Thoughts on Teaching – 05/16/2012 – Wrapping up the semester
I know I’m a bit late here, as I finished up the semester almost a week ago now, but things have not slowed down since. Now that we have time to work on our new house, we’ve been doing that every day. As well, my wife graduated with her BA over last weekend, so we had celebrations for her graduation. Also, Diablo III came out yesterday, and that is eating up my free time as well. So, summary of all of that is, it’s been busy.
However, I did want to wrap up the semester here. It was a pretty good semester overall. I tried out some new material, writing a new lecture and piloting some new assignments in my classes. Both my new in-class activities and the chapter quiz activities that I was using were quite successful and will be part of my core redesign next semester in my classes. The base class went well also, with few major problems. There were a few instances of cheating to deal with, and I didn’t devote as much time to the class in the second half of the semester because of our house hunting. Overall, it was at least a typical semester. I crunched some of the numbers from the semester, and it was about as bad as normal in the raw numbers. That’s the way with community colleges, we have a high non-success (a D, F, or withdrawal) rate. My overall non-success rate for the semester was 44%. So, 44% of the students who started the semester finished with a grade of D, F, or W. As I said, it is sad, but that is typical. We have a large portion of the population who is on the edge of whether they should be in college or not. For a lot of them, they are trying their best, but they really can’t deal with the level of work required for a college education. For others, they don’t really want to be there. They are in college because it seems like the right thing to do, or they have been pressured in by their family, or they just don’t have anything else to do. A lot of those don’t make it very far. Another group fall victim to the too-many-obligations curse. They are a full-time student, work full time, have family to take care of, and so forth. School starts out as a priority but fades over the semester. Even worse are those who are teetering on the edge of being able to do school and then have something bad happen – with a job, family, health, or something else. All of those things contribute to the high non-success rate. In fact, in my class, if you show up and do all the work, you are probably going to get a C or better, so almost all of those who are not successful are that way because of the reasons above. It makes it hard to fix from my end, because there is little that I can do in my class to make it better for those students.
Anyway, as I said, I just wanted to wrap up the semester here. I’ll have more substantial posts later, but this will tide everyone over, I hope.
Thoughts on Education – 4/29/2012 – Technology in the classroom – iPads and more
I have been saving up quite a few articles over my inactive time the last month or so, and today I want to turn to a couple that address technology in the classroom. Technology is often presented as the cure-all for education, and I will admit as much guilt as far as this goes as anyone else. I am always out looking for the new piece of technology (although often I can’t afford it), and I will often then sit down and think about how I could use it in the classroom. Unfortunately, a lot of what I would like to do with technology, namely engage the students more directly, would be difficult without all of the students having the same access to the same technology. This can be fixed through things like classroom sets of technology instruments, but that is an inelegant solution at best.
We have done several of those things at my community college in the past and present. A couple of years ago, we acquired a couple of sets of clickers, when that was seen as the latest tool for attracting student interest. We also had a push for getting online classes to think about using Second Life for a short period of time. Both of those technologies seemed limited and untried at the time, and I never found any interest in adopting them. Neither went far at the college, although I do think we have a couple of people still using clickers, and we do teach some of our gaming in Second Life. The question of the day on this topic is, of course, iPads. They are the latest thing, and I am part of a faculty workgroup that has gotten iPads as a test piece for our own educational use as well as overseeing the deployment and use of classroom sets of iPads. The question will be if this is another short-spike-of-interest device or if it has a long shelf life in education.
The latter option is reflected in this article, titled “How the iPad is Changing Education.” Although the article is more speculative than directly tied to evidence (probably because of the short time these devices have been really available), the article does point to some increase in learning and success among students using iPads. Of more interest is this point: “In the meantime, the devices make a great tool for self-directed, independent learning. There’s no shortage of one-off educational apps on any given subject, from American History to advanced biology.” Of course, this requires engaged students, and use outside of a classroom set (or time set aside in class to use the iPads for this purpose). Still, that is certainly what I have found as I have looked around for possible apps for use in the classroom myself. I can find dozens of whiteboard and projection apps, but the actual learning apps for the classroom are scarce. However, from teaching American history, I can certainly vouch for the number of American history apps out there, most of them informative and of very uneven quality. Few have much in the way of classroom application, although I have found a few. So, the iPad, as it stands right now is much more an information-retreival device than an active-use device in the classroom. As the article notes at the end, the real strength of the iPad for classroom use comes in the ability to make your own books and access iTunes U. As those areas develop more, there might be some possible in-class uses for them, but they still remain mostly passive presenters of information. I’ll be curious when the first truly in-class, adaptive, learning app comes along. Has anyone found one yet?
