Fouts's connection with his students or week five wed.

Last year, when I taught freshmen composition for the first time, I started off as awkward as all of my fellow Teaching Interns. I often became slightly confused (big surprise for those of you who know me) and felt uncomfortable. 

Also last year, there came a specific moment when I knew that myself and my students had made a connection. This was not necessarily an educational or pedagogical connection, but the kind of connection that you could call rapport. Rapport is something that, I am led to believe is not altogether common in the teaching field, although, I imagine that all good teachers develop it to one degree or another. 

Anyway, my "rapport moment" last year, occurred when, through a conversational chain of circumstance that I really don't remember, I attempted to dance the charleston. My students laughed. I laughed. After that, something had changed between us. I have a feeling that the something is the thing that can make the difference between a good teacher and a great teacher. 

This week I had a moment like that when we were talking about how to write an essay around the idea of "definition." I was going over a certain way to define an idea and one of my students said "couldn't we make a venn diagram of that?" 

See the thing is, I have a particular affection for venn diagrams. 

well, we ended up staying late working on our venn diagram (a diagram that depicted the definition of "potato chips." and one student even stayed while I turned off the lights and locked the door to talk about how cool venn diagrams are, how mystical in their simplicity. These are conversations that you can only really have on college campuses with young and hopeful undergraduates. 

so that's it. I feel we have connected on some level that is slightly different than just plain old teacher / student. I should admit here that I have had a couple martinis while writing this so I may be waxing sentimental...but I don't really think I am. I know rapport when I feel it.

Week Four Friday

I suppose the interesting thing that occurred was related to the length of the in class writing assignment. I told the students in my first section that their answer should be "approximately one page double spaced." 

there were two problems with this. In the first place, the Blackboard system that I have them write their responses on doesn't do double spacing and also doesn't do "pages." In the second place, I realized, after I said this, that the assignment didn't really warrant a one page answer. Not that it was impossible mind you. Well, I told them to do their best.

For my second section, I tried something a little different. I told them that there was not length requirement. I said. "there is no length requirement. If you think you have said all there is to say on the subject, you're done. But, if you think that any of your ideas can be unpacked a little more, I urge you to take the time to do it." 

well, the result is fairly inconclusive. Both classes wrote about the same amount of actual text. It would take me some time to decide if one class was more thoughtful than the other, but I don't really think this is very likely.

Week Four Wednesday

Wednesday is developing into in-class activity day. I really wanted to come up with a Jeopardy game for chapter 4: Unity, but I never got around to coming up with paragraphs for them to "fix" and making overheads of them. Instead I found that my book has an in-class project for this chapter so we did that. It basically consisted of three paragraphs written by a "student" which happens to have sentences in it that disrupt the unity of the essay.

So we just had a class discussion in which we talked about what lines we think should be cut. The participation was pretty good I am happy to say. After the exercise I made sure to point out to them that this is exactly what they should do with their own essays. Hopefully this will rub off on them if repeated enough times.

Week Four Monday

My students didn't show any interest whatsoever in my blog idea. I was really surprised about this because I naturally assumed that they would consider something like that to be a fun way to spend computer lab time.

Of course a certain amount of their apathy was probably due to the fact that I didn't give them an in-lab assignment last friday. I gave them a weekend assignment and suggested that they might complete in in class time but that, once they dropped off essay III, they were free to go. Now they are harboring hopes that they can do that every friday.

I should admit here that I am actually tempted to do so. In lab assignments have a certain air of busy work about them and my students are already doing more writing than any other 103 class that I know of. On the other hand, if I make them do a little writing in the lab every friday, it's likely to bring their writing skills up just that much more. So I think I will keep doing it.

I suppose the trick will be to come up with assignments that don't feel like busy work. So it goes.

Week Three Friday

Friday is computer lab day. However, I didn't keep my students in the lab for the entire class period today. I had them turn in essay II and gave them an assignment do to related to next week's readings. Instead of having them do the assignment in class as I did last week, I gave them until sunday 8pm to complete the assignment. I told them that they could most likely complete this assignment within Friday's class time, but they were under no obligation to do so.

