The weather has been so wonderful these days that I have taken my students outside of the classroom as often as I could. I never did that before, not with my previous students here, and not in Utah either, I don't know why. I guess the idea of having my students scattered around and having to scream to be heard, as well as the idea of teaching in front of strangers out there, always scared me. It is a question of control but really, I should have tried this earlier, because it is going well and I think the students enjoy it--and I sure do! When the students are doing peer reviewing of drafts, for example, or group work, there's really no need to stay in a dark classroom. So far, the only "problems" I've encountered with teaching outside is that I meet friends and chat with them, and so do my students with some of their friends, occasionally, and I have lost a few students a couple of times, when they decide not to stick to the group and want to work alone. This is fine with me, but maybe I'll address this in class one day, just to make sure that they keep an eye on our group in case I have something to say or want to check on what they are doing. So yesterday, after discussing the next project (organization, types of article they can use, etc.), I put people in pairs and asked them to read each other's articles, find their main points, and discuss with their partner how they could compare and contrast these main points in a paper. They did that outside, and I think it went well. As usual, they didn't do exactly what I thought they would do, but I heard them talk about interesting issues and good ideas on how to write their papers, so it was not a waste. Reading each other's articles allowed them to see what else is out there, to ask questions as to where and how they had found these articles, to see their differences in length, complexity, validity, etc. I had carefully placed the students in pairs that I knew would be help them get a picture (from their partner's comments) that they had not been able to see so far (and it also helped them get to know people that they hadn't necessarily talked to before). Allowing my students to work in a more relaxed environment and in smaller groups is also a nice way to integrate our new student better. Talking about our new student, Rizwan, this week has been rough! First, he didn't show up on Monday and I thought that he might have been sick or something. Being me, I knew that if he had a valid excuse, I wouldn't kick him out of my class even though he had signed a paper saying that he wouldn't miss class ever or else would accept an F. So, I was expecting to hear from him on Monday but didn't hear anything, and on Tuesday he was still not in class, so I thought that he had probably just given up, that the workload was too much for him, and that he had found a way to not need this class. The other thing that made me think this way is that he was still not registered as a student in my class on my roster. On Wednesday, we didn't have class, and finally on Thursday morning, I got an MSN message from him saying that he had been sick on Monday and then had been too scared of me to come to class on Tuesday because he had signed this paper. Too scared of ME? Do I really come across as such a mean person? I told him that I needed to think about what I would do with him and that he could come to class until I had made up my mind. We later talked in my office and I, of course, forgave him and allowed to stay in our class. He did look terrible and I think is going through a very hard time, so I just couldn't let him down. He mentioned CAPS, the counseling office, and I strongly encouraged him to seek help there because I wonder how he is handling all the stress and worries he must be going through by having started to go to his classes in the middle of the semester. I do feel bad for him and I am definitely the kind of person who gives second, or even third, chances to people, because I believe two things: first, that what goes around comes around, and helping people has never hurt anyone, and second, that I am where I am today because I have been given second or even sometimes third chances. The problem, though, is that I have a tendency to give way too many second chances to people, and they sometimes end up stabbing me in the back or letting me down anyway. This is exactly what happened with Dan last year and with Wael last semester. In the end, I still believe that it is their choice to do something good with their second chance, but at least I have done all I could do for them and shouldn't feel guilty if they mess up anyway (easier said than done, though). So, our new student is back with us AND is on my roster now. My dear officemate Mark told me that I should give an Incomplete grade to this student, which would allow him to stress less about this class, concentrate on the others for now, and then finish his English assignments later, during the summer. Rizwan and I talked again after class yesterday and I told him that I would agree to give him an I instead of an F if he came to class every day, took good notes and did his best, then finished and polished the assignments later, and turned them in at the end of the summer. I hope that he will choose this option, because it would alleviate a lot of stress from both of us! Well, other things that we have done this week: I introduced the concept of ethos, pathos, and logos, and it was a lot of fun, a lot more than what I had predicted. I decided to have a little activity with a few students, and it ended up being a big activity with the whole class! I put the students in groups of 3 or 4 and told them that they had to elect a speaker in their group and then write a speech for that speaker, who was in fact trying to become the president of our country, using only one of the three types of appeal. I know that they ended up working on their speech during our day off on Wednesday, and on Thursday, all groups had a very well written speech and sometimes even some extras (music, banners, introductions about the speaker, etc.). I laughed so much, while listening to their speeches, that I had tears in my eyes! I just can't believe that they would take a little exercise and make it into this big, fun, and very well thought assignment. At the end, we all voted and elected our new president, Opas, who will be able to choose the movie for next week's movie night. Other things that we did this week: I explained to my students why I took points off for grammar and spelling mistakes. While I was reading and grading their summaries, I thought that I was being unfair for taking so many points of for grammar, punctuation, and spelling, but then I remembered that article I read last semester about different kinds of mistakes and the way teachers reacted