 |
| Here. Write this down. |
Please write things down that you hear me say or watch me write on the board in class. When you don't write things down, you forget them. It's not rocket science. It's not any science, for that matter. It's common sense. And you don't even remember what it was you were supposed to have remembered because you didn't write it down. So write something the fuck down. Anything!
I know that not everything I say (in your estimation) is worth noting, but at least half of what I say is something you will need at some point this quarter if you plan to pass the class, including my advice on how to do well in the class, by which I do not mean that you "borrow" a piece of paper from a neighbor and then, when class is over, shove it into the side pocket of your backpack with the rotting banana and half a bagel I saw in there.
I am sick and tired of your claiming that I "never taught that." Yes, I did teach that. I spent 50 minutes teaching that. The fact that you spent an hour in a class and have no memory of it is not a reflection of me. You, however, didn't learn that... because you were too fucking stupid to write it down in the first place and overestimated your brain's capacity to remember anything from 20 seconds ago. So, for the love of a passing grade, get out the notebook mommy bought for you and fucking write things down already!
I'm *so* with you on this. I gave an open-book, open-note lit midterm (3 essays). I could not believe how many of my students took a *massive* hit on the second essay (which was to connect 4 authors we'd been dealing with for the past 6 weeks) and 3/4 of them bagged Emerson. Didn't even mention him except in the opening sentence.
ReplyDeleteThis despite the fact that I stood at the front of the room and did everything but light an M-80 to emphasize the primary way all 4 were connected. I even wrote it on the board and drew lines. Still got essays that just left one of them completely out of the picture.
I have started telling them "Write this down. It's important." And they shake themselves out of their torpor, dig for some sort of writing implement, and scrawl some shit down. The jury is out on whether they will be able to make sense of it later, but at least they're writing.
I blame their high schools, where they don't have to do anything to pass their classes--they just get passed along. And since my school is open admissions and caters specifically to the population that didn't even think about college until two weeks before the semester started in the fall, the majority of my students have no idea *how* to be students. They're lumps in the seats (not all, but many), expecting to pass because they show up.
The killer is that we offer NDC courses in study skills that only a very few are required to take (15 or below on the ACT composite), but that most of our students would get some benefit from.
If I ask them to write anything down, they then spend five minutes collectively begging the one girl (it's always a girl) with extra writing implements to hand them out - and oh! - while they're at it could they also get a piece of note paper and of course by then the moment has DEFINITELY PASSED and I am distracted from the process of containing my twitches of rage.
DeleteNow I figure it's their own ass they're risking, so why nag?
I remember these fuckwhistle types at Crusty Rock CC; they never seemed to last.
ReplyDeleteIf you make them fail, they might get out, get their crap together, and come back to be less terrible and more mediocre. And fuck the Dean - he says anything, give him a glowing-hot poker to the face like in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
I prepare handouts that have fill-in-the-gaps. Then the slides I actually show them in class have the gaps filled in. These are filled-in using a red font so that they know there is a gap to fill in their handouts. They fill in the gaps. It keeps them awake and following along. Every semester some students complain that they have to fill in the gaps and ask why they cant get the "complete notes" but I ignore them because this is all the pandering I am willing to do.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's already a lot of pandering.
DeleteWow--really? That seems like you're all but writing the notes FOR them. Do they learn better than those who don't have fill-in-the-gaps notes for them to use?
DeleteI LOVE the graphic. Thank you!!! :o)
ReplyDeleteI think we should be more positive.
Delete"I positively hate this fucking place!"
And more definitive:
Delete"I absolutely, positively hate this fucking place!"
My antidote to the student's constant mantra of "you haven't covered that material" was to be very involved about four years ago in helping adopt use of lecture capture software at my University.
ReplyDeleteWe use a product that allows the professor to record everything they write and everything they say in a format that can be accessed via Blackboard once the data has been processed and uploaded. I use a tablet PC hooked to the LCD overhead projector so I can solve problems directly from the posted notes: specifically we use Tegrity, which is awesome!
Once uploaded, I can go and see if a specific student watched the video of a specific lecture, how many times and for how long, etc.. Since I started using this product (I was part of a pilot project in 2007), the few students who have DARED to make this incredibly BOGUS claim that we "never went over this material" are directed to Chapter X Lecture Y to actually see what was taught. After hemming and muttering about their schedule and missing the actual class, I tell them rather kindly that if they were so busy, that's why we have the ability to "attend class" via Tegrity and that they are expected to go their FIRST to watch the video and take notes before coming to office hours to ask what we did in class last Tuesday. It allows us to completely boomerang the onus of responsibility totally to the students to be mature and responsible when they miss class. Sick? Watch Tegrity. Overslept? Watch Tegrity. Deciding to extend your Spring Break an extra week? Watch Tegrity. Whatever lame-ass excuse your students could create, with the the odd dead Grandmother thrown in for grins and giggles, Watch Tegrity.
