Tag Archives: Student

Tracking Students with E-Textbooks

Posted by Jackie in conversations, education, technology and tagged with , , , , ,
English: Textbook

English: Textbook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The hot topic in education today is how technology is going to shape, track and modify student behavior, especially in areas that are typically hard to control. The NYT writes about e-textbooks that will track student engagement in real time for professors to view. However, how we interpret this data is not so clear cut.

Adrian Guardia, a Texas A&M instructor in management, took notice the other day of a student who was apparently doing well. His quiz grades were solid, and so was what CourseSmart calls his “engagement index.” But Mr. Guardia also saw something else: that the student had opened his textbook only once.

“It was one of those aha moments,” said Mr. Guardia, who is tracking 70 students in three classes. “Are you really learning if you only open the book the night before the test? I knew I had to reach out to him to discuss his studying habits.”

Here are my questions: who among us hasn’t been that student, where everything you needed to know was discussed in lectures, and the reading so thoroughly reviewed that a sharp student didn’t need to do it in the first place? But more importantly, doesn’t this also point to a greater problem with how the course itself is designed? In other words, if that student can pass that class without opening the book, then hasn’t the teacher gone wrong somewhere in designing the course, the content, the lectures, the assignments and/or the choice of book?

Later in the article, everyone involved acknowledges that students will still continue to be inventive:

students could easily game the highlighting or note-taking functions. Or a student might improve his score by leaving his textbook open and doing something else.

Apparently, students taking paper notes are also penalized because the system can’t track them.

Finally, one of the professors seems to engage in some self-reflection toward the end:

“Maybe the course is too easy and I need to challenge them a bit more,” Mr. Guardia said. “Or maybe the textbooks are not as good as I thought.”

If our students aren’t engaged, aren’t challenged, aren’t paying attention, they certainly own part of that responsibility. But we do too, as it is our job to track and reflect and engage, even without any high-powered software to help us.

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Why I Teach

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching, writing and tagged with , , ,

“At the beginning of this year, English was the class I was most afraid of, and now at the end of the year, I think it’s the only class that hasn’t given me a panic attack. Thanks for watching out for the dyslexics and making everyone feel safe in your classroom.”

“My mom read over a paper of mine I wrote for my theater class, and when she was finished, she said, ‘Wow, Ms. Regales must be a really good teacher, because you have made so much progress in writing this year.’”

“Ms. Regales, the only word I can think of to describe you is SUNSHINE! If you have ever had a bad day, your students never knew it, and you always seemed so excited to see us and teach us this year.”

“This class was challenging and exciting; I never felt drowsy once, which cannot be said for all my classes.”

“You are a hard grader but that pushes us to the next level”

“You helped me see how hard I have to work to succeed”

“You care about our success and made me feel like you really wanted me to do well”

These are all statements my students have either said to me in the past two weeks, or have written on their end-of-year course evaluation. This year’s crop of freshmen is an especially sweet one, I think, but also, their words really made me think and smile and feel appreciated. What more could a busy teacher ask for, as the school year winds to a satisfying close?

Catcher in the Rye: A Love Story

Posted by Jackie in book reviews, teaching, writing and tagged with , , , , , ,
Обкладинка книги "Над прірвою у житі"

Image via Wikipedia

One of my least favorite books as a teenager was The Catcher in the Rye; I read it at least three times, convinced that at some point, I would understand why this was the great American novel I kept reading about, the one that everybody loved so much. And I hated it! I thought Holden was so whiny, and I just couldn’t understand what was going on with him, why he kept getting kicked out of school and wandering around being slightly creepy in New York City. I thought he was boring, and that the whole book was stupid.

