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Copyright © 2009 by Donald Gerz |
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To go to the links below, merely double-click them!
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College Prep Teaching Approach: Examples, Examples, and More Examples!
Excellent college preparatory teaching is much more than merely assigning students suitable material that will prepare them for college-level work. It is even more than thoroughly explaining to them how to do that work. More than anything, good college preparatory teaching is SHOWING students how to do college work by providing them with numerous EXAMPLES of the fundamental compositional and research skills they are expected to master in high school.
Consequently, I have filled this site with many EXAMPLES of college research and thesis papers as well as essays and other forms of advanced academic writing.
Since this site is for students who are preparing to do well in college, all research and thesis papers appearing on this site received excellent grades (A) by actual college and university professors.
On the left side of this page, you will find many links to help you with your work in British literature, world literature, composition, psychology, and even philosophy. (You would be wise to make regular use of those helpful links!) Please know that I will modify this site throughout the year to better assist you in your studies.
Study and work hard. That's the key to success.
Yours, Mr. Gerz
The Writers' Workshop is a gathering of fellow college prep student artists working individually and collaboratively under an experienced writer’s guidance to produce outstanding works of creative, innovative, and interesting fiction, poetry, journalism, prose-poetry, essays, humor, drama, experimental works, satire, and many other forms of inventive literary pieces.
The workshop's goals are to focus on new material; edit, improve, and redraft previous pieces; present works in progress to peers in an open and supportive writers’ community; and publish student work in a campus journal as well as on a world-wide website.
To read works of authors from the workshop, merely click-on link #3F on the left side of this webpage!
This survey of the world's great and historically significant literature will include short fiction, poetry, drama, the novel, oratory, and folk literature. Vast historical periods of various world literatures from 3500 B.C. to the present will be considered. Major geographical areas covered will be Africa, Ancient Greece and Rome, Asia, the Pacific, Europe, and the Americas. Naturally, since this is also a course in composition, students will be given many opportunities to write about the importance of the world's greatest and most historically significant literature.
This survey of Great Britain's magnificent and historically significant literature will include folk literature, short fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and the novel. The following essential periods of Britain's rich literary history will be represented: the Anglo-Saxons (449-1066), the Middle Ages (1066-1485), the English Renaissance (1485-1660), the Restoration and the 18th Century (1660-1800), the Romantics (1798-1832), the Victorians (1832-1901), and the Moderns and Post-moderns (1901-2001). Since this is also a course in English composition, students will be given many opportunities to write about the significance and importance of the literature that is the focus of this course.
This course will include the scientific analysis of behavior and experience—that is, the study of how human beings sense, think, learn, and know. Modern psychology is devoted to collecting facts about behavior and experience, and systematically organizing the resultant data into applicable and useful psychological theories. These theories aid in understanding and explaining behavior and sometimes in predicting and influencing future behavior. Historically, psychology has been divided into many fields of study. These fields, however, are interrelated and frequently overlap. Areas considered in this introductory course will include the following types and aspects of psychology: developmental, physiological, cognitive, comparative, social, personality, adjustment, abnormal, scientific methodology and measurement, as well as other aspects and types of this academic discipline.
"I was once being interviewed by Barbara Walters in three segments, all at once, though they were to be run on three separate days. In between two of the segments, she asked me how many books I had written, and I told her. She said, "Don't you ever want to do anything but write?"
"No," I said.
"Don't you want to go hunting? Fishing? Dancing? Hiking?"
And I said, "No! No! No! and No!"
She said, "But what would you do if the doctor gave you only six months to live?"
I said, "Type faster."
(Isaac Asimov)
"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile." (Robert Cormier)
"Books aren't written--they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." (Michael Crichton)
"Why Johnny and Susie Cannot Write Well"
By the time most children arrive in high school, if they have not developed an ear for good literature through the habit of reading it at home as they develop cognitively and emotionally, they will not be able to differentiate good from mediocre writing as they enter the high school classroom.
As well, if children cannot differentiate good literature from mediocre literature, they have no reliable literary patterns on which to base their own writing skills.
Finally, considering how reading and writing are being addressed in our culture and in our society today, especially in the home, the only way to teach students to write effectively is to show them examples of good writing and require them to hone their linguistic skills on these same sound literary patterns that they are not being provided at home and in our society.
I have given you many examples of good writing on this website, as well as links to other examples. If you are to improve your writing, make liberal use of them. That's why I have posted them here!
Learning to write well does not happen overnight. It takes a lifetime. Therefore, get busy!
Sincerely yours, Mr. Gerz
