Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
Woe
17 May 2004, 3:09 pm
Taken from today's prep lit lecture, here is Pedablogue's guide to...Writing a Better Essay
- Answer the question. That is all.
- Check that what you have said is what you think you have said, particularly concerning spelling and vocabulary. Consider, for example, how many times "public" has been expressed as "pubic".
- Don't strain for effect. Simple language is best.
- Follow requirements concerning referencing. In this course, MLA is the style guide.
- Trade favours in exchange for proofreading.
Today's recommended course of action was: if you started your essay the night before, this time start it two nights before the due date. You'll double the amount of preparation time it gives you!
I would tell them to start it three weeks beforehand as they are advised to elsewhere, but given the number of times I did that myself (0/zero), that would make me a big singing hypocrite.
Duplication
17 May 2004, 1:14 pm
Malheureusement, it looks as if I am not the only one to have come up with this nattiest of usernames for my teaching blog.A google search produced these two links, both blogging under the name of Pedablogue:
Mike Arnzen (link appears to be inactive at present but it is linked to from many sites)
Class. Dissed. Missed (at Live Journal)
As the last one to the party of using this blog name, I'm not quite sure what to do, other than adding "New Zealand" as a sub-header. It's a bit of a cheat but it works in most circumstances. Four million citizens can't be wrong, right?
Fear
17 May 2004, 12:23 pm
When feeling the fear of teaching, the key to doing it anyway may be as simple as journeying to the bottom of a mug of trim single shot hazelnut latte.I spend my weekends questioning my competence and my weekdays pushing ahead with the tasks at hand.
Less
17 May 2004, 12:16 pm
In last year's course surveys for my Foundation arts course, one student requested more films and less writing for the film studies unit. In the spirit of that, we have been watching as many films as the week can hold, which is basically one or two a week instead of one a fortnight. This means that periods of commentary and writing have had to be quite intensive.Today's exercise went really well. Last Wednesday I gave each student a personalised writing task based on my perception of their strengths and interests and tied to the viewing and discussion we'd had already. Today they had to interview each other in pairs to find out what their partner wrote on, then introduce that material to the class.
I stood at the whiteboard, markers in hand, and took notes on what they said under the headings "question", "argument" and "technical terms".
The level of competence concerning the technical language was higher than I expected, as was the amount of insight into the films concerned.
I think that student learning in this unit might have been facilitated by the sense of compromise and good will that pervades the classroom, ie, you guys like Jackie Chan? Okay, let's learn film studies by watching Jackie Chan movies.
Next week we switch to ensemble film. I'm wondering if my choice of Traffic has been entirely wise, since if I had trouble following the plot, how will a class with NESB learners in it do? On the other hand, there's lots of drugs and guns, so that will up their participatory willingness.
Au Revoir
16 May 2004, 6:07 pm
I've deleted the archives link since, as Des explained to me when he gave me the code, the permalinks confuse the archives links and all you get is the error page. Once I've figured an alternative I'll let you know. In the meantime, use the "retreat ... attack" links at left to get to the bloggy goodness.Anti-anticipation
16 May 2004, 5:36 pm
Right now, I don't feel up to giving my lecture tomorrow. This seems to happen whenever I come to something in my prep lit course that I haven't already been taught by someone else; in other words, the parts whose framework I've come up with independently.I suspect this isn't unrelated to my anxiety about my diploma dissertation, which is due in around four weeks and for which I still have a great deal of writing to do. Whether it's post-PhD exhaustion continuing three years after the fact or not I don't know, but the thought of making an original contribution to any kind of knowledge at the moment just makes me want to build a little fort out of blankets on my living room floor and stay there until the dogs get hungry.
On the other hand, I did find this in "Massification, Internationalization and Globalization" (Scott, 1998), which made me nod my head:
Clearly there is a potential conflict between how universities sell themselves to potential overseas customers and how they sell themselves to the national politicians (who provide their budgets) and to their own citizens, whether taxpayers or students. For the first group claims of exclusivity, even élitism, are a come-on; back at home they are a turn-off. But ... the presence of both international students and non-standard students (i.e. the new students sucked into universities by mass expansion) encourages universities to revise their courses, in terms of content and delivery, and to question the traditional discipline-bound structures that dominated the curriculum in élite higher education systems. (p. 109)
Leaving the argument aside, the use of the come-on/turn-off juxtaposition is the best thing I've read all weekend.
