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.

Week 6

The week began with a whole lesson on discussing the questions that students had begun discussing in groups in the last lesson. It was clear that many students hadn’t done any further work on them and that whatever work they had done was superficial. Because this was a building task leading towards their essay, I know that the quality of the work they did on these questions will be reflected in the quality of their essays. The dynamics in each of the classes was strikingly different when discussing this assignment. For one class eliciting responses was like pulling teeth while for another, ideas were freely volunteered and students even elaborated on each others responses and challenged my perceptions.

The homework assigned after the first lesson was to make a list of characteristics/features/devices that can be employed by writers to make their argument more convincing. Students were expected to do this by trying to recall what they had learned in writing lessons in the past and then by consulting their course handbook. I myself did the task but confined my list to those I could find in the course handbook. I came up with a list of over 50 items which took me over an hour to compile. When I glanced at students work at the next lesson, I found considerably shorter lists and when I questioned how long it had taken I found that students were obviously a lot more efficient than me.

In the last lesson of the week I stressed that students should leave the classroom feeling confident that they know exactly what they are going to do in the writing of their essay. If there is anything they are unsure about they should book a tutorial. However, the week is now ended and no one has booked a tutorial. Am I to assume that everyone clearly understands what is expected of them and that I will be receiving high quality essays next week?

The beginning of the week was rather gratifying as although the deadline for podcasts was 5pm on Friday, the assignment began trickling in as early as Monday. This was good for me as I was able to use these podcasts to sort out some technical difficulties with hosting them on my website. At the end of the week when the deadline arrived and I tried transferring students files to my website, I found that I quickly ran out of disc space. I immediately contacted our CIT department but of course they had already left for the long weekend. And so we will have to wait a few more days to see/hear what each other has produced. Of the 44 students registed in my classes – only 32 of them submitted podcasts. Next week the first essay is due. Collectively these two assignments account for 35% of the overall grade. If these same 12 students neglect to submit an essay next week then judging by previous experience it is likely that these 12 students have already given up on the course.

This week I also got the opportunity to introduce students to “turnitin.com”. Some had heard of it before and were quite concerned. One particular student who had had to use it in high school commented that it made her feel that students were being judged guilty until proven innocent. There is certainly an element of truth in this but I am sure that students know as much about what goes on with regard to plagiarism as I do. Those students who value their education and wouldn’t ever consider plagiarizing know that others do it and that every time a student gets away with it, they are devaluing the work of those students who work really hard on their own assignments and possibly get lower grades than their classmates who are cheating.

The whole exercise of students registering with turnitin.com gives to me a clear indication of how well students are doing on the course. Those students who follow instructions and are on top of their work registered immediately without any difficulty. Many still haven’t registered. Some students have already fallen behind in their work although no grades have officially been allocated yet. There are a core group of students who come to class every day, bring their books, do their homework, fill in their blogs every week. These students will be sure to do well on the course. There are others who have missed the maximum (or more) number of classes before penalties will apply, the same ones have been neglecting to do their blogs and other homework. I fear that when the assignments are due next week ( the podcast and the first draft of the first essay) many will not submit them. So, within the next couple of weeks, students will submit assignments worth 35% of their overall grade. What will students who neglect to submit these assignments do then? Time will tell.

Week 5

This week was when we started working on the first big writing assignment. Although I had brought students’ attention to it a couple of weeks ago, this was the first time that we started reading the text on which the essay would be based. Again I get the distinct impression that students are not really used to having to plan for themselves how best to use their time. When you give them a month to do something, some of them get all panicky worrying about it and everything else they will have to do that month. If they were given smaller tasks to do, night by night they would feel more in control. But when you tell them they have a month to do a larger task and it is their job to decide when and how to do it, then it is all too overpowering. However, I hope they realize that we will be working together on what I would call “building tasks” over the next couple of weeks and if they put lots of effort into those, when the time comes to actually write the essay, they will already have done lots of preparatory work with lots of notes and ideas.

