So, I have just finished calculating midterm grades (they are due at 9 a.m. on the Friday before spring break for some reason), and the results confirm my impression that one of my two comp classes is the Kingdom of the Clueless. Thirteen of them, out of twenty, have a grade in the C range or lower. One of those is a classic "ghost student" who showed up to the first day of class and then disappeared, but the rest have fully earned those grades. I don't think I'm that tough. There are three students in my other section of comp with Cs, and none with anything lower. They've had the same instructions, the same activities, mostly-the-same everything. This particular section simply ignores all directions, spoken or written, and all examples.
I can understand how visible bad habits, like arriving to class late or doing the bare minimum in peer workshops, spread among a given group of students. If you see other people doing something, it becomes normalized, and you figure you might as well do it too. It's a bad dynamic from the instructor's point of view, but at least I understand how it works and where it comes from. In this group, though, all but a handful of the students seem to have become identically clueless in ways that ought to be invisible to each other. For example, one of the assignments in this class is to read, summarize, and evaluate an academic journal article in your intended major field. I've been using some variation on this assignment for over fifteen years. They see multiple examples from previous students. There are some predictable places where most students have difficulty -- no freshmen are very good at the evaluating part, and lots of them struggle with identifying main ideas and central arguments -- and the occasional one-off error (there's always that one kid who decides an alternative-medicine website is a journal article). But mostly, they sort of do what they were asked.
This semester? An amazingly high percentage of students -- but only in this one section -- seem to have interpreted this assignment to mean "Write a personal essay about why you're interested in your major." I have literally no idea how they GOT this notion.
And why is the Clueless Class always the one that meets at 11:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Is that time slot jinxed?
I can understand how visible bad habits, like arriving to class late or doing the bare minimum in peer workshops, spread among a given group of students. If you see other people doing something, it becomes normalized, and you figure you might as well do it too. It's a bad dynamic from the instructor's point of view, but at least I understand how it works and where it comes from. In this group, though, all but a handful of the students seem to have become identically clueless in ways that ought to be invisible to each other. For example, one of the assignments in this class is to read, summarize, and evaluate an academic journal article in your intended major field. I've been using some variation on this assignment for over fifteen years. They see multiple examples from previous students. There are some predictable places where most students have difficulty -- no freshmen are very good at the evaluating part, and lots of them struggle with identifying main ideas and central arguments -- and the occasional one-off error (there's always that one kid who decides an alternative-medicine website is a journal article). But mostly, they sort of do what they were asked.
This semester? An amazingly high percentage of students -- but only in this one section -- seem to have interpreted this assignment to mean "Write a personal essay about why you're interested in your major." I have literally no idea how they GOT this notion.
And why is the Clueless Class always the one that meets at 11:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Is that time slot jinxed?
6 comments:
I have definitely had that class. It's one of the reasons I hate to teach two sections of the same class: vastly different responses to the same methods just frustrate me. Funny, but this semester my problem class also meets at 11. They're clearly not early-morning people, but why do they have to sleepwalk through my class?
After reviewing my records of the last FIVE semesters, I have come to the conclusion that the 11:00 Tuesday / Thursday slot is most definitely cursed! Yet, it's clearly not possible for the most dedicated slackers to schedule ALL of their classes for 11:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so where are they the rest of the time? Do they migrate? Are there different Cursed Hours in different buildings around campus? I feel like someone should get a grant to study this...
I currently have a problem class on TR at 11 as well. And it was the same a few years ago. I will never schedule myself at that time again.
I suspect that the connection between certain time slots and lower average grades may have to do with registration time. Those time slots are, for whatever reason, less popular than others, and hence are populated with students who registered later.
Funny thing, though, I've usually had pretty good luck with 8 a.m. classes (except for one semester when the 8 a.m. class was the one and only section of Basic Comp). You'd think early mornings would be the least popular time, and they are -- but the students who DO choose that time are mostly just fine.
I have two sections of a literature survey this semester. On the midterm exam, one section scored an average of a full twenty points lower than the other. Students in the weak section are also more likely not to have turned in their essays on time--or at all. In this case, my good section is 11, and my not-so-good is at 1. Besides time of day, the only big difference is book ownership: more than half the students in the later class do not own books or bring them to class.
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