Could I possibly love what I am doing even more? I don't think so. I have wonderful students and this semester is going better than any semester I have ever had! I feel very blessed and honored by the respect and hard work I receive from my students.
This week was spent discussing research questions. Last semester, I had a hard time helping my students find good research questions for their future research, and this time, I decided to spend a lot of time on it and set up a few rules: nothing about the war in Iraq and nothing related to sports. I don't know if it is a weakness of mine or something too difficult for anyone, but I simply can't handle those questions well and find myself unable to guide the students efficiently. The research question must also be academic enough, and I will not say "I THINK you can find something written about that topic, I THINK someone must have done research about that." No, this time, I want to know for sure if someone has written something about the topic before the students actually decide to write about a certain topic. I have also made my students read quite a lot about how to formulate research questions and hypotheses, what kinds of questions they can ask, etc. I introduced the future projects and how they had to be on the same topic but would be different too. This is tough to explain, and we spent most of Monday's class discussing it. Again, unlike my previous class, this class asks several questions, makes comments, asks for examples, and likes to discuss ideas. I guess I didn't feel very comfortable spending so much time on talking, but this week, I really tried to pay attention to WHO was doing most of the talking during these discussions. I could have done some more "scientific" research about the dynamics of our class discussions, but well, I didn't. I just paid careful attention and noticed when I was speaking and when my students were talking, the kinds of questions I asked, and the kind of answers given, if I provided some answers too quickly if the students didn't seem to know, or if I gave enough time for them to think about it, if the discussions were about useful topics and problems or if it was more just for the fun of it. I also monitored the topic of our discussions to see if we were often going on a tangent or staying on track. I remember that in some of my own classes, I always tried to get the teacher to talk about "other stuff" so we would have less to do and more fun in class, or that I didn't like some teachers because they were always talking about their wives, dogs, or political views, and I really wanted to avoid this in my own class. Well, I know that it is extremely difficult to monitor your own speech habits, but from my little study, I noticed a few things:
- I do ask many questions, but I do give opportunities to all my students to answer them and even argue about the answers. I must be more careful about which students always answer and which ones never do so I can make sure that everyone has a chance to speak.
- Yes, I do go with the flow and someone go off on a tangent, but if I have specific questions I want to ask actually written on my little lesson plan, I can easily go back to the initial topic pretty easily. In fact, this happened just yesterday as we were speaking about different ways to find good research questions. I had asked the students to fill out a simple form asking questions about different "sides" of their lives: hobbies, jobs, families, beliefs, problems, policies that affect their lives, news stories that interest them, campus organization they belong to, interesting facts about their families or friends, places they have visited or wish to visit, questions they have, etc. All the students had filled it out but didn't know how to use this information to find questions for their papers, so we spent about 20 minutes discussing this. I took the example of one student who had written that most people in his family were either teachers or in some kind of business. So there, how can you use this to find research questions? I asked him if these were common jobs in Malaysia (where he is from), and whether these jobs were prestigious. I then asked him what he and the people who were teachers there thought of the educational system in Malaysia, and if it was very different from the educational system here. And this is where other students started to catch up, and someone asked him what he was studying (engineering) and why he was not following his family traditions and studying to become a teacher or a businessman. Then someone asked why he had come to the US instead of studying engineering in Malaysia and if this had to do with the educational system there or here. More questions were asked and the students started to realize that there were several interesting topics that could be researched there already, with just this little piece of information, and then the conversation changed focus a little and we started discussing about the fact that the US students found in engineering here are those who really WANT to be there, while several of the international students in engineering programs here do not like engineering but do it and do it well because their families force them, because it is the only career that has any prestige in their countries, or because they know it's the only career that will allow them to earn enough money back in their countries to be able to "repay" their parents for the immense sums of money they spend to send their children here. I guess this was a culturally enriching discussion because everyone realized the differences in social systems, educational systems, and "family relations" that exist between countries. In the end, I was able to say, "OK now, we could speak about these differences forever, but do you see that differences in cultures and motivations and family relations would make greatresearch questions?"
- As for the time I allow before I answer my own questions, I am not doing to bad. I made of point of looking at each student individually after asking a question and of rephrasing some of my questions to make sure everyone had understood. A couple of times, I gave one or two examples which showed what I was expecting and allowed the students to feel more comfortable in giving other examples. Yes, I did think a couple of times that I could have waited a little more, but I wait about 5 seconds every time, look at everyone, and well, we'll see if I can do better than that. No, really, I think I am not doing too bad.