to them. I explained this to my students: different mistakes have a different effect on the reader. If they are typical mistakes that native speakers of English make too, they are fine (like punctuation, if I was instead of if I were, etc.). However, typically "foreign" mistakes were often seen as very serious, especially by young teachers and teachers in the engineering and math departments. The most accepting teachers are older teachers in liberal arts and humanities departments. So we went over a few types of mistakes (tenses, word order, articles, etc.) and discussed if these mistakes were "serious" or not and why. I really hate to have to take points off for such things, but I strongly believe that making mistakes gives a bad image, and the students have enough resources to avoid making those mistakes. I also feel that sometimes, the students allow themselves to make those mistakes because they are in a section with only international students and so they believe that I should be more accepting. I remember my own First-year Composition class, though, which I took in a regular section and on my first semester in the US, and every time I had to write something for this class, I asked all my friends to go over my papers and correct my mistakes over and over because I didn't find it acceptable to make more mistakes than the native speakers. After having taught native speakers myself, I see that in the end, I might have ended up with fewer mistakes than the other students, but I didn't know that at the time and am glad, because my grammar and spelling got much better that semester (not perfect though, I know)! This week, we also talked about different ways to organize a comparison/contrast paper (side-by-side pattern or back-and-forth pattern), and on the computers, we learned how to find and use good keywords that are also used by the Library of Congress, how to understand the numbers of the references so we can find the articles or book in the library, and finally how to use the library's databases. This is a complex process, since there are so many libraries, and it is difficult to understand that although you might find a great reference in a database, you might not find it in the Purdue library. I think that now, most students have understood how this works, but I will still spend some time working on that next week and especially on how to choose adequate keywords and use them efficiently. On a last note, we didn't have class on Wednesday at all, which is quite unusual since normally, I'd meet with at least some students every day for conferences and such, and not seeing anyone on Wednesday made me realize how used to the five-days-a-week pattern I am now, and how much not seeing my students for one day made me miss them! Teaching gives me energy, and even when things in my life are not working so well, forcing myself to "look" happy when I teach actually ends up making me feel happy too. My students are just wonderful! Two last small points: it seems like the feedback blog just doesn't want to work. The students won't write anything meaningful on it, even when I threaten them or give them time to write in class. I don't know if that's because they have nothing to complain about or because they're too scared to write something negative. Too bad. The other thing is that last Thursday, on our movie night, we watched Oh Brother Where Art Thou and it has been a success beyond my expectations! Several students have watched it again since or borrowed my copy of it, and now they are citing the lyrics and singing the songs! Well, that is indeed a very good movie and I am glad my students loved it in spite of the difficult language and accent of the actors.
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!
Happy Valentine's Day! I gave some candy to my students yesterday, the colorful little hearts with messages written on them, to teach them some "culture." This week, I felt like an answering machine, repeating the same things over and over and over. On Monday, my students had to bring their first draft of project two. While they were reading each other's drafts and making comments on them, I quickly read a copy of their first draft (they had to bring several copies) and commented them. It is incredible that I gave them the "outline" of their outline for this paper, I explained several times what this paper was supposed to say, and still, many students had managed to just do whatever with their first draft. During the weekend, I had read their outline and made several comments on them, and on Monday, I made some comments on their first draft too before I returned them, and still, when I met with everyone on Tuesday and Wednesday for individual conferences in my office, some students had not understood that they had to discuss ALL four of the main points I had put on the original outline. These conferences were very frustrating. I don't know where I go wrong; I don't know how much more I have to do for them to understand what I want them to do. On Thursday, the students had to bring an electronic copy of their third draft and read each other's papers on the computers so that they could make comments with the "insert comments" function in Word. I was so frustrated, at that point, that I said, "I expect perfection with this papers, because I explained the same things over and over to you!" The final draft was due on Friday, and I read half of them already and I still find that there's always one of the four sections that is missing or underdeveloped. Still, to be honest, a few students have also done a great job. I am not grading, right now, just reading, to get a feel for the overall quality of the work done. Yesterday, I was doing some reading for my Human Resources class and went through a whole section on assessment. Grading papers always makes me feel somehow uncomfortable and ask those questions, but yesterday I tried to phrase my concerns with concrete words. When I was in my mentoring group last year, we had to develop grading criteria for the papers we had to grade, and our mentor showed us different ways to do it. The other teachers in my groups decided on using different techniques and criteria, and I developed a set of criteria that I have used pretty much for everything since then. I value organization the most, and the development of ideas too, and then of course if the assignment follows the directions, and finally I give (or take) a few points for "language-related" items such as grammar, sentence structure, variety of sentences, spelling, etc. The last thing on my list is about format. I give some extra credit for going to the writing lab, and this can be good, because it encourages my students to go there and take advantage of their resources, but this semester, it seems like my students have