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.