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.
2 comments:
It's very interesting and encouraging that you do most of the things we do as homework and give importance to them more than most of us do(:
They didn't talk,utter even a word, is that what you meant by saying that the observes did something that they are very careful not to do. :)))
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