Not a long week this week, only two days, because it is Thanksgiving. I was cruel and asked my students to come on both Monday and Tuesday, although most teachers had given one, if not two days off to their students. But we have too much we need to do, and never enough time. So I brought some Swiss chocolate on Tuesday (good thing it was just the end of Ramadan!) and we worked on their papers so they would have less to do during the break. Four out of 14 students did not come on Tuesday: two were sick (one has been missing forever!), one was in South Carolina already, and the other one I do not know. So, on Monday we talked about fallacies. It was interesting because the examples that were provided in the textbook were very culturally related and not only did I have to explain the fallacies but before I could even do that, I had to explain what the sentence meant (for example about oil in Alaska and affirmative action). It was a very cultural day! We also talked about all the people who had influenced our world and how one of the main characteristics of these people was that they could speak very well--Gandhi, Martin Luther King, all the great prophets, etc. I am not saying that they have to write and speak as well as those people do, but they have to learn that words can be manipulated and played with to make the message more efficient. I think this is the main point of this class: not to make them proficient writers but to let them know HOW they can become proficient writers by showing them what areas can be improved and how. On Tuesday, we worked on their outlines for the final paper. This is going to be tough because we really do not have much time. I am trying to show my students how to work from an outline and fill in the information piece by piece, not necessarily in the order, how NOT to start with the introduction and work in a linear way. It will be difficult, but I think that some students will write decent final papers. Only two weeks left, it is incredible... and sad, because I am really getting along well with my students these days! Happy Thanksgiving!
There are so many things I would like to do and so little time left! The biggest problem right now is webpages. Now I know this has nothing to do with English composition... although my department would certainly be happy to know that I am teaching my students how to make webpages since this is a very "technology-oriented" department. In fact, the "goals for 106 instructors" handout that we got at the beginning of the semester, clearly says that we have to help our students "build confidence in their abilities to create, interpret, and evaluate texts in all types of media" and "know how to use commonplace software to create visuals that effectively make or support arguments." We also have to "integrate appropriate advanced technologies such as photo editing, Flash, or MOO building and e-book development" in our teaching. So really, I SHOULD make it a priority to teach my students about webpages, Dreamweaver (which we don't have on our computers!), and other such programs. I know that the majority of the regular 106 sections have put a lot of emphasis on teaching Photoshop, Dreamweaver (which they do have on their computers!), and PowerPoint to their students. However, my question is: what does that have to do with English? The teaching goals handout says that we have to use those tools "in a rhetorically sound way" but if my students don't know what an introduction or a counterargument is, then what's the point of teaching them how to be rhetorical on their webpage? The research I am currently reading for my own classes explains that students in general, and scientific students in particular, don't learn how to write adequately in their own programs (for example in engineering classes) and then find themselves in a workplace that requires them to write a lot, or in graduate school where they have to write articles and theses and don't know how to do it! On the other hand, I certainly understand that technology is becoming increasingly important, and I do agree that writing a five paragraph essay about our last vacation does not make much sense for "today's students." To tell the truth, I love to make webpages and believe that since I have learned how to do that (just a year ago) I have been able to understand better how this world works. I have also learned how to take advantage of what the Internet offers in a more efficient way, with this online teaching portfolio, for example. And I love to teach my students about this, because I do think it is important for them to know how the Internet works but certainly not because I think that a Freshman Composition class is the best place to do it. If you are interested in my department's perspective on this, here is an article that appeared in the Exponent about the new 106 classes. Anyway, here I am, with this dilemma at hand, and at first, I really did not want to get into technology more than to teach my students how to use Word efficiently, but now I have done it, and it is becoming a real challenge. On the one hand, I just wanted to introduce how to make basic webpages and how to upload them on the Purdue server. On the other hand, I now see that my students want to learn more about it because of course, it is more fun to do this than to work on the structure of the classical argument. Some 106 instructors have created a "first webpage" template that they had their students copy and paste on their Purdue account and that is all they did. I wanted to give more freedom to my students and let them create their own webpage, so I created an example page to show my students what kind of things they could modify and should or should not do on their first webpage, and I also made another page with specific directions they could follow to create a nice little website and upload it on Purdue's server. We have worked on their pages on Monday and Tuesday, and a little more during the rest of the week, but I just don't feel that we should spend that much more time on it, even thought several students have not yet been able to even upload even one page on their server. This is discouraging! Other than that, this week has been spent discussing the format of a classical argument. We talked about making a claim, articulating reasons, understanding unstated assumptions, finding evidence, using different kinds of evidence (research, personal experience, testimony, statistics, etc.), addressing