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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Grading Papers When There Are Too Many

In the ideal world with a realistic number of students, you’d assign something to write practically every day, you’d have conferences with all of your students, then they’d turn in first drafts and you’d make insightful comments and return them, and they’d consider your comments and hold workshop sessions with their peers, then crank out another draft and on and on until their essays were publishable.

You, unfortunately, are or soon will be teaching in a system funded by pocket change, so you’ll need to think more about surviving responsibly than actually teaching young people to write. It hurts me to acknowledge that you’ll basically wind up teaching “at” writing as opposed to teaching the thing itself.

Briefly, this is what you’ll need to do: Assign more essays than you can grade, and on those you do grade, find only one, certainly no more than two, areas to improve. More than that, and the student despairs. If there’s copious writing in the margins, the student either will not read it or, if she does, will either be pissed off or discouraged. She’ll go back to saying, “I’m just not a very good writer” or “I’m gonna get a bad grade in this class.” Neither response improves her writing. Be brief and direct and legible in your comments. When possible, let students revise essays based on your comments so that you know they read them, then speed grade the revisions, perhaps just tacking a few points on to the grades of the original.

As I grade a set of essays, instead of writing on several of them “You need to introduce quotes from the text, then briefly show the reader how it supports your thesis,” I jot down a brief note to myself about this issue. When I see other recurring errors or, yes, examples of effective writing, I note those too, and when the pile is complete, I put my notes on Blackboard, go over them in class and, when I feel the need, give quizzes on them. I have also asked them to revise their essays based on my Blackboard comments. I also refer back to this particular Blackboard document when it’s time for them to write another similar essay. This process saves much time and aggravation. (Obviously, it isn’t necessary to use Blackboard for this. It just makes it easy for all students to access this information at any time.)

You can assign a cluster of, say, three essays over a brief period of time, then have them run all three through the rubrics grinder, engage in peer editing if you’re into that scene, then pick the one they want you to grade. This way, they still get the practice, they aren’t penalized for their less successful efforts, and you only have to grade what is, according to them, their best work.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Two Don'ts

Here are a couple of Thou Shalt Nots, the first probably more for old-timers like me than for you. Still, you should cut it out and tape it to your desk or bulletin board or some other place at work so you can see it as the years go rolling by:

Don’t become so cynical and jaded that you forget about the students in your class who can’t wait for the learning to start. They’re excited about what they read last night and about what you’ll say today. They’re excited about what they or other students might say. Once you’ve been at it for a few years, some students will have heard about you from siblings and older friends, and they’ll have anticipated your class since junior high. Seriously. So imagine their response when they hear you talking as if it’s all a joke and none of them care and why are you even wasting your time doing this for a living. Try, try to teach to the ones who care, even if you think you have to imagine them, to pretend they’re out there. Trust me: They’re out there.

Don’t bring your problems into the classroom. If you’re having a bad day, the most you should say about it is, “I’m having a bad day.” So what? One of them is always having a bad day. You’re probably really angry with your significant other, your pets, a new district-wide initiative, the traffic, or Rick Scott. Do NOT make students pay for the sins of others! Fall into your lesson, and soon you’ll all feel better.

Monday, September 12, 2011

You Don't Have Time to Read This

My dear new high-school teachers, especially English teachers, please know that I’m aware of the irony of my writing something to make your professional life easier or more fulfilling or both at a time when you are too busy even to check your e-mail. But if I wait until you do have time – next summer – my advice won’t be helpful.

Well, that’s the way it always goes: Your leaky roof needs repairing most when it’s raining too hard to get up there. With that in mind, I return to the task at hand – offering tips for improving discussion classes — even if my words float harmlessly into an empty universe:

Because you are a human being, it can be very difficult not to load up your responses to student comments with warmth, affection, disdain, contempt, disbelief, etc. But try your best not to do this, not to make your responses personal. For one thing, a student’s comment shouldn’t be weighted with his family history (both his brother and sister were royal pains in the ass when they were your students), the history of his earlier comments (“That’s the fifth time you’ve connected this poem to Harry Potter. Could you perhaps climb up the ol’ literary ladder a bit?”), his lack of earlier comments (“Whoa! Look who decided to join us!”) or your ongoing tense relationship with him (you respond grudgingly through gritted teeth, avoiding eye contact).

