Thoughts on Teaching – 6/10/2012 – Teaching summer school
Well, that time is here again. Time for teaching summer school again. We always need the extra money, so I teach every summer. I teach online, as that is easier with my own schedule as well as easy to step in with prepared classes. Also, as I am the primary online history instructor at my community college, there is always a high demand for my classes in the summer. So, I never have to worry about my classes making. It’s a good thing all the way around.
The summer is always weird. Squeezing what the students normally do in a 16-week semester in 5 weeks is quite a challenge for them. They have a lot to do each week, and I don’t think that a lot of students realize what that means. We always get students who are taking vacations in the middle of the summer session or who wait a week before entering the course, leaving them tremendously behind. I think that students assume that an online summer course is going to be easy. The general perception of online courses, I have found, is that they are easy (not mine, unfortunately for them). As well, many assume that it will be easy to complete a course in 5 weeks because it takes up less time. The time demand is high, and you cannot put your work off until the last minute because there is a lot of it.
Summer school also attracts an odd mix of students. Here are some of the types I have noted:
- Students who want to finish their degree early and so are doubling up in the summer
- Students who go to a four-year university and are home for the summer and taking a class or two for cheap
- Students who have failed the class in the normal semester and are hoping for better results in the summer
- Students who have never taken either an online course or a college course and decide that this is the best way to do it
It’s the last group that is the biggest pain for me. It’s always a good 10-15% of the students. I don’t know if someone advised them to do it, or if they simply decided on their own that their first college course should be an online summer class, but it is almost universally a bad idea. Either online courses or summer courses by themselves are more challenging then many semester-long, face-to-face classes, but to do both as your first experience is brutal. I spend an inordinate amount of my time in the summer dealing with these students.
On the other side, the first two groups tend to be some of the most motivated and strongest students that I will see in an academic year, so the summer also has its good side, as these students can restore your faith in students. Teaching can be depressing, especially when a semester goes poorly, and the summer session can sometimes be rejuvenating because you do get some of the best students there.
As of right now, we are just finishing up the first week of the summer session, so four more weeks are left. The first set of assignments come in tonight at midnight, so I will be able to start sizing up the students at this point. And, as it is an online class, I again have online office hours. I have them Wednesday and Sunday nights, and, so far, one student has come by to ask a question. That makes it already one more student than came to my online office hours all of last semester, so there’s something.
I don’t know how active I will be posting on this blog this summer, but you will probably be hearing from me on Wednesday and Sunday nights at least, as I have to sit here at the computer for two hours anyway.
Thoughts on Education – 6/6/2012 – Studying in college
I wonder about this all the time. How much work do students really do in a class? I don’t know if my own memories are clouded by the distance, but I certainly remember working a lot in college. Admittedly, I went to an upper-tier private school, but still, I worked on my classes every day of the week. The only day that I took off completely throughout almost all of my college experience was Friday. I only worked a few Fridays over the four years I did my undergraduate work. All other days were fair game, and I usually did school work on all other days. Now, I did not study all the time by any means, and I did plenty of other things as well, but I just remember doing almost all of the assigned readings, working on assignments before they were due, and just generally being engaged throughout the school year as a full-time student. Of course, I did have the luxury of being a full-time student, working only enough to earn some extra spending money, so that did affect what I did.
At my community college now, things could not be more different. We struggle to get the students to do any work, and certainly do not expect the students to work on anything any earlier than absolutely necessary. Of course, it is a community college, and the students here are largely not that strong academically and often work in addition to going to school. Still, it is disappointing and difficult to try and teach students like this. I’m certainly not trying to romanticize my own background, but I think I was a pretty good and pretty diligent student overall. I had good semesters and bad semesters, good classes and bad classes, but I consistently did my work, paid attention to assignments, and was mostly engaged in my classes.
I’m certainly not the only one who has noted this. You just have to talk with any of my fellow instructors, or really instructors in general, and we all feel like the students aren’t doing enough. It is easy to dismiss this, as it is the same type of thing that teachers have been saying about students for a long time. I’m sure my own professors groaned about me and my fellow students as well. So, I don’t know if I’m really bringing up anything new, but I have come across a couple of articles on the subject as well.
