I think the biggest attraction of online teaching and learning is one of convenience. Students find that online learning fits in with their lives more easily, often because they are juggling child care and school or because they are trying to take a class while working full-time. Distance is often a factor, too. Students of mine have lived in places like New Orleans and Philadelphia. I have also had students from elsewhere in the state of Kansas, such as Beloit, Wichita, Pittsburg, Topeka, Manhattan, and Lawrence. My wife has had students logging into her classes from Germany and Bosnia.
Usually, the online classes offered at the colleges where I teach in Kansas City fill much sooner than onground classes. With the hassles that accompany technology, online learning can be much more difficult than students imagined. Not all of the students are as technically proficient as they need to be to navigate the class and to troubleshoot problems related to Java, for instance. The attrition rate in previous semesters has been as high as 50%; fewer students than anticipated withdrew during the most current semester, despite the introduction of WebCT 6.0 and all of the problems that occurred during the first month or so.
I first became interested in teaching online because of convenience, too. I was commuting a couple of hours a day from Leavenworth, which is in the northwestern edge of the Kansas City metro area. When my asthma led to problems sleeping, I was often exhausted when driving and caught myself nodding off at the wheel. Teaching online probably kept me from getting into a serious accident. Fortunately, I have now been getting shots twice a week for my asthma and sleep much better. Even so, teaching online prevents me from adding many more miles to my ten-year-old car, saves me money by not having to buy a newer car and by not buying so much high-priced gasoline, and contributes in a small way to reducing my carbon footprint.
I appreciate online learning the most during the winter when snow or an ice storm leaves several inches of accumulation on the roads and when the TV news reports on the amount of accidents and on the difficulties that drivers experience in trying to reach their homes. I can sit in my home office and glance out the window at the weather occasionally as I continue with my grading.
I am happy, too, at not having to deal with some of the more common discipline problems in the classroom. Students no longer attempt to talk to each other when I’m talking. Students no longer visibly show their disrespect by getting up out of their desks and walking out during the middle of class. Online classes have problems of their own. This last semester, a student who resented having to retake the second-semester composition class after having had the class at a private college openly expressed his negativity and intimidated some of the other students with his hostile views of the class and of those lifestyle choices he objected to in the reading. A few years ago, a student found it necessary to criticize one student who admitted having had an abortion and another student who admitted living a gay lifestyle. This student sent private e-mails to these students and quoted Bible verses in support of his own views.
Online learning requires that students take responsibility for their own education. A student who reads the material posted in the class and who communicates with me whenever questions arise regarding the assignments can succeed within the class. A student who doesn’t read the material and who doesn’t fulfill the assignments struggles with the class and often withdraws before the semester ends or simply disappears and doesn’t log on again. It isn’t possible to simply show up and sit passively in class.
There are also students whose writing skills require more individual attention than an online class can offer. These kinds of students often get angry and blame me for their own weaknesses when they never should have enrolled in the class.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Thoughts on Teaching Writing
At long last the semester has come to a close. Many of you probably have no idea what it takes to teach five sections of composition, with some of the sections having as many as twenty-five students. Each student turns in five essays, so there are a hundred essays to grade within any one section. When you multiple that number by five, the number of essays becomes overwhelming.
Usually, students tend to make the same mistakes in their writing. Students don’t realize what it takes to write a good essay in the second semester of composition, such as fulfilling the assignment, developing one’s ideas, integrating quotes smoothly, and documenting all of the sources that appear in the essay and from which words and/or ideas are borrowed. Some of the other essentials, which students still overlook, are creating an argument, maintaining one’s focus, using paragraph development, avoiding comma splices, fused sentences, and sentence fragments, and even catching spelling errors.
My students tend to experience the most problems when evaluating a movie and when critiquing a written text. The concept of establishing criteria unique to one particular genre of movie and providing evidence in support of each criterion proves particularly challenging. Likewise, students are often befuddled when expected to identify the intended audience in an article written for a journal like Harper’s, believing that the writer is addressing them.
