Long week again and I am exhausted... and so are my students. Spring is not coming as soon as we wished it were, the students have difficult exams and assignments, and a spring break was not enough for those who wanted to have some fun to get enough rest.
First, on Monday, I returned their project 4 to the students. I had a hard time grading those papers for several reasons. First, we had spent a lot of time working on this project, revising, peer-reviewing, and discussing outlines and drafts of this project. I expected those final papers to be near perfect but was disappointed to see that a few students were still struggling so much that I felt that the time we had spent working on previous drafts had been wasted. It was frustrating to see that sometimes, the students had made the changes that I had suggested at one place in the text but had not changed that same problem elsewhere in their text. This means that they had not internalized the rules or the issue and were unable to "export" a new knowledge on their own and to the whole text. Sometimes, I repeated something several times in class and also in person when going over a draft with some students, but it seems as if they were incapable to say to themselves, "Ok, let's check and see if I made that same mistake somewhere else in the text." What can I do about that? I am not sure, but I told my students that for the next project, I would read their drafts but not write any comments on them. They are free to ask me questions, but I will let them find their own questions and try to remember what I told them for previous projects... I told them that I would not always be their teacher and that it was time they tried to use those tools and strategies I taught them and applied them to their work, not just for this class, but for everything they had and would have to write. I know that some students were a little shocked about that and sad too, and I know I am punishing the good students because of those who will not learn from this experience anyway. That's always the same thing: those who didn't really need my help but were impatient to get it and learn a lot from it are now being punished, while those who needed my help the most didn't really take advantage of it, didn't pay attention, didn't make the needed changes, don't really care if their drafts are not reviewed anyway, and will not try to do it well on their own. I know I sound a little bitter, and that's how I felt this week, and for several reasons.
This week, we mostly discussed about how to conduct interviews with the experts the students are supposed to find. We went over several drafts of questions, talked about the kinds of questions that can be asked to different kinds of experts, and practiced the questions in class and with some guests who came to help us. What frustrated me is that I would give my students a lot of time to practice, I would give them examples and tell them what works and what doesn't work, and I explained to them that our guests were people who were making us a big favor by coming and helping and that it was their only chance to really practice their questions, take notes, keep a conversation going, thank the interviewee, etc. During those "fake" interviews, however, I still saw a few students who hadn't brought their questions with them, or who weren't writing anything down, and I just couldn't understand that. After the interviews, I told my students about my observations in general (that they should practically memorize their questions, that they couldn't allow "dead" time to take place, that they had to bring enough paper and not write their questions one after another without any space in between, that they could say things like "is there anything else you could tell me...?" if they didn't know what to say and needed a minute to think, that they shouldn't discard an answer just because it wasn't what they had expected it to be, that their questions can't be too long or complicated, etc.), and no one was writing those things down and they were all looking at me or the wall with a blank expression, so I just asked, "Does this bore you? Is anyone interested in what I have to say? Because I feel like I'm talking to the walls and if you're not interested I'll just stop wasting my time!" I know this was mean. But really, I didn't feel that they are interested in this project and that they took this opportunity to learn about interview techniques, which can be an important skill to master if they ever want to apply to jobs, for examples. I also told them that they could be as creative as they wanted to be, that the information they were going to gather might not be presented best in a linear manner but maybe on a power point presentation or a website, but I don't think many students will try that. In the end, I just said, "you are free to do anything you want as long as it is organized, logical, and that it shows what new information you've learned in an efficient way." Again, I know that some students were shocked by this lack of direction.
Well, on Thursday we had 10 guests in our class (which were hard to recruit because many students of the English Dept. were in San Antonio for CCCC), and I asked my students to write a little blog entry about that experience, to see if it was useful or not, what worked and what didn't. Again, I don't think it went very well, or at least not as well as last semester, because several students had to wait in line for their turn, a few students took the whole hour to discuss with one person (and not always about their topics!), and as I said earlier, some students were just having a fun discussion but not taking that time as an opportunity to really practice interviewing someone. So... waste of time? I want to know. Next week I will teach only on Monday and Tuesday since I will be going to TESOL until Sunday, so I told the students that I wouldn't be there to help them much for their project and that they had to work hard and ask me all their questions while I was still here. I feel like I am going straight for the biggest disaster of this semester... But the grades on the last project were overall quite low, so hopefully this time things won't be worse... Sorry, I am not very optimistic this time.
To end on a positive note, I did have a few students who worked very hard on their last project and who did well. In fact, it is interesting to see that I am now asking a few students NOT to work so hard on their project because I know they spend so much time on it that they don't sleep or spend enough time on their other assignments for harder (and, let's admit the fact, more important) classes. Someone was also thinking that the given grade was too high and not deserved... Those are things that don't usually happen to teachers, and I feel very privileged to have such hard-working students. Now, I am facing a difficult dilemma about next semester. Tony has asked me to teach 106i again in the fall and I have accepted (verbally) but now Shirley is also asking me to teach a 106r section, the Lily Retention Program class for Learning Community Students, and the section I would teach is that for students who are interested in learning Spanish. I would love to do that, and it is paid better than 106i and I would have additional money for activities and food. However, it would also mean teaching American students again and I am not sure I am up to that again, even though now I see how much extra help international students need and how much energy I am putting into this class. Tony is at CCCC too so I couldn't talk to him. The other thing that I learned today is that the 106r sections are offered only in the fall. I'll have to see with Tony if he would accept to give me a semester "off" so that I could teach 106r in the fall and 106i in the winter again. I still don't know though... this is a tough decision. I'd also like to teach other things while I'm here, such as Engl. 227, the intro to linguistics class, as well as Engl. 505, the mentoring class, maybe.
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.
