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.