things which I could TRY to do in the classroom, and HAVE tried to do in the classroom, but without mandatory participation most people just don't try. I see the hybrid as being a way of getting at that information and including a lot of things in the course that wouldn't ever come up in the classroom and that's really cool.

And well, maybe there's a paper in there somewhere...