Glen Burnie High School Students Visit Tawes
February 25, 2015
45 students from Glen Burnie High School visited Tawes Hall in early February to sit in on a model college class.
In early December, Mrs. Angela Speach contacted the English Department, asking if students from her AP Language and Composition class could visit campus and sit in on a college class. Professor Jane Donawerth volunteered to teach the class.
Speach expanded her idea and sent in a grant propsal, for which she received travel funds to bring her students to campus. When Donawerth heard that there might be up to 60 students visiting, she recruited two more professors to participate.
On Monday, February 9, Speach, three chaperones, and 45 students took a campus tour in the frigid weather, then divided into three groups to attend a writing class in Tawes Hall.
Donawerth, along with Professors Vessela Valiavitcharska and Chanon Adsanatham, taught the students, most of whom would be first-generation college students if they decided to attend. The three professors met ahead of time to arrange the curriculum. In their classes, they reviewed ethos, logos, and pathos, and introduced students to using topics or commonplaces as a way of generating supporting arguments. Students could use a list from Cicero, from Quintilian, or from a modern textbook by Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer. Valiavitcharska noted that the class focused on stasis of definition and what it means to make an argument with that stasis in mind. Adsanatham suggested Baltimore's curfew law as a topic, and the students were particularly excited to generate arguments against and for the law. After the 50-minute class, students ate lunch at the Union and returned home.
All three professors agreed that the students were college material--bright and well prepared.