Every student’s input is potentially another brush stroke in the evolving portrait of an idea. It’s all about how that particular comment contributes to the process that’s happening this moment. Your job is to measure the fit, to appreciate the effort, to make clear its connection to what has gone on before or to tactfully show how it is perhaps a brush stroke for another portrait, not the one that’s being painted today.

Do your best to respond thoughtfully, gratefully, and evenly to each comment. Do not respond to the first three with “Okay, good, fine,” and to the fourth one with “THAT’S IT! NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE! GREAT POINT, BOBBY!” This shines altogether too much light on the lameness of the first three efforts. You can’t entirely choke back your enthusiasm for the Blue Ribbon insight and still be authentic, but you can be careful with your wording. Some teachers successfully address this issue by simply saying “Thanks” after each comment, unless further elaboration or clarification is needed.

Try to spread the wealth. Don’t keep calling on Irwina, especially if other hands are up, even if Irwina’s comments tend to be especially insightful. If no other hands are up, pause for a second, then solicit other responses: “Okay, let’s hear from somebody else. Irwina can’t be the only one in here with ideas.” If Irwina becomes the sole spokesperson early in the semester, her classmates may happily allow her to carry the ball for the entire game.

Don’t, however, try to force everyone into the discussion. Students can be involved, participating, and actively learning without saying anything. Clearly, it is good to get as many ideas and pieces of ideas in the air as possible, but calling on someone who is pathologically shy may result in a continuity-breaking momentary freeze. The rest of the class will take a timeout from thinking about the topic at hand to share the anxiety of the stammering, quaking, dry-mouthed, coerced responder, while the responder will try to find ways to become invisible for the rest of the semester starting now.
Furthermore, introspective, contemplative, introverted students may sit in silence not due to lack of interest, but because they are busy internally processing and synthesizing their classmates’ observations. In college, I was one of these students, and I would get intensely caught up in a lively discussion only to find that by the time I was ready to step my toe in the river, the relevant water was downstream a ways. I did not want to begin my comment with something like, “Getting back to what Sheila said about Nick Carraway a few minutes ago …”

My best responses weren’t formulated until a few minutes after class, at which point, striding across campus to my next class, I would see the fallacies in comments A and B, the wisdom in C and D, and was now prepared to articulate a coherent contribution of my own.

Not to hold on to a grudge or anything, but I still sting at the memory of a high-school English teacher asking me a question about Emerson’s transcendentalism. I thought hard about her question and I could almost see the answer in the deep recesses of my adolescent mind. “I don’t exactly know,” I said. “You don’t exactly know?” she said. “I’d say you don’t know at all.” Without that snarky rejoinder, and given a bit more time, I believe an answer would’ve eventually made its way to the surface and I could’ve added to that class’s great store of Emersonian wisdom.

While I don’t like the idea of forced participation (or grading participation based on quantity), I also don’t like the idea of some publishable insight, some aphorism of the ages, trapped forever in the mind of a mute inglorious Milton in the third row, two desks from the back.

So I battle my distaste for calling on reluctant or seemingly reluctant students by trying to read their facial expressions. Most teenagers have not yet developed great poker faces, so if they have something to share, even if they’re shy, they’ll look like they’re about ready to jump out of their desk. If not, their face will say “If you call on me, I will either faint or race for the door.”

Sometimes I just ask students after class, “Hey, if I call on you, will you talk?” Or, “Are you one of those students who don’t mind reading aloud in class?” If I can’t catch them after class, I ask them in writing.

(If you’re asking questions to see if they read, of course, it’s tough luck if they’re shy or introspective: be ready or be embarrassed.)

