Monty Python works again

The Argument Clinic sketch never fails to make my FYC students laugh . . . and groan . . . and perhaps learn something about argument.
This short YouTube clip is good, but the whole sketch is even better.

Implications for online teaching

Listen to this interesting study I just heard on American Public Media's Future Tense. It's by Dr. Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University: it seems as though workers are more likely to lie when they communicate using email than when they use hand-written notes.

Yeah, well: no big surprise for many of us who deal with academic honesty.

Great Video

I've been showing some videos in my Intro to GLBT Studies course, and I just finished previewing another one tonight: "Daddy & Papa: A Documentary Film by Johnny Symons." (Here's a video clip.) It's a wonderful look at gay fatherhood, many different kinds. We had it in the Century College Library when I went to pick up my usual "alternative families" video, "That's a Family!"

Both films raise more issues than simply sexual orientation; the intersections of race and class are not far under the surface. It's tough to see the blatant discrimination still alive in so many places, such as Florida. It's only *last week* that a judged ruled the state's ban on gay adoptions as unconstitutional. What century are we in?

It worked, maybe

I had a brainstorm the other day about a trick to lessen students' obsession with grades to the exclusion of feedback. If you teach writing, you might know what I mean:

Students look at the grade/score on an essay and come up to talk, saying things like, "What did you take off for? I did everything you said to do." or "What didn't you like in my essay? I thought it was good."

I often say, "Did you take a look at my comments? If you didn't understand something, I'd be happy to talk with you to explain what I meant."

Often, students haven't looked at them (let alone read them!). That always bothers me because writing comments is where I've spent time teaching, offering feedback designed to help them become better writers.

So the trick? Don't total their scores. Here's how.

I use a rubric for evaluating essays: five criteria categories that can earn 20 points each. This year, I've decided to just list the values in each category, and students have to do the addition themselves.

Yesterday, in FYC (my most juvenile, disruptive, unlikable class of the last five years), I didn't get one single person up to the desk at the end of class! Hooray. I had an email later last night, but it was a question about revising her essay, proof that she'd read my comments.

Tentative conclusion: this trick works. We'll see what happens with today's FYC, a class full of responsible, engaging, thoughful students.

High Percentages

This semester, I seem to have more students producing "excellence" than I remember in any other semester. Am I just seeing differently since I've returned from sabbatical?

For example, some of my online tech writers have produced Instructions that are of almost-professional quality: our college's IT folks could learn a thing or two from these students.

And another example: The narrative arguments (first graded assignment) from One Section of my FYComp students have charmed me: as I read, I kept thinking, "We have to collect these in a book! These folks have great stories to tell!"

I read about a fellow who ended up working in a florist shop while out of jail on work release: now he's a horticulture major at our college. Another woman wrestled with giving up coffee for her health, and now she's seeing more results than she anticipated. Another student vividly described a car trip back from the cabin, ramping up the emotional pitch toward the car flipping in front of her. A young father celebrated his 2-year-old son; an older father celebrated his 19-year-old son.

One Section pays attention, does their homework, listens, offers thoughtful feedback to each other during workshop, asks serious questions. That behavior is reflected in their good writing.

However:

The "other" section, not so much. But the "other" section is full of high school students (current and very very recent) who stare blankly at me a lot, text message during class, don't do their homework, don't listen, complain. A high percentage of their narrative arguments aren't: a weirdly large number of them contain research and (wrong) in-text citations, talk about social issues (obesity epidemics, drinking age, pet neutering) which could've been linked to a personal narrative but weren't at all.

What conclusion would you draw from the "other" section's first assignments? That they'd been written for another purpose in another setting? That seems reasonable, huh? I've had that conversation with a couple of the worst offenders, writers of essays that are so-far-off the mark. One of those students has already gone to the dean, saying I "accused" her/him of "cheating." Oy.

Especially "oy" since I was really careful to say that I was coming to this conclusion based on what s/he produced: I couldn't come up with any other reasonable explanation since we'd spent a couple of weeks in class 1) looking at example narrative arguments, 2) talking about the chapter that explains what they are, 3) brainstorming and drafting in class. I said that I was alerting her/him early in the semester because I wanted to keep the lines of communication open. S/he thanked me after we talked, then apparently went right down to the dean.