decided that this is the best way to get good grades so they go there 3-4 times per paper, which ends up giving them really high grades on their final drafts! Anyway, two things make me a little uncomfortable when I use my grading criteria to give feedback on my students' papers: first, their very general meaning, and second, my relative way of using them. First, what I mean by "general meaning" is that I use definitions that can be interpreted very broadly. Of course, I know what I expect, but I don't know if the students know what I expect well enough from those criteria (which I give with the assignment description). If I say, "the ideas are well developed" or "the organization is logical," this can mean 100 different things to 100 different people. But then I don't want to say, "first there is an introduction, and in the body, you discuss this and that..." because I think that this is exactly what I explain in class and on the assignment description. At the same time, those very broad criteria allow me to include basically anything in them, to adapt them to the needs of the paper I am reading, and to stay very flexible as to the way I use the. While this is practical, I sometimes wonder if it is very fair. Sometimes I find one particular problem in a paper and find myself wondering, "OK now, in which criteria could this problem fit?" Having more specific criteria, on the other hand, could be useful and more "scientific," but then I am having a very difficult time thinking ahead about all the problems I might encounter and all the things I want to find in the papers. Another thing that I realize, too, is that having a great "organization" doesn't mean the same to everyone, and that one great organization doesn't look like another great organization. Some of the other teachers I know use even broader grading criteria than I do. I use numbers, and with international students do ask for a few more specific things, but I know that some teachers use check marks in criteria such as "organization: insufficient, poor, good, excellent." Is that better? Is that worse? Is that helpful? The second problem is about relative grading. I have been teaching for a while now and am able to get a feeling for what I expect in an A paper or a C paper. My grading criteria also help me grade on an absolute scale, and everyone can get an A if they deserve it, but I sometimes find myself grading a paper (student A) and then another (student B) and thinking "oh, student A did that better than student B" and then adjusting student A's grade to make it higher than student B's. If I had the time, I could first organize all the papers on a relative scale for the development of ideas and record the results (who is the best, who is the least efficient), and then do the same thing with organization, record it, and then with format, etc. and at the end, I would compute all the results and figure out who is at the top of all the lists, who is in the middle, and who is at the bottom, and give completely relative grades on a curve: students at the bottom of most lists get a D, those at the top get an A. Of course, this wouldn't be fair because the students at the bottom might not be THAT MUCH different from the ones at the top. So in the end, it's a good thing I don't use this technique. However, in spite of my relatively (see above!) specific grading criteria, which allow everyone to get an A if they deserve to, I sometimes feel that I am too subjective, that I let myself be influenced by little things (agh, he still hasn't gotten the page number thing right!) and then lose my objectivity (halo effect?), that I let myself be influenced by the efforts I think the students might have put in their papers and their attitude in class and during conferences, and finally, that I am strongly influenced by my overall "liking" of some students or others (he often smiles, he is always on time, he participates, he never complains, etc.). Does that make me a bad teacher? To what extent is this avoidable? Are other teachers doing the same thing? I don't know, and I wonder to what extent total objectivity is attainable. I guess it becomes harder in situations like my class this semester where I have decided to get to know the students better and not just in class but also outside of class, with the movie night, for example. In the end, I feel that don't just grade papers but that I judge individuals. Something that added to this week's frustrations is that I "had" to add a new student to my class. On Wednesday, in-between conferences, someone came to my office and asked if he could add my class because he was from Pakistan, had had some problems with his visa and all, had had to drop all of his classes and now had to re-register again (end of the fifth week!) for at least 12 credits in order to be "legal." I know that I didn't have to accept him but I think no one else would have accepted him, so I did. I don't know how things will go, but I did make him sign a contract (in front of a witness) saying that he accepted the following requirements and would accept an F or drop out of the class if: he didn't get a B or better on his "second" paper (due this Monday), write the first paper and do all the readings he missed by midterm, and miss class even one day. I know this is cruel, but he has missed so many days already, that I will have a lot of work explaining him what he has missed and what he must do to catch up. I don't want to spend extra time doing this if he misses class for whatever reason in the future. So far, the other students seem to have accepted him, but we'll see what happens and how his first paper is. I did tell him that I was the meanest of all the 106i teachers, but it didn't seem to bother him. I am now trying to talk to his advisor or the Dean or Students because I didn't get any formal letter explaining his exceptional situation and find it unacceptable. So, we started the third project: a summary. Easy project, you'd think, but I don't want to butcher this step and then have to go over it again when we do the comparison/contrast/review paper. I had our usual little activity to introduce summaries, where I ask the students to write about a movie they liked in 5 sentences, and then 3, and then 1, and then 10 words. Finally, I put them in groups and asked them to make a list of what you do find and what you don't find in summaries. Last semester, the students had done a great job, but this time, it was pretty pathetic. I heard main ideas, main points, introduction, key words, and that's about it. We are going to have to work hard on this next week! And on how to find articles too, and good ones at that too. So, next week, we have a lot of work, and this short summary is already due next Friday, so we'll have class every day. Let's hope for the best!
