Week 13

Well, this was our second week off this semester. I had no grading and so managed to switch off work for practically the whole week. I say practically the whole week because I went to visit friends in Berlin - friends who were ex-colleagues and so from time to time our conversations turned to "work". Also, strangely enough for me, I did not log onto the Internet for the whole of the week. This was despite the fact that my traveling companion had his state of the art iphone with him and was constantly online himself. Also the friends I was visiting had their two laptops constantly on. However, I resisted the temptation and confined myself to living in the "real" world. Of course when I got back to Istanbul, one of the first things I did was log on and I'm pleased to say there were no disasters awaiting me. Having had a week off, I now feel inspired for that last push towards the end of semester - primarily because I have already started planning for semester break. There's nothing like the prospect of another holiday to get you through a busy and stressful time at work.

Week 12

The first lesson of this week was devoted to students writing their in-class assignment. I did try to make like as easy as possible by allowing a week and a half to read the text on which the assignment is based. I also made the actual task available a full week in advance. As a teacher, supervising the writing of such assignments during class time allows for some time to catch up on administrative work. However, it still means that whatever students write in class needs to be graded at a later date and it's never possible to grade a whole set of assignments in the same amount of time as it took students to write it. And so, after students wrote the assignment, I had to spend every available moment for the rest of the week grading. Although I succeeded in grading the assignments in time for the second lesson of the week, I did not give the results or provide feedback. My major concern at the moment is getting students prepared to write their second essay. Therefore feedback on the in-class writing will have to wait until the second lesson after the Bayram - the day on which students will submit the first draft of their second essay.

Although we haven't really spent a lot of time preparing for the second essay, I often find that it is best to get students started as soon as possible in actually writing something. They may do quite a good job, in which case everyone is happy. However, if I find that the penny hasn't dropped then I will be able to fit in an extra draft for those who are struggling to understand what it is they need to do. So...here's hoping that the concept of synthesis is grasped immediately and we all have a pain free end of semester.

Speaking of pain-free, we now have yet another free week to look forward to. Now that I have succeeded in grading the in-class assignments and because "the ball is in the students' court" (they are working on their second essay)I am in the blissful situation of having no grading and so can look forward to a worry free week.

Week 11

Although I began last week's blog by pointing out that I was awarding students' first big grade, I can begin this week's entry by saying that by the end of this week I will have awared 58% of students overall grades. Before they leave for Bayram therefore, they will have an extremely good idea of how well they are doing.

In the first lesson this week I brought students attention to the course schedule. I guess they don't look at it other than when the instructor draws their attention to it. Most students were therefore surprised to learn that they have an inclass writing assignment next week. In order to minimise the damage caused by this assignment, it will be worth only 10% of their overall grade (as opposed to 25% which each of their take-home essays is worth) and I gave them the task in advance. They have also had over a week to read the text and I gave them the task in advance. Does all this mean I am going to get wonderful essays? Here's hoping.

Also this week students were given the first stages in preparing to write their second essay. The reading of the texts on which the essay will be based is not actually expected until next week but this week we did lots of building exercises. Here's hoping that when students do actually read the text, a lot of what they are reading will sound familiar. As one of these building exercises, students had to write a story in which one of the main characters is having an online relationship while at the same time is engaged in one in real life. The stories ended up exhibiting many of the same characteristics of essays. Although students were provided with the basic scenario, including the names of the characters, some completely dispensed with such details and let their imaginations run riot. The inspiration for the prompt on which the stories are based, comes from the text the students have to read for next week. I wonder whether the original researchers found that many of their stories had nothing to do with the original prompt that they provided their subjects with.

As hinted at above, we have another week off soon. I am hoping to have the in-class writing assignments graded by then and so will enjoy the break. Students also, if they get organized should manage to take all/most of the week off. A lot depends on how well prepared they are for writing their second essay. So, all of us have something to look forward to at the end of next week.

Week 10

The highlight for me this week was collecting the final drafts of essay 1 and then grading them. I say highlight, not because it was such a pleasant experience but rather because it was "momentous". In other words this is the first big grade that I will give students although this is now week 10. It might be better for students if, because we are 2/3rds of the way through the course, they had already been allocated 2/3rds of their grades. However, with such a lot of input required early on, all the grades are announced only in the last 1/3rd of the course. However, within the next couple of weeks students should receive almost half their grades and hopefully that will help to motivate them for the final push to the end. We have another week long holiday coming up but I'm afraid, unless we are extremely well organized, most of us will need to do some work during it. Just before the break students will do the in-class writing assignment, which I will then have the pleasure of grading and students will have the deadline for the first draft of their second essay shortly after the break and so unless they succeed in finishing it way in advance, they will also need to consider doing at least a little work over the Bayram.