As this article notes, the issue is also not just what you can access through a device like the iPad, but also how the iPad is used. If it is used, as I noted above, as a substitute textbook, then that’s all it is. The students will ignore it just as they ignore the current textbooks today. This is my greatest fear of our adoption, that we will not find enough content out there and not have enough time ourselves to develop new, and the iPads will end as just a fancy way to access content, leaving it relatively unnecessary. It will then be a neat trick, and not much more. This article comes back to the whiteboard idea again. We will have a new academic building where our iPads are going to key into Apple TVs in the room and hopefully be able to interact with smart boards. I might get more use out of the iPad as a teaching tool, and whiteboarding might be a good way to get students working with each other. We shall see.
However, without the new building, I have been struggling to figure out how to use this new technology in the classroom. That’s why this title caught my attention – “Five Ways to Bring High-Tech Ideas into Low-Tech Classrooms” These ideas are interesting enough to detail a bit here:
- Put the Facebook page on paper – Start up something that the students can use as a reading log or something like that. Basically, it’s a way to create a live blog of material going on in the classroom and outside. The students can see each other’s blogs and like them. Status updates, posting of pictures, linking, etc. can all take place. This is the most promising use of the iPad in the classroom that I have come across, as a platform to extend what is going on outside of class into the classroom as well.
- Build a classroom search engine – less interesting to me because I tried this before. I started using wikis to create a classroom definition bank starting about 4 years ago. I never was able to use it with any real success, but it might be useful someday for something like this.
- Tweet to Learn – OK. I don’t use Twitter. I probably should, but I don’t. Why should I? You tell me how it could be useful in a classroom situation.
- Encourage students to “chat” – an in-class chatroom is something I’ve been toying with for a while. Maybe this coming semester, as part of my broader changes.
- Talk the Text Talk – OK. No. Not going to do this, especially not in college
Anyway, I thought those ideas were interesting enough as part of what we could all be doing more of. I’m also getting a bit more desperate about how I’m going to use the iPads in the classroom. The college has spent quite a bit of money to get me one and have several classroom sets. I’m just afraid I don’t know what to do with them, and so I’m trying to think about it more and more.
As a side note, I start the final grading push for the semester tomorrow, so I may not be very regular here for a while. We close on our house this Friday as well, so that will also bring a whole new set of obligations.
Thoughts on Education – 04/28/2012 – Mentoring college students
I went up to campus yesterday on my day off to a meeting centered around a new push to mentor our students. I have been on our college’s retention committee for two years now, and we are starting to see some of our ideas floating up through the bureaucracy of the college and becoming an actual part of what we do. Some of the changes so far have been with regard to easing registration, requiring students to visit their instructors to get drop slips signed, introducing a small set of students to a “how to do college” class, and so forth. The faculty side of things has largely been left out of the changes so far, but one of the things that I have been pushing for is starting to come into existence. I believe that students should have actual faculty advisors that they talk to, not for setting up schedules, but for more general college advice and help making it through the college process. Thus, we now have the beginning of a mentoring program. It will be slowly launched in a pilot program this fall, and the meeting yesterday was the first in a series of meetings to gain interest and see who would be willing to use their time for this.
The program itself, from what I understand, will be aimed fairly narrowly at first. We will be advising first-time-in-college, first-semester, full-time students. Out of our 5000 or so students, that means about 3-400 students that we will be directly mentoring in this first batch. I fully applaud this idea. I would love to see it expanded soon, but I know that it has to start somewhere. As the program sits now, we will be given 5-10 of these students to mentor, with the expectation that we will try to meet with them around three times a semester, serving as a person they can talk to about college, get advice from, and use as a sounding board. These are students who need all the help they can get, but, honestly, there’s probably not a single student on campus who could not use some set of advice.