Talking about absences, something interesting happened: on Thursday, almost the end of the fourth week, I still had not had one absence and so I talked about it in class. I said, "I want to thank you for making the effort to come to class every day. I really appreciate this and know it is not always easy because you may be sick, tired, or overwhelmed with school and work, and sometime the weather is really bad too. If you never miss a day of class, I'll give you extra credit at the end." And on Friday, two students were missing and half of the students came in late! So, I did make a little comment about the fact that being late three times equaled being absent once... but when I think of last semester and how many students already had 4-5 absences, I feel very lucky! (In fact, one student in particular was always late or absent to class, last semester. Last week, I went to a game of cricket where he was playing and he arrived late for his first game and was not able to play. Some things never change!) This week is also the first time that I felt some frustration--not much, but a little, on Tuesday. Last week, I spend several days talking to my students in individual conferences in my office about their research topics, their ideas, and their questions. We discussed several ideas, and even with those who seemed to know exactly what they wanted, I tried to make sure that they knew where they were going and how. I also discussed about several options, trying to find the best one, explaining how "academic" this research had to be and why some topics would be harder to research than others... And I thought that by the end of the week, everyone was set and knew what would work or not and what they could do or not. This week, I had the students fill out a second form that would help them narrow down their topic, look at it from different perspectives, and phrase their research question exactly. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, I had the students come to class by groups of four or five and write on the blog (seems very difficult), share each other's research ideas, show me their form, and talk to me about their specific questions and concerns. Turns out, about a third of them had already changed topics or hadn't filled out the form so they still had no idea what they were doing or where they were going. On Tuesday, I was particularly frustrated by the fact that we hadn't had class on Thursday and Friday of last week and that this week, they also had two days off, but a few students still had not thought about what they wanted to do. That is something I really must remember: giving the students time off to work on their own does NOT mean that they will do anything. Many will just take the time off and do nothing. For Friday, the students had to write a second outline, and a few people still managed to change their topics. I know this is normal and I guess I can spend as much time as I want talking to them, explaining how to find good research topics, and giving them as much time as they need to talk to other classmates, think about their topics, try and change their minds, this will always happen. It is funny to see how I become so used to everything working very well with these students that the slightest little problem becomes a frustration! If only THAT had happened a year ago (and even a semester ago), I would have been so happy! So, on Thursday we discussed about the different kinds of questions one could ask and the different ways to find answers. We talked about report papers, reviews of previous research, papers that advocate or defend a point, papers that analyze causes and effects, and field research. I had the students discuss with one another to try and ask different questions about their topics and think about the different papers they would write this semester: an expository paper, summaries, a literature review (comparison/contrast), an interview report, and the final paper in which they will defend a point, prove a point, argue a point. We also talked about their outlines. I want them to start thinking in terms of main ideas, and for their next paper, they need to address four ideas: 1. introduce the topic they want to research; 2. explain why this topic is interesting to them and an audience; 3. describe their personal experience with this topic and how they became interested in it; 4. argue their plans and defend their research questions. The fourth point is the most difficult for them to understand, I am not sure why. On Friday, we talked about organization and how to work from an outline to a final draft. I had the students write 5 main points: 3 things they had done during the winter break, and 2 things they had not done. Then, they passed their paper to the next students who expended their points into small paragraphs. The next students then combined the 5 paragraphs into 2 large paragraphs and worked on the flow of ideas by using transitions and making sure the ideas were working well together. The next students wrote a conclusion to this "body." And finally, the next students wrote an introduction to this "paper." I explained that the next step would be proofreading. I haven't read the stuff they wrote but I hope it helped them realize what steps they had to go through with all their papers. It was a fun little activity, which also allowed them to be a little creative and laugh at what their classmates had developed with their initial ideas. So this week wasn't too exciting but hopefully, a good foundation for the future of the semester was laid down. I know I am frustrated with a few students, but overall, most students are working hard and are a pleasure to have in my class.
