I have changed my schedule and the time when my students need to turn in their final draft of the comparison/contrast paper, because we needed to work on a few more things before they could write a decent paper. First, I wanted them to practice comparing and contrasting articles, and also looking for information to compare or contrast, and so we worked with two articles I had found that talked about eating meat or not. I was very lucky to have found two nice articles which were very different: the webpage design, the ideas, the arguments, the statistics offered, the language, etc. So we spent a couple of days discussing these two articles. We had a nice discussion and I wish we had had more time to discuss it more, but it was something that I will definitely do again. At the same time, Tony told the 106i teachers that two additional questions were going to be on our student evaluations: this class taught me to use technology well, and this class taught me how to evaluate websites or something like that. I think that working on these two articles was useful for them because many had no idea how to write their paper.
The other thing I wanted to work on was APA. I told them how to do the general formatting of a paper at the beginning of the semester and they did it quite well on their first paper but then started to forget how to do it... so we first did that... and then one day we talked about how to cite sources in the text, such as "According to this author (year)..." etc. or how to cite the author and year after having summarized or paraphrased someone's ideas. The idea of plagiarism seems so foreign to them that I had to talk about that repeatedly. It is not that they intentionally plagiarize, but they just do not know how to not repeat someone's ideas without copying the words, the sentence structures, and sometimes whole sentences. That makes me think that for them, it is a question of admiration and respect to copy the words and sentences of people who are the "expert" at doing it. The following day we worked on how to do a reference page at the end of the paper. This APA manual is really nice because it actually shows examples of how to do it all, and so that's mostly what I told and showed to my students because I didn't want them to actually memorize rules. I want them to become accustomed to using this APA manual and to know where to find what kind of information. They all had bought their books, they all had brought it to class on those days, and they all seemed to understand how to work with this quite well, so I was happy. On Thursday, I had two people who observed my class for other classes, other 106 teachers, and one of them told me, at the end of class, that if she did this APA thing with her students, they would all fall asleep, not listen, not care, and not learn anything, and she was very impressed with my students. It is true that I often complain about them and I tend to forget that I have very high standards and expect a lot more from my students than other teachers do and so overall, I really have great students! They pretty much all participate, all try, all talk to me, all learn, and pretty much everyone's writing has improved! The first 6 weeks were tough, I think for everyone, but since then, this class has been going quite well and I feel good about that. We will see if I still say that after I get their final drafts of their comparison/contrast papers.
On Wednesday, I brought some bagels and cream cheese to class, and on Friday, I gave them the day off. It is the time when they have tons of exams and projects due, when everyone is tired (me included), and when we all need a break somewhere. This is why I also changed the schedule for this paper and decided to do one less project than I had wanted to do. After all, it is more important to do a few things well than several things in a rush and not so well. And in Tony's class we read how most international graduate students didn't know how to summarize and analyze ideas and how that penalized them later when they wanted to write articles and find good research assistantships, so I am hoping that what we're doing right now in our class will be useful in the future and I told them that they had to work twice as much as English-speaking students if they wanted to succeed now and later... and they seemed to believe me!
