Another week is gone and as usual, I am impressed with the hard work my students have done! Again, we had class every day this week and no one complained, even though they all have major midterms and papers and assignments due before Spring Break, and everyone is simply tired and sick of school. But they are holding up! I love my students!
This week, the biggest thing we've done was to learn about APA. Last semester, I did that kind of at the end of the semester and in a hurry, and the result was that many people didn't really understand the purpose and the ways to do it right, but this time, I spent four days on it and I think, I
think that all of my students have understood how it works. First, we went through the APA Manual together to see what kind of information they could find in there and I showed them where they could find help with grammar, punctuation, making tables and graphs, writing numbers, etc. and then I showed them the References section and had them find references for different objects/papers/books/articles/etc. They had brought some items to class (CDs, books, textbooks, magazines, etc.) and I also had them write the reference of each of these things and then show the class how they had done it on the board. Towards the end of the week, we talked about referencing items in the text and how to use other sentence structures than "John (2000) said... John (2000) said... and Marx (1999) said..." because it is a tendency that I saw in their drafts. Some of these references are tough, such as e-journal articles or internet articles with no date and no author, so we spent some time explaining different problems and how to solve them, and especially, where to look for solutions. I do hope that they will become very familiar with this book and see it as a valuable resource. One good thing about it is that one student told the class she already had to use it for one of her other classes, so it made the other students realize that it might indeed be a useful tool. I also learned that APA was also taught in their COM114 class, so either they have already taken it and are ahead of everyone in our class, or they haven't taken it yet and will be ahead of everyone in that class soon.
At the same time, we continued working on their fourth project, the comparison/contrast paper. On Monday, they had to bring their outline, which I collected, read, and commented, and on Tuesday, I put them into groups of three so that they could read each other's outlines and see how different they were. I had put them in groups that I had created myself, to make sure that people of different skills would be together--for example someone who had the organization very clear, with someone who had developed his/her ideas well, and with someone who was struggling a little more, etc. The other thing that I try to do, and I'm not sure that it's useful or not, is that I write individual comments on everyone's drafts or outlines, but I also make notes of the major problems I see in almost everyone's draft and I talk about them in class. For example, if I said that they had to have 3-5 main points in their papers and see that many students have more than 5 points but don't develop them well enough, then I'll write it on those students' papers but also address this in class and explain again why I believe it is important to keep the main points down to 3, 4, or 5, but develop them well with good arguments and ideas. In this case, I had originally said that they had to use three articles, one of which had to come from the library, but I also saw some people who were using the article they used for the previous project as one of their three articles, so I simply said that they could do this if they ended up finding a fourth article too... which started the discussion on how many articles they could use, and now the majority of the students is using more than three articles. Well, it looks like this semester's motto is "flexibility" and I like it, in a way, even though it is highly unpredictable. This flexibility seems to allow much more "life" and energy into our class and also to allow the students to fit the assignments to their needs and personal skills. I don't know exactly how to explain what's happening, but it seems like the students feel freer to adapt the assignments to their topics and writing abilities, and this is an interesting process to observe. It ends up making the excellent students work even harder and pushes the struggling students to work harder too because they see what their classmates are doing, so surprisingly, everyone's doing better. Because of that too, I worry less about everyone in general and have more time to spend with those who need my help more often, and I see that those struggling students are now asking me for extra help and sincerely seem to want to do really well. I feel so grateful for their efforts! So, on Wednesday and Friday again they had drafts due and again I collected them, read them, and made comments on them. On Wednesday too, I had them give their drafts to each other so that everyone had two drafts from two different people, and I had them comment those two drafts at home, with a peer review form that I had given them. I haven't seen those comments, since the next day they returned the drafts with the comments to the writers of the drafts, but I will see them next week and wonder how it went. Because we had so much to do with APA, I didn't want to spend Wednesday doing peer reviewing and thought we had done enough of that in class that they would know how to do it alone at home. We'll see.
Well that was our week, nice and easy, hard work but fun. My mystery student has showed up twice and not given me any sign that his life was going any better, but there's really nothing I can do about it. He said he was not doing well and didn't look so good at all, so I'm hoping he's doing something about it, but I can't really get involved in that story, I have enough with the students who do show up. I talk with them, help them, give them advice, try to cheer them up when life is tough, and every day, I learn more about how really hard the life of these international freshmen can be... and every day I admire them and love them more.
