I've been in the midst of a discussion with Ky regarding first year students, and the particular challenges we face in teaching them. Am I the only one who finds that teaching first years is a difficult balancing act? Many of my students either disregard my instructions or extrapolate my smallest comments to their "logical" conclusions.
Here are two illustrations of students taking my instructions too far:
I dealt with the first case this semester, when my student complained about his participation grade. He remembered that I told the class that attendance was important, and that good attendance would be rewarded. This student received a good grade, but he complained when he discovered that another student, who had worse attendance than his, received a higher grade. My mention of attendance being a factor in his grade caused him to assume that attendance was the only factor in evaluating participation.
My second example took place a couple of years ago. In one student's first assignment he/she neglected to footnote any indirect quotations. I took some time in my comments on the paper to explain how we need to cite not only direct, but indirect quotations, and so forth. In this student's next assignment, he/she footnoted every single sentence. (Mostly with "Ibid.")
Am I making my points too strongly, or is this the nature of first year students?
In other news, Teaching Carnival IV was hosted at New Kid on the Hallway this time, and my last post about my fears of standing up to the complaining student was one of the many entries featured! That explains the high blog traffic, in spite of the fact that I've been barely posting, and barely coherent, since I came home.
3 comments:
No, that sounds about par for the course with first-year students. I have a section in my syllabus on attendance and a separate one on participation, stressing that they are not the same thing. I still get the odd student who will sleep in the back of the room regularly and still try to claim he (it's always a he, it seems) should get full participation credit anyway, since he was in class every day. I've never gotten footnotes for every sentence, but I've had some similar misunderstandings about citations.
Teaching first-year students is really tough--so much of what you have to do is teach them how to be in school, but you also have "content" to get across to them. It is a balancing act. Also, too many first-year students aren't really interested in being in college at all and are just there to follow parents orders or because of some sort of societal peer pressure that tells them that's what's next after high school. Some of those students remain in upper-level classes, I suppose, but so many of those who are just coasting don't make it past the first year.
OTOH, when you're teaching first-year students the opportunity for light bulb moments is quite high and sometimes that evens everything else out.
It's amazing how similar that is to 6th and 9th grades.
I know what you mean about the "light bulb moments," Scrivener. In my final seminar with this semester's first year course, I essentially had all of my students take their readings and explain to each other why it's important to learn Canadian history, and especially about the country's founding. It was amazing to see what they've processed! I don't know that I've ever been so proud of them.
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