Observations...

I've been a bad, bad blogger. This last semester really got away from me, and frankly I didn't pay all that much attention to my teaching, other than the perfunctory preparation. I promise I'll be better now!

So, looking back on this last semester these are my observations:

--Upperclassmen/women are not really more responsible than my first-year students. This is my first time teaching juniors and seniors, and sadly I wasn't really impressed. They didn't attend class, often didn't do the readings, and were more likely to challenge my grading. I had a couple of great students, but overall I was hoping that the quality of students would be better.
--I went back to being a TA last semester, and I can FOR SURE say that I definitely don't like being a TA. I thought it would be less work, yada yada yada, but in reality it was really stressful. I had to develop discussions based on readings that I disliked and felt were unnecessary. I had to deal with a professor who was disorganized and whose syllabus said one thing when Blackboard said another. I am, admittedly, a control freak. But still. I am so excited to go back to teaching my own course in the spring!
--I need to work on being more empathetic...and by that I mean that many of these students have not written research papers before (a travesty, in my opinion) and I need to remember how daunting this is. I am not going to ease up on my expectations, but I do need to be more understanding about the particular challenges of researching in an archives. They are required to use archival sources and come up with a (relatively) original thesis. It can be quite scary and intimidating when you have a slew of newspaper articles, letters, diary entries, etc... on a particular topic but have no idea how to put them together into a coherent project.

What are your thoughts about this last semester? Anything you'll change?

Grades are in

And it's over. Apart from the deferred assessment student who is too ill to sit her exam until February. But mostly it's over.

See you next year.

Crazy answers from student exams

Question: Although Old English had contact both with Celtic languages and Romance languages, it was far more heavily influenced by Romance than Celtic. Explain briefly why this was.

Actual student answers:

"The Celts were inferior."

"The Romans were more evolved."

"Dutch is very similar to English." (Yes, I know: WTF?)

"Celtic was always a minority language." (What, including when it was the ONLY language family in the country?)

"Language influence generally spreads from the people conquering to the people who get conquered. Romance conquered the French, and the French conquered the Celts, and the Anglo-Saxons conquered the English. Celts didn't conquer anybody. They just fought a lot. So only the Anglo-Saxons and Romance languages influenced English."

Almost, but... no.

And this is why 90% of the exam was problem sets rather than short answers. Otherwise if the giggling fits didn't kill me, the urge to throw myself or my students off a bridge would.

Totally off-topic, but Bardiac asked nicely

I went to the gynecologist for a pap smear recently. It is a practice with a few different doctors, and I didn't specify who I wanted to see. The last name wasn't anyone I had seen before, but a pretty common name (think: "Smith") and the receptionist said it was a woman.

On the day of the appointment, I entered the doctor's office, only to discover it was someone I know socially. I had no idea she was a gynecologist—I guess she has discovered her work is not a popular topic of conversation.

I'm sure it was no big deal to her: she even seemed happy to see me. But although I am usually quite comfortable with my body and nakedness, it felt very strange having someone who I last saw at a meeting for a committee we are both on inserting fingers in my girly bits, while all the time chatting about mutual acquaintances and various recent events we were both at.

My relationships with female friends usually don't progress to quite that level!

Where do they get their English?

How can a native speaker of English come up with a sentence like: "Christianity was next to always preached in French"?

There is so much weirdness there that I don't even know where to begin.

(Yes, I'm still marking essays.)

I feel like the world's meanest teacher

I think I kind of screwed up. I didn't do anything technically wrong, but maybe I should have considered the consequences a bit more carefully.

I had my students hand in an assignment one week before the end of the teaching period. I pulled out all the stops to get it marked in time to return it on the last day of class, so that the students can use the feedback in revising for the final exam. Except... I also have a policy that I don't accept late work after it has been discussed in class—even if said student was not IN class that day—because they might have heard the solutions from someone else, or seen them on WebCT in some cases. Bear in mind that these are problem sets we are talking about, not essays. There are right and wrong answers. This no-late-work-after-discussion-in-class policy is clearly stated on the syllabus and on WebCT. It is also a policy that is generally shared by most courses in my department.

I warned students in class the week before last that I would be returning the assignments this week, although I forgot to explicitly remind them this mean they couldn't hand them in after Monday.

Approximately a third of the class was more than one week late in handing in the assignment. I didn't realise how prevalent the problem was until I had already returned the first class's sets, and already told some students that no, I would not accept any more late work. Now my inbox is full of 20 or so begging emails explaining that they are so incredibly sorry, they had no idea they couldn't be late, since when does a lecturer return stuff with a week's turnaround anyway? and now they aren't going to graduate and it's all! my! fault! Except that it's all! their! fault! and they won't do it again, promise, just please please bend the rules this one time or my mother is going to kill me.

I really really don't think I can change my policy now, because some of the students affected dropped the course, and if I bend the rules for others then they dropped for no good reason and would have every reason to be pissed off with me and maybe lay a complaint. As it stands, I don't think anyone has grounds to officially complain, but I am possibly going to have the highest fail rate of any course in my department, and a lot of miserable students.

I have offered alternative assessment to anyone who, after the final, sits on a mark between 40 and 50% and was affected by the late assignment problem. This isn't much different from official university policy anyway, which requires me to offer make-up work to students sitting on a mark between 45 and 50%. But I don't know how many of them will take me up on it. Mostly I think they'll just sulk and fail.

And it's all! my! fault!

I thought we were past this stage

A student today brought a note from her mother to excuse her from the homework because she was too busy babysitting.