Steven Mayers

COURSES DESIGNED AND TAUGHT

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City College of San Francisco

English 44B: Survey of World Literature Past and Present: 1650-Present. This English class introduces students to a selection of some of the most impactful pieces of modern literature, and the historical context, through periods of Enlightenment, Neo-Classicism, Travel, Encounter, Colonization, Slavery, War, Resistance, Emancipation, Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism.   Read works by:  Moliere, Voltaire, Locke, Kant, Jefferson, Rousseau, Pu Song-ling, Basho, Ramprasad Sen, Diderot, Swift, Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Wordsworth, Ghalib, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Marx, Maupassant, Nietzsche, Zola, Equiano, Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Kipling, Twain, Dickenson, Pirandello, Woolf, Kafka, Eliot, Kobo Abe, Borges, Neruda, Camus.  The course will be centered on reading, analyzing and writing about short fiction, poetry, drama, and excerpts of longer fiction written between 1650 and the present, considering the historical circumstances that these texts grew out of and often respond to.  As a literary survey course, as opposed to a composition course such as 1A, the largest bulk of the work is in reading and studying the texts, in order to respond in short answers and short essays on the midterm and final.  We will be reading selections from a variety of genres and eras.

English 1B: Reading, Writing and Critical Thinking About Literature. City College of San Francisco. A second-semester college reading and composition centered around critical thinking and literary analysis.  Through reading and analyzing short stories, poems, plays and novels, students learn critical literary terms and the ability to analyze and criticize literature from a variety of perspectives.  Some of the authors we will be reading are William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Carver, Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Blake, John Keats, William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Paul Bowels and Italo Calvino. 

English 1A: University-Parallel-Reading and Composition: Writing from Exile. City College of San Francisco.   A university-level freshman composition course centered on reading and writing nonfiction and mastering essay types. We focus on writing essays that utilize multiple illustrative types as well as complex arguments, using the argumentative models of Aristotle, Stephen Toulmin and Carl Rogers.  The class is focused on critical analysis of complex texts, and I have chosen exile and identity as a theme that runs throughout the readings, as the writers we read often discuss their critical perspectives on their homelands and concept of home.  We read Isabel Allende’s My Invented Country, Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, James Alan McPherson’s A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, and Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Other Essays.       

English 96: Academic Writing and Reading: Writing in the New World Era. City College of San Francisco: Emphasis is placed on critical reading of expository prose and imaginative literature as well as on writing essays, with attention to developing a variety of techniques in paragraph and sentence construction for the creation of a college writing style.  In the readings we focus on central issues in the contemporary world.  Students choose their own topics for research essays based on various themes.  One essay focuses on politics and language, another focuses on globalization and free trade, another on women's issues, and another on the environmet.  The readings for the course draw on writers such as Annie Dillard, Malcolm X, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Octavio Paz, Mário Vargas Llosa, Amy Tan, Edward Said, and Jamaica Kincaid, Amayarta Sen, Kofi Anan, Henry Louise Gates Jr., Anthony Giddens, Benjamin Barber, and Ellen Goodman.
 
English 93: Introduction to Academic Writing and Reading: Images, Public Space, and Writing. City College of San Francisco:  The first semester of Academic Writing and Reading focusing on expository and argumentative writing. The course is centered on the themes: media, youth, schooling, public space, work, history and postcolonialism.  One essay is a comparative rhetorical analysis of four newspaper articles on the same topic; another is a process-analysis essay analyzing how TV news is created and delivered; another describes and analyzes advertisements.  We read Diana George and John Trimbur’s Reading Culture, and Steve Powers and Neil Postman’s How to Read T.V. News, as well as pieces by James Baldwin, Gloria Naylor, Juan Williams, Roland Barthes, and Mike Davis; class reading is predominantly non-fiction.

University of San Francisco

Rhetoric and Composition 250: Academic Writing at USF.  University of San Francisco. This course is designed to provide transfer students with prior writing credits an introduction to the standards and research methods expected at USF.  We read selections from Fields of Reading, analyzing texts from various fields, and writing research essays. As 250 students have had some writing experience, I have them choose their own topics for research papers.  One essay focuses on politics and language, another focuses on globalization and free trade, another on women's issues, and another on the environment.   We read short pieces by Alice Walker, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Jonathan Swift, Pablo Picasso and Stanley Milgram. 