This was echoed in this article from the Chronicle recently. In it, community colleges are admonished to stop blaming others for the problems of students not succeeding and doing what they can internally to improve this. I think the retention work we have been doing, and this mentoring program as a part of it, is a good step along the way toward creating better chances for success among our students. As well, the second point from the article is also part of this. She says that colleges, especially community colleges, need to be better at guiding students through the process. Right now, our students, without a serious amount of advice outside of preparing schedules each semester, blunder forward until they have reached enough credits to do something with them. For many, the idea of a degree plan, a goal outside of taking their “basics,” or even what it takes to graduate, is something that only the most academically involved and prepared students have. A mentoring program can help focus the students in on their plans and help with general academic planning throughout their career. If we can get them in, out, and done, we will be succeeding. The longer they take, the more likely they are to not succeed. As well, the less focused they are, the less likely they are to reach a satisfactory conclusion to their academic career. Hopefully this mentoring program can get them going with that.
Programs like this are also an answer to the question of how we measure student progress. Right now, we are in this wave of measuring, one that looks at the progress that students make academically as they proceed through college. This article from The New York Times illustrates that, discussing the need for something that can measure progress and pointing out the different ways this is currently done. I think an equally valid measure is what success the students have in reaching their goals, regardless of specific success in a specific course. With a mentoring and advising program, that can be helped, as we can work with students who are often lacking in a real idea of what they want to do. This group we will be dealing with is especially unconnected to the traditional measures of success and progress, as they have no family experience to fall back on as to what they should be doing in college. What they know is that they are supposed to go to college to get something (often undefined) and that by taking classes they will somehow get there. I know we are not the first place to ever put in place an advising program, and I know that success with the program will depend on both instructor and student participation. However, if we can even point half of these students in a more productive direction, then we will have success. If they can come out with a better idea of what they need to be doing, what classes will get them there, and what they can do with the classes/degree afterwards, then we will have helped them along the way.
Thoughts on Teaching – 4/24/2012 – An uninspiring class
It is always hard to get going and motivated toward the end of the semester. I’m tired, the students are tired, and everyone is just waiting on the end of the semester to get here. We all can’t wait for it all to be done, and this is always more true of the spring semester than the fall semester. These last couple of lectures are really rough to get through for that very reason, although if the classes can help support me, I can usually make it through them without too much trouble. Monday was a show in what that means. I teach two classes on Monday, one at 9:30am and one at 11am. The contrast between these two classes is stark.
In the 9:30 class, the students are generally good, paying attention and responding to the lecture. I am not the type of person who asks very many questions in lecture, so the response I am talking about is eye contact, nodding, smiling, and that sort of thing. It doesn’t take much of that to keep me going well. If you add in a few questions or comments from the students, then I can make it through a lecture just fine with no problems and some enthusiasm, even at this late date in the semester. The lecture covered roughly the period from 1980-1992, so I talked a lot about Reagan, spent some time on Iran-Contra, discussed the fall of the Soviet Union, played out the Persian Gulf War, and ended with the 1992 election. It is not, admittedly, the most exciting lecture, and I would love to divide it up into at least two lectures to hit some of those topics in more detail. However, it flows pretty well and is not too bad of a lecture. Most students at least find the Iran-Contra explanation to be interesting.
The other class was much different. It is my two-way video class, so I know that the high school students that I connect to will be completely unconnected. I don’t know if they are monitored on that end, but I get the feeling they are only vaguely paying attention, especially by this time in the semester. What was more of a problem was the students in front of me. The class originally had 15 people in it. Two have dropped, so technically there are 13 students in the class. However, on Monday, only 7 showed up, making it a tough class to begin with. Out of those 7, only 2 of the students were actually paying attention to me with any of those visual clues that I mentioned earlier. And even those two were obviously day dreaming by a certain point in the lecture. So, I just lost all interest in it myself. If the students aren’t into it, I can manufacture enthusiasm earlier in the semester, but, by this point, it can be a struggle. I turned into super-fast lecture mode, just spewing out the material, with little regard for the ability of my inattentive class to follow it. And, none of them protested, asked any questions, or even looked up at me. The result was that the lecture that took me about 70 minutes during the 9:30 class was over in 55 minutes in the 11am class.
That is what an uninspiring class can do, and why I just feel that the lecture style is killing me and my students after a certain point. I hope tomorrow will be better, but it was a forgettable day.
Thoughts on Education – 3/18/2012 – Comparing 5th graders to college students
My fifth grade boys brought home an interesting assignment on Monday. They had to write an outline for a “research” paper that they are working on. They had to pick a topic and then write a thesis statement. They had to put it all into the standard 5-paragraph essay format, putting in topic sentences for each paragraph and then listing 3 details they were going to put in each paragraph. What was interesting about that is that they really did not have a strong grasp on what a thesis statement was or how to put together the paragraphs. I saw the instructions that the teacher gave them, and it’s not like they hadn’t been taught this to a certain extent, but the boys obviously had not fully grasped it.
