End of Semester

We are now almost at the end of the Fall semester. I am preparing to submit my marks for my classes next week. I have supervised three exams so far this week and have one more to do tomorrow. This semester none of my classes wrote final exams so these have been strictly supervision of exams other faculty will mark. Supervising exams is generally boring work. However it has to be done in order to protect the integrity of the exam process -- or so I am told.
I am amazed each semester how, all of a sudden it seems, many students start to take an interest in their marks. Perhaps it is not all of a sudden for the students, perhaps they only get vocal with their concerns at the end of the semester. I have had a significant number of e-mail messages from students asking about marks on assignments that were marked and returned anywhere from two to eight weeks ago.
And every semester, after the exam is over, at least two or three students, sometimes six or eight, ask if there is anything they can do to raise their mark. My response is usually something like "the course is over, there is nothing you can do now". I wonder if students have been trained to ask such a question or if there are always a few people who believe in asking such questions just in case the answer is "yes".
Invariably the students who express the most concern about their marks or about extra work are those students who should have been concerned during the semester. They should have been paying attention to their marks and finding ways to learn the material during the semester. If you are in a race and you are way behind the rest of the people you don't think to ask the coach or the judge if you could run some more after the race to show how fast you can be. You either stay far behind or you find a way to get ahead -- during the race, not after it is over.
Maybe I will try that analogy on my classes in the next semester. It sounds to me like something they will understand.

Rewards and consequences

In the last two days two students wrote to me about different things which seem to have the same theme. I do not want to extrapolate from the words of two to the beliefs of many. However I have heard or read enough similar ideas in the last seven years to think that there are many students who have identical or very similar ideas at least at some time in their academic careers. Since I teach all first semester students perhaps these ideas change over their time at school, I hope so.

The first idea was from a student who said I did not mark his last assignment fairly. He deserved a better mark because of the time he took to think about it and write it. This idea is often expressed as "I tried so hard" My immediate thought when I hear this expressed (which I rarely say out loud to students) is "we get rewarded for achieving, not for trying." (In the words of Yoda "there is no try, do or do not.") This particular student told me how long he worked on the assignment, which is quite unusual. I gather he expected me to be impressed that he spent two hours working on an assignment that is worth 5% of his final mark in the course. So I did a little math. If two hours equals 5%, then forty hours equals 100%. Since it is a fourteen week course, that is a little less than three hours a week. That is a reasonable amount of time for each course and it is practical for most students. The student had five weeks to do the most recent assignment, that suggests the student should have used more than two hours to do the most recent assignment, possibly as much as fifteen hours. If I marked his assignment solely in terms of reward for time spent I gave him far more than he "deserved".

The second idea came from a student who thought I treated her unfairly because of the mark I gave her for not following the rules for the assignment. (These rules have been the rules for two test and two other assignments, and she followed these same rules four times before.) Her rationale for requesting an adjustment: "everyone makes mistakes". I had to agree with that comment, everyone does make mistakes. I thought about that idea briefly and then I passed on the following idea to her. Everyone does make mistakes. However, every mistake has at least one consequence. She saw the consequence of her mistake in her mark.

Both of the above ideas seem to based in the idea that because I do something, no matter what it is, I deserve a reward, not the appropriate consequence but something positive just because I did something. This is appropriate when children are being toilet trained, but it is not how employers treat employees and it is not how post-secondary students (or even secondary students) should be treated. All actions have consequences, some consequences are positive and some are not.

Average vs Exception

In the last few days I have noticed when teachers get together, even just two of us, we often talk about students, not by name but by action. Often I hear "I have a student who ...". I think it is interesting that we talk about the exceptional student or students, not the average, the regular, the middle students. I suppose this is a human thing, to notice and discuss the one person or thing that is different from the rest. Perhaps this is in our biological history. But it can give uninformed listeners the wrong impression. The student that gets talked about is almost always the exception, the one who does something unexpected or out of the ordinary or completely differently from the rest of the class.