I will be starting my twentieth year of teaching college English in August of this year. Occasionally, a student may think that I exhibit bias when grading his/her essay because the grade isn’t what the student had expected. I am long past the time when I had to shut down my own biases when grading an essay. It’s true that I am not particularly fond of reading essays about incest and rape. There aren’t other topics that offend me. Few if any topics can cause me to overlook my role as a teacher of writing. Some of the ideas are often stupid and not thought out, but I’m not going to tell the writer what I think directly. My opinion doesn’t matter; what matters is how well the writer has fulfilled the rhetorical situation and how well the writer has fulfilled the criteria for that particular essay while still conforming to the conventions of academic writing and standard written English.
Despite how hard I work during any given semester, there are still students who complain because of the final grade for the semester. Students think that grading someone’s writing is subjective when what I have said in these paragraphs proves that grading a text is actually quite objective. A teacher with less experience might exhibit idiosyncratic criteria when grading. Usually, when composition teachers are brought together and asked to evaluate someone’s essay, we can agree on that essay’s strengths and weaknesses.
You might be thinking that I now have the summer off to relax and do nothing until the start of classes in August. In two weeks, I will be teaching another four sections of composition; two of them will last seven weeks and the remaining two will last eight weeks. I get a longer break, about three weeks in length, when classes end in July.
One benefit to this frenzied pace of teaching and grading is that the students I encounter change from one semester to another. Some of them do leave a lasting impression. I can still remember the students I taught twenty years ago. I also see some of my students within the community, such as last summer when I entered the hospital for a brief stay and encountered a former student of mine who now works as a nurse. Another one of my students worked in a booth at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival and was surprised that I still knew her name. Those kinds of encounters are plusses. Fewer of these encounters occur now because I don’t see my students. We communicate within an online environment. Once in a while, I actually meet with a student who needs my help, or I see a photograph in the local newspaper that lets me match a name to a face. I can go out to the store now and not have someone say, “Hi, Dr. ------.” Sometimes I miss that recognition.
Usually, students tend to make the same mistakes in their writing. Students don’t realize what it takes to write a good essay in the second semester of composition, such as fulfilling the assignment, developing one’s ideas, integrating quotes smoothly, and documenting all of the sources that appear in the essay and from which words and/or ideas are borrowed. Some of the other essentials, which students still overlook, are creating an argument, maintaining one’s focus, using paragraph development, avoiding comma splices, fused sentences, and sentence fragments, and even catching spelling errors.
My students tend to experience the most problems when evaluating a movie and when critiquing a written text. The concept of establishing criteria unique to one particular genre of movie and providing evidence in support of each criterion proves particularly challenging. Likewise, students are often befuddled when expected to identify the intended audience in an article written for a journal like Harper’s, believing that the writer is addressing them.
I will be starting my twentieth year of teaching college English in August of this year. Occasionally, a student may think that I exhibit bias when grading his/her essay because the grade isn’t what the student had expected. I am long past the time when I had to shut down my own biases when grading an essay. It’s true that I am not particularly fond of reading essays about incest and rape. There aren’t other topics that offend me. Few if any topics can cause me to overlook my role as a teacher of writing. Some of the ideas are often stupid and not thought out, but I’m not going to tell the writer what I think directly. My opinion doesn’t matter; what matters is how well the writer has fulfilled the rhetorical situation and how well the writer has fulfilled the criteria for that particular essay while still conforming to the conventions of academic writing and standard written English.
Despite how hard I work during any given semester, there are still students who complain because of the final grade for the semester. Students think that grading someone’s writing is subjective when what I have said in these paragraphs proves that grading a text is actually quite objective. A teacher with less experience might exhibit idiosyncratic criteria when grading. Usually, when composition teachers are brought together and asked to evaluate someone’s essay, we can agree on that essay’s strengths and weaknesses.