Needless to say most of them chose to leave early. Time will tell if they complete the assignment on time, but I'm sure they will. Both of my sections seem perfectly willing to do the small amount of homework I assign. Also this way, I think that students will be more likely to read the assigned reading for next week. So I'm pretty happy with how things went.

I am thinking about seeing if my students want to start a class blog. This would give us a regular assignment for Friday lab days and I think they would enjoy it. Also, I think it will increase the overall amount of writing that they do, which, as any writer knows, is likely to improve their writing skills more than anything else.

note to self

talk to students about not double spacing after a period.

week three wed.

In both sections of my class today we played "the five C's of style jeopardy. In this game, students choose a category and a point value (100-500), just like regular jeopardy. Then I put a sentence on the overhead projector that has something wrong with it stylistically and the students try to "fix" it. This went really well last year when I taught engl. 103.

This time around it went pretty well, though not quite as smoothly as last year. For one thing, the overhead projector in the classroom for my first section is extremely old and displayed a tendency to create smoke in a somewhat frightening manner. This distracted the class a little. Also, the "five C's of style" is something out of last year's writing handbook, which we no longer use. So students couldn't have their handbooks open to give them ideas. A really prepared teacher who is on the ball would probably have come up a new version of the game that used the new handbook.

third week sunday: grading essays

This weekend I graded essay I. The prompt for this essay is simply that they have to write a personal narrative of some kind. I decided that, at least for these first drafts, I will give full credit to any essay that is properly formated, at least one page long, and shows a bona fide attempt at being the kind of essay requested (narrative, descriptive, comparison, etc.). Of the 50ish essays I have graded, only one didn't fulfill these meager requirements. This one dissenter was printed in arial. I gave it a 98/100.

The thing that impressed me the most about these essays is their length. The main reason I came up with my revised syllabus was to prevent my students from writing several pages of bullshit because their main concern was to fill what appears to a freshman as "a lot of pages". I do feel that the ability to unpack one's ideas in order to make a paper long enough is an important skill. However, I feel that it is both less important and easier to cultivate than invention and organization.

Anyway, I stressed the fact that these essays only had to be one page long to get full credit. Last year, when i assigned a three page essay, my students complained that "it's too hard to make my ideas stretch out that long". Wasn't I surprised last Friday when several students came up to me with three page essays complaining that "It's too hard to make them any shorter" Is it some kind of reverse psychology?

The essays themselves were all very thoughtful. I can't seem to shake the feeling that this year's students are more thoughtful than last years...strange.

About the time I was 80% done with my grading, I realized that I was writing pretty much the same thing on every essay: some version of "this is a good narrative. For the revision you might consider opening the story at the point where your team went to the big game and then filling the background in later." I think, if that happens again, I will put less comments on each paper and just talk about suggestions for improvment in class.

second week friday

This semester Friday is the day that my two sections meet in the computer lab. So, what I had planned for them was a continuation of the active reading lesson from wed. I had students read a very short personal narrative by Julia Alvarez called "snow". After that, they had to answer the six questions on page 47 of the textbook and post their answers on the class Blackboard site.

things went pretty well for both sections. It was immediately clear to me that students are far more comfortable with the Blackboard system then they were with the Weboard system last year.

I haven't had a chance to read the responses they posted yet. Hopefully I will have time over the weekend.

week two day two

This is really the week that classes start in earnest. At least that's the way I see it. For one thing, students shuffle around a fair amount during the first week. Mostly, though, it seem like if you try and really get deep into the subject matter the first week, you have to start all over again after the labor day weekend.

I probably should have given my students some kind of at home project to do over the weekend. I didn't really give them any homework. Last week Friday, I handed out the writing prompt for the essay that's due this Friday and I encouraged them to possibly take a look at chapter two of the reader. So today, when I went to talk about chapter two, I didn't have anything really planned and they hadn't read it. This is not an ideal situation, but it's not really the end of the world either. I had read chapter two and I knew what I wanted to lecture on, and I figured I could get some kind of discussion going.