The students who don't or won't take notes in a large Chemistry lecture? I love these guys! They give me familiar faces to see in the sea of large classes (300+) as the semesters go by. They are huge moneymakers for the university: take the class without a real investment and fail it and then either change your major to avoid this subject OR retake the class and take it seriously.
Like all unforunate writing teachers forced to read draft after draft of student papers, I hold individual conferences with students to help them improve their writing. The class before conferences, I used to give a little speech about the necessity of taking notes in conference. Few people bothered, so I thought "fuck it" and stopped giving the speech. Now, no one takes notes at all. Most just sit there and stare at me, secure in the belief that they're the world's concentration champion.
ReplyDeleteUntil the night before the final paper is due. Inevitably, I get panicked emails: "You wrote on my paper that I should develop the third paragraph more. I know we went over this in conference, but I can't remember what you meant by this. Could you please refresh my memory?"
My favorite evaluation once said: "She told us how to improve our papers, but she didn't write it down for us. She just had us in for a conference and expected that we would write it down ourselves!"
Ah, yes, the one-on-one conference where they claim, "I'll remember this." And they never do. How hard is to just to write it down? I don't get it.
DeleteNavy and joint-service training centers have a time-trusted instructor technique when going over "essential" material likely to appear on an exam"
ReplyDeleteThe instructor stomps his/her foot three times and says something like: "this is material you can expect on the test..."
It has a made a successful transition to my classrooms. Like the all but M-80 attention-getter described above...students often STILL don't write that part down.
I do this sometimes (I learned it from someone who instructed on weekends at the Airforce Academy). Now I'm just a stomping fool and students STILL don't write it down. They expect a study guide with all the notes I put on the board.
DeleteStrange. I have the opposite problem. They try and take down every single word on the slides if I use PowerPoint. They request the slides - I won't hand them out, so they try and copy down everything. This keeps them from thinking, and they can't answer the questions I ask.
ReplyDeleteSo I quit using PowerPoint. I put only those words on the board that I want them to write down, and review in the last minute of class if they have these words in their precious note-gadgets. Of course, the smartalecks just raise their iPads and take a picture every now and then. I'm okay with that when I'm wearing my hamster costume for "Introduction to Hamster Fur weaving", but generally not the rest of the time. I want them to write at least a few words on their own.
I wonder if it's something in the water?
Susie, me too! PowerPoint led to crazy copying-without-listening. So now I use overheads with much less text, and I can circle what's most important.
ReplyDeleteBut I would like to take this opportunity to thank my fifth-grade teacher, who taught us "double-entry" notetaking. He collected our social studies notebooks weekly, going over them to see that we were writing down what was important in what we read/heard on the right-hand side of each sheet of paper, and using the blank left-hand side to write down keywords, questions, and mini-outlines. It must have been tooth-grindingly awful to go through these notebooks every weekend, but he did, and that took me right through grad school and beyond. Thanks, Mr. B!
I had a seventh grade teacher who did something similar (though not every week - grading all that does sound exquisitely painful). But it's worth it even just to become more conscious of the fact that note-taking is a skill that can be learned and improved through practice.
DeleteIt amazes me how often they ignore my key phrases like, "this is important because," "the reason why we read this passage is because," "what you should get out of this reading is," or "the significance of this is." I say this at the beginning and the end, and even recap the big picture every few days. Yet I still hear whining that my exam questions were too vague (the questions that replicated the precise wording I used in lecture? which was also echoed on Blackboard? really?) or that they don't know what to focus on for the exam. I know it's not *me*, but it frustrates me that these students are considered worthy of analyzing to my clarity on evaluations.
ReplyDeleteSo is it that they don't take notes because they don't listen in the first place?
ReplyDeleteI think so.
DeleteFor me, the key thing that's missing in the students is a sense of discernment. Not everything I write on the board is actually worth writing down. Especially if we're brainstorming, I'm using the board as a place to park ideas that we'll come back to later. They may or may not turn out to be worthwhile, that's why we're having the conversation. As the dialogue continues, I tend to underline, box out, or otherwise signify the things that I think are important. And I've taken to captures images of the board with my cellphone camera and posting them to our CMS. Actually on the one classes' most recent papers, some of that conversation came back to me, so that was gratifying.
ReplyDeleteBut the bottom line for me is to make sure they have actually been taught what it means to pay attention and to take notes, cuz I don't think those are natural skills. I won't condemn a student whose prior education was deficient, I'll try and fix it. But once I have, I expect them to APPLY those skills and so to maintain them. Yep, good luck to me with that!
My students won't take notes until I have finished writing, and they get pissed because I go to erase the board.
ReplyDeleteKinda sad when the instructor writes really really slow and you see your students frantically taking notes like news-reporters at an auction.
I teach the dummy class by the way!