Week 14

From students’ perspective, this week was probably a very easy one – there were only two day’s of lessons. However, as I set Wednesday evening as the deadline for submission of final drafts of the second essay, it turned out to be my most demanding week. Some students were really organized and even got their essays in early so that they could go home to their families and relax not having to worry about me and my demands. However, the ball was now back in my court and I had the stress of getting everything graded by next lesson. Having a day in which you plan a bit, teach a bit and grade a bit is perfectly manageable. However, when you start grading at 7am and do nothing all day but grade, the lack of variety makes the whole process much more difficult. However, again I must say that I was generally pleased with the quality of the work I received as virtually all essays were comprehensible and to a greater or lesser extent demonstrated mastery of the art of writing synthesis. I had noticed but it came out in conversation in class that at least for one section, the class average grade for the second essay was higher than that for the first. Given the level of difficulty of the task, this was quite an achievement. Another reason for this higher average would be that a few weaker students who had been struggling to keep up had opted to drop the course and focus their attention and energies on their other courses.

Week 13

Time has flown. I of course have had to look forward to the end of course and plan what will happen for the last couple of weeks. When the week began, I could say that there were still three weeks left but the reality is that because of holidays lots of lessons will be missed. As mentioned before, it is clear that students feel a great sense of relief when they hand their essays over to me - they have worked hard on creating them and while they are in my possession for evaluation, students can let go of the responsibility and "take a breather". However, because I am so acutely aware of how little time there is left, I worked hard through the weekend to ensure that I could get all the essays back (at least those I had received on time) during the first lesson of the week. This meant that students only had the weekend to recover from the writing of the first draft. The ball was thrown back in their court and now they have to start worrying again. They may feel pressured by having to get their final draft in before their big Bayram but I hope that once they go home to their families and realise that they have no work from Comm 101 screaming to be done, they will appreciate that the final push was worth it in the end.

This week was another one of those busy weeks where I had to conduct compulsory tutorials, teach and grade late submissions. I haven't yet made a tally of who did and who did not attend a tutorial but there of course will be a few who will claim that they could not find a time to suit them. There were of course lots of slots on Monday and Tuesday that were never filled. I have also had students sign up for fifteen minutes before the deadline for submission of final drafts. I suspect that they haven't yet put two and two together and realised this but when they do and they try to book an earlier slot, they will of course be all filled.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I hope students can. There appears to be a few that can't. In fact there are a few that have fallen at the last fence. Some students appear to have just given up at the prospect of having to write the second essay. This is really a shame as they are so close to the end. One final push and they'd have it over with. However, they are now committing themselves to having to repeat the course next semester. Here's hoping it'll go well for them but from past experience I can only warn that because of how tired they'll be they may even have less energy next semester for jumping that last fence.

Week 12

This is the week in which students have to hand in the first draft of their second essay. They have been warned also that the quality of their second essay will have a bearing on the grades they will get for their final exam. The final exam will require them to write a similar essay to what they are doing now and so what they learn during the process of writing this essay will prepare them for their later exam. From discussions of the text in class and practical exercises we are doing, I feel that most students have a fairly good grasp of what it is they need to do. This whole idea of synthesis is quite new to most of them and it is understandable if they feel a little phased at first. It would be great if we had more time to do further practice but I’m afraid we don’t have that luxury. Teachers who have to constantly look forward and plan to the end of semester are acutely aware of what needs to be done and what time there is to do it. Students seem to survive from day to day and so don’t fully appreciate why particular deadlines need to be set. Unfortunately my course must proceed according to the schedule regardless of whether another instructor has organized a mid term on a particular day.

I left school at 1pm on Friday with a bag of essays to be graded over the weekend. The bag was not as heavy as it should have been. At least 30% of students missed the deadline for submission. What do they think is going to happen now I wonder?

Week 11

This week I learned from one student that when they got their grades for their first essays, many students were assuming that I was playing a trick on them and would eventually tell them to reverse the numbers in the grades. In other words if a student got 86% they were assuming that I would tell them it was only 68%. So, I guess I had deflated them so much that they didn’t really believe that they could do so well. However, it is clear that most students are really trying and paying attention to detail and responding to feedback. However, there were some students who were of course, rather unhappy with their grades. I remember one student in particular who had her essay returned to her at least three times because it was not three pages which was the minimum requirement. Each time she returned exactly the same essay which was still only two and a quarter pages long. Eventually I had to give up and just give her a token grade.

I had to miss one of my lessons on Wednesday morning in order to deal with an important administrative matter. When I turned up for my 12.30 lesson, one of the students demanded fair and equal treatment – he was of course suggesting that I cancel the lesson as I had had to do earlier. However, when offered fair and equal treatment – come in on Saturday morning for a makeup lesson – he declined and was quite happy to be treated “unfairly and unequally”.

Well, almost half of the overall grades for the course have now been allocated and so students should have a fair idea of how they are doing. Hopefully they will be able buckle down now for the home stretch and maintain the momentum that we have built up. However, this is the time of the semester when students tend to be overwhelmed by mid terms and find it difficult to keep up with all their work.

Week 10

I think most students were a bit overwhelmed when they left the first lesson of this week – due to the many homework assignments I had to give them. Students tend to like to put things off/postpone until a later date and so having just finished with Essay 1 they were probably expecting to be able to take a breather before commencing essay 2. Alas, today was the day on which I had to introduce them to task 2 and all they would need to do in preparation for writing. The deadline for submission of the first draft is only two weeks hence and because completing the task involves reading two texts, we have a lot of work to do in the next two weeks.