- When it comes to my doing all the talking, it is only when there is something I must explain or that the students have not read about or understood. For example, I spent some time explaining about word limits on projects and why they were important because someone had written on the blog that he/she would have gotten a better grade if there hadn't been a word limit. I said that I really wanted them to concentrate on the QUALITY of their writing and not the quantity, that much could be said in just a few words, and that I hadn't taken that many points off in the first place. I reminded them of the two stories they had read, "No Cats in America?" and "Bart" and how powerful these stories were even though they were only a couple of pages long. It is true that I have reduced the number of words they can write from 1000 maximum last semester to 900 this semester, but I don't think this makes any difference. The students last semester were also complaining, and so were the English-speaking students last year when they had to write everything in 1500 words only. It was actually funny to hear them say "WHAT? 1500 words? That's waaayyy too much, I'll never be able to write that much!" and then, once they started writing, they would complain because they had 2000 words and I would tell them to reduce, reduce, reduce! Well with 900 words, at least, no one thinks it's too much, but some students still managed to write up to 1200 words on their first project! I too do hate the word limits imposed by my own teachers, but I do understand them for two reasons: 1) they DO force me to go back and cut out the unnecessary information, the blah blah, and to rephrase my sentences and paragraphs in a more focused and efficient way; 2) there are several instances when a very strict word limit is given, for abstracts or grant proposals, for example, and it is never too early to practice following very specific directions. I won't give a maximum word limits for the interview report but I WILL give a minimum limit, because I know that this is a paper that the struggling students have a tendency to seriously shorten. I will not give ANY word limit for the final paper, because by that time, the students have so much information about their topics that they can write pages and pages of interesting information without any difficulty. I am still thinking that NOT giving them a word limit might lower the quality of the overall paper so I might still change my mind, but last semester, I initially said 7-10 pages, then felt bad for the struggling students and also because other 106i teachers were not asking for that much, so I said 5-7 pages. In the end, I got anything from 5 to 12 pages. The question then becomes, "is it possible to grade fairly papers that are so different in length?" But I told my student that it was not because they wrote a lot that they would get good grades, that what HAD to be in the paper COULD be written in 5 pages, and that quality (organization, depth, etc.) was always the most important of my grading criteria. It is important to realize, also, that by then, I know my students very well as well as the grade they will get in this class, and I usually don't go into much details to grade this last paper, except if the student's grade is borderline between a B and a C, for example.
Talking about grading papers, the first project, which I got on Monday and returned on Wednesday, was not bad. The maximum was 99%, the minimum 78%, and the average was 89.3%. Wow, now that I am looking at this, I realize that this is very high and that I was maybe too nice. The thing is, several students had low B's but had gone to the writing lab a couple of times, which really increased their grades a lot! So FIVE students got an A- instead of a B because of that. I will give a little less extra credit for the writing lab next time and will try not to inflate my grades too much, but really, I don't know if it's because I am a bad writing teacher or because my students just worked hard, but I sometimes simply couldn't give a low grade to a "good" paper! This is also the first project and the easiest one, and I am also struggling between the desire to not discourage my students from the start and not tell them that they get good grades with not much work.
The last thing we did this week, besides going for a walk in the snow on the only day of sunshine (but by a temperature of 10F!) to get some sunlight, and watching Fried Green Tomatoes yesterday night (I just love those evenings, they are so fun and refreshing, especially when we have arguments about what an orange is or is not), was to have our first "individual" conferences. By personal, I mean in my office, one student at a time, and for 15 minutes or plus if needed, instead of the usual 5-10-minute, in-class, rushed, with-everyone-talking-around-us, kind of conference that I don't really find efficient. Talking to my students like this, in a more quiet and nice environment, allowed me to get to know them a little more, to ask them about their other classes, their lives, our English class, their questions and concerns, and their ideas for their research. I find this kind of conferences very nice and agreeable because it allows me to spend some face-to-face "quality" time with students who are often very quiet in class or sometimes "hiding" on the extremities of our semi-circle table arrangement. During those 15-20 minutes, I feel that I have finally "met" some of the students who have always been in class and done their work (by the way, in 3 weeks, I haven't had a SINGLE absence!), but who have been there without really been there for some reason. During conferences, we talked about their fears of making mistakes when they speak English, their fears of saying something stupid, and their shyness in general for some of them. I also saw that about half of the students already have good research questions but that the other half will need more help. The discussion we had yesterday in class will have helped, hopefully, and next week we are also starting the week with three days of conferences, readings, and form-fillings. I have a not too bad feeling about this, and think that everyone will be able to find something good and interesting to research, even if with a little help.
Ah, what a great week this has been!
