Grading Student Blogs

Note to my Ethics of Food students:

During Monday's ENG103, I talked a little bit about how your overall performance on your blogs will figure in the "low stakes writing" part of the course grade (30%). The grade for "low stakes writing" includes all of the grades for weekly responses and informal presentations, but it also includes an evaluation of the quality and interest of your blogging activity as a whole. Having an active, creative blog will positively impact this portion of your grade; having an inactive blog will negatively impact the grade. One of you has emailed to ask me for some clarifiction on what counts as an active, creative blog, and I thought the answer should be posted here.

What I mean is that you should work to make your blog active by posting informally about topics related to the class on your own, instead of just posting assignments. For example, look at my Ethics of Food blog: I post at least three times per week, and there are posts on a variety of subjects related to what we're talking about in the cluster. Some of my posts (about 40%) are course materials: assignments, feedback, etc. Most of the posts (about 60%) are related to our cluster topic, but are not course materials: links to news items, videos, images, small pieces of informal writing on the fast food industry or industrial agriculture. Some of my blog entries are short and very informal: for example, the posts on "The Invincible Happy Meal" or today's post on George Lopez. Others are longer and more developed, but they're still just me "thinking out loud."

Keeping an active blog should be about the same for you. Post a few times every week. For each formal assignment you write (40%), do a few informal posts (60%). Your blog doesn't have to look like mine or read like mine, but it should demonstrate some engagement with the cluster topics. Use the blog as a tool to bring your course-work into your everyday life.

For example, you might post informally about a food-related experience: a meal you ate, something you noticed on a trip to the grocery store, a job you had, a crazy adventure you had trying to fulfill a food craving late at night, etc. Or you might draw a picture of your lunch once a week for the rest of the semester and post the drawings. Or you might post a Youtube video that you think relates to the class and say a little about it. ("Here's a great George Lopez routine on immigrant labor in the fast food industry...") Or you might investigate the food options you find in your neighborhood or at school.

This should be an easy way to raise your grade, and it should be fun. Note that not everything has to be writing, because I'm not grading these posts individually. If you're an "okay" writer but a good artist, you can use your art to make an exciting blog. The point is, you should try to make your blog more than a place where you deposit homework. Instead, it should be something I and your classmates want to check in with.

I know someone is going to ask exactly how the blogs will be graded. You'll find a description of how the grades will be assigned here.

Grading Student Blogs

Prof. Gallardo just posted a link to Christopher Long's excellent rubric (description of how grades are assigned) for grading student blogs over at Community 2.0. I'll be using this rubric for my grading this semester, so students in my ENG101/103 classes should read it over.

First Day

Off to a rocky start yesterday with room assignment problems, but we did manage to hold a solid get-acquainted session in LIB110. I put together a quick questionnaire for the students re their eating habits, and we asked them to interview and introduce each other. Aaron and I did the same. As expected, there were tremendous variety of diets represented -- everything from "fried stuff" to whole organics purchased at the Union Square Greenmarket. It will be interesting to see if there are any changes in people's diet as the semester continues, and in what direction.

Interview Questionnaire

Instructions: Choose one of your classmates as a partner (someone you don’t know, please) and interview that person using the questions provided on this sheet. Then, using what you’ve learned, introduce your partner to the rest of the class. Save this sheet so that you have contact information for at least one of your classmates.

Basic Info on Your Partner

Name:
Major:
Borough:
Neighborhood:
Email address:
Phone/txt:

Questions for Your Partner

1. What did you eat over the weekend? Try to list everything!

2. What’s your favorite fast food chain? Why?

3. What’s your favorite meal at that chain? Why?

4. How often do you eat there? Do you always get the same thing?

5. Do you cook? How often? What kind of food do you usually cook?

6. Where do you shop for groceries? Why?

7. At the grocery store, do you buy mostly “processed foods” (frozen food, instant foods that you mix together and cook, heat-and-eat food) or do you buy mostly “whole foods” (raw meat, dairy products, grains, vegetables)?

