Ohhh, what a week! First, because we had had so many days off before, and because I realized I would miss several days of class during the TESOL conference and therefore had to work quickly, I decided that we would have class every day this week. And that wasn't easy. Working five days in a row like that is not unusual, but having to prepare lesson plans for every day, seeing all my students every day, and grading something or giving feedback every day was new and certainly challenging (even the ELC was only four days a week).
Last week I explained how uncertain I felt about grading, and well, this week, as I graded and returned my students' papers, I had to face this exact problem: first, most students got really good grades because they went to the writing lab several times, which means that the few students who did not go to the writing lab got relatively lower grades than the others, and I understand how they could feel bad about that, but really, they could understand the problem. Second, this one student, who had received an 83% on his first paper got an 84% on the second one (I didn't see the previous grade when I gave the 84%) and was quite unhappy. He explained that for his first paper, he hadn't really looked at the assignment directions but that on the second one, he had, and so couldn't understand how his grade was higher by only 1%. He also didn't seem to understand my grading criteria (too vague), and, worst of all, he remembered things that I had said on the second day of class that had nothing to do with assignments but that he thought did, such as "free writing allows you to express your ideas better because you are not constantly thinking about directions or grammar or organization, etc." It is true that I did say that, while I was explaining why I believed that doing some free writing at the beginning of class for 10 minutes every two or three days was useful: most student, especially international students, have a tendency to focus so much on grammar and the language itself that they forget to develop their ideas well and in a "flowing" manner. I explained that free writing was a good way to brainstorm ideas for new projects, but I did NOT say that it was the only thing to do when writing a project. This student, however, seemed to have understood that. We spent two hours in my office, him arguing and arguing and arguing, and me trying to explain what I meant by all this and why his paper hadn't received a good grade, but I am quite sure that it was useless since I had to repeat things two or three times. As I re-read and re-graded his paper, I realized three things: one, I had been too harsh on this student and my guess is, it's because I think he is quite smart and could have done much better, and also because his not going to the writing lab had given me the impression he didn't really care about his paper; two, I need to be more careful with what I say in class, not that I am saying wrong things but maybe I don't explain things in context, or with their limitations; three, I am unable to respond well to a student's endless arguing. In the end, I managed to pull myself together and stick to a few things that I really wanted him to understand, but allowing a students to argue for two hours like that was not a smart thing to do and should have been avoided somehow. I mean, I am not against the fact that a student wants to understand better why a paper got a specific grade, but not for two hours. After the student left, I felt like a horrible teacher and was ready to quit. The final grade was an 89%, and the student later apologized for his behavior and has been quite cooperative and nice since then. We have concluded that he should ask me every time he didn't understand something and that I would try to be clearer in class about my expectations, and hopefully, things will go better. This has also made me realize that I have taught composition for a while now and don't always remember that what is obvious to me might not be to my students.
On Monday (after I had gone to a four-hour Flash workshop which was really cool, we are so lucky to have these free resources as TAs!), I introduced the next papers and how the summary and the comparison/contrast papers would work together. Last semester, I had introduced the idea of making a table with the information the students found in the articles they would start to gather for their research but I hadn't made it clear enough, I guess, because many students had been confused and had taken a while before they were able to build a useful table. So this semester, as the students were finding their very first article, I showed them how to read it and compile the information into a table that they could use later. But first, instead of taking an article, since everyone is studying a different topic, we chose three movies: The Matrix, Titanic, and Life is beautiful. We chose some criteria that we could use to "judge" the movie, such as acting, plot, setting, message, characters, awards, genre, etc. and made a table with all this information. Then we discussed about each criteria and how the three movies compared or not, for example if the acting was better in one movie or another, or if one movie had received more awards than the others, etc. I explained how whole papers could be written about just one or two of these criteria in order to compare movies which, on the surface, don't have much in common. It seemed like they understood quite well and then were able to give examples of how they would do it for their own papers and with main ideas instead of criteria. I told them that they should start putting the information from their articles in tables or they would not remember what information was in what article after they had found five or six articles, let alone 20.
Tuesday was a computer day. The goal was to make the students more familiar with the kind of online articles they could find for their research. Like last semester, I had chosen two different articles that discussed the benefits or disadvantages of eating meat, one from a popular magazine, and the other one from a more serious medical-like webpage. I introduced the ideas of advertising, pathos, logos, ethos, format, colors, statistics, references, style, etc. and asked the students to judge those two articles and explain why one would be more convincing than another and how. We talked about the differences between what the articles DO, what they SAY, and HOW they say it, and also about how to find the important information that you could use for a summary or a comparison/contrast paper. We continued the activity on Wednesday and also talked about what to put into a summary and how. I had given my students some reading to do, and that proved very useful: one was a short story, and the other one was a summary of the short story with explanations of every part and almost every word--what an attributive tag is, how the intro works, how this is not a summary of their ideas but of someone else's ideas, how opinions can't be expressed, etc. On Wednesday I also got somehow mad at my student for one reason: several students told me that they couldn't find any articles that were related to their topics! I explained and re-explained that we still had 7 weeks to answer the MAIN research question that they had and that they needed to start thinking about the steps they needed to take in order to find their big answer. Several students were looking for articles that only and entirely discussed everything about their topics and would give them an easy answer, but I explained that THEY had to find their own answer by looking at the different aspects of their topic and proceeding step by step. For example, one student wanted to know what could be done about corruption in Malaysia and of course didn't find anything about that, but I told him that he should first define what corruption is, where and when it takes place, why he thinks something needs to be done about it, etc. Overall, I told my students that they were great students because they often did what I told them to do, but they also had to THINK by themselves too!
Thursday was quite fun because every student had brought four copies of their first draft and exchanged them with one another. Then I kicked everyone outside, although it was not really sunny, but it was the first time that it was not too cold to stay outside for 30 minutes and I think we all need fresh air sometimes. So the students spent the hour reading each other's papers and trying to reduce the word counts from 300 to 200 by making the texts more compact and filled with information (and no blah blah). As I was going around and looking at what everyone was doing, I realized that they had almost no idea about how to do that, and so on Friday, I took one student's draft (with his permission, of course), copied it on a transparency, and reduced its amount of word by cutting, cutting, and cutting long sentences, repetitions, useless ideas, etc. I actually love to do that and tried to show my students how much fun it could be to play with words like that and how amazingly more powerful a text could become through this process. Their final draft (summary, 300 words) was due on Friday but I said that they could turn it in on Monday but that I didn't want to see one useless word in there! I had also read their first drafts and, instead of writing the same things over and over on every draft, I made a list of important points to remember and gave that list to the whole class: include the author's name, title of article, source, date, use the last name only, use attributive tags, keep the text in good English, put the whole reference at the end, make a clear distinction between the primary author and others that he/she might cite, explain acronyms, link ideas together, use first, second, finally, etc., mention the rhetorical purpose of the article, use proper format, etc. I am hoping that the papers I will get on Monday will be brilliant! What upsets me, though, is that the students who needed to make the most changes in their papers were the ones who were NOT taking notes and asking questions when I was explaining which problems I had found in their drafts and how to avoid them. The others, the ones who took notes and asked questions were the ones who had already written a pretty decent summary! I guess it is always like that.
Next week, I will first introduce the next project and then talk about ethos, pathos, and logos. Much can be done with that and I am hoping that my students this semester will be as enthusiastic about and interested in those ideas as my students last semester were. One thing is sure, though: I will definitely give everyone (including me) a whole day off, with no homework, no class, no grading, no lesson plans, no assignment, no conference, no student, no nothing!
