{"id":1553,"date":"2016-01-18T06:53:26","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T13:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikebellah.com\/wordpress\/?p=1553"},"modified":"2016-01-18T07:39:10","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T14:39:10","slug":"a-new-semester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/?p=1553","title":{"rendered":"A New Semester"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Will miss them\u2014my students with whom I\u2019ll begin a new semester tomorrow. Would like to tell them so, but that would sound corny.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too soon. We haven\u2019t hung out together yet, which, in my class, means we haven\u2019t read one another\u2019s stuff yet. Yes, they read my things too. It\u2019s how I teach.<\/p>\n

It started 20 years ago when I was a graduate teaching assistant at Texas Tech. I decided to give myself the same assignments I was giving students. For example, while they wrote narratives about people who had influenced them, I wrote columns in the Amarillo Daily News<\/em> about the same\u2014my father-in-law<\/a>, my wife<\/a>, my sister<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll use those pieces this semester to show how a writer forms a thesis statement, how he crafts an introduction, how she decides what to include and exclude in a story\u2014because knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to leave in.<\/p>\n

And, hopefully, they\u2019ll learn from me, as I learn from them (a subject that deserves its own blog post).<\/p>\n

So I\u2019ll tell these students that on the last day of class (how grateful I am for what they\u2019ve given me). And it is then I will say how much I\u2019m going to miss them, which I hope won\u2019t sound too corny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will miss them\u2014my students with whom I\u2019ll begin a new semester tomorrow. Would like to tell them so, but that would sound corny. It\u2019s too soon. We haven\u2019t hung out together yet, which, in my class, means we haven\u2019t read one another\u2019s stuff yet. Yes, they read my things too. It\u2019s how I teach. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1560,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions\/1560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}