spring semester observations/highlights/random thoughts

I’ve obviously taken a little blogging hiatus. By the end of the spring semester, my wrists were so sore that I just couldn’t type anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. I knew I had two reports relating to committees I served on and three letters of recommendation to type, so I tried to minimize all other typing. It’s pretty sad that nowadays I can’t write anything of any substance longhand, so my typing hiatus meant a blogging hiatus. After about two weeks of only very light typing, my wrists feel much better—although they are still too sore for me to even think about doing any handstands.

Spring semester was wonderful in so many ways. It was my first post-dissertation semester and everything about it seemed a little brighter, a little sharper than the last several semesters. My classes all ended on high notes, with final conferences being across the board positive and final presentations being strong (not necessarily across the board but certainly overall).

Some observations/highlights/random thoughts about the semester:

• As far as I can tell, only one student plagiarized in any of my classes. As usual, the plagiarism was stupid and pointless—the stolen passage was in a different font from the rest of the paper, spaced differently, and included an external link. A quick google search revealed that the passage in question was lifted directly from sparknotes.com.
• Students this semester were less resistant to blogging than they were in the fall. The only change I made to my basic blogging requirement (post twice a week, respond to at least one classmate a week) is that instead of asking students to post a comment to any other classmates’ blog, I asked students to post a comment to a particular student’s blog. In one class, I created a rotating schedule of who was supposed to comment on whose blog for each week. In another class, students were already working in small groups (3-5 people), so I had them post comments to other group members’ blogs. I don’t know if this small change made the difference or if there’s something else at work.
• This semester, I used bloglines to keep track of students’ blogs, which made my life about a thousand times easier. Once I figure out how to export lists of subscriptions through bloglines, I think I can have students create bloglines accounts and subscribe to each others’ blogs.
• Between increased conferencing with my Comp 1 students and my use of audio comments for my Comp 2 students, I reduced my written comments on student work by about 85%. While there was no time savings (time was simply reallocated to conferencing and recording comments), I do believe my time was better spent. Students responded very positively to the increased conferencing and audio comments.

tags: audio_commentary  composition  teaching  

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