Having assigned the reading of Tyler’s text for homework, I began the class during which we discussed the text for the first time by getting students’ overall impressions. Initially students approached it quite positively because it was only half the length of the text that they had read previously. However when they got down to reading it two of the sections generally found the text to be more difficult that the previous one. They attributed this to vocabularly and length/complexity of sentences. The general impression in the third section was that this text (Tyler’s) was actually easier than the earlier text because it was “more academic”, more carefully structured and direct. Because of the task we were working on, I gave students what I would consider rather challenging questions on the structure of the text and techniques/devices employed by the writer. In other words instead of focusing on what the writer said, we focused more on how he said it. I got the impression that for many students, this was the first time they had done anything like this. To help guide them towards an understanding of “what” the writer was doing, I provided discussion questions under the headings, micro structure and macro structure. As students worked in groups I found that rather than focus on the difficult questions with which they should be grappling they generally wandered off task and discussed other things – in Turkish of course. Oh what to do? In order to ensure everyone was clear on what they ought to be doing, after about 15 minutes we reviewed possible answers to the first three questions. It was clear from answers suggested that despite having read the text, most students had no idea of what the context of the text was – where it was published, what the text was aiming to do and why it was published where it was published. Students had not completed the task by the end of class and so I had to assign its completion for homework.

Week 4

Although I began this week thinking it was going to be a short one, the reality is that for most classes we had our full complement of two meetings. The main focus this week has been on ascertaining how well students have understood the text they read as homework. I myself and still trying to figure out the difficulties that first year students have with reading. To this end I carried out a number of experiments. I got all 3 classes to complete a quiz. The questions were purely checking reading for literal meaning – no inferences or evaluation were required in order to complete it. Many of the answers required just a single word and others just required students to quote from the text. One class was instructed to do the quiz, first as closed book and then after they had done their best with the book closed, they were allowed to redo the quiz as open book. There was one instance of a student getting a higher grade on the closed book version. All quizzes were peer graded and one class I got to redo the quiz even after we had agreed on the right answers. I did this because I found that with the peer grading some students had marked answers correct that were clearly wrong. Consistently, (even when the quiz was redone after grading) the majority of students received a failing grade.

This is of course all very demoralizing for both students and me. In a sense this is exactly what I was expecting to happen and I actually told students this even before they did the quiz. I was hoping that they would prove my expectations wrong. I could avoid giving such quizzes but what would be the value in that? Students and teacher could then convince themselves that texts are being read and understood but what if in reality students don’t understand what they are reading or perhaps worse – they misunderstand what they are reading. At least if you know you don’t know something there’s some hope that you might go off and learn it – or you certainly won’t act as if you know. If one can convince oneself that they understand a text then no further action is required. However, if one admits that one does not understand, one feels obliged to do something but what is it that one should do? Hopefully the skills acquired by students on this course will equip them to deal with texts they don’t fully understand.

From looking at students’ work this week I can identify that one of the major problems is lack of attention to detail and lack of sensitivity to accuracy. Again there were many spelling mistakes and inaccurate quotations although students could have consulted their books for the correct versions. Philosopher or psychologist – does it matter? Does it matter whether one uses Turkish spelling or English spelling? Students seem to think that if their answer is somewhere “in the ballpark” then that’s OK. In the next few months they will have to realize that details are important in academic writing. Students must learn that there is a big difference between saying “this relationship is mediated through computer communication” and “this relationship is mainly mediated through computer communication”.

The second lesson of the week consisted mainly in students creating a synthesized list of points from the text, arranged under headings provided by me. They seem to have worked very well together and have come up with quite a comprehensive list. It may be a bit early in the course to get them synthesizing but it fits in naturally with what we need to do now. Having synthesized information within one text they should better understand the process involved in synthesizing a number of texts later. It was interesting to see how different people can read a text and isolate different points. While I monitored group work I noticed that one student had noted that masturbation offline tends to be solitary whereas masturbation online is a social activity – a point dealt with in the text but one that had not struck me until she expressed it in such blunt terms.