counterarguments (by rebutting opposing views, conceding to counterarguments, or qualifying our claims), anticipating objections, and appealing to pathos, logos, and ethos. We worked on several examples and I explained these concepts several times since they are not always easy to understand. Next week I want to talk about fallacies and get the final paper started. I gave three quizzes to my students just to make sure that they were doing the assigned reading (because I know that they tend to skim over the information and I believe that this is something they need to understand well if they want to write a decent final paper). The interesting thing was the discussions that came up when I told them that their final paper was going to be an argument paper. Several students had a very hard time understanding how they could present the information they have gathered throughout this semester as an argument. Many simply wanted to learn more about a certain topic and have never taken a position. I thought about that a lot and wasn't sure what to do, especially since our textbook (the Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing) does present other types of writing styles: analyzing and synthesizing ideas, investigating cause and consequence, making an evaluation, proposing a solution, writing to persuade, etc. So at first I wanted to present all these different styles to my students and allow them to choose the style that they think is the best to present the information they have. However, in the end, and mainly because of the time restriction and the fact that my students are starting to be a bit overwhelmed with the end of the semester coming, I decided that everyone was going to have to formulate some kind of argumentation. I will tell them that there are different kinds of arguments and that sometimes, we argue not to propose a solution but just to show that there is a problem. Rohit can "argue" that the situation in India concerning AIDS is dramatic and needs to be addressed, but not give a solution. He could think about different solutions and present them but does not necessarily have to argue one over the other. Kester can present the information he gathered about new regulations for international students and "demonstrate" that those regulations can sometimes be beneficial and sometimes be confusing or detrimental to the students. Yes, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that we can find a way for everyone to present his/her information in some kind of an "argumentative" way. Well we had class every day this week and I did not meet with anyone individually, and I must say, I wish this week had been longer! We still have many things to do before the end of the semester, and I am really starting to feel comfortable with my students, which is very agreeable. I graded their interview report this week, also, and many students had done a good job. It was very difficult to grade because some students had written three pages while others had up to seven pages, and I did not always know how to balance depth of information, organization, and assignment requirements. I guess that is why I had a grading rubric, but giving a low grade to someone who was presenting extremely interesting information for seven pages (but with a poor organization, for example), was hard, especially since I know that most students were quite excited about this project and put a lot of work into it. One student, who usually gets 60 or 70 on his papers, got a 93 on this one, and that was really rewarding (for him too I bet)! I hope they all will do a great job with their final paper too!
Time flies! It is amazing that we only have 4 weeks left and that includes Thanksgiving week... Things went rather well this week for our class, but individual students are starting to feel overwhelmed. All my students are having exams and several papers to turn in right now, and it's just going to get worse until the end of the semester so I am very worried, especially for some of them. Monday, we worked on reported speech. I had prepared several examples, including examples with different tenses, questions, statements, and imperative sentences, and we worked through them while I was trying to make them think of the rules. I gave them a little trick to check if what they wrote was right: when you say, "he asked me if his car was ready" you can just erase the "question section of the sentence" (he asked me if) and see what you have left (his car was ready). If you can use this last part in your answer AS IT IS, if it is a statement and not a question, then you are good (I told him HIS CAR WAS READY). I bet it works well with the majority of the sentences but not all, but still, it helps to see if you have a question or a statement. On Tuesday, we went over the interview project and look at a good example. The example talked about this person interviewing a social worker about children with disabilities or something like that and reporting her interview in a very nice manner. What I wanted my students to see was that they did not have to use the "I asked... He said... I asked... He said..." format, because that is quite boring, but that they should organize their report by topics and find nice transitions between ideas. As I was looking at first drafts today, it was interesting to notice that the great majority of the students had copied the format of this example almost sentence to sentence, especially in the introduction and the conclusion. I have been wondering if this is a good or a bad thing, and I guess it can be a good thing since they have had to think about the different "parts" of an introduction and translate those parts into something meaningful for their paper. What else? On Wednesday, I talked about the Internet and how and why to use it. We talked about different strategies to use to find good information and looked at different search engines, and also discussed how different pages can give reliable information or not. Our textbook gave a good list of questions to ask about websites, to evaluate them, and I had my students go over two different web pages about food to evaluate them using those questions. Finally, I explained the web terminology (root, domain, server, files, directory, etc.) and as I was explaining this, I realized that they did not know much about all this and only two students had ever been exposed to webpage construction or management. I