Weekly Recap: Week 3 of Fall '09

Unrelated Introductory Fact: One of the greatest perks of living in the early 21st century is using a laptop while you're in bed.

Most of my week was spent reviewing lessons/notes from last Fall and muttering to myself about how much work I had to do in order to update them. Being newer to the profession, I'm finding myself having an odd type of stability for the first time that allows me to consistently teach the same classes, and as a result I'm attempting to refine the material and make it better each time. This generally results in me sitting in my office perplexed over my own notes and realizing that there's a good 15 minute gap in a lecture that I'll be teaching the next day, so I better come up with something. Then I get distracted by the internet (damn you mental_floss!) and this happens:

For my writing classes this past Tuesday I had what I thought was a solid lesson plan. About twenty minutes in I realized there was no way I could fill the remainder of the class with what I had left. Being caught under prepared sucks, when an idea hit me: use the last five minutes of class to let them ask me "anything they want, anything at all" about their research paper. Naturally this didn't work, as most students are in a blissful state of procrastination and don't even know their topic, let alone a question to ask me. I did the semi-baffled professor bit ("Really? None of you have a question about this project? That's surprising."), but they held to their guns, doing the if-none-of-us-ask-a-question-he-might-let-us-leave routine.

After class wrapped I took out my notes and a red pen: NEXT TIME PLAN MORE FOR THIS DAY.

Highlight of the Week:

Since school started, the weather around here has been spectacular. On Wednesday I graded a big stack of papers while sitting out in the sunshine. I'm pretty sure there's a direct correlation to how much higher than average the temperature is and how much higher than average their grades turned out.

It Begins...Defiantly vs. Definitely

For some reason my students have a compulsion to load their writing with affirmations. They truly feel the need to sincerely convince me that they absolutely, honestly feel a certain way (HAH! See what I did there? Oh, wit.). While the peppering of adverbs is usually just a bit of lazy writing, the issue that comes up with the most consistency is mistakenly writing "defiantly" instead of "definitely." Spell-checkers fly over this one, and it usually leads to pretty funny mistakes in meaning.

A colleague and I started joking last year about keeping track of how many times this gets misused, and in what context. It only took three weeks for me to catch one this semester, and I figured what better use of a blog than to keep a running list of these. Without further ado, the first entry in what is absolutely, positively, and most assuredly to become a long list:

"I love the outdoors, so I can defiantly spend a lot of time outside."

A defiant position, indeed.

Active Teaching: Looking for Help

After last week's frustration, I've been over-hauling a lot of lesson plans for the next few weeks. This has lead to me reordering a couple of sessions and a ton of work. I've developed some new activities that hopefully will be interesting and informative, but I have a blight on my horizon for next week that I could use a hand with.

I'm talking, of course, about the bane of all writing teachers. The day of the semester that haunts our dreams, waking us in the night, sweating. The lecture where three simple letters combine to become a migraine-inducing storm of frustration.

The MLA Citation lecture.

Personal disclosure. In my College Study Strategies course I came up with a formula for my students to remember:
Absence of Talent (A topic comes with difficulty) + Ignorance (Not knowing about a topic) + Avoidance (Dodging the topic) = Weakness

Despite years of teaching MLA Citations, I find that my weakness formula applies pretty well to myself. I have difficulty with it, I'm not as knowledgeable as I should be, and I avoid it until I must engage with it. Terrible, I know. It's like a chef who can't make eggs.

Please take this post as my attempts to make amends. I'm asking for any input or insight on how to teach this effectively.

Weekly Recap: Week 2 of Fall '09

In a bid to update this frequently, I'm going to attempt to do weekly recaps of my week every Friday. We'll see how long this lasts.

Week 2 of the Fall semester is usually a blunt reality check for most students. The initial fun of "Gee whiz I'm in college!" is wearing down and the realization that they have a ridiculous amount of reading assigned for every class is becoming more and more apparent. Regardless, it was a pretty fun and productive week despite my grump-fest on Tuesday.

My writing classes had a presentation from the library on Thursday for how to do appropriate college-level research. I haven't used Infotrac / Academic Onefile since I left grad. school, and was pretty astounded by the changes they've made in the last few years (would provide a link but it requires campus log-in to access). It's vastly more user-friendly, and even goes so far as to provide citations for you, which leads me to a small dilemma.

It seems that there has been an influx of websites/computer apps that can create MLA (or any other style) citations based on whatever information you provide. The 21st century nerd in me thinks that this is awesome and can save a ton of time for students. My inner writing teacher worries that this is an enterprise that can actually hurt my job. I believe in the value of teaching citations (even though it's dull), yet I can't help but feel a bit like I'm arguing for people to do complicated math problems when there's a readily available calculator.

Highlight of the Week:
One of the courses I teach is Introduction to College Learning. With the right instructor, this is a really fun class that gives students (specifically freshmen) a frank impression of what college life and expectations are.

We were discussing personal values in connection to academic and personal goals today, with an emphasis on active learning. The main "lesson" of the day is to be proactive in thinking about what you want from this experience so as to avoid getting a degree you won't use or wasting your time and money pursuing something you dislike.

After class a student stopped by my office to talk. His problem? He's here pursuing a psych. degree because his parents want him to, but what he really wants is a career in music. He wants me to provide advice on what he should do with his life.

Yikes.

I talked about how this is an age-old issue to face at this stage in life (do I take the "safe" bet that people want me to, or do I follow a passion?) and weighed the options of both choices, pointing out that they don't necessarily exclude one another. I pointed him to the Career Services office and told him to hunt down some Music faculty to discuss his options further. I encouraged him to do an honest bit of soul-searching after getting some more resources, then talking with his family. We concluded thusly:

Me - "Who knows, this could be one of the best decisions of your life."
Student - "Or the worst!"
Me - "But at least it's a decision, and you get to make it. This is your life. You're two weeks into your freshman year of college and making active decisions about your future, and the world is full of people who never make those decisions."

He left my office happy, optimistic, and still thoroughly confused on what to do - but - he's thinking - and any week that ends that way is a good one.

The Grumps: On Not Following My Own Advice

Teaching a developmental writing course is a mixed bag. Some days you get to engage students in critical thought and introduce them to the power language has in our understanding of controversial issues.

And then, there are the other days. The other days are full of somewhat obligatory lessons on how to properly cite MLA quotations, paraphrase properly, and of course the slew of grammatical errors and rules that I still, six years into this profession, struggle to explain.

Today was paraphrasing day. We started out well, looking at a "what not to do" article that was written by a good old fashion sexist, which sparks some good conversation and illustrates how arguments written with little more than an opinion come across as foolish and ineffective. We segued into how internet research works, using some laughably inept websites that came up with our basic Google searches as examples of why it's important for us to shift to using academic research through the University Library system.

Ten minutes into the class and we were rolling along smoothly. The students aren't thrilled to be required to take this course, but it's bearable....that is, until I decide to spend 40 minutes lecturing from Power Points.

Three words in my own defense: I. Know. Better.

However, it's this part of teaching that I'm struggling with - how do I communicate fundamental, factual, and dry material in a way that is engaging, interactive, and effective? How do I make grammar rules fun and snappy? Fair warning: any Youtube links to School House Rock at this point will have dire consequences. Students are interested in that for about as long as it takes to say "meh".

My lesson for the day? Plan better, I suppose, and investigate my resources. There has to be a way to grow and make this work, and the only person who can do that is me.