Note To Self

talk to students about not saying things like “in my opinion” or “I believe”

Week Seven Monday

Section one. I had another class where I ran out of things to talk about before the time was up. I’m not totally surprised about this because I spent all weekend studying for the upcoming comprehensive final that I have to take. However I’m starting to think that I have had altogether too many of these short classes this semester.

I wonder if I should come up with more activities for my students to do in class. I usually have the whole class go through some scenarios related to whatever we talked about. But I suppose that if I came up with an additional activity to reinforce the concept, my students would be even more likely to take something away from the class.

Week Six Friday

I should have created a project that would have taken my students the entire hour instead of thirty minutes at best.

I had a short freewriting assignment that basically asked them to freewrite about what they would do with their life if they knew the earth would be destroyed in five years.

Their answers ranged from thoughtful to semi-retarded, which is as I expected. The longest anybody spent on it though was 29 minutes. I don’t really think that they were trying to get out as early as they could (some students always do, I guess)

Week Six Wednesday

I don’t know. I felt like I could have done better today.

The assignment was for them to read one of three very short essays (at home), and come to class prepared to discuss them, particularly in terms of the introductions and conclusions.

As is somewhat typical in this kind of situation, my students didn’t want to talk much.

I should have anticipated that this was going to happen and come up with some concrete activities or questions to break them out of their apathy, but instead we all pretty much sat around like a bunch of semi-retarded children on a broken down short buss.

Next time, I need to plan on their lethargy and come up with specific strategies to break them out of it.

Week Six Monday

Monday has become fairly routine. I hand students their weekly essays (graded over the weekend) back. Then I tell them what the essay assignment will be for that week (this week its compare and contrast).

After that I ask them if they have any questions and then I usually turn their questions into a session in which we go over some of the ways to organize or come up with ideas for the assignment.

That’s about all we did today.

Week Five Friday

The only interesting thing that happened today was an interesting decision I had to make.

I found an online grammar quiz for my students to take. The assignment was simple: click on the link, take the quiz, and print out the sheet that has your results. The problem was I had trouble deciding whether to have them print out the sheet with their mistakes on it (which would give me and idea what they needed to work on) or to have them go back and correct their mistakes (which would help them to learn more).

I decided to have them fix their mistakes online, then print out the results and hand them in. It felt to me that it was more important for them to practice their skills than it was for me to “catch” them making mistakes, but I can see advantages to either way.