End of Week 5

Two weeks since I have written, two weeks of classes and assignments. Most students seem to have adjusted to being at college. Some have not. At this point I am familiar enough with most students that I have noticed patterns in their behaviour. Items I have noticed include: absences, poorly done work, little or no attention in class, reluctance or refusal to follow simple requests. I attended a faculty meeting this morning with the group who teach computer technicians and programmers. One person reported a study done several years ago that showed final marks are almost always within 1% of mid-term grades. That backs up what I have experienced. Students who don't get involved in their college education within the first few weeks do not do well. And it is possible to measure that involvement through the work they do in the first six or seven weeks of the semester.

My struggle is to find a way to help students connect with their education in courses that are basic skills for all their other work. Telling them they need to know these skills to succeed in all their college courses does not work very well. Many of them think they learned the necessary computer skills before they arrived at college. There seems to be more interest, or at least more focused work on these skills this semester than I have seen in many years.

Technological struggle: Many students prefer to play with the computer rather than listen to me. This is extremely distracting for their neighbours. Obviously if two or more students in the room are exchanging messages then several students are not participating in their education. There is software that will control the computers so the instructor controls what appears on students' screens. I would like to be mandatory software in our labs but it won't work with laptops.

End of Week 3

At this time every year, at the end of three weeks, I feel the weight of being back in the classroom. I have spent about three weeks with students in classes and in the college. I have been struck, overwhelmed sometimes and depressed sometimes by the behaviours of students. As is normal for human beings, I often extrapolate from behaviours to attitudes. That is not necessarily fair, but it is what happens, especially when I am low in energy.

The behaviours I have seen that I do not like include what seems like adisregard for normal courtesy between students and between students and faculty.

• "Hey" as an address to faculty, in person and in e-mail


• Please and Thank you do not seem to exist


• Foul language accepted as part of normal conversation


• Using both sides of hall or stairway, blocking others' movements

When I see and hear students in the hallways and the cafeteria they are usually quite animated. When I seem them in classrooms (mine or other faculty) they look listless, inattentive, sometimes asleep. Their faces change from open and reactive to closed and non-reactive. There are very few who show any desire to learn or even to take notes in most classrooms. I don't know if this is the result of their previous academic experiences. Since I teach mostly first year students I think it must be. Perhaps no one has ever expected them to be active learners, pursuing knowledge instead of just absorbing information.
I wonder if it is a fruitless task to expect to get most of them to participate in their own education. I wonder if their behaviours do reflect an essentially self-centred attitude: "prove right away this will be of benefit to me, otherwise I am going to be mentally absent". Other than marks I know I cannot prove what I teach will be of any benefit to any of them.
What to do, how to deal with this situation?

We have finished two academic weeks and start the third one tomorrow. Observations for the last week:

1. I can get a lot of work done during the mornings when I am not in class and during times between classes.


2. Many first year students are needy, wanting my attention, or asking me to tell them things they could discover on their own.


3. Many first year students want or demand immediate feedback if at all possible.

Solutions:

1. Be thankful, use the time and don't take work home.


2. Help them learn where to look for answers.


3. Encourage and support them to use computer-based training. It is set up to give immediate feedback.

I need to pay more attention to the internal and external signs about my role, my direction and my goals. Can I become a better teacher? What does it mean to be a good teacher or a better teacher? Do I want to be a better teacher?
I also need to know how to adjust the style sheet for these blogs. There is far too much white space.

Three days of classes in the first week. No classes on Monday because of the Labour Day holiday, no classes on Tuesday because of First Year Orientation. I wonder if the loss of classes for all college students is worth whatever is gained in the one day set aside exclusively for First Year Orientation.

My professional development programme includes taking the Kolb self-evaluation test, twelve questions to determine my learning style. After having seen the test and accompanying booklet, it is clear to me the college's whole professional development programme is based on Kolb's work. I did a little research and discovered there is a long list of researchers and research that rejects Kolb's theory. The basis of the criticism seems to be 1) the observations are not repeatable 2) the theory was developed before the observations 3) the theory and observations do not result in predictions. In other words, 1) my test results today may not be my test results tomorrow, 2) my test results will have no effect on the theory behind the tests, 3) my test results as a learner do not predict how I will teach others. I am going to run some tests and do some of my own observations.

First I am going to check the validity of the questions by answering the questions with random numbers. I should be able to write a programme that will generate hundreds of test results fairly quickly. If the questions have no bias then random answers should generate completely balanced results. However I also need to keep focused on my work with students.