This week I decided to make students participants in their own study based on the first text we need to read for our next essay. I did have some qualms initially about doing it as some people may view it as ethically questionable. However, if students actually carry out the activities that the participants and researchers in the study did, then there is a much better chance that they will understand what it’s all about. In order to ensure that nobody gets hurt I have tried as much as possible to allow students to remain anonymous. However, I am not surprised to find that students can figure out which story was written by whom – mainly due to content or sometimes students are perfectly happy to draw attention to themselves and reveal with story is theirs.

This is the week in which I got finished grading the first essays. I must say that overall I was really quite impressed. Obviously there will be some students who are not at all happy with their grades but I am hoping that they can be realistic and see what areas they are weak in. Some students were clearly well satisfied with their grades. There were also the couple of incidences with tears as some work had to be rejected for not meeting basic standards. Again I detected a lot of nervous energy that was not being channeled appropriately. I genuinely feel that if students can learn to channel their energy more systematically and pay attention to detail then they will be able to achieve very high standards.

Week 9

The deadline for submission of final drafts of essay 1 was this week. For me this week was somewhat easier than last week as, although I had a complete week of teaching and conducting tutorials, at least I didn’t have any grading – or at least very little. There were the usual few who managed to slip “out of the loop”. The deadline for two of my sections was 12 noon on Friday. By then only 18 students in total (from two sections) had submitted their essays. I should of course have received almost this many for each section. However, this means less grading for me… Students wonder why they fail – again it’s normally because they don’t actually produce the work.

Although I felt that what I was doing in class was basically revision of skills that students would have learned earlier – in high school or in ELC – it emerged from discussions in tutorials that for many students it was their first time ever considering how a paragraph should be structured, how to write a topic sentence and then how to support it. Such discussions reinforce the need for going back to basics and taking nothing for granted.

Again this week some students have handed in their work early. It’s good to see that they are doing things as and when they have time. I try not to assign work for the next lesson but rather allow as much time as possible so that students can fit the work into their schedule. For those that are organized this seems to be working but for those who need the motivation of a deadline hanging over them, this simply means that on certain nights (before a deadline) there is a big backlog of work that needs to be caught up on.

As this was week nine I informed students of the fact that I will award 4% of their overall grade for the blogs they have done up until now. Until this week I had not allocated any grades and so I also warned students that almost half of their overall grade will become known within the next week or so. So, within a week they should all have a good idea of how they are doing on the course.

Again this week, one of my sections will have noticed that we had another visitor in class. Yes, I was peer observed again. I am sure students noticed that my observer did something that they are very careful not to do.

Week 8

At the end of last week students submitted the first drafts of their essays and so I had a wonderful weekend grading. Actually, although some students may feel rather disappointed with the feedback they got, I must say that overall I was really quite impressed with the quality of the work I received. It does seem that most students are making a genuine effort and when they take nothing for granted but systematically work on improving their writing – they really can do it. However, I continue to be dismayed at how students reduce all feedback to whether Mr O’Regan “liked” the essay. I even had one student accuse me of hating her essay. Even when they received a rubric (to which they had access even before writing their essays) with detailed feedback followed up by a tutorial in which the feedback is further discussed, the feedback is consistently summarized to “he likes it” and “he doesn’t like it”. Students will admit that they haven’t got a thesis or that they have one but it doesn’t address the task. They will admit to having no explanation for their choice of what to include/exclude from a summary. They will admit to having no particular reason for organizing their ideas in the way they have. They will admit to forgetting to enclose quotations in quotation marks…But yet…Mr O’Regan arbitrarily chooses to like or dislike an essay for some reasons known only to himself. One wonders if students’ main strategy to pass this course is to do a psychological profile of their instructor so that they can provide him with what he “likes”. Don’t they realize that he keeps telling them what he “likes”, he writes downs lists of what he “likes” so that they can easily check off the list as they provide what he “likes”. This week has been a particularly busy one for me as, as well as the normal teaching I have had to grade essays, conduct tutorials and attend lots of meetings. I am of course sympathetic to students when they document how much work to do but I seriously question how effectively they use their time. Of all the things that one could teach them, getting organized and using one’s time efficiently is perhaps one of the most important.

There are a few students who seem to be really on top of their work and even hand assignments in, up to a week before the deadline. Although the deadline is not until next Monday, a couple of students have handed in their peer reviews of podcasts. Students accuse me of being harsh but wait until they see this feedback. It was rather heartening for me to see that the students giving feedback were being totally honest if not being somewhat direct. I did fear that students would make superficial comments and claim that everyone’s podcast was wonderful in the hope that this would result in me giving everyone a high grade. However, if others are as blatantly honest as these first pair have been then I imagine that everyone will be thrilled with the grades they receive from me. Often students’ criteria (which they get from their own experience of viewing podcasts on the internet) is much harsher than mine. I am fully aware that most students have made a podcast for the first time and in a language that is not their own. I don’t expect them to be as proficient as those of other podcasters who have been at it for years.

We have done quite a bit of peer review this semester and so when I had one of my peers visit one of my lessons this week to review my teaching, it seemed only fair. However, as one would expect, students did not seem to be their normal bubbly selves. They were somewhat more subdued than usual. I have noticed this also in the past when being formally assessed as part of a teaching course. If students “dislike” a teacher and want to make him look bad in front of an observer what is it they ought to do? If they misbehave, this doesn’t necessarily make the teacher look bad – it simply makes the students themselves look bad…and how can they be sure that the observer isn’t really there to observe them and won’t report them to some higher authority. And what if students “like” their teacher and want to make sure he looks good in front of the observer? Unfortunately most of them seem to think that sitting quietly and listening to everything the teacher says is the best thing to do. They are reluctant to interact with the teacher for fear that they will respond inappropriately and make it look like he’s not doing a good job of teaching them. Of course the reality is that observers tend to be teachers themselves and they know exactly what is going on. The ideal observation is when students and teachers just continue as normal and behave as though there is no stranger in the classroom.