Awkward Turtles: Making Introductions Not Teh Suck

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teh

I spent the morning reading 98 introductory blog posts from this class and the freshmen in my Academic Writing class. For part of the morning, my spouse sat across from me as we gulped coffee. At one point, he asked me what I was reading because I had a constant grin on my face (and one post from Elisa actually made me laugh out loud when I got to her lovingly modified quote from Szwed). 

As can be expected, many of us are not a fan of the introduction. Or even if we don’t mind, we struggle with what to say about who we are and what we like. These things matter. I am well aware that it is impossible to capture who we are in a blog post. For school. But it’s really really really not just a way to kill time in the first week for me. Everything I know about learning tells me that if we are going to learn together, we need to feel part of our small community of practice. At the end of the day, it is human to want to be seen and heard and to feel you are needed. The intros help do that.

In the spirit of that, here’s some stuff: I’m from Chico. My own children (now 25 and 27) are fifth or sixth generation in this area. I still can’t believe that I have a job that I love in my hometown. It’s never lost on me what a gift this is. I originally went back to school to get an English degree because it was the degree I could get the fastest (based on previous coursework) and I was trying to get out of a really horrible marriage. When I least expected it, I became completely engaged in literacy and composition studies and decided to go on to the MA (here at Chico) and the PhD (at Berkeley). I started back to school when my daughter was in kindergarten and finished the PhD her first year in college. Along the way, I remarried and am not embarrassed to say that even after 17 years, we have kind of a fairy tale partnership. I commuted to Cal for seven years from Chico (shout out to an amazing spouse and my kids for being incredibly supportive), so I have a lot of empathy for students who do this school gig while commuting, holding other jobs, and/or supporting families. I study digital literacies, writing in the sciences, and I dabble in game theory. I spent a small portion of break returning old school to Warcraft II and III, which was a blast. I still have my Atari hooked up and we own Ms Pacman, Centipede, and other retro games. Geeks through and through in our house.

I’m completely fascinated by everyday literacies and will probably spend a career trying to convince other faculty to be gateways to literacies as opposed to gatekeepers. I look forward to working with y’all as we think about what it means to support writers.

Thanks for the introductions! Hoping it will make things less awkward turtle-like as we going into the semester.

We have a pretty big crew of mentors on Twitter together, so this could be a time to try Twitter out. You can follow me: @drjaxon

Best,

kj