Having previously taught at Penn State for the past three years as both a graduate teaching assistant and

lecturer, I knew I would already have a fair amount of experience when beginning my GTAship for the KU English Department. The courseEnglish 101seemed fairly comparable to Penn States English 15. Although I noticed a considerable change in pace from the classes I had once taught, I fully expected to have attentive and motivated freshmen. And while I would never categorize my students as un-attentive and unmotivated, I did find stark differences. Before, I had never had to fail a student for a single paper. Before, I had never even had to fail a student for a course. Before, I had never had a 50% attendance rate on any given day for a freshmen-dominated class. So, now, with the end of the semester looming, I need to begin to think about how I will approach teaching 102 and future 101 courses to better accommodate my students and my own teaching practices. In Unit 1, the zine unit, I was excited. Having created my own zine in college and having subscribed to several zines since high school, I thought that this unit would be an effective way to pump up my students for the course. Instead, I got confused stares, a few hipster accusations, and overall frustration. But I soon realized that this frustration didnt solely stem from my course; rather, it stemmed from adjusting to college life and culture in general. I needed to think about how repeating key information and supervision that was respectful of their time were both necessary. And, while I feel like I emphasized the zine aspect of the assignment effectively, I also acknowledge that my time spent in class discussing the rationale was minimal. That was where my students fell into pitfalls by reporting on their topic rather than explaining their decisions. In contrast, I felt like I course-corrected and began to re-emphasize and re-explain aspects of the rhetorical analysis assignment. I purposefully placed check-in steps where students had

to have their image-text approved and meet with me for individual conferences. Due to these conferences, I know I learned more about my students and, hopefully, students felt they could come to me more often with questions and concerns. For future courses, I will certainly keep the mandatory individual and group conferences in place, as they give me more time to spend with students outside of the whole classroom setting. Students feel more comfortable and I feel like I can more fully address their concerns. When receiving the rhetorical analyses for grading, however, I was a bit disappointed. I become concerned when students were mislabeling ethos as pathos and vice versa in their analyses. Spending more time on these terms and perhaps even introducing a few reminder quizzes may help students remember these terms and apply them correctly in class and in assignments. And while I found that, overall, the grade distribution worked for me, now I that I know the kind of attendance patterns my students seem to have, I think I will factor attendance and participation back into grade in a more obvious manner. For example, making attendance and participation 10-15% of the grade will, I hope, make it more obvious to students the consequences of excessive absences. However, I will keep my overall teaching persona the same. I learned during my time at Penn State that starting out as more rigid in terms of my demeanor and dress worked for me. In establishing this professional distance (especially as a woman), Ive found students respect my authority in the classroom, although I always pair this persona with friendliness, smiling, and laughing often. As the semester progresses, I will often loosen up a bit more in terms of demeanor and dress by having casual conversation before class, cracking jokes. This strategy has worked for me every time Ive used it, and so I will continue to implement this going forward in my teaching here at KU.