I haven't fully finished grading the essays yet but again there were no major surprises. Most students appear to have made a genuine effort and were very careful in editing. I wonder if this was because of all my threats or are they normally this careful?

As students handed in their final drafts of essay 1, I felt it was my opportunity to slip in a couple of lessons not directly related to either essay 1 or essay 2. Therefore the lessons this week were focused on the issues of plagiarism and the fact that vocabulary learning is a life-long process. I know students won't be pleased when early next week I start talking about essay 2 and assign work for that. Many in their last blogs commented on feeling the need for a bit of breathing space between assignments but I'm afraid with deadlines looming, we must keep going. Yes, I could move deadlines but the semester still must finish on January 9th. With Bayrams, Christmas, New Year etc. everything has been carefully worked out and so students will just have to trust that as much time as is feasible has been allowed for each assignment.

Week 9

Once students hand in the first draft of their first essays, the real work begins for the teacher. Last week was spent grading and the main focus of this week was seeing each student for a 1:1 tutorial. By the start of this week I had graded practically all of the essays that had been submitted the previous week. When I went to my office on Monday morning I did of course know that there were four or five students who had not yet submitted their essays and so I was expecting to find that that number of essays had been slipped under my door. Unfortunately there was only one and even now – two weeks after the deadline there are still 3 students who have not yet submitted an essay. These same students have also missed their 1:1 tutorials. So, if one can’t get them to so some work or even come and talk about what their difficulties are, what is one supposed to do?

Both lessons this week were spent giving feedback on the essays. Students have now received feedback in 4 different ways – comments have been written on their essays in the form of an error correction code indicating grammatical/stylistic/content problems. They also have a rubric indicating how successfully they have fulfilled basic requirement such as writing a thesis, organizing their essay in a logical way that is clear to their reader etc. This rubric also contains detailed comments on specific points related to their own essay – the kinds of comments that wouldn’t fit in the margins of their essay. As mentioned above, both lessons (ie. 150 minutes) were spent giving feedback based on common problems that most students experienced in the writing of their essays. Finally, each student has received personalized feedback in their tutorials. Based on all this feedback, they have been warned that I am expecting to see quite dramatic improvements in draft 2.

My overall impression of essays was that they were pretty similar to what I receive each semester. In other words, this year’s students are not dramatically different from any others. Again there were quite a few students who appear to have learned nothing on the course. They have continued doing things that they have done in the past. In other words, in high school they may have written lots of essays on literature, giving their personal response to what they have read. Often this response involved copious amounts of quotation. They completely ignored any instructions they had been given but just continued writing in the way they have always written – thereby failing to demonstrate that they have learned something new. They just don’t seem to get the point that there are different types of writing for different purposes. They are now doing a different type of writing with a different purpose but no matter how many times you tell them this, they revert back to what they’ve been doing for years because that’s more comfortable and most of them probably received good grades for what they wrote in the past. It’s a similar problem with students who have spent the last year of their life practicing for the writing assignment for the TOEFL exam. However, as I keep reminding them, a lot of what they wrote would fall far short of the requirements for TOEFL. Some students are still presenting essays without a thesis of with a single body paragraph. This would indicate retrogression rather than progression. I am sometimes described as being “picky” and having standards that are far too high. Surely a thesis or at least three paragraphs in a three page essay isn’t asking for too much!

Week 8

The day of reckoning came at last - the deadline for first drafts of essay 1. It is now a week after the deadline and I still haven't received essays from some students. This morning I received a podcast from a student three weeks after the deadline. Implementing the rule that 10% is deducted for every 24 hours or part thereof that the work is late, this student of course will not receive a grade. I wonder if she realises this. Likewise these other students who haven't yet submitted an essay, 7 days after the deadline, are now down to receiving a maximum grade of 30% - assuming of course that they submit an essay today. I wonder what their strategy for passing the course is.

Those essays that I did receive were no more surprising than those I received in earlier semsesters. There were some students who didn't attain the minimum requirements with regard to length, there were some who didn't answer the questions they were asked and there were some that I just simply could not understand. However, none of this is new and I have to keep reminding myself that I get a fresh batch of students each semester; students who are learning things for the first time and although I may be teaching something for the umteenth time, they are struggling to master it for the first time.