Decision
15 May 2004, 9:20 pm
I must decide whether, while taking a bath which I shall shortly run, to browse The Globalization of Higher Education (ed. Scott, 1998) or to eat another bowl of Caramello ice-cream.Perhaps I could eat the ice-cream in bed.
Back
14 May 2004, 2:03 pm
Excuse my absence yesterday. I paid the price for avoiding marking on Wednesday night and attempting to cover up the avoiding with alcohol, both by feeling very seedy all day and having to mark such a large number of essays I feel ashamed to quantify it here. I was at work for about thirteen hours.However, they are now done and wait in the office to be collected, transformed into works of graffiti art by my extensive comments, and with the grade and further typewritten comments stapled in back.
Although the range of understanding of the conventions of essay formatting was variable, most students showed a grasp of what it was they were being asked to do in terms of writing paragraphs and creating an argument. Actual expression tended to veer between overdetermined and too informal. One poor soul actually included my doctoral thesis in her bibliography. I see no way in which eighty thousand of my abstruse musings could help an eight hundred word essay, but I've been wrong before.
Limey
12 May 2004, 9:50 pm
Sometimes several elective nightcaps are all that stand between one and a tidal wave of marking.Essays versus tequila is by no means a perpetual war, but on the occasions when it arises there is a predictable victor.
All this is not unrelated to an afternoon spent wrangling data projectors, the last round of which remained recalcitrant and out of focus, which is either due to a fading bulb or a faulty tape.
To find out which would mean watching Mr Nice Guy again and, my newfound enthusiasm for Sammo Hung notwithstanding, I just don't think I can do that three times in three days.
Teach-in
11 May 2004, 8:30 pm
I have joined an on-line discussion group made up of teachers in the various tertiary institutions in my area. It is quite a lively place and I have already been engaged in a warm and friendly sort of discussion with a lecturer in a different department here on campus. Many people are skeptical of the extent to which interdisciplinary discussion can help academics, but I think because this group is focused on teaching and not research, the opportunities for speaking to rather than past each other are great.And with the current state of mild cultural and institutional panic about the place of international students within our culture and education systems, I am in the rather good position of keeping cool due to my proximity to the straight dope, by which I mean first-hand knowledge about the students themselves.
It's nice to know something people are actually interested in. Poetics of Robin Hyde, anybody?
Foggy
11 May 2004, 8:22 pm
The fog of marking by which my weekend was defined remains over my head, which is to say that I didn't get it finished. Instead I read Whale Rider in preparation for the last two days' lectures, wrote the exam for my prep literature course, and then went out for dinner at my friends' house. All that worked out rather well in terms of meeting at least some of my deadlines, but I still have more than twenty essays to get through before Friday.One can only do so much in a day however, and my work-cum-entertainment this evening has been to watch Jackie Chan in Mr Nice Guy in preparation for tomorrow's film studies class. My charges got their novel folios back today and even those who had reason to be disappointed, with both me and with themselves, coped okay. In general the class atmosphere is positive and students seem to feel they can talk to me about anything, which is what I want. One student is bringing some friends to watch tomorrow's film, which is great. I like the idea of my class as a place people can drop into for a little rest and recreation as well as learning.
Teaching film is taking up much of my energy. I have perhaps got too many films in relation to how much content I can get through, but I think this serves to make it more engaging. Students don't mind having to work hard when they're also being entertained, although they may feel differently when I give them homework assignments tomorrow.
Top-Up
11 May 2004, 8:15 pm
Thanks to inacrumbling for adding me to her buddy list, both here and in my other place. I checked out her entries which put me right back feeling like a student, which to me doesn't seem so long ago but when I think about it in actual years ... well, it's eleven years since I was a first-year, wide-eyed, ready to learn and worried about my hair.Well, some things don't change, anyway.