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.

Week 7

This week went rather quickly as Monday was a national holiday and so two sections of the class only convened on one occasion this week. For the third section we managed to more thoroughly look at the elements of a good summary – something we had not done previously because of a missed lesson over Seker Bayram. Wednesday’s and Thursday’s lessons were somewhat predictable. This was when I collected the first drafts of essay 1. I could detect a considerable amount of nervous energy in the air. After students have worked intensively on an assignment for a few days, there seems to be a great sense of relief in handing it over to the instructor – it is no longer their responsibility and once I have it they can relax and don’t have to do anything further. Therefore to many students’ dismay, their essay was deemed unacceptable because it was incomplete. What a catastrophe? As I have stressed from the beginning of the course, the main reason for students failing this course, semester after semester is that they will just not listen to or read and follow instructions. Their first instruction was to include their instructions with their essay. If only they would keep the instructions in front of them while working on an assignment and consult them regularly, then there is some chance that they might actually follow them. However, although students may be working hard and doing their best, there is no sense of organization: systematically working their way through a process. As mentioned earlier, there seems to be this buildup of nervous energy as a deadline approaches and instead of being methodical and systematic to doing a task, students just throw all their energy into it often being unsure as to what exactly it is they ought to be doing. As I said to them many times, even if they just learn to do what they are told on this course, then that will be a great achievement.

Also this week students were assigned the task of listening to each other’s podcasts. With one of my student’s help I believe that I have now managed to “host” all of the podcasts on my website, despite the variety of formats and file sizes with which I was provided. Because of these podcasts, my website has more than doubled in size. Out technical department understandably may not have been too happy with having to give me so much space but I will have to endeavour to keep my site to it’s current size and avoid further expansion.