What's the Solution?
Hello. I called in sick again today.
A bug's been going around the office and our house (Dad just recovered from a bad cold), and it looks like I've caught it as well.
It might have also been the fact that my area was very cold yesterday, and that I had spent the entire day checking papers. The combination of intensive checking, extreme patience in correcting and a frigid room temperature had finally taken its toll... not only did I have nightmares about checking stacks and stacks more of papers (to my horror, I also ran out of pens to check with), I also woke up to a fever and a migraine.
And so here I am, blogging to keep some sanity intact while pushing out the little pangs of guilt I have for choosing to blog instead of continuing my checking spree.
It's days like this that I recall my highschool and college daydreams of being an instructor. Those daydreams never really included checking and reading papers. Little did I know, paper-checking would be the greater challenge of teaching.
The fact of the matter is, I'm not so much concerned that I'm checking papers, but that I'm "policing" as I go rather than directly fixing the problem. More often than not, it's because of submitted papers that I realize what else needs to be addressed before I actually assign the paper.
It's very easy to cross out lines, to write comments and to write "this can be improved by:" followed by bullet points, as compared to having to explain what makes good writing in one or two meetings. Note, I am not even teaching a writing class; my concern ought to be more of content. But with the development my students have been taking in writing their papers, I realize that I need to pause and address writing problems before I can demand insightful content from them.
When I first began teaching, I was (actually) excited about reading papers. I looked forward to see what students had to say, to see what insights and ideas they could share with me about a given topic.
Three years later, I still see that common problems students face in writing papers involve bad grammar and the lack of a point. Although bad grammar can be pardoned, the latter problem has become more and more evident in the past semester.
Maybe the problem is not that they don't really know how to write a paper (although, it IS also a problem), but that they don't really have anything to say.
And here I am, demanding that they tell me something, in exchange for a grade.
I've come to realize that maybe the solution is filling the bucket using a more forceful approach.
I find that when I have next to nothing to say about a topic, reading up on it helps me realize that I do have something to say. Maybe reading more (well-written articles, periodicals, readings) is the solution to this. Not only that, but I have to actually be demanding about it. It's not enough to tell them that a reading is "useful", because that won't get them to read it. I actually have to say that it's "required".
I'm adding that to my to-do list for next semester's subjects, then.
Yes, that also means that I'm leaving the light on, holding the torch, staying positively hopeful about this.
While I'm at it, here's an article that's really helped me stay optimistic about teaching. :)