Week 3

As mentioned last week, from the instructor's perspective, things are still moving slowly as, although it is week 3, because of constantly changing class lists, I haven't yet got onto the really serious work. Then, this week began with two free days caused by snow. I sometimes think that students don't view their instructors as human and think that we don't like having days off. Of course we do, but we are used to thinking more long term and have to worry about how we will get through the course work. Furthermore, I don't know if students actually know but Yuk has strict regulations about how long a semester should be in order for it to be considered valid. If lots of days are canceled because of snow, the university would have to compensate in some way by for example taking days off our spring break or extending the length of the semester.

I am glad that I am not the president having to make decisions about whether or not to cancel lessons. Unlike in other institutions, our president seems quite decisive. A friend of mine who works in Sabanci university had to go to class on Monday - spent most of the morning getting there and was then told that she could head for home at 2pm. All in all, it was a frustrating day for her as she spent most of it traveling and got very little work done. I also added to her frustrations by informing her on Monday afternoon that our president had already made the decision to cancel lessons on Tuesday. Her comment was "what a wonderful university you work for...". How many of us would agree with her?

As I write this, the sun is shining and temperatures feel like they are well into their teens. In the course of a few days there has suddenly been a dramatic change in the weather. This helps one think of Summer and the end of the semester - although we are only 3 weeks in. Still, it give the impetus to keep going.

Having had two days "off" this week, I am now concerned about how I will manage in the coming weeks. I of course didn't take the days off but used them to catch up on some "administrative" tasks. Most of the time was spent reading and responding to students' blogs. When explaining how do do a blog I showed students some examples from last semester. As in most cases, students were worried about how much they should write. I showed them examples of both extremes and I was quite surprised to find that most of them have gone for erring on the side of caution and writing lots. In particular I remember one student who reflected on the difficulties he had in writing 500 words for the diagnostic essay. When I finished reading his blog I quickly pasted it into MS Word and did a word count - 1,303. I don't believe he realized how much he was writing in his blog. One of my main goals in asking students to do this blog, is to give them the experience of writing in a more relaxed setting and allowing them to write as much/little as they want and not have to worry about being graded. I will of course continue to read the blogs each week but I hope students can appreciate that I may not always have time to respond with individual comments each and every week - especially during the weeks in which I am grading essays and conducting tutorials.

During the one and only lesson of this week, I gave feedback on the diagnostic essays. I know that students don't particularly enjoy these types of lessons as they appear to be simply a list of what not to do (after you have actually done them all). However, as the course progresses and they stop doing what they are not supposed to do, these feedback sessions will get shorter and shorter as they start doing what they should do. I must remember however to make sure that I give some positive feedback and congratulate them on their achievements and reinforce what is being done correctly.