Feeling Blue

It's that time in the semester: students either panicky or missing, rarely meeting deadlines, needing extraordinary questions/prompts/prodding/provoking/shenanigans in order to contribute to a class discussion.

Why? Maybe our semesters are just too long.

Or another possibility: unintentional [?] undermining. Here's what a student told me:

This guy is in my FYC course and wanting to write about the assessment test scores needed to get into various writing courses. He thinks the scores are too high (we just recently had to *lower* our scores to match up with other MnSCU colleges). He's in the dental assisting (or maybe dental hygiene) program and doing fine. "My teacher likes me so I'm getting good grades," he said. [I've typed out his sentence exactly as he said it: note the coordinating conjunction.]

"My teacher doesn't know why I have to get good grades in English -- the scores don't matter for us because writing doesn't matter in our jobs." [These words are almost exact; I'm paraphrasing, but the *teacher* is the one who said that writing didn't matter.]

WTF? I mean, can't we *college professors* recognize that writing has value in any profession? Or perhaps some of my colleagues are not really college professors, something I've long suspected: they're trainers at best, smiley-sticker awarders more like it.

I work so hard to combat the education myths circulating in our culture: just showing up to class is not going to result in an automatic A. Showing up is an opportunity to learn, to show what you've learned, to try wrestling with tough topics and new ways of thinking.

Of thinking.

It'd be so nice if my campus peers [?] would value thinking.

*Sigh*.

Even my best students . . .

. . . can't work with sources. I've just read the most *horrendous* source-based essays that I've ever read in my life. Seriously, in my twenty-plus-year teaching life. Not even my own elementary school children wrote essays this terrible: disjointed, inaccurate, pointless, rambling, copied, unclear. Now I'm curious about where my previous students bought their essays.

I'm stumped: I stepped them through the process, with tour of the library and its databases, required annotated bibliography, conference with me, pre-research-paper essay persuading me that they had a reasonable research question and some idea of where to go to find their answer(s), rhetorical analysis of a sample student essay, three in-class workshops on drafts (for content [a variation of Elbow's Believer/Doubter exercises], for structure, and for citations).

I don't know what else to do. Are students that stretched that they can't do any work outside of class? We spent almost five weeks on this "unit," five weeks to produce a "researched essay" based on a question that they had related to our college common book.

The saddest thing is that I won't be teaching FYC again for at least a year. So what do I do with my terrible job this semester?

Didn't do it

Of the twenty-two students in my afternoon FYC class, only two came with the completed homework today: a ten-item annotated bibliography. They'd had a week to do it.

Some said they didn't understand what "annotated" meant (okay, didn't hear me talk about it in class, didn't read their textbook). One said she didn't know what "item" meant (okay, I should have said "ten-source bibliography" I guess). Four hadn't been in class a week ago to get the assignment (indeed, have missed the last two weeks and so were woefully behind in our whole research process toward the researched essay).

As a result, I had to completely revamp what I wanted to do in class. We did *look* at this rubric for evaluating sources, but we couldn't *do* it or *use* it with our own sources because folks hadn't prepared.

How are they going to do their essays in the next two weeks? The past two weeks were supposed to be about finding and reading sources.

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.

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.

Good first day

A couple of innovations worked well:

1) With introductions, for years I have asked students to "interview" each other and then introduce that interviewee to the whole class. Typically, I ask a question about the student's course goals/objectives, but I get tired of hearing, "My goal is to get an A in this class." So this year, I asked, "What do you hope to get out of *and give to* this class?"

The second part of the question solicited answers like, "I hope to give time and determination to this class." Yep, much better.

2) For a first-day writing exercise, I handed out a couple of cartoons about writing: next to each cartoon was blank space, and I asked students to think about the cartoons and put something in the space.

I deliberately used the word "put" to see who would write, who would draw, etc. One student drew an excellent extension of the first cartoon, and almost all students wrote something of interest. All were completely absorbed with the assignment. I'll definitely do it again.

One/Two Down

So I figured out the structure of my Comp 1 courses: it took MUCH longer than it should have. The wonderful/terrible thing about sabbatical is that it's caused me to change/realign/revise the books/assignments/timeline I use in my courses. All my courses!

The tricky thing with Comp 1 is that I have two different kinds of time frames: even though they're each twice-a-week classes (which I prefer because then the course doesn't feel like high school), one meets for 75 minutes twice a week and the other for 110 minutes twice a week.

The 110-minute meetings are easy to fit with my "lecture/discussion plus writing workshop" pedagogy: Tuesdays are whole-class meetings with lecture/discussion about the homework; Thursdays are Writers' Workshops with half the class meeting 4:00-4:50 to "workshop" two writers' drafts, the other half the class meeting for 5:00-5:50 to workshop.

The 75-minute session is harder: workshops will only be 30 minutes long, with some wiggle-room for transitions between groups. And with two writers for each workshop, 15 minutes is really not enough time to fully workshop a draft, so I'll have to be quick about keeping us on track!

This year I've also added a blogging component for the students: the idea is to get them to write, write, write in various forums for various purposes. The blogging won't be "graded" as such; it'll just be counted, sort of how I work with reading journals in non-comp classes.

(Hey, the use of the semicolon above makes me think about this Boston Globe article called "Sex and the Semicolon": interesting! I'm an over-user of colons [and hyphens], so we'll see if anyone writes an article about them.)

Online tools for writing

In the wake of my reading the Pew Internet and American Life study called "Writing, Technology, and Teens" (press release is here; PDF of the whole report is here), I've been thinking about what kind of online tools could help students write. I've learned about a few -- I'm trying to decide if it makes sense to tell students about them.

Dr. Paper: not free and originally developed for high school students, supposedly formats APA style correctly

Paper Calendar: free, will make a schedule for your paper-writing tasks

Late Night Writer: free, will ask questions to take you from topic to thesis to supporting paragraphs to finished (if disjointed) essay

yWriter4: free, writes a novel for/with you

Google Docs: free, create, collaborate, share documents online (I'm thinking of using this for class)

Buzzword: free (for now?), like Google Docs but an Adobe product

More to come, perhaps.

Cross-College Colleagues

I spent the afternoon yesterday with a couple of tremendous people: Steve Kaufman and Kathleen Devore over at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Kathleen graciously allowed me to sit in on a class -- and even chime in with a story of my own, no matter a bit off-topic -- and observe her teaching, her students, her milieu. I learned about a book I'd never heard of: Contemporary Plays by Women of Color.

These kind of conversations and collaborations are absolutely essential, I think. It's so easy to get caught up with the issues on our own campuses, with our own colleagues, in our own classrooms. A simple visit to another college, to another colleague's classroom opens that trap we'd been "caught up" in.

It's risky, though: most of us don't like the idea of someone else observing our space, our interactions with our students: why is that? The ever-present fear of evaluation? Most of us have been graduate students where evaluation was personal, or so it seemed, and had serious ramifications. Others of us have been observed by deans and supervisors, folks whose job it is to grant us better or worse working conditions. Others of us are just private, I suppose, although a truly private person probably doesn't go into teaching much.

The biggest thing I learned, though, is something I keep learning over and over from my colleagues: that good teaching and learning happens in so many ways, through so many small and serendipitous events/acknowledgments/comments, with so many different kinds of people/artifacts/questions/constraints.