Week 6

The week began with a whole lesson on discussing the questions that students had begun discussing in groups in the last lesson. It was clear that many students hadn’t done any further work on them and that whatever work they had done was superficial. Because this was a building task leading towards their essay, I know that the quality of the work they did on these questions will be reflected in the quality of their essays. The dynamics in each of the classes was strikingly different when discussing this assignment. For one class eliciting responses was like pulling teeth while for another, ideas were freely volunteered and students even elaborated on each others responses and challenged my perceptions.

The homework assigned after the first lesson was to make a list of characteristics/features/devices that can be employed by writers to make their argument more convincing. Students were expected to do this by trying to recall what they had learned in writing lessons in the past and then by consulting their course handbook. I myself did the task but confined my list to those I could find in the course handbook. I came up with a list of over 50 items which took me over an hour to compile. When I glanced at students work at the next lesson, I found considerably shorter lists and when I questioned how long it had taken I found that students were obviously a lot more efficient than me.

In the last lesson of the week I stressed that students should leave the classroom feeling confident that they know exactly what they are going to do in the writing of their essay. If there is anything they are unsure about they should book a tutorial. However, the week is now ended and no one has booked a tutorial. Am I to assume that everyone clearly understands what is expected of them and that I will be receiving high quality essays next week?

The beginning of the week was rather gratifying as although the deadline for podcasts was 5pm on Friday, the assignment began trickling in as early as Monday. This was good for me as I was able to use these podcasts to sort out some technical difficulties with hosting them on my website. At the end of the week when the deadline arrived and I tried transferring students files to my website, I found that I quickly ran out of disc space. I immediately contacted our CIT department but of course they had already left for the long weekend. And so we will have to wait a few more days to see/hear what each other has produced. Of the 44 students registed in my classes – only 32 of them submitted podcasts. Next week the first essay is due. Collectively these two assignments account for 35% of the overall grade. If these same 12 students neglect to submit an essay next week then judging by previous experience it is likely that these 12 students have already given up on the course.

This week I also got the opportunity to introduce students to “turnitin.com”. Some had heard of it before and were quite concerned. One particular student who had had to use it in high school commented that it made her feel that students were being judged guilty until proven innocent. There is certainly an element of truth in this but I am sure that students know as much about what goes on with regard to plagiarism as I do. Those students who value their education and wouldn’t ever consider plagiarizing know that others do it and that every time a student gets away with it, they are devaluing the work of those students who work really hard on their own assignments and possibly get lower grades than their classmates who are cheating.

The whole exercise of students registering with turnitin.com gives to me a clear indication of how well students are doing on the course. Those students who follow instructions and are on top of their work registered immediately without any difficulty. Many still haven’t registered. Some students have already fallen behind in their work although no grades have officially been allocated yet. There are a core group of students who come to class every day, bring their books, do their homework, fill in their blogs every week. These students will be sure to do well on the course. There are others who have missed the maximum (or more) number of classes before penalties will apply, the same ones have been neglecting to do their blogs and other homework. I fear that when the assignments are due next week ( the podcast and the first draft of the first essay) many will not submit them. So, within the next couple of weeks, students will submit assignments worth 35% of their overall grade. What will students who neglect to submit these assignments do then? Time will tell.

Week 5

This week was when we started working on the first big writing assignment. Although I had brought students’ attention to it a couple of weeks ago, this was the first time that we started reading the text on which the essay would be based. Again I get the distinct impression that students are not really used to having to plan for themselves how best to use their time. When you give them a month to do something, some of them get all panicky worrying about it and everything else they will have to do that month. If they were given smaller tasks to do, night by night they would feel more in control. But when you tell them they have a month to do a larger task and it is their job to decide when and how to do it, then it is all too overpowering. However, I hope they realize that we will be working together on what I would call “building tasks” over the next couple of weeks and if they put lots of effort into those, when the time comes to actually write the essay, they will already have done lots of preparatory work with lots of notes and ideas.

