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.