on not commenting on students' final projects

• Students seem more interesting in listening to audio comments or having conversations with me than in reading my comments. (I say “seem” because I haven’t collected data in any organized fashion, so my conclusions are based on purely anecdotal data.)
• Students seem more likely to engage with my audio comments or comments made in conferences than with written comments. In other words, students’ main concern with written comments seems to be to find out what their grade is. With audio comments and comments made in conferences, students seem more likely to perceive the situation as a dialog in which they can—and must—participate.
• Audio comments and comments made in conferences seem to come across as less directive than written commentary, resulting in students being more likely to carefully consider my comments and less likely to simply “do what the teacher said.”

This semester, I am not writing a single “final comment” on any of the three classes’ worth of projects I’ve collected in the past week. Instead, I am reading everything, making notes on my laptop, and holding “extended office hours” next week during which students can drop by and talk about their projects. Students who don’t want to talk about their projects can either not come by or can come by and just pick up their work.

Reading the projects in anticipation of the discussions I’ll have when students stop by is much more fun than reading them and writing copious comments and then being irritated when a large minority of students don’t bother to pick up their projects (and my comments) or wondering if the students ever read or thought about what I said. And I much prefer to spend the last few days of the semester having in-depth discussions with students rather than shutting myself up in my office and getting hand cramps.

tags: audio_commentary  composition  student_work  teaching  

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