Week 4

At last we are getting down to some serious work. I am somewhat concerned that we haven't started work on writing our first essay yet, but I always find that it is a good idea to read, discuss and assess understanding of another text before beginning work on a text that will play a major role in assessment. To this end, students were assigned the reading of what is perhaps the "easiest" (but not shortest) text in their course book. As with last semester, at the beginning of the first lesson of this week, I solicited students overall impressions of the texts, its level of difficulty, level of interest, complexity of ideas etc. The overall impression was that the text was eminently readable and students felt that they understood it rather well. And so...on with the quiz - which again was judged to be fairly basic, didn't contain any tricky vocabulary/grammatical structures and which was straightforward and what one would expect. The grading was again done by peers and the appropriate answer for each question, identified in the text and then discussed. Students were again disappointed with grades but I was in no way surprised although I am still trying to develop a theory as to why students perform so badly. The most reasonable explanation appears to be that students are trying to answer the questions from their own perspective rather than reporting what the text has to say. As very few of them have done text based writing in the past, this is understandable. So, hopefully the easy solution will be to teach them how to incorporate ideas from other writers' texts into their own writing. As with previous semesters I also found that students were often unable to accurately grade their peer's work - often marking it correct when in fact it was wrong. This could be due to them not understanding the answer being presented in the text, not understanding what their peer had actually written or possibly even simply being unable to declare a friend's work as "wrong" and allocate it a "0".

Although we had no snow days this week, I am pleased to be able to report that I succeeded in reading all students' blogs - although admittedly I didn't post a comment for them all - but I did for most. As soon as I finish writing this, it will be time to return to them and read entries for week 4.

I have also now created a profile (with very basic information) in Facebook, with the intention of experiencing what it could contribute to one's social life. To date, two students have invited me to become "friends" and so I wait patiently to see what this "friendship" will involve.