8. What’s your favorite meal to cook at home? Why?

Lost in the Supermarket

Although I think the topic of fast food provides students with a terrific entry point into talking about industrial food production, I'm disappointed that we won't have time this semester to cover the industrial food chain that leads backward from the modern supermarket. At some point in the future, I may re-tool the course to include that material. The best article I've found so far is Raj Patel's "Checking Out Supermarkets" from his amazing book Stuffed and Starved. I think this article would work extremely well with a unit on supermarket design.

Here is Stuffed and Starved at Amazon.com. No preview, unfortunately.

Notes on Course Development

Over the past few weeks, I've been planning my syllabus for the ENG101 (Composition I) and ENG103 (Research Paper) sections of the Ethics of Food cluster, which I'll be teaching with Dr. Rizzieri of Humanities (Philosophy). In my courses, we're going to focus on three broad areas of the theme:

1. The "political economy" of food: How does the food industry function as an industry? How has the capital from that industry shaped our way of eating, our thinking about food, our public policy, even our *bodies* themselves? If our food is produced by massive production chains, where do we as consumers fit into those chains? My hope with this thread is to push beyond individual ethics or moralizing and examine how the systems involved in food production encourage and sometimes even force individuals to make the choices they do, making alternatives invisible or very difficult to pursue.

2. The health effects of industrially-produced food: How does industrial food impact our bodily health, both through the content of individual foods and the overall content of the typical diet?

3. The environmental effects of industrial food production: How do the current practices of the food industry impact the planet ecologically? Are these models "sustainable," and if not, why not? What would have to change?

Having established the problems with industrial food production, towards the end of the semester we'll discuss individual and collective responses to those problems -- in other words, what we can do about it. At this point, it looks like I'm going to be relying mostly on Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, with some excerpts from Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, William Cronon's great chapter on the rise of industrial meatpacking in Nature's Metropolis, and a few other items. Because of the ENG103 component, my courses will be heavily research-based, so I'm going to be asking the students to really dig into the issues they encounter in these readings. And of course all the usual lessons of college-level writing will be at the center of how their arguments and their findings.

Dr. Rizzieri will teach an Environmental Ethics course as a part of the cluster, which that seems to be leaning toward an exploration of the origins of the human/animal divide and the question of "business ethics" in food production. I'm very excited to see that he'll be teaching Peter Singer and Jim Mason's The Ethics of What We Eat, as I have usually taught portions of that book in my food-related courses. I think the cluster format is going to work well for this highly complex material, because the students will be able to approach these issues through several different frameworks without any one course feeling "overstuffed" (pun intended) as mine sometimes has.

The Ethics of Food

Announcing a new cluster: The Ethics of Food!

Here's the description:

Where does our food come from? For most of us, the obvious answer is the grocery store, the bodega, or the restaurant on the corner. But it’s also obvious that there is more to the story: someone grows the food, someone cleans and prepares it, someone brings it, and sometimes, someone cooks it. You may have bought that burger at a cart on Thompson Ave., or that apple at the cafeteria, but each of those foods came a long way to reach this neighborhood, moving across the U.S. or half way across the world from the place where it was first produced. On the one hand, that tells us that the way we eat is shaped by forces much larger than we might think. On the other hand, it tells us that the choices we make when we eat have an effect on the lives of people—and other animals—very far away from us. In this cluster, we will examine both of these ideas from a variety of perspectives, through writing and research, ethical inquiry, historical study, and literary reading. Our studies will focus on how food is produced and how its production has changed over time; how the way we eat affects our environment and how it affects the people who grow and prepare our food; how it affects the plants and animals we grow as food; and how it is influenced by economic interests, technological developments, and political relationships. Readings may include work by Eric Schlosser, E.F. Schumacher, Peter Singer, Raj Patel, Upton Sinclair, William Cronon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marion Nestle, Vandana Shiva, and Michael Pollan.