I didn’t keep up with this blog quite as much as I intended. I slacked off of it during and after my comprehensive finals. Sorry. I’m going to write my end of the semester reflection now, then I may add a few mid-semester reflections over the christmas break. With any luck I’ll pick this blog up again for the spring semester.
This semester was difficult for me on a personal level. My failing the comps, the death of one of my students, and my unhappy romantic life all contrived to put me in a frame of mind that was not entirely ideal. I hope that these things didn’t affect the education that my students received at my hands. I suppose the art of teaching well when one is undergoing personal turmoil is something that ought to have its own conversation on the blog. For now it will suffice to say that I don’t believe my students suffered from it.
The real question that I need to consider is whether or not my syllabus was too easy for my students. Also, I need to consider whether or not I was too easy of a grader.
For the first half of the semester, I gave my students full credit for any weekly essay that was a page long and in the right font. This gave any student who made a bona fide attempt an A going into the second half. So, for at least the first half of the term, my class was essentially gradeless. I remember reading an interesting article last year on “the gradeless composition class,” but I can’t remember the title of the article or the book it was in. I loaned all my teaching of composition books to my mentor last september. Maybe I can ask her.
Anyway, long story short, almost every student of mine who turned in all of the assignments received an A for the class. What I would really like to determine is this: did their writing improve more, less, or the same as students whose teachers were very strict (draconian?) in their grading? I will have to do some research into this question. This is research that I probably should have done before I wrote my syllabus. But I didn’t, or I didn’t do enough, because the question is still open for me.
Posted by cattledog5 
