Just Wait....

I'm nowhere near retiring, and each semester I wonder if students can get worse. And you know what? They can!

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From KPNX.com in Phoenix:

An Arizona mother said she hopes cruel birthday cupcakes given to her teenage daughter will become a “teachable moment” about the horrors of the Holocaust.

Deborah Muller, of Paradise Valley, said her daughter’s 14th birthday party this month included cupcakes that guests were allowed to frost. Two girls, who Muller said are friends of her daughter, decorated cupcakes with chocolate swastikas, even though the birthday girl is Jewish, according to KPNX-TV.

Muller said in a now-deleted Facebook post that the girls told her they did it to “be funny.” She said the teens all recently learned about the Holocaust in school, and were aware of the symbol’s meaning.

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I love the detail that the students had been learning about the Holocaust, and my only response is: "Not much."

Early Thirsty: Can a Paperless Classroom Work? From Alex Outside Allentown.

I'm sorry to say I've invested the past 13 weeks trying to make a completely paperless classroom work, mostly because my college has mandated it. No paper. No copying. No printing. Everything online through a large and powerful course management system.

And it's been a nightmare. I've always been tech-y, so a lot of this was familiar to me. But what I cannot seem to do is guarantee that my students have SEEN, TOUCHED, or READ any of the pertinent material I distribute, which goes from a syllabus to assignments to lessons. I'm a little document-heavy, or so I'm told, so it adds up to about 50 pages of stuff I've made available over the first 90% of the semester.

Never have I had so many idiotic questions about due dates, policies, or criteria. I'm constantly reminding them of the CONTENT section of our CMS, re-sending links. If I tell them to read something, I can SEE that they've not logged in an accessed the file. It's NOT the same as handing them a piece of paper in person, pointing to a paragraph, circling a date.

And I know I should make them responsible, and I know that in the end they must want to access this information and benefit from it.

But far too much of my time this semester has been spent begging them to read the distributed course material that is designed to help them. I'm very curious about your experiences.

Q: Can a paperless classroom work? How do you increase the chance the "available" material gets used and read?

Tuesday Open Forum.