I had my first meetings with Estefania Lamas and Delanie Goerig this week.
My class time with Estefania is 3:00 to 4:10 on Thursdays in the reading room in the Multifaith Center, but there’s a small chance we’ll need to change it. Estefania decided to focus the course on her hometown, San Antonio, Texas, and the social, economic, political, etc. changes going on there (some initiatives she mentioned are SA2020 and CafeCollege). She said that ideally, she could bring her work in our class back home and work as an intern in the City’s planning and development office or someday run for mayor of the city. She wanted her longer research paper to explore the city’s history, but also expressed interest in some less conventional types of writing like speeches and grant proposals. I’d like to work these in wherever possible. I’m very excited about her topic and her goal of working toward a position in city government, and my first impression is that she’d be very successful.
Some concerns we discussed are: she suffered a concussion last spring and considers herself 90-95% recovered but sometimes she makes spelling and grammar mistakes that used to be automatic for her. She asked me to be very diligent in pointing them out and correcting them. We also, because she’s so personally invested in her topic, discussed the need to keep the focus of the course on writing, and prevent it from becoming a sort of independent study.
My class time with Delanie is 2:50 to 4:00 in the Classics library in Founders. She would like to focus on representations of home in film (TV shows, documentaries, movies). I asked her to put together a list of the films she’d like to look at and email me by Sunday so I can put them on the syllabus. She declared the course credit/non during our meeting. She also asked about using the course to fulfill her arts/film/music distribution requirement (which I think would be great, and I’ll ask about in our meeting on Wednesday, Lynne).
I gave both students a 2-page “personal writing history” assignment for next week along with sending me info about their readings.