Carnegie Notes from Sept. 19^th through Sept. 23^rd

This week was a bit rough in terms of staying on top of lessons. I had to miss one class—only an hour, but still, we can get a lot done in an hour. The rest of the week in class, we worked on parts of speech and finding subjects, verbs, and prepositional phrases.

In terms of behind-the-scenes work, I spent probably ten hours of the week tinkering with minor WebCT glitches and tweaking slides to fit the things I emphasize in teaching. Time spent with WebCT involved reopening and closing certain tests for certain students, determining why certain tests weren’t showing up on “My Progress” for certain students (and answering their e-mails to assuage their fears that they weren’t getting credit for work completed), previewing quizzes, fixing minor errors within the quizzes (e.g. a couple of quizzes did not have the correct answers checked, and there were a few typos), and letting Chris know about the glitches so he could correct them on other teachers’ websites. I also reviewed the PowerPoint lecture slides to make sure nothing in the lessons would conflict with what I would be discussing (e.g. I emphasize that to + a verb cannot be used as a verb by itself, so I relabeled them infinitives; on the section on types of nouns, I added a list of pronouns, etc.). I had also misunderstood about how the slides would translate on screen; on my computer screen, it looked like some of the circling and underlining was misaligned, so I readjusted two entire slideshows before learning that sometimes they project differently on the screen and the misalignment wouldn’t show up on the screen.

I’m also still struggling with the balance of time for bookwork and lecture slides. The book has easy-to-understand rules, clear examples, clear lists (of prepositions, helping verbs, etc.), and great exercises, and I’d like to keep the students connected to the book. The book also covers issues I want the students to keep in mind—issues not covered in the lecture slides, issues I’ve not gotten around to adding to the slides. We’re not spending as much time with the book and practices as I would like. However, I’ll have to trust that between the lecture slides and the exercises they get outside of class, they’ll get the equivalent or better of what they’d have gotten if we’d managed to work the book exercises. I feel that maybe I ought to require the students to do more exercises from the book (they already do the chapter review of each chapter we cover), but I fear that with the number of WebCT exercises they’re already required to do (though they seem to be keeping up well, or at least two thirds of them), I would overwhelm them. This is something I’ll have to work on for next semester—perhaps shortening the slides or not doing all the exercises built into the slides so that we can do more from the book.

In terms of time in the classroom, things went fine. The students stay engaged and participate joyfully. I believe this can be attributed to a number of factors: the slides are colorful and easy enough for everyone to follow, yet challenging enough not to bore them; the class is one hour long—I’ve always had hour and a half classes, but the one-hour unit seems perfect for students at this skill level; and the good luck of chemistry—an attentive and fairly serious group of students. (I spend roughly four hours weekly with 189 students alone in my office ~ they’re most eager to do well.) I did discover that because the class IS just one hour and because they need the entire hour on days that they write their papers, I will no longer give them their on-line vocabulary quiz on the same day that they write their papers.

In terms of the work they’ve submitted, it’s difficult to determine whether my using the slides instead of working from the book is making a difference in their writing. Very few finished their papers (again, maybe a function of it being only an hour-long class, though they were allowed to bring their outlines with them). They were given the papers back with comments and have turned them in as an out-of-class rewrite (so they had unlimited time and the possibility of assistance). Those papers are looking about average for a beginning-of-the-semester set of papers. Therefore, I’ll have to see how their second paper goes (to be written the end of this week).