Be sure, of course, to make it clear that students must be recognized before they speak. Otherwise, Irwina will begin sharing her opinion before you’ve finished asking the question, and all the other little ideas in the room will die a silent death.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Discussion Strategies That Might Work: Part Two

* Have a goal or an objective or a critical rationale – a spine, if you will – for the session, and try to link all comments to it. There’s no need to be overly fussy about this, but you must show students this is NOT a random bull session. Many students have been conditioned to believe that when the teacher steps from behind the lectern and asks for their input, they (the students) can all relax and share their feelings, opinions, politics and family history.

You do NOT want to be in the room when this happens.

This fuzzy, sprawling, pseudo-academic, late-night coffee-house, teenage-angst talk therapy session needs to be nipped in the bud immediately: “Today, we’ll explore the nature of _____ in Ch. ____ of ______.” “Let’s talk for a while about the role of older women in the first third of Huckleberry Finn.” This will help keep the discussion focused, will help keep it moving, progressing toward an attainable goal. All the comments become barnacles attaching themselves to the same sunken ship.
* Having a goal or an objective isn’t the same as having an agenda. If you have an agenda, i.e., your own favorite interpretation of a story or poem or historical incident, you’ll tend to ask questions that nudge your students in the direction of your interpretation. “So can you see where Twain was probably ridiculing the Grangerfords’ lack of taste?” “Yes.” “Anyone else?” Silence.

When students catch on to your manipulative line of questioning, their responses may degenerate into the “I-think-what-you-want-us-to-say” variety. That’s just embarrassing.

The agenda-ridden discussion doesn’t really go anywhere, and there doesn’t tend to be any original insights, though it certainly keeps you from having to think on your feet. Your particular reading of a text or event is free to live another day and you still will not have experienced the net-less terror of having to reconsider, revise or defend it in front of a live audience.

If you have become quite attached to your interpretation, you can still share it, but why not give your students a crack at articulating one of their own first? It will give them a great deal of confidence and make them look forward to playing this game again some day. They’ll remember this class and this topic longer because of the role you let them play. One day they’ll e-mail or text or Facebook you and thank you for letting them think for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions.

That is not to say that this is all about making them feel good about themselves. Maybe they will, but the important achievement is you’ve allowed them to join in legitimate academic discourse and they can see that it’s not just people shouting each other down, but a quite exhilarating, if taxing, activity that serves as a training ground for critical reading, thinking on their feet, analysis, arguing with evidence, careful listening, patience, tolerance and the expression of feelings.

So let’s recap this balancing act quickly: You can’t let an academic discussion go wherever it wants, but at the same time you, the teacher, cannot know exactly where it’s headed. Leave room for the students to surprise themselves and you, so that you, too, are forced to think on your feet and work on synthesizing fresh ideas into, well, something.

Stephen Brookfield , author of The Skillful Teacher, likens this to white-water rafting: Your discussion now has a destination (down river), but there are many ways to get there. Students may go from shore to shore as long as they’re still in the river. They may not reach the destination the way you had in mind or the most efficient way, but they’ll still get there. They may bring up questions and issues you aren’t prepared for, but, hey, you’re a teacher: Deal with it! Just avoid the rocks!

The Skillful Teacher

I found this a helpful book when I first read it years ago. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787980668.html

Monday, September 5, 2011

Discussion Strategies that Might Work: Part One

I have these priceless little moments of Eternity while I’m teaching when I seem to be given a God’s-eye view of myself and of my class filled with students and I will feel like the overly excitable Othello greeting Desdemona at Cyprus – it’s too much joy, a bliss that becomes a burden with my awareness that it may never be duplicated. Where else, I wonder, will I have this kind of fun again?
Almost every time I’m granted this gift, it comes during a class discussion, and given the exuberance of the moment, “discussion” is about the most withered, bland, hollow word possible. “Communion” would be more accurate, because the “I-ness” of the 20-something students and their teacher has morphed into a charged “We.”

When I reflect back on these moments, I remember intimate, almost mesmerizing eye contact; smiles of recognition; scattered laughter, often of the ah-hah variety; brows furrowed in concentration and anticipation; hands raised, queued up as other voices await their turn; I hear my voice, if at all, answering a question with another question or saying, “Okay, let’s go to Fred, then Stacy, then Hank, then Lily. Go!”

