Poems, Maxims and Extended Thoughts

Good, sound reading, researching, and writing skills are essential if students are to successfully meet criteria for completion of academic degrees. Equally important is the development of strong voices for thinking aloud critically, posing and solving problems, and participating as engaged students in classroom discussions. Professors encounter multiple levels of preparation in composition courses, especially in this climate of technological advancements.

Students’ social lives are distanced from physical, face-to-face communication, enabling them to create personas and grow accustomed to brevity in communication (i.e., texting, Instagram®, Snapchat®) ready and able to choose new apps once created and disseminated. Educational institutions respond with enhanced smart classrooms and new and improved platforms for online courses. None of this poses problems for students with excellent support systems, students with the latest technology at their fingertips and skilled in switching from abbreviated language to formal, Standard English. These students will fair well. But some students cannot make the immediate leap and do not have the same background support systems and technology; the double-dutch jump into the fray is not easy, especially when they encounter educators lacking in the skills and tools to encourage reluctant readers and uncertain writers whose potential rests just beneath the surface of opportunity.

Poems, Maxims & Extended Thoughts? is intended not only as a learning tool, purposefully seeking to remove layers of self-doubt, to challenge students to enter the academic world unafraid by providing reasons to read, write, express, respond, research and demonstrate movement from narrative to argument structures; it is also a cultural tool to make visible some of the problems faced by everyone, to reopen the door for discussion and communication.