Week 7

This was another extremely short week. The whole nation will know about the fact that Wednesday was Republic Day and a national holiday. As is customary, people are given a half-day prior to national holidays in order, I believe, to allow them to travel home and be with their families. However, given the location of its campus, Koc university tends to not expect students to travel to campus for just 2 1/2 hours of lessons and so, as well as having Wednesday off there were also no classes on Tuesday. As an instructor this works out well as all classes miss an equal amount of lessons. It can be difficult when one section misses a class and another doesn't. Things run much more smoothly when classes are in sync.

With the deadline for submission of the first essay next week, my main concern this week was to ensure that students were equipped to address the task they were given. Last week we dealt thoroughly with the first part of the task and so this week I wanted to focus on the second part. It basically requires students identifying what it is that a writer can do to make his/her writing more convincing. In effect this is what teachers are trying to teach them to do but from time to time it is useful to get students to closely examine someone else's writing and identify how in practice, a writer utilizes all these techniques that the teacher is constantly on about. Here's hoping that students will themselves employ some of these techniques when they write their own essays. Yes, I acknowledge that there is a third part to my task but I am leaving it up to students themselves to decide how to go about responding to that. In effect this is their opportunity to respond in a more subjective way to the ideas being presented in the text. The main thing is that they will need to back up their response with evidence. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

I feel somewhat guilty in how I spent a considerable amount of my extra free time this week. I must have spent at least 10 hours organizing my itunes library. This primarily involved tracing stray songs and labelling them. I also got album art for everything. I have done this before and ended up losing my library and having to recreate it. Here's hoping that I will never have to do this again. Despite having album art for everything on my computer, when I synced the ipod there were many albums without artwork. I have also discovered how to get audiobooks to appear under audio books and having transferred everything over, I discovered that they were better where they were and so I moved them all back to music. Each individual track in "audiobooks" is treated as a separate audio book and there is no way of grouping them. Now, how clever is that. However, if you put them in with all your other music you can at least group tracks as if they were albums.

Week 6

Well this was the week in which students were required to submit their podcasts. Initially when students were assigned the task and made aware of the fact that they had the option of either doing one that was just audio, or alternatively they could include video - most seemed to be planning to do just audio. For practically all, it's their first time preparing a podcast and so audio seems daunting enough without making life unnecessarily complicated by trying to make a video. However, in the end it appears as though most students have in fact produced a video. I guess that once they sat down to do it they realised that they did in fact have the necessary skills and equipment to make a video. For me of course this has given rise to complications as the videos have been submitted in many different formats and I need to make sure that they can all be played on Windows Media Player. This is taking a bit longer than anticipated for some but it should all be sorted in the next few days. Again there were no surprises - despite being warned not to, many students still went ahead and submitted files called "podcast". Some submitted 3 or four separate files and expect me to put it all together for them. Nothing surprising here - all in a day's work.

As students submitted their podcasts we began working on their next assignment which is to write their first formal essay - the first draft of which is due in a couple of weeks. The essay will be based on one text which they read for the first lesson of the week. I gave them a handout with questions that drew their attention to the overall structure and techniques used in the article. Students got to discuss their answers in pairs and then if they weren't finished by the end of class they were to complete it for homework. Practically a whole lesson was taken up explaining the requirements for the essay - length, submission to turnitin.com, what should accompany the first draft etc. I didn't notice anyone taking notes. Hopefully everyone will understand the instructions provided. If so, one wonders why I feel the need to explain them thoroughly in class.

Week 5

Perhaps I am confusing everyone else but I am calling this Week 5 as it is in fact the fifth week of the semester although we had one of them off. So, some of my students will, this week, write a blog and call it week 4 thereby appearing to be a week behind. However, because they actually wrote a blog for week three (the one we had off) they should be labeling their blogs the same as me. I think the confusion is because they wrote one blog to cover weeks 1 and 2 and then started calling their second blog “week 2”. So, it is now week 5 although students have written only 4 blogs – so blog 4 should be labeled “Week 5”. I have written all this in the hope that students will actually read it and start naming their blogs consistently. This week I will be checking for entries for week 5 but if they are not labeled correctly it will appear that they have not been done.

So, what happened this week? Well, for the first lesson of the week we tried a technique of trying to identify the main points in a long text by basically identifying the main points in each section of the text. I provided rather general questions about each of the section, which if they answered, should help them to identify the main ideas. From those I examined more closely, it would appear that if I ask a general question I am destined to get a very general and vague answer. For example one section of the text extended for over nine pages, explaining the potential effects of Internet use on our social interaction. The question prompted students to present some of the possible effects of the Internet on our social interaction and one student’s response was “The Internet might have some negative effects on our social interaction”. So, nine pages has been summarized to this but even that is inaccurate because it fails to acknowledge that the Internet may also have some positive effects on our social interaction. This is just one examples of the responses I got to my questions but it is fairly representative and so I now know that I need to focus on the role of detail, in writing in general, but in summarizing in particular – there seems to be a tendency to put no detail in a summary but rather make general, vague statements that reduce the complex argument of another writer to a redundant statement that is pretty much meaningless.