Having assigned the reading of Tyler’s text for homework, I began the class during which we discussed the text for the first time by getting students’ overall impressions. Initially students approached it quite positively because it was only half the length of the text that they had read previously. However when they got down to reading it two of the sections generally found the text to be more difficult that the previous one. They attributed this to vocabularly and length/complexity of sentences. The general impression in the third section was that this text (Tyler’s) was actually easier than the earlier text because it was “more academic”, more carefully structured and direct. Because of the task we were working on, I gave students what I would consider rather challenging questions on the structure of the text and techniques/devices employed by the writer. In other words instead of focusing on what the writer said, we focused more on how he said it. I got the impression that for many students, this was the first time they had done anything like this. To help guide them towards an understanding of “what” the writer was doing, I provided discussion questions under the headings, micro structure and macro structure. As students worked in groups I found that rather than focus on the difficult questions with which they should be grappling they generally wandered off task and discussed other things – in Turkish of course. Oh what to do? In order to ensure everyone was clear on what they ought to be doing, after about 15 minutes we reviewed possible answers to the first three questions. It was clear from answers suggested that despite having read the text, most students had no idea of what the context of the text was – where it was published, what the text was aiming to do and why it was published where it was published. Students had not completed the task by the end of class and so I had to assign its completion for homework.

Week 4

Although I began this week thinking it was going to be a short one, the reality is that for most classes we had our full complement of two meetings. The main focus this week has been on ascertaining how well students have understood the text they read as homework. I myself and still trying to figure out the difficulties that first year students have with reading. To this end I carried out a number of experiments. I got all 3 classes to complete a quiz. The questions were purely checking reading for literal meaning – no inferences or evaluation were required in order to complete it. Many of the answers required just a single word and others just required students to quote from the text. One class was instructed to do the quiz, first as closed book and then after they had done their best with the book closed, they were allowed to redo the quiz as open book. There was one instance of a student getting a higher grade on the closed book version. All quizzes were peer graded and one class I got to redo the quiz even after we had agreed on the right answers. I did this because I found that with the peer grading some students had marked answers correct that were clearly wrong. Consistently, (even when the quiz was redone after grading) the majority of students received a failing grade.

This is of course all very demoralizing for both students and me. In a sense this is exactly what I was expecting to happen and I actually told students this even before they did the quiz. I was hoping that they would prove my expectations wrong. I could avoid giving such quizzes but what would be the value in that? Students and teacher could then convince themselves that texts are being read and understood but what if in reality students don’t understand what they are reading or perhaps worse – they misunderstand what they are reading. At least if you know you don’t know something there’s some hope that you might go off and learn it – or you certainly won’t act as if you know. If one can convince oneself that they understand a text then no further action is required. However, if one admits that one does not understand, one feels obliged to do something but what is it that one should do? Hopefully the skills acquired by students on this course will equip them to deal with texts they don’t fully understand.

From looking at students’ work this week I can identify that one of the major problems is lack of attention to detail and lack of sensitivity to accuracy. Again there were many spelling mistakes and inaccurate quotations although students could have consulted their books for the correct versions. Philosopher or psychologist – does it matter? Does it matter whether one uses Turkish spelling or English spelling? Students seem to think that if their answer is somewhere “in the ballpark” then that’s OK. In the next few months they will have to realize that details are important in academic writing. Students must learn that there is a big difference between saying “this relationship is mediated through computer communication” and “this relationship is mainly mediated through computer communication”.

The second lesson of the week consisted mainly in students creating a synthesized list of points from the text, arranged under headings provided by me. They seem to have worked very well together and have come up with quite a comprehensive list. It may be a bit early in the course to get them synthesizing but it fits in naturally with what we need to do now. Having synthesized information within one text they should better understand the process involved in synthesizing a number of texts later. It was interesting to see how different people can read a text and isolate different points. While I monitored group work I noticed that one student had noted that masturbation offline tends to be solitary whereas masturbation online is a social activity – a point dealt with in the text but one that had not struck me until she expressed it in such blunt terms.