My work, in these moments, has become the game I was sent here to play. I am become a (male) midwife – a midhusband? – of ideas, a tour guide for insights, a trainer for mental aerobics, an aging Yoda trying to turn the Farce of public education into the Force.

So for purely selfish reasons, I prefer discussion to lecture – not that I can’t get quite a kick out of the latter as well. But it’s not just fun: We have known for many decades that students retain very little from lectures, that they learn more when they learn actively, i.e., when they have a larger role in the learning process, and that students remember most the classes in which they spoke (as opposed to chatted) the most.

Learning is more meaningful and lasting when the learners are involved in the arduous search for the concepts to be learned. I suppose we could save time by telling them up front the “meaning” of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, but think of how much more a part of them that speech will become if they work through it and arrive at a meaning of their own.
Perhaps we’ve all heard this too many times by now, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat this saying, most often attributed to Lakota lore: “Tell me and I will listen, show me and I will understand, involve me and I will learn.” Discussion classes, done well, involve everyone with even a trace of a desire to be involved.

Here are some suggestions to help you start and maintain an engaging conversation with a room full of young people:

* Unless your discussion is purely exploratory (“Let’s see what we all know about nuclear fission! Joey? Anyone?”), be sure to provide adequate information or background – through lectures, handouts, assigned readings or such – before the session. In most cases it’s not a good idea to erect a discussion on the foundation of a fairy’s wing, or to try to forge wisdom out of fumes.

Early in my high-school teaching career, as I was leading into Huckleberry Finn, I tried to evoke some feedback on the Reconstruction Era. A more serious student, prepared to take notes on whatever motes of knowledge our discussion produced, asked, with pen poised above his paper, “Was Reconstruction before the Vietnam War or after the Vietnam War?” Even I knew then I should probably put things in a little context before we talked further.

* Hospitality is vital. Figuratively speaking, you need to send students invitations to contribute, greet them warmly when they do, thank them for their help and protect their vulnerability. Remember that they’re taking a risk when they publish an idea, insight or opinion in the presence of other teenagers, i.e., some of the most judgmental humans on the planet.

Their comment may sound stupid to their classmates. It may sound stupid to you. It may even be stupid. Let’s say for the moment that it is.

Unlike the brains of the responder’s classmates, yours has developed a capacity for empathy. Your immediate task is to channel your inner Meryl Streep and act as if the comment is perfectly valid, that it does not make you want to laugh out loud, now, then share the hilarity with your spouse when you get home, then remember to enter it into your log of Student Howlers.

You need not, on the other hand, act as if the comment is right on target. Rather, try nodding pensively and saying something like, “Hmm. You may be on to something. I’ll have to think about that a little more. You keep thinking, too. And thanks for you comment. Someone else?”

The task of discouraging classmates from ridiculing the comment needs to have been accomplished back on the first days of school when you were building rapport and establishing a community of mutual trust and respect. If you’ve done that, anyone who mocks another student during a discussion will feel like an idiot.

“You’re among friends,” I remind them early and often. I start saying this on the first day and keep saying it, implicitly at least, from then on, especially before a discussion.

It’s tempting to say here, “Don’t be intimidating to your students or they’ll be afraid to say anything, and if they do say something, it’ll just be what they think you want to hear.” But I’m not sure we always have much say in such matters. If you’re very tall and have a deep voice, for example, that’s not likely to change. Some humans are just flat out more intimidating than others.

You can, however, carry your education, your knowledge, your wisdom as a gift to be shared, a living, breathing search engine at the disposal of the class rather than as a shield to protect your dominance. Most students are already pretty sure you know more than they do, so have some modesty about your advantage. The truly well-educated person has good reason to be humble about all s/he has yet to learn, as well as the protean and contingent nature of what s/he already “knows.”
If students feel intimidated by you or they think you’re dismissive or will make light of their responses, they won’t talk; if they do, it’ll just be what they think you want to hear. This means discussion classes are usually better later in the academic year. This also means you have to work on building a kind of rapport that encourages conversation.

Before we go any further — you know, we could have our own discussion if you’d submit some questions or observations.