In the second lesson of the week we did further work on summary writing by recalling what had already been taught/learned and then discussing how applicable that all is to our current situation. Collectively each class had a good grasp of what is involved in writing a good summary and so we now have a fairly sound theoretical basis but in the coming weeks we’ll get to see how well it is put into practice.

Time has just flown by and some students seemed surprised when reminded that their podcasts are due next week. When the task was first assigned one could say, “no need to worry yet as the deadline is the end of October” but surprise, surprise, the end of October is fast approaching. When I first ran this course and had to learn how to host the podcasts on my website the whole process was very time consuming for me. It was a rather steep learning curve. However, this time I am hoping to be well ahead. I am currently working on preparing the host page for each student and will hopefully finish that later today. Then when students submit their podcasts, all I will have to do is place their files in the appropriate folder and ensure that the file is named according to the students own name (as instructed). In my earlier attempts I had to use a laptop with a mere ½ GB of Ram but this time I have one with 2GB and if necessary I even have access to one with 4GB. This is particularly important when dealing with large video files. Despite being told to give their files their own name, I wonder how many files will be submitted called “podcast”. Don’t students realize how unhelpful it is for 60 students to submit homework with generic names like “podcast”, “homework”, “essay” etc. When it comes to grading surely it is obvious that the most important thing an instructor needs to know is who’s work he’s looking at. He already knows it’s a podcast, because it was submitted to the folder called “podcasts” on the day that podcasts were due.

Week 4

The weeks are flying by and although students may feel that they are working hard, I fear that we are somewhat behind. I'll feel a lot more comfortable once I have allocated and set the deadline for the submission of the first essay. Perhaps I am worrying unnecessarily and simply feeling guilty about having had a wonderful break so early in the semester. I must also keep reminding myself that there are officially 17 weeks scheduled for this course and so even though it is now week 4, we have two weeks tagged on at the end of the course that we wouldn't normally have. So maybe I should just relax.

Again, I was amazed this week to find that some students think I can read like that robotic cop in the TV series I remember from my youth - Homes and Yoyo. Some students believe that I can read a dense page of academic text in about 30 seconds - this assumption I believe being based on the fact that it took them about 1.5 minutes to read the same. The sad fact is that it takes me considerably longer to read a text than it takes most of my students. I really need to improve my reading skills - it should be them teaching me - not the other way round.

It has been interesting reading students' blog this week and finding out what they all got up to for their Bayram. For all, it was, as expected, very much a family occasion. However, some families stayed at home, some checked themselves into a hotel and still others jetted to the far side of the planet. Although I did allow two weeks to read the above mentioned text, some students give the impression that their Bayram was, for all intents and purposes, dominated by all the homework assigned for the Comm 101 course. I find this difficult to fathom given that none of them spent more than 3 hours doing it and many spent as little as half an hour. Anyway, I managed to read the same text (rather slowly apparently) and still have a good time.

During the first lesson of the week I gave feedback on the diagnostic essays written in the second week. There were no major surprises although from students' perspectives they were perhaps rather surprised. Many didn't even attempt to answer the questions they were asked, many answered just one of the two questions, some wrote one long paragraph, many had no thesis etc. etc. Hopefully the feedback has reactivated some ideas from the distant past and that next time they write an essay they will remember at least the basics. Every semester there is the same issue with transfer of skills - students already know quite a lot about essay writing but they don't transfer this old information, from previous courses previous teachers. Each time they do something it's as if they expect to start the learning process all over again. So, one of my main challenges this semester is to get them to transfer what they already know to their new situation and to get them to continue transferring what they know from lesson to lesson.

Week 3

Well, this was the week we had off. I did try to make sure I was off although I must admit that from time to time I did end up thinking about the course and what I could do to improve it. Also I returned to Istanbul a couple of days early so that I could read and comment on all my students' blogs and prepare the week's lessons. I must say that generally reading the blogs it sounds like everyone has a very positive attitude to the semester ahead. That may be because most of the blogs were written immediately prior to the commencement of a week's holiday with their families. Hopefully they will be as enthusiastic when they return to the classroom.

