The end of the semester is near and I am both sad and happy. Sad because I feel very comfortable with this class and will miss those students a lot. It is not the first time I enjoy a class that much, and strangely enough, I don't feel connected with some of the students this semester the way I felt with the first class I taught at the ELC, for example, or most of last semester's students. This class has not been incredible, marvelous, wonderful, but is has been really good. I have never had any serious problems, which is something unusual, and what's nice is that the semester has been good from the start and we never really had serious ups and downs. I also didn't feel insecure in front of these students the way I did with my first Purdue class and also my first ELC class. And we didn't have a difficult beginning, nor are a few students complete strangers to the class, the way it happened last semester. So, for all these reasons, I can say that this semester has been a new experience and a good one too. It's just been good, constantly, and I've always felt comfortable in front of these students, rarely annoyed and never seriously, and all students together form a pretty tight group, we have some fun, we work hard, things are going well, and I am happy. This class has never been a burden or something that I have had to "deal with" outside of my work life, in my student or personal lives.
This week has gone fast, like all the others. We studied the different kinds of persuasive writing that the students could choose for their final paper. I have decided to keep it as a paper, since they will often have to use this format in the future and I know now that they can be creative if they have to. It is also the format that will allow them to use all the information they gathered throughout the semester the best. So basically, they will have three options: the classical argument, the evaluation paper, or the proposal. I gave them these three options because not all their topics would have worked well with the classical argument since some students were trying to discover information, others to compare different situations, and others still to find solutions. Someone who wants to know if the government in Venezuela is really a democracy or not will want to make an evaluation of the situation there and compare it with other counties. Someone who has shown that discrimination exists in Indonesia will want to find some solutions to the problem. In the end, I'd say that about 50% of the students have chosen the classical argument and the other 50% has chosen another way of writing this last project. So this week, this is all we did: learn about those different persuasive kinds of writings and decide which kind was the best for everyone. I had my students try to write outlines for every kind of writing with their topic, and to formulate different kinds of claims or hypotheses, to see which one would fit their topic and the kind of information they had gathered the best. It was not an easy process but at the end of the week, everyone seemed to be ok. I asked the students to choose one way and to stick to it, to read the chapters and the examples closely, to follow the guidelines given by the textbook and to use the grading criteria that are (and thankfully!) given as peer review questions but that I will use as grading criteria, so the students know exactly what to expect.
On Thursday and Friday, I had half the class bring a first outline of their paper and the other half work alone, outside (nice weather!), to try to understand those three types of persuasive writings. I had told them to work in pairs and to help one another come up with different outlines, and it turned out that the group that went out on Thursday worked all together as a group and not in individual pairs. I pretended to be mad and said "thanks for listening to my directions" but really, I realized that they worked very hard and were able to understand the concepts quite well. I am proud of them. I see that even though I wasn't there to supervise what they were doing they still worked responsibly and learned what they were supposed to learn. This makes me want to give more freedom to my future students and allow them to prove me that they are studying not only because I ask them to but also because they want to and trust me to know what's best for them. It is funny how I went from being a total dictator (102, for example, was a complete dictatorship!) to realizing that my students trusted me and were ready to do anything for me (last semester) to learning that they not only trusted me and were ready to do anything for me but also really wanted to learn and were ready to go beyond what I asked them to do. This is amazing and I feel very privileged to go through this learning process. I don't know if this is because of the fact that my students are international or just because I am changing too, but I hope that my 106r class can go that well.
