Lately every time I sit down to write in this space, a little nagging voice tells me, "If you can't say something nice...." And then I close the window to avoid a cynicism explosion, which would be totally not my fault since cynicism is in the air right now--literally, if I am to believe a student paper stating that "global warming will have a cynical effect." If the climate itself can get cynical, then what hope is there for mere mortals?
The problem right now is that it's raining contempt. Not everywhere--just in one class and just from one corner of the class. I'm not naming names, but if students' contempt for education were made of quarters, I'd be on my way to Tahiti right now instead of shivering under a shawl in my office. I have definitely reached my quota on student contempt, with six weeks of the semester still ahead.
But on the other hand, I'm reading a set of first-year essays that demonstrate massive improvement over the previous set. Either a whole bunch of students took some serious time to polish their drafts or else we're looking at a tsunami of purchased papers, which I sincerely hope is not the case.
So apparently I can say something nice: my first-year students rock! (Well, some of them, anyway.)
2 comments:
That's good news about the papers!
I'm at the end of my patience with students who take blind guesses when asked what a word means. And then they're SHOCKED to be wrong. Look up the [expletive deleted] words you don't know! I'm also at the end of my patience with student papers which demonstrate that they just couldn't bother to do better. Gah!
I'm with you. This morning in a literature class small groups had to study short passages from a work, look up the unfamiliar words, and then explain the passage to their classmates. None of the passages had too many unusual or unfamiliar words, but all had two or three. They had a good 20 minutes to work on this, during which time I circulated and asked if they needed help. The first group to report back to the class was unable to provide any insight into the meanings of the only two words I asked them about. The rest of the groups did better, but only after they saw that I was serious when I said I expected them to know all the words. But I don't know why the first group fail so utterly to do the most basic thing: look up unfamiliar words!
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