Gripes: Small and Small-ish

Small:
Why won't the html tags I insert in my "Keeping Track" list stick? I want the list to be a *list*, not a paragraph. Whenever I refresh, I have to re-add the coding to get the line breaks, and then as soon as I access it again, the breaks are all gone. Irritating.

Small, sort of: Last week during our "Student Success Day," an online student came in for a f2f conference. It was good to meet her - she's the best student in the online courses. But she "suggested" that I post everyone's grades for everyone's assignments so that everyone could "see where we are at." She said it would help her know how hard to work. I just don't get that. Maybe I'm just a victim of my own temperament and pedagogical training, but it seems to me that I should resist every effort at making students compete with each other. Education is about learning for me. And learning depends upon so many individual human factors that it seems ridiculous to think that you can tell anything important about your own learning by comparing your scores to your classmates' scores. I guess I'm an idealist. I thanked her for her suggestion and said I'd think about it.

A bit larger: Another student in one of my literature courses has been bugging me about "what's on the test?" She's the class English major, too. It's so discouraging. I don't think she's read even a tenth of the assignments so far this semester, based on her lack of contributions to class discussion, and the midterm is tomorrow night. She doesn't seem interested in analyzing literature at all; she asks questions all the time like "Do we have to know the author of this story?" and "What do we have to know for the midterm?" She seems to think that identification is all that matters, which is such a low-level learning outcome if we consider Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. I conducted the midterm review last week by asking them to pull out their syllabi, and we looked at the course objectives, which are what drive the activities I plan for the course.

These objectives all begin with "When you finish this course, you will be able to do the following:" For example, the first one is "describe the history and features of the genre of the short story" (okay, too many prepositional phrases). This objective directly ties to the work we did the first two weeks of the semester, where we read and discussed the history, and to the work we've been doing all semester in our class discussion about the elements of stories.
So in our review last week, many students -- non-English majors, mind you -- began looking through their notes and the text to pick out things they'd remembered discussing or reading. The second objective is "recognize the names and works of some important figures in this tradition, understanding why they are considered important." This one, too, resulted in most students shouting out names of significant authors (Edgar Allan Poe, for example, and Kate Chopin). The truculent student asks, "Do we have to know all of the stories they wrote?" (Each of these authors has two short or short-short stories in our textbook, stories that we've talked about more than once, one that we even saw a film about.)

So I guess, basically, she wants someone else to tell her what to know. We had a discussion about this tendency in my composition course when one student introduced everyone to "SparkNotes." I told them that this is what I think about SparkNotes:

"Does anyone in here know how baby birds are fed? Well, their parents eat and digest food and then vomit it into the babies' open mouths. Of course, this feeding has a legitimate function - it provides nutrition at the baby stage - just like SparkNotes has a legitimate function, to be the starting point when you're trying to learn something important about a new subject. But are you baby birds? Do you want your ideas about literature/history/philosophy/etc. predigested and vomited into your heads? Or do you want to feed yourselves by eating and digesting the literature/history/philosophy/etc. yourselves?"

So now we have a code phrase - "Baby bird?" - when we talk about where they've gotten their ideas. I kind of like it.

Online teaching vs. Online learning

I'm in the middle of grading a batch of assignments for one of my online courses. It's taking a very long time (a minimum of a half-hour per student) because of how long it takes to read and think and write comments to them. And this time is just the grading time, not the course instruction time (via discussion board, news items, emails). I'm not sure yet if it's more time than a regular classroom, but it certainly feels like it is - maybe it's the lack of variety in the mode of interaction I have with the students because everything is mediated by the technology.

I'm thinking that the right way to talk about the terms "online teaching" and "online learning" is to call it "online delivery" because the teaching and learning gets subordinated to the technology, at least in the courses I teach online (technical writing). When I first agreed to teach tech writing online, it seemed the perfect course because tech writing requires familiarity with technology and because it's about writing. Online courses are ALL about writing because every single student-instructor or student-student interaction happens via writing. Students and instructors write a LOT, so it's a natural fit in a writing course, I think, because my pedagogy relies on the premise that people learn to write better by writing. The more we do, the more we get better at doing it.

But I'm continually frustrated by the constraints of online teaching because my students are getting such a thin experience in the course, it seems. It's tough to provide substantial feedback to all of the students without getting just plain tired of writing the same thing over and over, keeping tabs on my tone and sentence structure, knowing that many students don't read it (they just look at their scores) unless they want to pick a fight with me. Thank goodness for the best students who take an online course (or any course) because they want to learn something, not just click through a bunch of modules in order to receive a score/grade that's acceptable to them (which is only an A or B).

This job I have is hard.

Collegial . . .

Just spent an hour reading a colleague's portfolio - one to be submitted for a Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Teaching. It's risky to show a colleague your work, your student comments, your assignments, your teaching philosophy. What I read revealed a lot about my colleague, and I'm impressed - frankly, honored - by the trust it implies.

I wrote an entirely-too-long email responding to the portfolio, an email that'll arrive approximately 18 hours before the portfolio is due. Will my comments be of any use, especially because they're not especially analytical or diagnostic: they're mostly questions, queries, musings about the uncomfortable places in the document. What would I do with the kind of information I just gave to a colleague?

Why did I think I could . . .

. . . keep track of the work I do?? I mean, I've been trying to keep a count of (trying to account for?) the student work I read, respond to, and evaluate. But I'm woefully behind in my accouting, even though I've handed back one set of papers to my Comp 1 class and two sets to my two Technical Writing classes. Oy!

What's in a grade?

On Wednesday afternoon, I was walking across the bridge that connects the two halves of my campus, through a flurry of snowflakes, on my way to an interminable but important meeting. I'd been grading papers all morning, and I was thinking about how someone who was an administrator instead of an instructor would hear that phrase "grading papers." It sounds simple, but what does it really entail?

For me, grading requires a lot: First I have to read the students' essays/documents. This means decifering (especially if they've handwritten their work), decoding (especially if they've used language and syntax in a way they think is sophisticated), understanding what they were saying AND what they were trying to say, diagnosing the issues behind that gap. So these are all the actions just for reading the students' work.

Next comes assessing, figuring out how this particular document compares with the criteria we're using to analyze writing, criteria that I've handed out to them, of course. "Is the lack of development in this essay a 10 out of 20 points or 12 out of 20 points?" This assessment is linked to the diagnosis above because the assessment is a way to help the students see what they've got to work on this semester.

Then comes composing the comment that I write to accompany the essay scores. This comment has to be sufficiently encouraging and yet critically accurate - no small feat. And I write knowing that many, many students don't even look at what I've written - they've been conditioned to react to a score or grade because that's what gets measured.

[Aside: I read a quote from Einstein: "Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted, counts." Yep.]

And finally, I must hand the documents back to the students, who're nervous, as am I sometimes, because they feel judged - their writing is *them* - and I completely understand this feeling. I can say over and over, "The score is for this artifact, not for you. The comments are to help you figure out how to improve your score if you choose to do so." But the whole institution of education conditions them to ignore these kinds of comments.

So that's what I've been doing when I've been "grading papers."