What’s 376 for?

February 11th, 2008, 7:49 pm PST by Greg

Since my recent blogging spree is for CMPT 376 (Technical Writing, etc, etc), I have been thinking about the course. It seems to me that a lot of people probably don’t actually know why we suddenly have a writing course in CMPT.

A couple of years ago, the University introduced requirements for all SFU students (that started after a certain time). Now, if you want to get a degree from SFU, you have to have taken:

  • Two writing (W) courses. One of these has to be in the upper division (300 or 400) and probably in your own discipline.
  • Two quantitative (Q) courses. These are math-like courses, but don’t have to be MATH.
  • Eight breadth (B) courses: 2 humanities, 2 social science, 2 science, 2 others. These are courses outside of your discipline.

That sounds like a lot, but you can double-count all you like. So, a philosophy course could count as both W and B-Hum. These courses can also count towards degree requirements: a CMPT student that takes MATH 151 fulfills a degree requirement, and gets Q credit.

Anyway, back to CMPT 376. Since CMPT are good members of the University community, we introduced this as a “discipline specific” writing course. That will let our students fulfill the University’s upper-division writing requirement in a way that’s (presumably) relevant to them.

There was talk of making CMPT 320 (social issues) a W course. That course has a lot of problems of its own. We ended up deciding to go for a dedicated, functional writing course, rather than a disfunctional course that did two things badly. Plus, a lot of our students could use a full three credits dedicated to improving their writing.

Because Ted’s a good person, he agreed to design and (initially) teach the brand-shiny-new writing course. So far it has been quite interesting. Ted is a very different kind of instructor than I am. Usually when I say that about somebody, it’s not meant to be complementary, but in Ted’s case, though, I’m really enjoying the course.

I keep oscillating on whether or not I would want to teach the course. Some days, I’m excited to give it a try. Some days, the very idea terrifies me: what the hell makes me think I know anything about writing?

One Response to “What’s 376 for?”

  1. Curtis Lassam » Blog Archive » I’m A Small, Petty Man Says:

    […] I’ve been skipping out on 376 a lot lately. Greg Baker tried to address the problem of What 376 Is For- and while the theory is sound, the course itself so far seems a little bit light on […]