know that other 106i teachers have already had their students make a website and publish their own papers on it, but I always thought that my students probably knew enough about it already and I was also scared to have to deal with the Purdue server! The last reason why I did not want to work on this kind of project is that the computers we are using in our class don't have Dreamweaver but only FrontPage, and I have gone from writing HTML codes directly to Dreamweaver, so I did not want to have to learn FrontPage. Anyway, at the end of the hour, I decided that I was going to do all these things and teach my students how to build simple web pages using FrontPage and how to publish them on the Purdue server. They asked for it! Needless to say, I was scared! This is why, on Thursday, we first reviewed the web terminology and the way links work, and then I spent some time talking about webpage design, not that I know much about it, but I just showed my students why tables were useful, and how to use colors, fonts, images, links, etc. Then, they took the FrontPage handout I had told them to print and bring to class and I left them fight with their first page. Every time someone was asking a question, I had to try to find the answer myself first... but fortunately, FrontPage is very similar to Words, and I also had a few students who were quick to understand the system and ready to help their classmates. It was a fun activity, actually, since I was not really the one in control there but instead let them experience and learn and fight with the whole thing. I think they really enjoyed it and some students had already done some nice pages by the end of the hour. I really liked doing that. It reminded me of my first days, when I was trying to make a webpage by handwriting HTML codes... it was such a pain, but I learned a lot! I still wish we had Dreamweaver, but maybe it's better to start with FrontPage, which is really simple, and then let them use Dreamweaver once they understand the basic concepts of webpage design. I showed them my very first index page.... (I wouldn't have known how to make this link if I hadn't learned the HTML codes!) and also another example, a bad one, to explain to them how they could use tables. They were all able to have at least one link from their page to our 106i page and an email link to their email address. Fun! On Monday, we will spend the hour fighting with the Purdue server until everyone has a webpage or two published! Today, I simply met with all my students to go over their first draft, and talk about how things are going for them. As I said earlier, some of them are not doing so well and missing class or not doing their assignments or simply looking really depressed... so I wanted to talk to everyone individually and make sure everything was OK and let them know I would help them even with their other classes. We talked about their countries, their language, their families, a little, about their other classes, their plans for the Thanksgiving and Christmas break... and I could see that some of them were happy to do it. I told one student in particular to contact the counseling office to talk to someone because he has had many very difficult things to deal with in the last year and is definitely not doing so well. I love all those kids so much! I can say "kids" because today was one student's 18th birthday! They are still so young! I was 23 when I came to the US and it was hard, and I can't imagine being here at 17 and dealing with all those engineering classes, homesickness, language problems, the new INS regulations, roommates, the laundry to learn how to do, etc! One of the other 106i teacher told our mentor group that she had just realized one of her students, from India, had flown directly into West Lafayette last summer and had never left this campus since! Not once! Too much work and no opportunity. Wow... I wish I could organize something nice for those students for Thanksgiving.
This week was an exciting week! My students seem interested in what they are doing, finally. I guess it is because the interview project is just more interesting than the other projects. Maybe I should have done it first, before the comparison/contrast paper, to get the more excited about their research, but I also wanted them to know more about their topic before asking "experts" to help them and give them more information. So... I will have to think about that. It was already an interesting experience for them to write some questions and realize that many people DO know a little at least about their topics. More about that soon... On Monday, we worked on our interview strategies. They had to have a list of questions, already, and they tried them on each other to see if these questions made sense, if they were clear enough, and if additional questions were needed. We talked about questionnaires, also, and the fact that it is more time consuming but can be useful, sometimes. I talked with one of my students, in particular, who is doing some research about Jihad... and who might have to face some hostility when he asks his questions, so I told him to write a questionnaire and give it to several people. It will be more objective, because people would not be scared to say what they really think, since it is not to his face, and it is also more neutral and less direct. For him, it makes it easier because he does not have to pretend that he is not hurt or angry about people's responses. The important thing I emphasized too, was that these interviews should be an opportunity to learn more about their topic, and not just to confirm what they already know. They have to go deeper into their research, and not stay at the surface of things the way many have in their comparison/contrast papers. It is easy of course to simply find materials that confirm what you already know and to not stop and think about things, to not analyze them, but to now say "and now, what else is there to it?" When I was grading their comparison/contrast paper, I sometimes wrote huge lists of questions they could ask during their interviews because I was a little frustrated at their "shallowness" and lack of... enthusiasm... or thinking... I don't know, but I hope I made it clear that I expect more. The problem with some students is that they started to focus too much, to narrow down their topics so much that they forgot to look at the big picture. While they were working on their interview