So, we had to have some work time on Monday on what a thesis statement is. Since these are fairly simple research papers (topics = muscle cars for one and puffins for the other), we had to start pretty basic. I had them think about why they wanted to write on those topics and then come up with three reasons for each one. So, the why they wanted to talk about the topic became their thesis, and the three reasons formed the body paragraphs. While that sounds pretty simple, it was actually a pretty long and agonizing discussion, as they had not really thought about why they had picked their topic, outside of the fact that it seemed cool. So, we had to work on some reasoning skills and delve down below the level of cool and into the reasons behind cool. It took quite a while, and one of the boys did have a short crying fit over frustration at not being able to articulate his reasons. However, we ultimately prevailed, and they were able to put together their ideas into the format that was desired.
What was interesting about that, is that we put more thought into how they were going to go about thinking and writing this paper than I think a lot of my own students do. They have just as much trouble with the idea of a thesis statement and presenting evidence, which makes me think that my 5th graders are not alone in not fully understanding this concept at this level. In fact, it seems to me that this is a concept that gets lost all the way through, as there really is no excuse for my college freshmen and sophomores to be having trouble writing a coherent thesis statement and using evidence if they are supposed to start learning about this all the way back to elementary school.
As I said, though, it was very obvious that even though my 5th graders had been taught generally how to do it, it took us a long time to translate that into a practical and working thesis and essay outline. So, maybe it is just assumed along the way that they have learned this before, when maybe they really have not.
The whole process has made me think about assumptions. I assume a lot about what the students I teach have had as a background before entering my class. As this example shows, however, just because someone is taught something, that does not mean they actually understand it. I think this is certainly a lesson that all of us in education need to consider on a regular basis.
Thoughts on Teaching – 3/17/2012 – Writing a new lecture
I did something new today. I didn’t finish it, but I did get it started. I started writing a new lecture. That might not seem like that big of a deal, but it is when you are stuck in the academic rut that teaching at a community college can get you in. At my community college, I am only allowed to teach the two halves of the American history survey. That means that it is easy to simply rely on the same lectures over and over and never fundamentally change anything as far as what you teach. It is just the same two classes over and over, and it is an easy rut to fall into.
This semester, as I was looking at my schedule for classes this semester, and I came up one day short with all that I wanted to do. So, I decided it was time to write a new lecture. I have been relying on the lectures that I wrote in graduate school, over six years ago. I have altered them some and moved things around, but I have not fundamentally changed anything about them in all that time. My own lectures have ended in 1992 since the point, as that was appropriate when I first developed the lectures for the second half survey. With the new space that I had this semester, I decided it was time to extend the class. So, I am now going to go until the September 11th attacks.
That means that I wrote a lecture today that covers basically 1992-2001. It was weird to write that lecture, that’s for sure, as I lived through that period, even more than the 1980s material. I was a fully functioning and politically aware person through all of that time, and so I saw the things first-hand.
It was also weird to sit down and write a lecture, as I have not really done that in a long time. I had to think some just about organization and what I wanted to cover, in a way that I have not had to in a while. Right now, the lecture is running quite long, but I’m taking the approach of putting everything down that I can think to talk about in a class. Then, I can go back in and shorten, clarify, and focus the lecture. I want to make sure that it has a good thematic focus and a strong base of evidence, just what I ask of my students in their own writing.
The next step after I finish writing and editing the lecture will be to do the other things that are involved. I will then have to put together the PowerPoint associated with it and record the audio podcasts that accompany the lecture. All of this will be in preparation for the debut of the new lecture next week.
The ironic thing about all of this work is that I’m about to abandon the lecture format, so this might be something that doesn’t even get used that much. But I still want this to be a good one, even if the students don’t appreciate it.
Thoughts on Education – 3/28/2012 – Thinking about the future of education
I haven’t done any article reviews in a while, so I thought I’d sit down and hit my Evernote box a bit here. So, here we go.