Rhetoric and Composition 120: Academic Writing at USF. University of San Francisco. This course is designed to provide incoming students an introduction to the standards and research methods expected at USF.  We read selections from Fields of Reading, analyzing texts from various fields, and writing research essays.  I have them choose their own topics for research papers.  One essay focuses on politics and language, another focuses on globalization and free trade, another on women's issues, and another on the environment.   We read short pieces by Alice Walker, George Orwell, James Baldwin,  Martin Luther King Jr., Jonathan Swift, Pablo Picasso and Stanley Milgram. 

San Francisco State University

English 214: First Year Composition: Composition and Literature. A second-semester college reading and composition centered around critical thinking and literary analysis.  Through reading and analyzing short stories, poems, plays and novels, students learn critical literary terms and the ability to analyze and criticize literature from a variety of perspectives.  Some of the authors we will be reading are William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Carver, Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Blake, John Keats, William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Paul Bowels and Italo Calvino. 

English 114: First Year Composition. Basically the same course as 1A at City College:  A university-level freshman composition course centered on reading and writing nonfiction and mastering essay types. We focus on writing essays that utilize multiple illustrative types as well as complex arguments, using the argumentative models of Aristotle, Stephen Toulmin and Carl Rogers.  The class is focused on critical analysis of complex texts, and I have chosen exile and identity as a theme that runs throughout the readings, as the writers we read often discuss their critical perspectives on their homelands and concept of home.  We read Isabel Allende’s My Invented Country, Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, James Alan McPherson’s A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, and Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Other Essays.
 
Cañada College, San Mateo Community College District

English 110: Composition and Literature. Cañada College: A second-semester college reading and composition centered around critical thinking and literary analysis.  Through reading and analyzing short stories, poems, plays and novels, students learn critical literary terms and the ability to analyze and criticize literature from a variety of perspectives.  Some of the authors we will be reading are William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Carver, Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Blake, John Keats, William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Paul Bowels and Italo Calvino. 

English 165: Advanced Composition and Critical Thinking: Writing from Exile. Cañada College:  A second-semester college reading and composition course focused around critical thinking, analysis, and writing.  I picked the theme, "Writing from Exile," because of the wide variety of literature on exile, from political exiled writers, to refugees of war, poverty, as well as the interest many writers take in finding an exiled place, or critical perspective, from which they write.  We'll be reading Isabelle Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Virgil Suarez, James Allan McPherson, and also short readings  by writers ranging from Voltaire and Victor Hugo to Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe.

- English 100: Reading and Composition: Borders, Cultures and Writings. Cañada College: A university-level freshman composition course centered on reading and writing nonfiction and mastering essay types.  The readings for the course draw on writers in the Americas such as Annie Dillard, Malcolm X, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Octavio Paz, Mário Vargas Llosa, Amy Tan, Edward Said, and Jamaica Kincaid.

English 836: Writing Development: Writing and Identity in America. Cañada College:  This is the second semester of the developmental reading and writing course above.  In this semester, students move from sentences and paragraphs into essays.  The theme of the course is using writing as a tool for discovering and expressing telescopic identity on a personal, local, national, continental and global level.  The course includes an extensive section on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, in which we focus on education and careers. 

English 826: Basic Reading and Writing. Cañada College:  A developmental writing course focused on writing effective sentences and paragraphs.  While the class is focused on grammar, syntax and rhetorical skills, students respond in writing to readings which include essays, short stories, film and theater.

Reading 826: Academic Reading Strategies. Cañada College: A developmental reading course, the class is focuses on increasing comprehension of college textbooks, including skills such as reading rate/comprehension, vocabulary acquisition and application, reading rate flexibility, and study habits such as note taking, test taking and concentration.

Hogan High School, Vallejo, CA

12th Grade English: 19th and 20th Century British Literature. Hogan High School: A senior English class, this course focused on writing (from sentence to essay) and reading fiction and poetry.  Readings worked chronologically through the 19th and 20th centuries and included Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelly, Tennyson, Kipling, Hardy, Woolf, Wilde and Yeats.

12th Grade AP English: Film as Literature. Hogan High School: A senior honors English class focused on studying and writing about films as pieces of modern literature, I designed this course to be a survey of Hollywood film throughout the eras.  We compared contemporary and classic examples of film in the popular genres: mystery, western, romance, drama, sci-fi, action and horror.  We covered directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Robert Altman, Jean Luc Godard and Federico Fellini. 

American Academy of English

TOEFL Preparation. American Academy of English:  This course was designed to prepare students for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), which is the primary language test for college placement.  The course was divided into four sections which were touched upon daily: reading comprehension, listening comprehension, grammar and syntax, and essay writing.
 
- English as a Second Language, all levels: Universidad de Guanajuato, Berlitz, Mission High School, American Academy of English, Pro Active English.