The dean thinks maybe a learning disability? I think it's an veracity disability.

Common Book Blog

One of my colleagues asked for input about how we faculty are using the college's Common Book. He's presenting about it at next month's TYCA conference in Duluth, Oct. 2-4.

I'm having a good experience, so far, with my students' engagement. Here's the message I sent my colleague:

Hi, Larry.

I'm having some interesting success with the Common Book this semester, my first time working with a common book since I was gone last year. I decided to think about about the book for my writing courses (Engl 1021 and 1025) as a common topic for class discussions. The place/space for these discussions is cyberspace.

For both courses, I've set up blog (with Blogger) where students are discussing the book. In my totally online Engl 1025, technical writing class, I think of it as a way for them to "talk" with each other even though they don't see each other in class. The blog space is a kind of classroom space: it's secure because I've set it up so only "invited authors" can read/write to it (I invited the students via their college email accounts). For my face-to-face Engl 1021 courses (I have two sections), I've set up ONE blog where students from these two different classes are talking to each other.

If you want, I can add you as a "reader" for the blog so you can see some of the thoughtful things they're saying, stuff like today's Engl 1025 student's post about chapter 3: the student wrote, "According to the last part of the chapter [three], I cannot understand why American negotiators rejected the policy documents because we all share the same planet, the existing of people is much more important than obligation of a country. One over all conclusion about this chapter: It is great."

Cool, huh?
Julie
_________________________________________________________
Julie K. Daniels
English Department
Women and Gender Studies Program
Century College

"Please stop confusing me!"

I've spent the last three hours of this afternoon teaching in my online technical writing course: a big assignment is due Monday at 11:59 p.m., so the usual hectic flurry of draft swapping, instructor paging, and discussion posting is happening.

This post's title is a quote from one of those students: s/he wrote it this afternoon in the Subject line of a public posting to the course website, under the "Q&A About Quizzes and Exams" section. This student has not been scoring well on the quizzes.

Now, these quizzes are completely open-book. Students can take them twice with no penalty: the highest score counts. The only constraint is that students only get 15 minutes each time to take the 10-point quizzes. Correct answers are not provided between attempts -- and I haven't been able to figure out how to provide them after the second attempt (our college's D2L CMS is woefully difficult to work).

To my mind, it's almost impossible not to get 100% on such a quiz when 1) you have all the questions after you take the quiz once and 2) you can use your textbooks. My idea in creating the quizzes this way is to get students to read the material so that they will do well with the *real* assignments for the course, which are the writing assignments. I have even given a small talk to colleagues about this quizzing philosophy/practice, calling it "Quiz to Learn," opposing it to Quiz to Test.

Anyway, this unhappy student posted the following (yes, this big block of text is exactly how it appeared):

"After reading our sections the quiz was on 3 times, i still got 6 out of ten. I Felt completely sure that two of those were correct. You become too repetitive in some instances and give us too many options. I do appreciate being given more than one chance. But how are we supposed to learn what the right answer is if it does not tell us. Would you not rather have your students get them all right, and know that they have in fact at some point learned what is correct and what is not correct. I cant say from experience, but i would prefer my students know the right answer, and possibly make the quizzes less confusing, or give less answers to certain questions, in hopes of them actually learning the material correctly. I have never taken a mutliple choice test that offers so many answers to one questionthat all sound so much alike. Especially when given a time constraint it puts us under pressure. I just want to know the correct and proper way to do things, and hopefully still get an A or B in this course. I hope the next quiz is not so confusing. Probably more so if you are giving us 3 chances! Not trying to be ude or judge your teaching styles. I just wanted to state my take on the situation. Thanks for reading. Is it not our job as students to question things?"

Don't you love the last line, with its archaic syntactic inversion to begin the question? :-) Such a wonderful rhetorical tactic.

SO Slow

The last few days, the CMS (Desire 2 Learn or D2L for short) for our online courses has been TERRIBLY slow at loading.

I'm teaching an online tech writing course, which requires almost daily input from students, and we get timed out on some of our posts. I've begun copying ALL of the messages I post (these posts are my teaching, after all!) because often when I go to "Post" on the Discussion Board, the entire system locks up.

