I’ve been looking for a way to work in a podcast into one of my classes, especially the Media English class, but there just wasn’t room this time around. However, I did a slight overhaul of my rest-of-semester-plans with some of my students. Here are the results: Students in my Media English class are making presentations. This is for most of them in lieu of the Media Diaries which they were supposed to start keeping in Week 2, but which most of them never really started. It adds a little to the workload, since they’re supposed to be getting their …
Category: teaching in Korea
A Cappella and Other Thoughts
Yesterday I attended a concert on campus. There’s a shy girl in one of my writing classes who came to me, ticket in hand, and asked me if I would come and see her sing. She’s a nice kid, and a diligent student, so how could I refuse? Well, it turned out to be a cappella music concert. You know, where vocal groups sing without instrumental accompaniment (aside from a little beatbox work by some of the guys in the ensembles, and that’s still not really instrumental). Now, it may seem strange to those of you who think of groups …
A Great Exercise
I had my Elementary Composition students do a pretty cool exercise this week. They’re working on including details and examples in their writing, and we did an exercise where they had to choose details and examples in the room and write a paragraph showing how they feel about school in general. But that wasn’t the really great exercise. The really great exercise was when I had them pair up with someone in the class whom they don’t know as well as others. A few people were resistant to any novelty at all and ended up with friends, but most followed …
Lest You Imagine I’m Bitter…
In case my posts about marking and plagiarism leave readers thinking I am bitter or unhappy in my work, I don’t mean to leave you with that impression. I have had one of those days which, well, which I find come after midterm exams: I’ve been interacting a lot with students, in all kinds of capacities. I had lunch with one student who’s genuinely worried about his writing and wants to get it in shape. We talked about different exercises he could do, the importance of analyzing his readings and reading a lot (and aloud), and of course, the importance …
Plagiarism Update
Let’s see.
Dog Soup and Someone Else’s Lessons
I made a small tactical error. I let my best writing class — which is one of my Elementary Writing courses, by the way, not the Advanced course — suggest topics, and hastily I chose the most controversial ones. Of course, this included “Dog Soup” and “The Yellow Dust from China” and a few more very commonplace topics. Commonplace if you’ve taught free-talking or writing courses in Korea before, anyway. The interesting thing is how diverse the views were on certain topics, such as the Yellow Dust phenomenon, and how shockingly homogenous the arguments were about a topic like Dog …
Marking Countdown
Here’s what’s left for me to mark: 8 of the Advanced Writing Course essays (2-3 pages each) 28 11 in-class essays (meaning handwritten, 1-3 pages double spaced) a few outlines that have not yet been submitted for my public speaking course midterm the one remaining outline that one student forgot to do up for class today (because she was studying for her last exam, an excuse I accepted because she’s generally a good student), but will be handing in tomorrow morning Here’s what I’ve already marked: 70 in-class essays (meaning handwritten, 1-3 pages double spaced) 15 speeches (with the audio …
Weirdest Recipe Yet
My Elementary Writing students were working with forms of organization, and we touched upon the structures of lists. Lists of items in which order doesn’t matter — say, ingredients in a recipe, where we just list with commas and an “and” before the last item, and sequence lists, where we outline a series of steps in a procedure, starting each new step with a word indicative of the new step: “First”, “Second”, “Third”, “Next”, “Then”, “After that,” and “Finally” (plus variations). So I had this bolt of inspiration and asked students to submit recipes to me. The recipes would consist …
Plagiarism and Learning
Reading “Why plagiarists do it” by Jack Schafer puts me in mind of the work of marking piles of essays, writing assignments, and exams. One of my students plagiarized in a way I haven’t yet seen. I could tell almost as soon as I saw the text — without reading it, even — that it was copied from somewhere. How? One of the simplest clues is that when someone plagiarizes text from the Net, he usually isn’t the most engaged person. He’s not the kind of person who gets to know a lot about technology, learns how to use software, …
The Economics of Cheating (And Catching Cheaters)
Over at Gangwon notes, there’s an interesting post about the economics of caring about cheating.. I should note that this is specific to cheating on tests. I gotta say, I kind of agree. Most cheaters: Are inept students to begin with, and are likely to hang themselves with any rope you actually give them. Are highly susceptible to well-designed tests. The cheaters among Korean students benefit very much from the multiple-choice, regurgitate-but-don’t-demonstrate-deep-understanding forms that testing often takes here. A test that’s designed simply to force a student to demonstrate understanding and enough intelligence to performing a little synthesis of the …