Telling the Truth

I've been thinking of using this blog to tell what really goes on at my college: the happy stories are easy, of course -- like the goofy summer-school student who stopped by my office today, pleased to spend an hour chatting because she had two hours "to waste."

She wanted to show me a book she'd checked out of her public library -- "The Gay Rights Movement" -- wondering how she could buy it.  I spent 45 minutes with her, analyzing "The Children's Hour," hearing about her classes, including ear-training and logic (the textbook's cover photograph of trees in mist really confounded her: how is that the image of logic?).

But what about the not-happy things that occur all around me?

• Tech writing students who, asked to talk about "usability," immediately begin sharing horror stories about our college's new website.  
• The faulty registration system that did not screen the students for honors courses; as a result, both students and faculty have been surprised this week to find that what they thought they were signing up for is not what they've received.  
• Faculty and student training sessions led by someone who treats all the participants like children ("If I raise my hand, that means you should stop talking!").  
• Financial aid not distributing vouchers for book purchases until the second week of the semester -- so students cannot begin the reading unless I lend them my personal books (which I continue to do). 

I could write a longer list.  It might be healthy for me to purge in this blog, but I'm not sure . . . should I tell the truth about how much worse the infrastructure has gotten since I arrived 9 years ago?  Many, many things are worse, and part of the reason I think is that our president has hired his pals instead of smart people: young men who are protecting their fragile machismo by treating others badly (especially the women who run the joint).  It's just so classically sexist that it's almost funny.

*Sigh.*

"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.