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.