The first article comes from the ProfHacker blog at the Chronicle of Higher Ed. As with so many others, the intent here is to look at way the future of the university system will be, and while I teach at a community college, and not a university, the ideas are still relevant. I also, of course, like the origin of this one, since it came out of a conference at my alma mater, Rice University. It starts off this way: “I sometimes hear that the classroom of today looks and functions much like the classroom of the 19th century—desks lined up in neat rows, facing the central authority of the teacher and a chalkboard (or, for a contemporary twist, a whiteboard or screen.) Is this model, born of the industrial age, the best way to meet the educational challenges of the future? What do we see as the college classroom of the future: a studio? a reconfigurable space with flexible seating and no center stage? virtual collaborative spaces, with learners connected via their own devices?” Certainly, my classrooms are set up that way, even my “other” classroom, the two-way video one, still has all of the emphasis on me. The article also noted: “With declining state support, tuition costs are rising, placing a college education further out of reach for many people. Amy Gutmann presented figures showing that wealthy students are vastly over-represented at elite institutions even when controlling for qualifications. According to Rawlings, higher education is now perceived as a “private interest” rather than a public good. With mounting economic pressures, the public views the purpose of college as career preparation rather than as shaping educated citizens. In addition, studies such as Academically Adrift have raised concerns that students don’t learn much in college.” I have posted up articles that talk about both of those things before, but this information from this conference really narrows it all down well. At its heart, what the article notes from the conference is that it is time to update the model to the Digital Age from our older Industrial Age. That we have adopted the multiple-choice exam and the emphasis on paying attention in class from this old Industrial model, where creating a standardized and regulated labor force was key. In the Digital Age, it will be important to “ensure that kids know how to code (and thus understand how technical systems work), enable students to take control of their own learning (such as by helping to design the syllabus and to lead the class), and devise more nuanced, flexible, peer-driven assessments.” Throughout the conference, apparently, the emphasis was on “hacking” education, overturning our assumptions, and trying something new. While the solutions are general in nature, I found this summary of the conference to be right up my alley, and certainly a part of my own thinking as I redesign. I wish I had known about the conference, as I would have loved to have attended.
Looking at the question from the opposite end is this article from The Choice blog at The New York Times. The blog post was in response to the UnCollege movement, that says that college is not a place where real learning occurs and that students would be better off not going to college and just going out and pursuing their own dreams and desires without the burden of a college education. What is presented here is some of the responses to that idea. A number of people wrote in talking about what the value of college is, so this gives some good baseline information on what college is seen as valuable for. Here are some of them:
- “a college degree is economically valuable”
- “college is a fertile environment for developing critical reasoning skills”
- several noted that you can get a self-directed, practical college education if you want it
- “opting out is generally not realistic or responsible, given the market value of a degree”
- “the true value of college is ineffable and ‘deeply personal,’ not fully measurable in quantifiable ways like test scores and salaries”
That’s just some of the responses, specifically the positive ones, as that’s what I’m looking at here. It is interesting to see the mix of practical things and more esoteric ideas. I think that both are hopefully a part of college education and that both are part of what we deliver. I would like to think that’s what my students are getting out of college in general, and I hope that the redesign that I am going for will help foster that even more. I especially hope to bring more of the second and fifth comments into what I am doing, as that is the side that I think a college history class can help with.
Then there is this rather disturbing article, again from The Chronicle of Higher Ed. It discusses the rising push for more and more online courses, especially at the community college level. As the article notes, that is often at the center of the debate over how to grant a higher level of access to the education experience for more and more people. But, with more emphasis being put on the graduation or completion end and less on the how many are enrolled end, this could end up putting community colleges at an even higher disadvantage. As one recent study put it, “‘Regardless of their initial level of preparation … students were more likely to fail or withdraw from online courses than from face-to-face courses. In addition, students who took online coursework in early semesters were slightly less likely to return to school in subsequent semesters, and students who took a higher proportion of credits online were slightly less likely to attain an educational award or transfer to a four-year institution.'” So, we are actually putting our students into more online classes that make them less likely to finish overall. In fact, they are not only less likely to finish, but they are less likely to succeed at that specific class or come back for later classes. As well, a different study pointed out similar problems for online students: “‘While advocates argue that online learning is a promising means to increase access to college and to improve student progression through higher-education programs, the Department of Education report does not present evidence that fully online delivery produces superior learning outcomes for typical college courses, particularly among low-income and academically underprepared students. Indeed some evidence beyond the meta-analysis suggests that, without additional supports, online learning may even undercut progression among low-income and academically underprepared students.'” This is disturbing to me, as this is exactly what I teach at least half of my schedule each semester in – the online environment exclusively. I know that success in an online class is difficult, although I have actually been slowly improving the success rate over time in my online sections. I think I’ve finally hit a good sweet spot with the online classes right now, and I’m less in need of fixing them at the moment. I do, however, agree with the very end of the article that says that what is often missing from the online courses is the “personal touch.” That is the only part of the class that I would like to change, as I need a way for me to be more active in the class right now. I can direct from the point of putting in Announcements and the like, but I do feel that I get lost in whatever the day to day activities are. I need to design some part of the class that has me participating more directly rather than leaving it up to the students. Otherwise, I do think I’m doing pretty well in this part of my teaching career.
