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.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
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!
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!
Monday, November 10, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, November 3, 2008
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.
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.
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