The other challenge will be this weekend: students have their second major assignment due Monday at 11:59 p.m., which means I'll have tons of last-minute questions on Sunday. That'll be fun, to download drafts, read and comment, then upload when the system's excruciatingly slow.

Anyone else having a problem like this? It's happening both on my home computer (I have wifi) and my office computer.

Freewriting Discoveries

The first essay's due in a week, and students were supposed to read two chapters that (1) provided techniques for finding topics and (2) explained the features of the first essay.

Logical class-start activity: freewriting about possible topics for the first essay since freewriting was one of the techniques discussed in (1). How did this activity turn out, you ask?

Freewriting often leads us to what we didn't know we thought, often reveals more than we had in our brains. Freewriting can cause unveiling and revealing.

For example, fully a quarter of the students wrote that they had not read the chapters. Another quarter revealed as much by exploring topics wholly unsuited to what was explained in (2). Another quarter started excellent drafts, coming to some bright insights and fascinating possibilities. The final quarter couldn't do the assignment: one even wrote "I don't know what to write" over and over, almost 200 times in 15 minutes, after writing, "I'm not creative. Even my psychiatrist says I'm not creative."

Now I know too much.

Students are Blogging

It's great: students are talking with each other on our class blogs. I've found out that our Century Soccer team won this weekend in Wisconsin. I've also found out that the Common Book is resonating with my students.

This innovation might be a good idea.

Proofreading Matters

From CAC.OPHONY: Conversations in Communication Across the Curriculum via Talking Points Memo: Click on the image to see the error better.

A Clean Desk

There's really something to be said about leaving the office for the weekend with a cleaned desk. I have never, ever managed to do so before. But for some reason this year, I've done it twice now. Feels very satisfying.

I finished grading the first batch of assignments from my online tech writers: for the first time *ever* in my teaching career, a student earned a perfect score for her first assignment. Stupendous. I also had a bunch that earned 90% of the points -- also great. Only three of 23 who failed (one with a zero, even though he turned the assignment in!), so this semester is feeling pretty good. So far. :-)

My Comp 1 classes are very different from each other, despite the fact that they're both afternoon classes and both have full enrollment: the MW class is full of high school kids who text during class, fool around with each other becuase they know each other. I have to be a mom in that class, which I hate.

The TTh class has working adults, older and more disciplined, who do their work diligently and with humor. It's a fun group -- more diverse, too: a fellow from Palestine who already has a BA, a couple of Somali students, four or five Hmong students, a woman from India or Pakistan, another from Laos. It's just so cool when Nirmala and Mustafa collaborate on a piece of writing, or Blia and Jehad. What a great country we live in.

When you know too much

So during the fire alarm this afternoon, I sat with a former student who's finishing a law enforcement degree at the college. She's funny, has a complicated life, and likes to talk to me about a wide range of topics.

She told me about her online course this summer, American Government, where she didn't learn a single thing. How can that be? I asked. Because the course consisted of reading and taking a weekly quiz. That's it. No interaction with other students. No feedback or conversation or discussion with the professor. She spent nearly $500.00 for this "course."

What do I do with this information? I'm breaking my neck with my online course: was in the office until 10:40 tonight uploading my first batch of graded assignments: 23 students, two or three files each to upload, minimum five minutes per student -- you do the math. These numbers don't even count the time it takes to download their written work, read it, comment on it, save it with a different file name so I can distinguish it from the ungraded work.

These numbers also do not count the time spent reading discussion postings (from the whole class and in the small groups I've set up so students can peer review each others' work), making discussion postings, writing News items, commenting on the class blog, answering questions, etc. To me, a college course means students have interaction with an instructor and with material. Is that old-fashioned?

Our union thinks that all online courses are the same. They're not. And somehow something must be done. But what?

So much writing!

Why do I ask for so much of it? Then I have to read it. Do I think students won't write unless they think I'm reading it?

So much depends upon the first few class meetings: expectations set, attention focused, energy rewarded. I have to have some kind of "follow through" so that students do their homework as well as their classwork.

The thing is: all writing is good. All writing helps students become better writers. Even the goofy writing like they're doing on our class blog. Silly!