OK. I think I’m going to call it a night here. Any reactions?
Thoughts on Teaching – 3/27/2012 – Dropping classes
This was a banner day for dropping my class today. That is probably because the next big round of assignments is coming due in the next week or so, and people are getting out now before they have to put in any more actual work. I signed drop slips for 4 students today. That’s certainly not a record by any means, but it is always interesting that they come in waves like that. I had three come to me either right before or after class, and since my Tuesday/Thursday class is the worst one this semester, in terms of grades at least, that is really no surprise. What is more surprising are the other two who came by my office. Two different students came by with progress report sheets to fill out, and I had to break it to both that they were doing very poorly in the class. Both of them knew that generally, but the numbers are much harsher. Of the two, one decided to drop, and the other stayed in. With both, they had skipped a significant portion of the assignments due so far, so they should not have been really surprised about it. Still, they were, as I think that students often don’t think that much about the effects of their actions on their class grade.
The good thing about the drops and discussions of progress today was that all of them took responsibility for their poor performance. I didn’t have any who blamed anything that I was doing in the class, which is really always a relief. I don’t know about any other teachers out there, but I am always incredibly nervous and self-conscious about my teaching and whether I am giving the students everything they need to succeed. I see a failure by a student as a personal failure on my part quite often. I always wonder if there’s something else that I could have done for them. So, when they come to me and talk about what they did wrong in the course, it always is a bit of a relief – guilty relief – but still relief. I don’t know if it is just my personality or if it is something every teacher feels, but I get very personally invested in my students. It’s one of those things that does make this job exhausting at times, as I take even a rough comment or criticism as a personal attack on my teaching skills and I fret over it for a long time. But a day like today, while upsetting because so many dropped, is somewhat of a relief, as I got some personal validation that I was not directly to blame for any of these. Isn’t it strange how the mind works? I assume things with my students are my fault until proven otherwise. Any other teachers out there have this same feeling?
Anyway, just a few thoughts to end a very long day.
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 
Thoughts on Teaching – 5/7/2012 – A short grading break
It is grading time again. I have a set of projects due at the end of the semester, and I have essay exams as the final. So, I am doing a lot of grading. Luckily, I am a lot more on top of it at this point than I usually am at the end of the semester. I am generally caught up now and will just be grading exams as they come in from this point forward. This is all helped by the fact that I do not leave comments on any final projects/exams, so the grading does go faster. My general philosophy on this is that comments are intended to help the students improve over the course of the semester, and so putting them on at the final project does not help them a whole lot. Plus, as I well remember myself, few will ever go back to look at comments on things turned in at the end of the semester. Also, as I apparently had some students who did not realize until the end that I had been leaving comments all along, perhaps the whole commenting thing is overrated anyway. I always feel like I should leave a lot of comments to justify the grade, and I also use a grading rubric to justify the grade. However, it does appear that most students are just happy getting a number grade that is not too far off from what they were expecting and going with that. Makes you think (or not, in their cases).
This has also been my first semester at my community college to experiment with take-home tests. I was generally pleased with what I got from the students, as I was not sure what I might get at the beginning. Certainly the effort was mixed all the way around, but I certainly feel that I got a good level of effort overall from the students. I also do feel that I got a pretty decent level of actual thought from the students as well, which is better than what I see on a lot of other essays. I think the experiment went pretty well overall.
We also closed on our house last Friday, so we have that to look forward to once we get this semester done. My wife is graduating with her BA at the end of this week, and then I’ll be done with the semester, and she’ll be done with the first part of her schooling. We can then turn our attention to the new house and get going on working on it so that we can move in sometime in June. We are pleased overall with the house and ready to get going.
And, I think that’s it for my short update here.