I meant to write this weekend and let you all know how my lesson plans turned out, but I ran out of time. So here it is.
I was moderately successful. In my disengaged Composition II class, I asked lots of leading questions during my lecture, and got some feedback. Mostly from just one student, but that's better than nothing. This week, I'm going to try a trick other teachers here use with bigger classes: making them go over the reading and then give the lecture to the class. Usually instructors will break the class into groups, but with only 4 students, they'll have to work individually. I hope it works!
With my overly-talkative Composition I class, I managed to get through the lecture in a reasonable amount of time. We were able to do some group editing, but because I was focused on providing my own edits to their rough drafts, the conversation wasn't as well-directed as I would have liked. I got them back on track with some focused discussion questions, but by the time I took them to the library to work on their papers, we only had 6 minutes of class left. So, again, mixed results.
My biggest problem right now is the number of students I have who are failing my classes. I don't have a bell curve in my classes, which is what you usually expect to see -- most students have Bs or Cs, with a small number acing the class and a small number failing. Instead, I have a bi-polar graph -- my students are either passing with flying colors, or they are failing. Very little in-between. Now, statistically speaking, it's hard to get a well-distributed curve with 4 classes of about 5 students each. But even if I add them all together, across all my classes, the same pattern exists.
I don't think the problem is that my classes are too hard -- if that were the case, I'd have a bunch of C students and a bunch of F students, right? Instead, the pattern I see is this: if you come to class and turn in your homework, you have an A in my class. If you don't come to class and don't turn in homework, then you are failing.
So the question is, how do I get my students to all come to class and turn in their work?
I think I'm going to be visiting the academic dean soon to see if she has any ideas there.
Who's writing...
- tiff_tut
- North Salt Lake, Utah, United States
- I'm a woman with degrees in creative writing and cultural anthropology, experience in retail sales, merchant processing, teaching English as a foreign language, and archaeology, who teaches writing and computer classes at a local college, and works for a herpetology society. I also like to read, cook, knit, watch movies, make baskets, take photographs, craft, travel, and blog. I currently live in Utah with my husband, T, and our two dogs. Oh, and I'm a Cancer, which explains the crab thing.
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