Tonight was one of the funner classes to teach.
I regularly have the classes I teach play the game, “Win As Much As You Can.” It’s designed to get people to learn about trust. I use it to specifically get them thinking about communication and in presenting an argument. They usually have a fun time and learn a little about themselves and each other in the process.
I also had them go through several “research” examples and decide which ones are plagiarism and which are okay. We didn’t get time to talk about them, but it should prove to be interesting because their definition of plagiarism is not usually the same as mine.
Yay! I just got done grading all my students’ portfolios. They are due Tuesday by midnight, so I got them done pretty early.
I was impressed by some of the students’ revisions. I had one student go from a D grade all the way up to a B.
On the flip side, I had a few students who went the entire semester but just did not write the papers or fix the problems and they failed. In fact I had 9 students fail this semester (out of 27). Crazy. I don’t get it. Of those 9, 3 were ones who stayed all semester (rather than the 6 who just stopped coming).
My teaching percentages are about the same though. I’ve been tracking it since I started at UVU. It is about as easy to fail my class as it is to get an A, percentage-wise. The main difference is in whether students are willing to re-vise (I hyphenate that purposefully to enphasize the re-visioning that they often need to do from one draft to the next).
So, I’m going to have some very happy students, and some who will have to take the class all over again. Yuck!
Who came up with Microsoft Word’s default style?
Can’t they come up with a student version that has the standard double-spacing and serif font and regular margins and normal header and no extra spacing between paragraphs?
My students just don’t seem to get it.
And while I’m ranting, why didn’t I scare away more students this year? Come on, I’m mean and onery and expect students to rewrite papers. Maybe I should have had the first paper due much earlier? Any other ideas on what I should do to scare them away?
