Fall  2009

About me

Office hours (alt.) Mondays         9 a.m. - 1 p.m. Tuesdays                 9:30 - 11:30 a.m. Thursdays                9:30 - 11:30 a.m.             (I'm also available in the WRC Tuesdays 3 - 4:10 and Thursdays  3 - 6:30.) Courses English 1A syllabus paper assignments study questions/TP assignments English 6 syllabus study questions second midterm Some useful links                            Norco library electronic sources Purdue University Owl  (online writing lab) Norton literature online Three of my favorite websites:

I'm in my nineteenth year teaching full-time at RCCD. Before that, I was a Visiting Lecturer in English at UC Santa Barbara for seven years and at UC Irvine for three.  I also taught part-time at several other community colleges before coming to Riverside in 1991 (and Norco in spring 1992).  I grew up in Ohio, went to college at the University of Chicago, and did my graduate work at UC Berkeley.  To help pay for my education, I was a golf course maintenance worker, drove a cab, delivered mail, took care of rhesus monkeys in a behavioral pharmacology lab, and worked in an asbestos paper factory--among many other jobs.   When I'm not grading papers, I like to cook, putter around in the garden, watch or listen to (and occasionally still play) baseball, read (especially mystery and espionage novels--I once interviewed for a C.I.A. job), and plan or remember vacation trips (I find actually going on them a source of great anxiety).  I'm happily married, the stepfather of three essentially grown children, a doting uncle, a concerned citizen, a Midwesterner by birth, a Californian (for 36 years now) by choice and inclination, a teacher.  As for teaching, I can say honestly that nothing I do matters more to me--I strive always to improve, and I think I'm a better teacher now than I was 20 years ago.  (Certainly I'm a much different one.)   I came to RCC Norco when the campus was barely a year old and the full-time faculty could go out to lunch and sit together around a circular booth at a restaurant on Hamner Avenue.  Now we're so large (collectively, if not individually) that we don't all know each other by name.  But I still greatly appreciate this college, my colleagues and students, and the opportunity I've been given to teach here.  Announcement and reminders . English 1A: The third paper assignment is now available.  Here's Tuesday's PowerPoint.  Note TP assignment for Nov 5.  King/Anzaldua paper peer response on Thursday, November 18.  Bring three legible copies. English 6: We're reading Emma for Nov 17.   Somewhere in the Upper Pennisula of Michigan, circa 2002.  Not all of my encounters with moose over the years have been this tranquil . . . photo by J.L. Flick