I should have known, but of course I didn’t expect it. Now, I should clarify: most of the students who have come and seen me about grade-modifications have done so on relatively understandable grounds. They admitted error, but expressed an opinion that perhaps I was a little too harsh in my grading. This I can swallow. But there is a small group of students in one of my classes who basically spent the semester, to one degree or another, shirking a major assignment that I informed them many times, from the beginning of semester, would be worth 25% of their …
Category: KOREA
Teaching How to Write a Resume
Today I made a crack with my class about my teaching over the last semester. We’d just finished a very detailed examination of two different resume types, and I was asking if they had any questions, and they said, “No.” “Was it all clear?” “Very clear!” a few of them said. When I quipped, “First time all semester, I was finally clear!” A few of them laughed just a little too hard at that. However, it was a particularly good lesson. I handed out two resumes, one using the Experience-Based format, and the other using the Skills-Based format. We discussed …
Tight Shirts and the Complainer
Two things from the last week: Very tight T-shirts seem to have become de rigeur on campus. I don’t know if it’s the weather, or whether these young ladies are thinking that wearing T-shirts that show off their chests will help “push-up” their grades slightly (uh, terrible pun), but I have noticed that all of a sudden, show-offy T-shirts are being worn by just about anyone who feels she has something to show off. (The other young women are still in princess garb and plainer, baggier clothes.) It’s not working, by the way. I am nothing if not scrupulously fair …
AAAAAAAAAAARGH!
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 …
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 …
Someone I’m Beginning to Get the Feeling I Wouldn’t Like Much
One of my students wrote an essay on Jo Jung-rae, who is a famous and well-known author in Korea. A friend of mine read his epic ten-volume Hangang (The Han River) back during my second year here, and spoke of it with praise, but also seemed to find reading it onerous. Interestingly, she was studying Japanese at the time and her boyfriend told her to study it (but, then, he was studying Japanese then, too, and was quite good at it). That’s ironic, because according to the essay my student wrote about his epic, Hangang, and about the author himself, …
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 …
Boribap is also not very funny
If you haven’t had boribap, and if you cannot read Korean, it means “barley rice”. It’s often used in a kind of be bim bap (mixed rice) dish, where you take the rice (boiled with barley) and mix in vegetables and some hot sauce, stir it all up real good, and eat it. And then it grumbles around inside you for hours, dragging itself along every available surface within (which is very cleansing, I suppose) and giving you the most amazing gas. You also need to make sure there’s a bathroom available to you on demand for the rest of …
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 …