Intro
Welcome to English 101!
I’m Holly Pappas (I’ll try to get a short video introduction up soon, if I can get over my stage fright!).
I could introduce myself a lot of different ways.
My blog introduces me this way: “I’m a community college writing teacher with one husband, three daughters, four acres, and eighteen chickens.” (I’m not sure the eighteen is still accurate, and this spring will be the time to “turn the flock” and get a new batch of chicks.) Chickens aside, my nest is empty, with one daughter out of college and starting her seccond year as an elementary art teacher and the other two daughters in college. I’m a fan of contemporary fiction and, since the year of the Impossible Dream, the Red Sox. With my new-found “free” time, my latest hobby is bike riding.
I’ve been teaching English here at BCC for nine years. Though I got my degrees in fiction writing, I’ve mostly been writing essays for the past decade or so; for the past couple years I’ve been working on a book-length memoir about my experience of mothering and being mothered.
I’m always changing the way I teach this course, and this semester is no different. We’re going to be using blogs this semester, as you can see, both as a central place to store documents and exchange information and as personal writing spaces. Please don’t be intimidated if you’ve never blogged!–it’s no harder than sending an email (though there are a few fancier things you can do). If your class is scheduled in a computer lab (and three of my f2f classes are), we’ll have plenty of time in class to play around; if you’re not in a computer lab, please feel free to drop by my office hours if you’re having problems (or we can schedule another time to meet–I’m free mid to late afternoon most days as well). The other (sort of) different thing about this class–my new experiment for this semester–is that you will each be choosing your own “theme” for the class–we’ll be talking about this after we get the blogs up and running.
In the pages below, you’ll find some general info about navigating around this course space, the course syllabus, and some other info about setting up a blog and choosing a theme to get us started…
