In Class Demonstrations

The brief post from yesterday was typed on-the-fly in our classroom as I was doing a bit on technology: the opportunities and limits of web searching/web sources.

Because we were talking about "colonialism," we googled in different ways: the web, blogs, scholar, images, videos (almost all of these new to students, who are used to clicking the first google hit, usually wikipedia, which some consider an unreliable source -- we did change the wikipedia entry for colonialism to say it was the name of my pet golden retriever; in about 90 seconds, we got a message saying that our addition looked "unconstructive.").

To see if the Google blog list would be updated with my own blog's mention of colonialism, I asked students to give me something to say. That's when Mike said, "Colonialism is good."

We never got back to seeing how long it took for our post to show up on Google's blogs list, but it's there now, WAY down the list.

Classroom discussion

Tonight in class we're talking about technology in teaching. One of my students has said, "Colonialism is good." We're trying to find balanced sources on the web.

What to do

I'm curious about what folks do when faced with a academic dishonesty issue, one I've wondered about in the past and now has occurred again today:

I've had students deliberately, knowingly plagiarize, and when I tell them that I will be following the consequences for this act (student earns an F for the course), the students withdraw from the course. That way, a W shows up on their transcripts instead of an F.

What to do, if anything, about this inaccuracy? Oddly enough, I had this situation occur last year with a fellow going into *law enforcement* -- not quite a rule-follower, that fellow.

Pretty good exam

The midterms are almost graded -- one of the students earned 97 of 100 points! I'll look forward to the second half of the "semester" if this good work keeps up.

Which way to approach . . .

. . . Jane Eyre? So many possibilities, so little time.

And I can't even trust that all students have read the novel: they'll come to class to find out what I or others say about it so that they'll know what'll be on the midterm exam. Another summer session quandry.

This YouTube video by Zuxana of Slovakia compares three versions of the famous "falling off his horse" scene, which is the first time Jane Eyre meets Rochester, although she doesn't know it's him. The variety of interpretation might interest my students . . . .

My "pretty okay" class

Teaching in summer is whirl-wind: compress sixteen weeks into six and call it an equivalent? I don't think so, especially when it comes to a literature course where one must read -- really read -- the texts and not just the SparkNotes for the texts. One of my colleagues at the U of M even called a lit course in the compressed summer session "unethical."

Interestingly, the course is full of non-Century students, at least three of whom already have degrees and one of whom is currently a high school teacher getting some continuing ed credits (he's taught for a dozen years, so I'm curious about his take on my style). None of the students is especially bright, although most are perfectly nice. No one stands out as a pleasure to work with -- one or two seem eager but not very skilled or practiced at reading or talking about reading. A couple make LOTS of excuses all the time. A couple never seem to do any of the course reading. But another couple of them may surprise me.

Most of the non-Century folks are from local private colleges, earning their "gen ed" credits where it's cheap. That feels a bit funny because their *experience* is cheap, too: a thin, diminished experience with literature when a college education should include a rich, robust experience with all that literature reveals/teaches/brings/invokes/stimulates.

But I'm a liberal arts gal, one not interested in "consuming" education. I'm out of step with my times, really. But I have to say I'm okay with that.