20130731.0830

Those who have read what I have written know that I discuss my work as a college-level English teacher--a work that I am moving to Oklahoma to be able to continue with some sense of security.  I assign my students a fair amount of writing, even though I know that many of them are entirely unaccustomed to doing such work.  I also try to model the kind of behavior I want to see from my students, and so I end up doing the same assignments I give them.  When I assign them a short essay--say, a summary of an article from the New York Times--I do so from having written a number of them and doing yet more at odd intervals, and the same is true if I ask for a short contrastive essay, or yet other kinds of papers.

One that I assign to my first-year composition classes and my literature classes is a conference-length paper, one intended for a fifteen- to twenty-minute presentation--although, given the relative newness of the experience to my students and the demands on my own time, I tend to work at the shorter end of what is acceptable for such a thing.  Since I am teaching one section of first-year composition and one section of literature this term, I have drafted two such papers (and recently!); the second, a piece on Robin Hobb's Words like Coins, is of particular note for me, offering something of a new experience and what might be a small foray into digital humanities work, broadly defined.

It is so because I have Words like Coins only in e-book format, and working with it in that format was my first experience with inserting marginalia for my own use into an electronic document.  (I tend to grade papers in digital form, but there is a marked difference between writing comments for students who too often do not read them and leaving notes for myself to follow later as I draft papers.)  The process is a bit unwieldy for me, given the number of clicks necessary for the input method to work, and I am still not able to scan through an electronic document as quickly as a print one to find individual notes and comments.  Still, the notes are typed rather than scrawled out in my less-than-elegant pen-hand, and they mark out the text to which they refer more clearly than my analog scribblings, so there is something worth pursuing in the process.

I have long since decided that the e-reader my lovely wife bought for me a few years back would be the venue through which I will read most of my leisure reading (I maintain a subscription to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as I have since 1999, and still receive it and some other magazines in print).  My library remains (if a bit leaner due to packing for the move), and it still receives additions, but those are typically critical materials and gift/display copies; the throwaway books with which I occupy myself on planes and trains are being moved to the e-reader.  I do a fair it of work with such materials, however, and it is good to know that I can do so in the digital as well as in the print.