Peer Mentors

One of the things that helped me get through my MA was having peer mentors. The program I was in didn't have assigned mentors, like the writer of tale 101, but there were two students in the cohort above us that seemed to take on that role themselves. It was really helpful to have people that offered themselves as references for any issues that we were having. The fielded questions that ranged from teaching issues to adjusting to a graduate workload. Even small tips, like "Make sure you mark any emails you send to Dr. So-and-So urgent or she won't read them and you won't get a response," helped us maneuver through this new terrain. There have been students here at Ball State that have done similar things, though I think not having a designated community area from grad students to congregate makes it a little more difficult. All in all, there's a lot of help that grad students get from the department and the faculty, but there tends to be a certain type of information given by peer mentors that is invaluable.

There are no stupid questions?

In my mentor's class on Friday we were discussing causal arguments. As one of the activities for the day my mentor had the students come up with 'Why?' questions. The book we're using had suggested this as a method for choosing a topic for a cause-and-effect paper. The students broke up into small groups to come up with ten different questions and then my mentor wrote some of them on the board. Since it was Friday, everybody was having a little fun with the questions. Why do girls wear Uggs? Why don't people flush the toilet? Why do people have ugly pets? The atmosphere in the classroom was light, if not a little goofy, and there was a lot of laughing. Then my mentor went on to explain the primary research aspect of the paper and asked if anyone had questions. That's when one of the of the students said, "This might be stupid, but can we interview ourselves?" And my mentor, having gotten caught up in the silly atmosphere of the classroom, responded, "That is stupid." Everybody giggled, including the student that asked the question. However, after class my mentor felt horrible for responding that way. The student in question has always had a goofy way about him and he tends to joke the most in class, so it didn't bother him at all, but my mentor still felt bad that she had called him stupid in front of the class. Monday, class went on as usual and it didn't cause any affect on that particular student's participation, but it is probably a good idea to make sure we don't get too caught up in the atmosphere of our students that we might accidentally offend one of them.

Freshman Comp as Disaster Response

Recently, I started reading this article by James Pangborn called "Freshman Composition as Disaster Response." I haven't finished it, so I can't actually say if it's all that great, but the content is pretty interesting. In the article he compares the way Freshman deal with writing assignments to how people deal with disasters. One of the main messages, that I've read so far, was that the effects created by the way students deal with their writing can be what lead them to plagiarize. In the article he talks about how many Freshman, like people in "high-stakes, time-sensitive" situations, tend to struggle with effective time management, they develop tunnel vision, which affects their ability to make decisions and evaluate consequences. When they get caught in these problems their first instinct is to revert back to something that has worked for them in the past. For Freshman writer, that tends to be the way they were taught to write in high school. That's about as far into the article as I've gotten, but it seems to make sense. Freshman don't deal with pressure very well and deadlines can create the time-sensitive situations that Pangborn was talking about. In those types of situations students fall back on what's comfortable or they may have a higher risk of cheating. Those are things that I'm going to have to take into account in my own classroom and try to develop my lesson plans in a way that deters that type of thinking.

Grading

We're getting into the time in the semester where my mentor is involving us in grading. Grading has to be my least favorite part of teaching. I like reading students' papers. I'm always excited to see what they have done with the topics they have been working on. I think what I don't like about grading is the fact that I don't feel like I can spend as much time as I would like on each paper. I just don't have the time,, especially if I want to get them back in a decent amount of time. That means that I have to focus on what I believe are the most important or most helpful things. This gets frustrating because I want to talk about everything and I know that I can't. The other problem is trying to write my feedback in a way that the student will understand. With freshmen it's difficult to know whether or not they will know what I'm talking about. Hopefully, over time it will get a little better.

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

Between our textbook review and having to order our books this week I have been doing a lot of thinking about composition textbooks. One of the biggest challenges for me is the price of textbooks. I have such a a hard time justifying the use of a textbook that would cost the students more than $40-50. I know that the content should probably be more important than the price, but having been one of those students that had to purchase those books and still getting notices about my own student loans I can't help but take the price of a textbook into consideration. I was one of those students who tried to pay for all of my books out of pocket if possible and sometimes that was a struggle. When I was still majoring in the sciences, I paid almost $800 for all of my books and equipment for one semester. That probably wouldn't have happened, except that semester all of my instructors chose new editions of textbooks that I couldn't find used copies of. My struggle now is that I love Dr. Ranieri's multimodal textbook, but I believe it costs around $90. I think the students would get a lot out of it, but at the same time how much are they going to be able to focus on school work when they are worried about having enough money to pay for it?

Just Let me Help You!

Tale 67 really struck a cord with me. My last university had a pretty low retention rate for undergads. We had a lot of commuter, nontraditional, and part-time students. The majority of the students were working at least one job, though I would estimate that a large majority were working at least two, and many of them had a family they were taking care of as well. I worked with students that were consistently late to class because they had to drive across town from work, students that had to miss classes because their child was sick, students whose jobs scheduled mandatory training the same time as our class, and even a couple of students who had lost their homes in the middle of the semester. There are so many obstacles that students have to deal with that its no wonder some of them decide that its not worth the effort and drop out. It's disheartening sometimes when we're not able to help students, especially when they've put in all the work, but I've come to understand that most of the time we can really only help them with what's going on in our course. 

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Feedback Go Down

          A recent comment by my mentor last week has got me thinking about instructor feedback. She was handing back the first paper and she told the students that they shouldn't be frightened by the amount of writing that they saw on their papers. She didn't want them to think that she was trying to tear their papers apart, she just wanted them to know what they could work on for revision. At the end though, she mentioned that sometimes she forgets to put positive feedback on the papers and that they shouldn't take that as a personal slight. I was a little surprised because I have always tried to give students at least some kind of positive reinforcement on all of their assignments. Not that I don't give them critiques as well, but I feel like sometimes instructors are so focused on finding what's wrong with the paper that they don't notice what the students may have done right. Most of the students in our classes are not English majors and many of them are not confident writers. Being too/solely negative in your comments can have a damaging effect.

          The worst case of damaging feedback I've seen was in the second year of my MA. A previous student came to me to talk about an assignment he was doing for his current English class. He was extremely upset because on the second page of his paper the instructor had written that she didn't read the rest of the paper because the first part was too bad. I was shocked. Had this student been one of my strongest writers? No. Did he struggle sometimes with grammar? Yes. Was his writing bad enough that it hindered the meaning of his papers? Not at all. I was so mad at this instructor (and I still am! Your still on my list lady!). I knew that this student had always come up with great topics to write about and good ideas about those topics. He simply struggled with more of the grammatical aspects of writing, which was common at that school because we had a lot of students that came from very large, underfunded high schools. And yes, sometimes I had to get on this particular student about proofreading his papers, but now he was telling me that he didn't even see a point to turning anything else in. He was afraid to go talk to the instructor because he thought she would just tear him down further. He was even considering just failing the class (it was too late to drop) because he said the comments on his first paper were similar. This student did need guidance in his writing and he did need to have a lot of critiques on his papers. However, the negativity of the instructors comments and her failure to acknowledge that he had any strengths in his writing made him just give up. To me the point of FYC classes isn't to weed out the bad writers, it's to help develop those writers so that they can be successful in the future and sometimes that development needs to include building their confidence.