You might be thinking that I now have the summer off to relax and do nothing until the start of classes in August. In two weeks, I will be teaching another four sections of composition; two of them will last seven weeks and the remaining two will last eight weeks. I get a longer break, about three weeks in length, when classes end in July.
One benefit to this frenzied pace of teaching and grading is that the students I encounter change from one semester to another. Some of them do leave a lasting impression. I can still remember the students I taught twenty years ago. I also see some of my students within the community, such as last summer when I entered the hospital for a brief stay and encountered a former student of mine who now works as a nurse. Another one of my students worked in a booth at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival and was surprised that I still knew her name. Those kinds of encounters are plusses. Fewer of these encounters occur now because I don’t see my students. We communicate within an online environment. Once in a while, I actually meet with a student who needs my help, or I see a photograph in the local newspaper that lets me match a name to a face. I can go out to the store now and not have someone say, “Hi, Dr. ------.” Sometimes I miss that recognition.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
West of the 100th Meridian
I managed to spend some time last weekend on the other side of the 100th meridian. Clicking on this photograph will enlarge it a bit. Notice how the road on the right of the photograph runs all of the way to the horizon. My wife thinks that Pete Townsend somehow had this kind of view in mind when writing "I Can See for Miles." It's easy to forget all of the problems occurring elsewhere in this country and overseas when living within such a landscape; it's easy to forget that anywhere else exists at all. This kind of place is my equivalent of Varykino.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Kneeling in Prayer
after the Pygmies
of the Iture Forest
I dropped part of my car outside
Enid, Oklahoma, along U.S. 64,
almost two years ago. My mechanic
gives it, maybe, another year.
The rust crunches away at its body,
peeling off strips of paint
before it chews through the frame.
My bank account spits out mud
whenever I lift the handle and try
to fill the sink. The IRS offers
to garnish my wages, adding a sprig
of watercress with each check.
Such gestures won't pay my bills.
If I only knew what to awaken,
I would sing sweetly, like droplets
of rain, offering a song each morning,
afternoon, and evening. My only tree,
a twenty year old cottonwood, whose limbs
shaded my window, and whose seeds
floated past like moths, dirtying
the neighbor's yard, was cut down
last summer when she complained
to the town. Nothing else covers me
but the sky. My landlord releasing
the coolant from the air conditioner
lets its cancer spread to clouds
and gnaw holes over Antarctica.
Maybe I should lie down next to you,
placing my ear over your stomach,
to hear a forest waking in your body.
The hourly bells of academe drifting
over the town call us now into prayer.
This older poem of mine appeared in Red Rock Review 13 (2003): 82. The references to the pygmies come from Denise Carmody"s The Oldest God: Archaic Religion Yesterday & Today, which I read when I was an undergraduate and in one of her classes.
of the Iture Forest
I dropped part of my car outside
Enid, Oklahoma, along U.S. 64,
almost two years ago. My mechanic
gives it, maybe, another year.
The rust crunches away at its body,
peeling off strips of paint
before it chews through the frame.
My bank account spits out mud
whenever I lift the handle and try
to fill the sink. The IRS offers
to garnish my wages, adding a sprig
of watercress with each check.
Such gestures won't pay my bills.
If I only knew what to awaken,
I would sing sweetly, like droplets
of rain, offering a song each morning,
afternoon, and evening. My only tree,
a twenty year old cottonwood, whose limbs
shaded my window, and whose seeds
floated past like moths, dirtying
the neighbor's yard, was cut down
last summer when she complained
to the town. Nothing else covers me
but the sky. My landlord releasing
the coolant from the air conditioner
lets its cancer spread to clouds
and gnaw holes over Antarctica.
Maybe I should lie down next to you,
placing my ear over your stomach,
to hear a forest waking in your body.
The hourly bells of academe drifting
over the town call us now into prayer.
This older poem of mine appeared in Red Rock Review 13 (2003): 82. The references to the pygmies come from Denise Carmody"s The Oldest God: Archaic Religion Yesterday & Today, which I read when I was an undergraduate and in one of her classes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)