Thursday, October 28, 2010

Group Work =/= Conference Time: A Smackerel

To my students in English XXX—

I know there was a paper due to Blackboard before the beginning of class today. In fact, I planned a somewhat fun, no-preparation-required group exercise to be completed during class because I knew many of you would be tired after rushing to finish up the paper (even though you’ve theoretically been writing pieces of it for homework for the last 2.5 weeks), and wouldn’t complete, or possibly even notice, any preparation I did try to assign. In short, I really tried to accommodate the realities of the situation. So, after I’d explained the exercise and told you to begin work in your groups, did 1/3 of you really have to line up in front of my desk to discuss the problems you had completing and/or turning in the paper? Couldn’t you have waited for the end of class, or even office hours, or sent me an email? Since when does “begin work with your groups” sound like “if you’d like an individual in-class conference, now’s the time”?

11 comments:

  1. Snowflakes have a really hard time following directions, pretty much all the time. If you let them do anything unstructured, or even semi-structured and autonomous, they'll start wandering around and/or getting off task. It's the old "herding cats" problem.

    God I wish we could use corporal punishment, like in the old days when education actually worked and students actually learned.

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  2. I will just sit here in stunned silence at that comment ...

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  3. I thought she was trying to emphasize sarcastically the extremes of the state of classroom behavior - then versus now. Although both teaching methods and student behaviors have evolved (in positive and negative ways), the issue/question is how do we instill some sense of discipline in students who clearly have none. As we all know, it is quite frustrating.

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  4. Seth, it wasn't Cassandra's comment that left me speechless.

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  5. I thought we were both addressing NC's comment.

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  6. Y'all need to chill a bit, I think: No Cookies is using (here and in many other posts) a style you may have heard of, called "hyperbole." Look it up.

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  7. Just because they come forward doesn't mean you have to answer the questions then. I find that feigning ignorance of their likely off topic questions and asking them something on topic usually gets the point across. Like this...
    Student: Yo proffie!
    You: Yes? did you not understand the instructions?
    Student: Yeah I understood, but..
    You: good! so head back to your group and help them understand!

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  8. introvert.prof, perhaps you are giving No Cookies too much credit. This is the same man who grouped single mothers with exconvicts as those undeserving of a second academic chance.

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  9. @Irritated: yes, I do use that technique, and others, to send them back to work (and it might have been closer to 15% than 30% of the class; No Cookies isn't the only one to engage in occasional hyperbole). I just wish they wouldn't come up in the first place. It feels like an ever-escalating arms race: we plan group work to get them engaged (and make sure they're prepared for whole-class discussion, since they resist reading, or reading thoroughly, or thinking about what they read), then they find ways to avoid engaging during group work, then we have to find ways to re-engage them during group work, and so on.

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  10. During one of my recent lectures I had a creepy experience reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." I was down in the pit before my 190 inquiring minds and suddenly they started flying off of their seats before class and asking questions! One of the Front Row Floras said "Wow, you look really stressed out now."

    Hah.

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