Welcome to your first semester of college composition! We're excited to work with you this semester and to help you grow as a student and writer. This academic year, we'll be focusing on writing as an act of exploration.

You probably have never heard of Mike Rose, but in a very real way, he is responsible for you reading this introduction to this course. Mike Rose, who died in 2021, believed all people, no matter where they start or what obstacles they do or do not have stacked against them, possess the ability to succeed. In the introduction to his book, The Mind at Work, Rose writes,

I grew up a witness to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work. Such work put food on our table, gave shape to stories of affliction and ability, framed how I saw the world. [...] Measures of intellectual ability and assumptions about it are woven throughout this history. So I’ve been thinking about this business of intelligence for a long time: the way we decide who’s smart and who isn’t, the way the work someone does feeds into that judgment, and the effect such judgment has on our sense of who we are and what we can do.

During this course, you’ll have an opportunity to read and hear Rose’s views on the work of learning and how often society underestimates learners. Rose and teachers like him are the inspiration for the first-year writing program here at NCTC.

In an essay posted to his blog in 2016, Rose shares several tips on writing and thinking. These tips are as relevant to you, a first-year writing student at a Texas community college, as they are to the UCLA graduate students Rose was writing to. In his first tip, Rose tells us to “pay attention” to our writing. This seems natural enough, coming from a writing teacher, but Rose does not see writing as only something we do while in school. Writing is “invaluable,” he explains, and “an exceptionally potent tool…as you see things that trouble you and you want to give voice to or—something we don’t do enough—when you see things that need to be celebrated.”

Rose implores us to view writing as a skill worth practicing and improving because it is a skill that empowers the writer as a thinker and as an achiever. That is what we'll be doing this semester: thinking and achieving.

We are going to start that process of thinking, achieving, and exploring in our first major assignment, a Narrative of Place.

For this lesson, we will:

Explore/Learn
- Read in The Hub:
  - Preface: "NCTC's First-Year Composition Curriculum: An Overview"
  - Preface: "First-Year Composition Focus 2023-2024: Writing as Exploration"
- Read in The Address Book, "Introduction: Why Do Street Addresses Matter?" (pg. 1-14).