questions, I also mentioned that they have to be flexible and allow the topic to go where it was going, even if it was not in their original plans, because after all, they do not know all the interesting things they can learn and all the sides there are to it. Tuesday was the most exciting day. I had written to some friends to ask them to come to our class and be interviewed by my students so they could practice their interview skills and see if their questions made sense to "unknown" people. Eight people came, graduate students and 106 teachers, and my students spent the whole hour talking with these people. It was very interesting to go around the classroom and listen to what was taking place there. Our "interviewees" reacted very differently depending on their experience with non-English speakers and also depending on the topic of the interviews. Some of our guests were giving advice to my students when they were "leading" the discussion or when they would not phrase things well enough or speak loud enough, for example. Other were answering "I don't know" to most questions because I guess they didn't know anything about the odd topics of my students, while others were trying to lead the discussion to topics they knew something about. Overall, my students were able to talk to 2-3 guests and they loved that experience! They realized what it meant to ask questions, listen, and take notes at the same time, what it is to organize your questions so you can have a real conversation going and not just random questions, and hopefully how they needed to interact with their interviewees to keep them interested and glad to help. It was a "fake" interview exercise, but many students have already learned a lot from our guests and will include this new information in their interview report. That is when they also learned that they need to go deeper into their topics because what was new information to them was often not new information to the interviewees, especially those who were older and who had taught international students before. On Wednesday, we didn’t have class. I let them work on their questions and find people whom they could interview. As usual, I think maybe one or two students actually took advantage of this day to do something and the others just took a day off. It is hard to know what to do and how to allow the good students to do good work while not allowing the less enthusiastic students to be lazy and wait for the last minute to do their mediocre work. I must say, though, that I was impressed with the feedback given by our interviewees after Tuesday's class. Those I talked to, said that they thought my students were very prepared, polite, and able to conduct a great interview. Some even said that they were impressed by the way my students were able to ask follow-up questions and keep the conversation going! Ha! My work with them was not useless! I also asked about individual students, especially those I was worried about, and it seems like they had done well, much better than what I had expected. Now I know the people who told me all those good things were also 106 teachers, so they are used to talking to less-than excited students, but still, I feel rewarded (and I told my students about it and told them that they should feel rewarded for their hard work too), and less worried about those few students I thought would not be ready. On a much less exciting note, though, I lost a student. This is one huge failure for me. This is the student who was so unprepared for the last project and turned his paper late after I had told him not to, the one who had already missed so many times that if he missed one more time, according to my syllabus (and constant reminders!), he would fail this class… and well, he didn’t come to class on Tuesday, nor on Thursday. Overall, this student was definitely not doing well and never listened to my advice about what he should do to catch up with the rest of the class. I have a hard time thinking about what the real problem was, though. Did he respect me but really needed extra help, or did he simply not care about English or not respect me, or did he have a personal problem (like homesickness) that prevented him from doing as well as he’d wished? I just cannot tell, and his failing my class is also my failing as a teacher. I could have cared more, it is true. Sometimes I got impatient with him because he would never seem to want to understand that to my suggestions could in fact be helpful! I feel so prejudiced too… he reminds me of that other student I had a while ago, from Oman, who was acting in exactly the same way, just as if he thought I really didn’t know what I was talking about. Many other students are not like that, I know, and I need to stay objective: I did warn this student several times about his absences and about the fact that I would not accept any more disrespect from him. Thursday: I decided to spend some time working on “reported speech.” Well, it seems that I need to spend way more than one hour on that, because I had them do two exercises in class, one to change reported speech into direct speech, and the other the other way around, but it was one big disaster! I don’t think I have ever heard that many mistakes in one hour! It was hilarious, fortunately, and we spent the whole hour laughing, since I managed to not make this too threatening for their ego… Even the close-to-native English speakers made several mistakes. The biggest problem is of course to change a question into reported speech. “When can you go to the movie?” does NOT become “he asked me when can I go to the movie,” unlike what almost everyone seems to think, real native speakers included! So, we will do more of this on Monday, and go step by step, tense by tense, with statements, questions, and imperatives. Those imperatives are tough too: “He told me NOT to go there.” On Thursday too, I brought some nice little cards and had my students write thank-you notes to all the people who helped us on Tuesday. Really, we had a blast that day, and several of these people said that they wanted to do this big practice activity with their students too. Overall, besides the fact that I lost one student, this week was quite an event, and very stimulating. My students are now ready to go “out there” into the real world. I think that many, if not everyone, will do well and gather some interesting information. I am eager to see what will come out of this project.
