Yes, it was a difficult semester, and I am not proud of it. Too many things went wrong at the same time, and this is not an excuse but an explanation.

First, because of the new organization of the First-Year Composition classes, students and teachers have to change classrooms every day of the week. For example, a class can meet on Monday in a regular classroom, on Tuesday in "conference room," on Wednesday in a computer lab, on Thursday in a regular classroom, and on Friday in a "conference room" again. All those classrooms may not even be in the same buildings. When I asked to teach this class, I was afraid I would have to walk between buildings and walk even more if I got confused with the days (which happens regularly with the students), so I asked if I could teach a computer class instead. This means that we met every day in a computer lab and nowhere else. However, while it helped my walking and parking problems, it also proved to be very difficult to teach to students who would hide behind their computer screens and be chatting online instead of listening to me. I tried different things (turn off the screen, come closer to the front of the class, etc.) but it was not enough, and in the end, I have some interaction with the students at the front of the class but basically never felt like I met my students and really talked to them. If this ever happens to me, I will work much harder on knowing my students from the start and interacting with the whole class. This could be done by meeting outside of the computer lab, having more conferences in my office with individual students, and asking the students to move around the computer lab and not sit at the same desk every time.

 

A second problem was that this class was supposed to be a "Learning community" group, that is, a group of students that took English together and Spanish together. This would allow the students to form tighter relationships and to decrease their likelihood of dropping out of Purdue. The Spanish teacher and I met several times before the beginning of the semester to plan activities and share ideas to make our classes exciting and closely related. For example I organized "movie nights," where I would offer a movie to the students and their friends every Monday night and would also bring pizza or other treats. Both the Spanish teacher and I were there every single Monday night and we chose movies that could relate to English but also to Spanish, to traveling, to school, and to anything else we thought the students could be interested in. However, from the start, three things happened: 1) The students did not know they were in a learning community and didn't know what that meant. They had been placed there because of their schedule requirements for other classes and didn't care about Spanish or English or making friends any more than regular students; 2) The students never "bonded" or became friends together. In fact some students rarely talked to others. And 3), the students were never interested in our activities. We gave them the choice, we asked them to tell us what they would like to do and where they would like to go, but they didn't seem to care and never suggested anything. They also stopped coming to the movie nights after a few weeks. This was very disappointing to the Spanish teacher and I, and we felt that the students never cared to make this work.

 

A third problem was that I had just taught international students for three semester before that. My experience with those international students had been fantastic and very strong. I had been faced with their struggles, their happiness, their homesickness, and their efforts to get into difficult engineering programs. I had loved the diversity they brought to our classroom and had made great friends. In short, I had given my heart to them and they had given me theirs. And I thought that I had gone too far with my international students and that I should "distance" myself a little more from my students. When I started teaching this 106r class, I found myself in front of English-speaking students from Indiana, whose main concern was to get accepted by the right fraternity and whose main struggle was to find a date for Friday night's party. I know this sounds stereotypical, but that's how it felt. I tried to talk with them about their concerns, their lives, their successes and struggles, but they made me understand that I was the teacher and simply couldn't understand what they were going through. Because I had decided not to get too involved in my students' lives, I did not insist much. The fact that this semester was also when the US president was re-elected probably didn't help, since most students voted for him and knew that I was French and probably didn't like him. The gap was then not just in generations but also in cultures. I did not connect with these students and they didn't want to connect with me. I felt like I had nothing to offer them that they would be interested in. And they probably felt like I didn't care. I believe that that was a mistake on my part, and that I could have tried harder to connect and understand them. In fact, the following semester went much better because I completely left my beliefs and opinions outside of the classroom and became sincerely interested in my students' lives.

 

A fourth and final problem I encountered that semester was that I had just finished the qualifying exams a few days before the beginning of the semester and had started writing my prospectus. The focus of my research changed often, not because I didn't know what to do but because my expectations were too big and my ideas often impossible to realize. I was finally able to defend my prospectus by the end of the semester, but the fact is, I had sometimes been more worried about my research than about my students. Although I am glad the prospectus defense went well, I am sad that I sacrificed my students for it, in a way, and I promised myself not to do it during the following semester and to balance my job and my studies better.

 

All this and more may explain why this semester was by far the hardest and least successful semester of my teaching career. I do hope this will never happen again and have learned a lot from this experience. While this has been quite discouraging at times, the two teaching awards that I received for the previous year of teaching make me realize that this was only one semester and that I can be a great teacher. As my advisor told me, everyone has a bad semester from time to time. Since this was the first experience of that kind in more than six years of teaching, I believe that she was right. The following semester went much better, and I am very excited to be working with advanced First-Year students and international graduate students next semester.