You know, I had a bad impression of the Academic Affairs Office where I work even before I was hired. I don’t know what happened, but twice they claimed not to have received my transcripts — transcripts that somehow arrived everywhere else they were sent. Ahem. Well, getting final, official clearance to match the unofficial permission I’ve repearedly to go to Clarion West, this seems to have become well-nigh impossible. Almost. But fill out this one more little paper, and maybe we’ll see. Oh,and this one. And can you fill out that form? And retype this letter, but leave this …
Category: teaching in Korea
One major lessonI learned last night
I’ll be keeping the final projects for all my classes on file, which means that I’ll be giving students a brief chance to look at them, and then reclaiming them. One thing I learned is that when students have only 10 minutes to check out their writing feedback, half that time is spent hunting for explanations of the grade, and half is spent comparing with others. They tend not to very intensely read my summarizing notes, but if they do, they read it more closely than all the little notes I make throughout the text. So think I’m going to …
Consolations
I’ve never really had to deal with a grading curve. I’ve always either had students that essentially fit the curve naturally, or else not been required to use it. So during conferences with my students, I showed them what the final grade was for their final project, and then told them a tentative grade. I like grading transparency. Most of the people whom I told, “You’re probably going to get a C in this class,” accepted it without much fuss. But a couple of the people whom I told, “Look, if there were no curve, I’m pretty confident you’d get …
Deadlines are called that for a reason
Many of my students seem to have grasped that deadlines include the word “dead” for a reason. Still, not quite enough of them have grokked it. In my two huge writing classes, I’ve received less than 40 out of 50 final assignments which were due at noon today. Several of the students in my Media English class are still trying changing their minds and plans on a Final Project that’s due a week from today, and several students I met today hadn’t reviewed my comments on essays that they’ve had for a week and are supposed to have rewritten for …
ClassBlogging
During the past semester, I’ve been running classblogs for my writing classes. Here are my observations from this experience: It’s really hard to keep up with multiple classblogs. One should either (a) tell students from the start that it’s for practice and peer feedback, and that comments will be limited to encouragement but mainly on the content of random posts not feedback on grammar or structure, or (b) make sure that one can actually keep up with giving specific feedback on mechanics to a certain percentage of posts. It’s quite useful to tell EFL students that a specific number of …
I Hope The Info Packet Suffices
People in the Academic Affairs Office are once again requesting more explanation of the Clarion Workshop. This is the third time they’ve asked for more info, and this time they’re looking for some kind of official explanation of the “Program”. I explained that there’s no official “program” and that it’s not really a conference but more like a “course”. I’ll be bringing the Info Packet I received in the mail to the office tomorrow morning, to see if there’s anything there which can be photocopied to explain the program. I really hope that suffices, because I can’t think of any …
A New ESL/EFL Wiki
The indefatigable EFL Geek has started something new: an ESL & EFL Wiki. For those of you who don’t know what a Wiki is, the short version is that it is the most promiscuous of website forms. That means that just about anyone can edit it, contribute, and so on. What this means is that he’s started a cooperative website at which people can post articles, links, information, materials, resources, and so on. It’s a lovely idea, and I heartily encourage anyone who’s interested in, or working in the field of, EFL or ESL to go on over there and …
What I Can and Can’t Teach ‘Em…
Recently, in a creative-writing context, diekreuzen wrote: I’m glad I missed my last fiction class. Since we’re coming to the end, students are starting to get touchy about their progress. They wonder why their writing hasn’t gotten better. They’re lashing out at the critiques, questioning their usefulness. Such displays make me cringe–like witnessing adult temper tantrums. All of this is the unhappy realization that no one can tell you how to write. You have to figure it out for yourself. I have been thinking about this. Post-midterm, I have been making strong efforts to ensure students in my elementary writing …
Eggcorns
I miss these. I used to see them in student papers in Canada a lot, but here, they’re not so common.
Presentations
In a few moments I need to wrench my mind back to school-related work: I’ll be presenting a talk on Monday to my Public Speaking class on how and why to use, and how and why NOT to use, a PowerPoint Presentation. I have a few sources to draw upon, but the one I think most highly of is a post over at Creating Passionate Users, which I’m not going to link to directly from here, because I don’t need a trackback from that post leading to this blog — one of my students knows about this site, and that’s …