Week 3

I guess one could call the first couple of weeks of a course, “the honeymoon period” and I think students are beginning to sense that that is now over. As always, things run smoothly and appear to be running fine until it’s time to give feedback on work done. For the first lesson this week I gave feedback on the diagnostic essays that students did in the first week of classes. For me there were no surprises. The performance was pretty much similar to that of previous courses and so I got exactly what I was expecting to get. The students however were consistently surprised at the “grade”’ they would have got if I were to grade their essays. Admittedly, I haven’t yet “taught” them very much but all I expect them to do is display what they have already learned – what they learned about writing essays in high school and in particular, in preparation for the TOEFL exam which they had to pass in order to be admitted to Koc University. By asking directly, I found that they had all heard of the concepts of an introduction, a body and a conclusion. They had all also learned of the need for a thesis. Sadly, these elements were missing from a large majority of the essays. Even the concept of paragraphing seemed to have been completely forgotten by many students. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties students had was with answering the question that they were asked. I get the distinct impression (as I always do) that students are not used to answering questions but are rather more used to simply “writing about a topic”. In the past their writing in English has been for the purpose of displaying their command of vocabulary and grammar – how they said things was important and what they said wasn’t given as much attention. Now however they must realize that at university one of the main reasons you will write is to display knowledge. As a communication instructor – yes of course I am very interested in “how” they express themselves, but as I am preparing them for later life at university I will be paying very close attention to what they say. If what they say isn’t worth saying or is inaccurate, then they will be told that, regardless of how well they have expressed it. We are not writing for the sake of writing but in order to convey information.

By the end of class and after reading students blogs I got the sense that students could honestly see the shortcomings in their essays and why they were not deserving of a passing grade. Most of them seem confident that they will do much better in their next assignment and that they will remember to employ the devices and principles that they have already learned as well as incorporate any new guidelines/instructions that I will provide them with. (Here’s hoping).

I am pleased to see that students are being very proactive and that although I haven’t set a deadline for the choice of a topic for the podcasts most students have already chosen a topic. It is great to see that they are not leaving everything until the last minute but are rather planning ahead. There are of course the few – as there always are, who haven’t yet taken any action. They will end up having to choose a topic that they perhaps do not know very much about and will rush through their preparations at the last minute.

On the subject of homework assignments, from reading students’ blogs I get the impression that many don’t really have any sense of how to manage their time. I guess in high school or in ELC homework assignments were for the immediate future ie. Whatever homework you get today is for tomorrow or at the very latest, the day after. However, because last week, I gave students an overview of all the different assignments they will do in the coming month, many of them seem to be overwhelmed. They don’t seem to be used to “multi-tasking” and planning when to do things. Surely they must realize that if one were to calculate all the time that they will spend preparing their podcast, writing their blogs and writing their first formal essay it will all amount to less than 20 hours. This is on average 40 minutes per day. Yes, I know that some of them will leave everything until the last minute and I know that some students can only operate by “burning the midnight oil” but even if they do this it would still be possible to complete the assignments within a single day – admittedly it would be a hard day’s work but it would still be possible. In the past students probably have had others manage their time for them – they only had to worry about planning night by night. However, if they are going to survive at university, they will need to learn to plan their own work schedules more long term. They’ll begin to appreciate this as soon as the mid-terms start. They must learn that a mid-term in one subject should not completely absorb one’s time and energy. While preparing for a mid-term, work on other subjects must continue as normal.

Week 2

At last, classes are settling down in that whoever I had this week is who will be around for the rest of the course. I am sure students get frustrated with all the moves but I doubt they appreciate how much more hassle it is for instructors. The main new features I had to introduce to students this week were of course the completion of a blog and a podcast. This week, after the movement of students around sections, there were considerably more students who knew what a blog and a podcast were. This was somewhat of a relief to me. A couple of students actually were already keeping a blog.

The deadline for creation of the blogs was Friday at 5pm and I am pleased to say that most students met this deadline although of course there were a few who didn't. An instructor can always tell a lot about what's going to happen later in the course by how students perform in the first couple of weeks. Those who have already written in their blogs have tended to write fairly positive comments. The word "fun" has been used quite a lot but I hope students appreciate that attending courses at a university is not all about fun. My own university life was possibly the time when I had most fun but it wasn't during classes. The fun part was what I got up to outside of class. Classes were hard work. It worries me when students have the expectation that classes should be "fun". I have tried to incorporate a certain number of fun elements but overall the course is going to be hard work and the sooner students realise that, the better. Things will start to get tougher as they will realise when they read the next text I assign. When they then have to start writing, they'll realise how even tougher it is.