This Washington Post article is interesting, just from the perspective that it takes. According to the article, the average student today studies around 15 hours a week, whereas in the 1960s, the total was 24. Even at the “better” universities, apparently the average is only up around 18 hours a week. The article then notes the 5 top reporting schools, each of which exceed this average. Most are small, isolate, private liberal-arts schools, with the University of Wisconsin being the only exception. I have to wonder, however, what the average is at my community college, as I’m assuming that community colleges were not included in these numbers, although I could be wrong.
Also in the Washington Post, is this article, asking the question, “Is college too easy?” It takes these same statistics and turns it around. Is the problem that the students aren’t working hard enough or is it that we instructors aren’t asking enough of them. The data they have shows that the average student in the 1960s worked roughly 40 hours a week in college, while the average today is 27 hours a week. That brings about the chicken-and-egg conundrum. Are we asking less of students because we expect less of them or are students doing less because we ask less of them. Or is it really a symbiotic relationship all the way around that has led to this decline? I don’t really know. I have taught for around 10 years now, and I can see the creep toward asking less and less. This is especially true in an era of tight budgets and increased class sizes, since asking more of students means more work for me with no more (and sometimes less) compensation. So, I wonder where to look to think about this problem. Even my own wife has said to me that she remembers working harder in high school (over a decade ago) than in the bachelor’s degree program she just finished.
I don’t know what to think about it, so I’m just raising questions here. What do you think?
Thoughts on Teaching – 5/19/2012 – Revisiting office hours
Interestingly enough, I came across a recent article on a subject that I have written about before. I have debated the usefulness of online office hours here before, and a recent article in Inside Higher Ed raised the question again. Apparently, San Antonio College is considering going to online office hours because students just don’t go to regular office hours. As noted, professors these days are more likely to contact a student over email or something like that rather than them showing up to traditional office hours in an academic office. In this case, the professors still have to keep five day office hours on campus, but they are allowed to have five of their office hours off campus. However, my earlier issues are still there. I wonder about the actual office hours either way. If students don’t come to traditional office hours and they don’t come to online office hours, then what use are office hours in general?
I completely understand why we are supposed to have them. We are meant to be available. We are meant to be working. If we are not there physically, then we are not working in the traditional sense of the word. We have a board member at my community college who is already convinced that we do not work enough. According to him, our contract is only for 15 hours of teaching and 10 hours of office hours, so we are overpaid and overworked. If we were to move to even less “on campus” time, then the argument would be even stronger that we do not really work.
On the other side of things, there is the question of whether the office hours that we do have are useful at all. What is the use of simply sitting in the office. Am I filling a purpose sitting there? Am I fulfilling a purpose by sitting in online office hours that nobody attends. Or, as the article raises as the real question, is the real interaction that we do with students not in something easily classified as an “office hour?” Where are the real interactions with students? Here’s what I do with students:
- talk with them before and after class
- answer emails within 4-6 hours of receiving them, if not sooner
- participate in class sessions both online and in person
- consider myself on as a teacher from the time I get out of bed to when I go to bed
What do you classify all of those things as? They all take place outside of traditional office hours, except the that I do answer some of the emails and participate in online classes during what are my on-campus office hours. Yet, for the most part, the time sitting there is simply time for me to get things done. However, is doing those things on campus useful? Could I be just as useful doing them somewhere else? But if I’m not on campus, am I not fulfilling my duty as a teacher to be available whenever my students need me? If I’m not on campus, what about those 6-10 students who do come by my office during the semester for help? Or, if I was available in other ways, would those students not come by? What about the non-tech-savvy students? What about the students who want face-to-face interaction? Is it enough for me to be available before and after class? Or do I need to be there for them?
There’s also the question I did raise in my earlier post about the online office hours. I had only one person come to them all semester. Apparently they are not useful as I have them right now either.
So, what is the solution? I don’t know. Any ideas out there?
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, 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.