As it played out, things were not as cohesive as I wanted them to be. Chapter two is about active reading. I was surprised that nobody in either of my sections claimed to have learned anything about active reading in high-school. I'm not sure if this was because they really weren't taught active reading, or because they didn't feel like talking. As any fycomp teacher can attest, students often have a tendency to clam up and give you blank stares. I suppose that they do this because they simply don't want to be there. It may also be that they think there is a possibility that if they don't respond, I will run out of things to say early and let them go. I suspect that it's probably about two-thirds the former and one-third the latter reason.

So anyway, we talked about active reading. In my first section we had a class discussion about the sample essay. The book has a handy checklist of questions for one to ask oneself in order to get the most out of the text. So we applied these questions to the essay "intelligence" by Isac Asimov. That went pretty well, but I felt like I was repeating myself a lot. Well, one can only say so much about active reading. You just have to make them do it.

For my second section, I had them divide up into groups and each group attempted to answer one question on the checklist. I felt like this went a little smoother. The only problem was that several of the questions rely on the answer to the previous question, so some groups didn't have a lot to talk about. In retrospect, I probably should have had each group answer all six questions. I may do that next time around.

All in all, I think I could have taught a little better today. I should have come up with a little more formalized lecture and a slightly better group activity and I should have done it in advance. I often don't do a great deal of preparation for a class because many of my best ideas come to me right before the class starts. However, this time around, I think it would have been a good idea.

First Week Sunday

Today I graded the diagnostic essays that students wrote in class on friday. As always, these essays are pretty much fun to read. I found that one of my sections largely chose to write on the original prompt that I gave out while students of the other section chose almost unanimously to write according to the "invisibility vs flying" prompt, discussed in the previous blog posting.

When I comment on these essays, I am pretty easy going. They are not for a grade, but just an introductory sort of experience. So I mark any glaring grammitical mistakes in the margins and I write mostly encouraging comments at the end of each essay. Every essay usually contains comments that go something like this "this is a good in class essay. You have some interesting ideas and your organize them fairly well. Also, your essay was (fun/interesting) to read. Hopefully this class will help you take your skills to an even higher level."

The general trends are more or less the same as last year; an inability to tell when the word "its" is a contraction and when it isn't and the tendency to write as if they were speaking to somebody. If my students can graduate from my class using the correct "its" and eliminate that speaking tone from their writing, I think I will be on to something.

It seems to me that this year's diagnostic essays are more thoughtful than the one's my students produced last year. I don't know if they really are or if they just seem to be. I think that they must be, though. for example, whenever I have students write about flying vs invisibility, they never fail to pick up on the fact that invisibility is the more sinister of the two powers and that it's more easily used for nefarious purposes than is flying. This year, one of my students writing on the subject noted that invisibility is not so much evil but rather it is the power (of the two possibilities) that gives its owner the ability to chose for his or her self whether to be good or evil.

So it occurs to me that I must try and encourage this thoughtfulness in my students. Perhaps my students were just as thoughtful last year but I was not experienced enough to notice it.

first week third day

The plan for this day is basically what was referred to in my fycomp class as a diagnostic essay. The purpose of a diagnostic is supposed to be for me to see what their writing skills are like and for them to get a little bit of an idea concerning what kind of things I will be looking for when I grade their "real" essays. So anyway, today was supposed to consist of approximately fifty minutes of in-class writing. I had come up with a pretty good writing prompt, but I found myself unable to simply stick to that. I gave them a choice, they could write from the original writing prompt or, if that didn't interest them, they could choose instead to write about what they would choose if the had to choose between the ability to fly or the ability to become invisible.

This is an exercise that I came up with last year and several of my office mates used it as well. I got the idea from an episode of This American Life, and it is an excellent way to get students to start talking. I found last year that fifty minutes seemed to be stretching it a bit for the diagnostic exercise. So, this year, I spent about the first fifteen to twenty minutes having a class discussion about the super-power choice question. This really worked out well, because the super power thing also seems to be a little too much for a whole class time (although I should point out here that one of my colleagues has an hour long exercise that calls for dividing the class up into two sides depending on which power they would choose and having them come up with a good argument for their own super power and against the other super power. I have sat in on a class where he did this and it was quite effective)

so anyway, I am writing this on Saturday and I was going to look over my student's essays today but, quite frankly, I had too much to drink last night and I have had a raging headache all day. So, I have decided to put the essay's off until I am in a more neutral state of mind to read them.