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.