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.