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Welcome, or welcome back, to West Chester University, Fall 2003.

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Wondering what to do here? You can get around this site simply by following the links to the left. They'll stay put there as you navigate around, through, under, above, and beyond the information presented on these pages (unless you go exploring). If you check back here regularly during the semester, you'll notice new pages added as class notes, handouts, assignment sheets, announcements and various other materials begin to appear under the headings you see over there. Some materials are already in place (like the course syllabus), and you can try clicking on them to get a feel for how the site works.

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This site is maintained by the founder of Brainstorm Services, West Chester University Adjunct English Instructor, Stacy Tartar Esch. Its purpose is to give students in my classes an additional way to get in touch with me as well as an additional way get connected to information crucial to thier success in their respective courses. On this site, students will find the course syllabus, my own lecture notes, visual aids, class handouts, exercises or suggested exercises, suggested reading, announcements, and supplemental links for the further exploration of topics we discuss in class. All of the materials published here have only one aim: to help you get your head around our course material more completely, or more conveniently. Think of this site as your virtual notebook.

New for Fall 2003

This academic year (Fall 2003 - Spring 2004) I am on hiatus from the classroom. So while I'm away from home, I'm working on launching a new feature for the "virtual notebook" (preserved from last semester to the left). Although I already provide a weblog, I've decided to work on an expanded version of it, something more detailed and instructive that will provide my students and the wider Internet audience with more focused units of study (for lack of a better, more engaging term!)... Periodically, a kind of cyber-centrifugal curiosity spins me out into the web or deep into the reaches of a library to hunt for knowledge, or to absorb an author, and I love to read. These journeys are joyous. But eventually a heavy kind of gravity, a nagging need to step back and think about it all, to distill and synthesize and bring it back to earth where it can be shared with other people overtakes me (teachers are a special breed, no doubt about it!). A weblog just doesn't cut it. Thus, the pages found under "Journeys" (see the menus to the left), updated as often as I'm able.