I spent my week off communing with nature. I went to a ski resort - not of course with the intention of skiing but rather enjoying the fresh mountain air and the views. Nevertheless I did get to trek through lots of snow as the first fall of the season had already come - only at high altitude of course. For my first three days the mountains were shrouded in fog and so I could have been anywhere. My world was only a circle of a few meters. Fortunately however after three days the fog lifted and I saw where I was. It was heavenly - especially after three days of gloom. I got lots of exercise as I got to, amongst other things, climb the tallest mountain on the Balkan Peninsula. I got caught out - because there were subzero temperatures and I was trudging through snow quite a lot - I took no precautions against the sun and ended up getting quite burned. I'll be more cautious if I do go on a ski trip.

Week 2

It was perhaps a wise decision not to do much in week 1. By the end of this week the classes had "settled" to what I hope will remain a steady number. I am pleased to be able to report that on the day we did the diagnostic (the first lesson of the week) most students were present and so there wasn't a need to do much chasing. There was one strange occurrence in that a student who had appeared very diligent from the outset only appeared in the doorway right at the end of class. For some reason she had assumed that if she were late for class she would not be welcome. Again, perhaps I didn't stress it enough when I explained the syllabus but any student is welcome at any time. If they are only there for half the lesson then hopefully they will learn at least half the stuff. And again, this girl showing up right at the end of class at least allowed me to assign her homework so that when she comes to the next lesson she will have caught up. So even if you only arrive in time for the last minute of the lesson you should quietly slip in to learn what your homework for the next day is.

The second lesson of the week was devoted to getting students started on more long term projects. Although the deadline is "in the distant future" it is time to start choosing topics and thinking about what exactly one will say about these topics. I am sure that some students are still not quite sure of what exactly a podcast is and so I will have to show them some during the next few lessons. Hopefully this will inspire them to be creative and experiment with things they have never done before. Also during this second lesson I needed to get students started on the writing of their blogs. I am pleased to be able to report that most students had no problems whatsoever in creating their blogs. Initially they were asked to create blogs without actually posting anything in them. It will be interesting to visit the blogs later and see what they have written. One girl, who was somewhat confused, did write to me and explain that she had tried to create her blog but had not succeeded. At least she was aware of her responsibilities, tried to carry them out, experienced difficulties and sought help. There are however a few others who have not yet created their blog or contacted me to indicate that they are experiencing difficulties. I wonder what's happening there. What will happen when the assignments become more demanding?

As indicated in my post of last week, it does not feel right having a week off after only having had two weeks of lessons. However, who am I to look a gifthorse in the mouth. I hope when we return a week later that we won't have lost the momentum that we have built up until now. Getting back on Monday 6th may be a bit of a shock as it will be straight down to work rather than a gentle easing in like at the beginning of semester.

Week 1

I entered class at 9.20 on Monday morning with a certain amount of trepidation. This was to be the first day back and it would be students’ first lesson of the year. Previous experience had taught me that attendance in the first week of lessons is extremely volatile and given that beginning the end of week 2, we would all have a week off, I felt certain that a large proportion of students wouldn’t bother coming to the first two weeks of lessons. Remember this was bright and early Monday morning. You can imagine my surprise therefore to find that by 9.30 there was only 1 out of 18 students absent. That’s about the best attendance I can expect at any time throughout the semester. Monday’s 12.30 lesson had a similarly impressive attendance. However…on Tuesday when I went to my elective class, my predictions were demonstrated to have been accurate – only 1 of the officially registered students turned up. As well as this one “official” student, there were also two others, who were graduates, wanting to audit the course. So, with just three students, I began the course and actually kept them for more than an hour and a half. They were all enthusiastic and didn’t resent having such a long lesson with such few students on their first day.

Based on past experience, I decided this semester to do, in the first week, little more than explain the syllabus and get to know students and allow them to get to know me. Normally I would try to get the diagnostic essay done and dusted, but as a result of all the frustrations in previous semesters, I decided I wouldn’t get started on any official course work until the second week. In retrospect this was a wise decision as there appears to have been a lot more movement of students than in previous semesters. Now that numbers have settled I feel somewhat guilty as a couple of my sections are rather sparsely populated. However, as this means less grading and an opportunity for more intense interaction, I am pleased overall.

I have nothing strange or exciting to report on my new batch of students. As is to be expected they were all rather quiet and “bright eyed and bushy tailed” as it were. It’s a new beginning and they all seem enthusiastic to a greater or lesser extent. Long may this enthusiasm last.

I don’t normally like to make an issue of the weather but I am beginning to realize how depressed it can make one feel. I tolerated a rather miserable month and a half in Ireland in the “knowledge” that I had warm and sunny weather to look forward to when I returned to Turkey. This happened for about a week but now the weather we are having is just like Irish weather. Do I have to wait until next Summer for pleasant weather? How depressing if I do.