Now, of course, I look forward to teaching the book every year, and it’s consistently the most popular book in the ninth grade curriculum at my school. The students who struggle with reading finally feel like they can understand a book, and often tell me that they found themselves reading ahead without knowing it. The capable readers enjoy trying to puzzle out what Holden is and isn’t telling us, why he’s such an unreliable narrator and how that affects our knowledge of events and characters. Every year I have students saying they have crushes on Holden, and every year, I have students saying they really identify with him, that he speaks a lot of feelings they haven’t been able to say. Sometimes it’s students I had pegged early on as probable Holden-fans, and sometimes, it’s the girl I least expect, the polar opposite of Holden, who comes to me after class one day and says, “I totally get him because we are so much alike!

In some ways, I think this is because, dated slang aside, Holden remains a classic teenager, one with lots to say but who struggles with how to say it, one who lies without even knowing why he’s done it, and one who is torn between wanting to remain a child while being drawn inexorably towards adulthood. He’s an outsider when he should be an insider, a sensitive person in a world full of phonies, someone who longs to be understood but manages to alienate those who try to connect with him: teenage stuff, for sure. But then, as an adult, I found myself much more empathetic with Holden than I could manage to be as a teenager. I think being totally unfamiliar with his world of privilege was one obstacle, though that may say more about me than the book itself, and I found the stream-of-consciousness style and unresolved ending a little off-putting as well.

Teachers often like to shuffle their curricula when they’ve been teaching a text for so long that it loses any appeal, and I get that; after reading hundreds or thousands of essays on the significance of Desdemona’s handkerchief, it’s understandable for Othello to lose some of its magic. But at this point in my career, I can’t imagine saying goodbye to Holden.

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All Ninth Grade, All The Time

Posted by Jackie in conversations, education, teaching and tagged with , , ,
education

education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

This is my first year teaching only 9th graders all year, as in previous years, I’ve been teaching juniors or seniors during the same year as well. Since I’m also on the 9th grade advisory team, this means that I’ve been immersed in this particular freshman class, which luckily happens to be a really wonderful group of girls. Next year, I’ll have a senior course in addition to my freshmen, but this year has been really interesting to me in terms of teaching one prep for multiple sections, and what drawbacks and benefits there are.

As often happens, ProfHacker has come up with a practical pedagogical article that, while written by/for the professoriate, is thought-provoking for high school teachers. Billie Hara writes about teaching multiple sections of a literature survey class and how the different demographics and dynamics of the sections pose some challenges. One of her favorite methods is Think-Pair-Share, which is one of my favorites as well. It’s useful for when you have a group of students who don’t want to talk much, or to encourage reflection in a class where everyone shouts out, or when you have one student who dominates the class discourse. I also like to have students write down their thoughts first and then share, which can serve all of the same purposes, but is also encouraging informal writing, which can often make students more at ease with formal writing when done repeatedly.

Another dilemma she mentions is what to do with pacing when you have one class that is capable of moving faster than the other sections, but for various reasons, you can’t really let them. It would make class planning a lot harder if you have three sections all at different places in a novel, and at the high school level, I don’t want the girls telling each other what happens next or being able to prompt each other with “right” answers for discussions or assessments. The other difficulty is that since my classes are all “regular,” not designated honors classes, I wouldn’t want one section (or their parents) to start wondering why another group was chapters ahead of them, and then believing that there was some kind of invisible tracking going on. I address this most often by differentiating discussion among my sections, making sure that each class hits the key points, but offering more scaffolding to one group while encouraging the next group to push even deeper into analytical thinking.

All in all, I’ve enjoyed my all-9s year so far, as much as I’m looking forward to developing my senior elective on Latin American literature too. I talked on Parents Night this year about how much I love teaching ninth graders, and while I saw some disbelief on some parents’ faces, it’s completely true. I enjoy teaching the kind of compositional and comprehension skills that are ninth-grade appropriate, I get to teach some really great literature, but also, ninth graders are just so much fun. They are still closer to children than young adults, for the most part, so while they aren’t always the most organized group, they are enthusiastic and curious in a way that older students are sometimes careful to hide. The analogy that springs to my mind most often is puppies: they’re tricky to train and they don’t always go where they are supposed to, but they are curious and lovable, excited and affectionate, and it’s thoroughly fun to spend your day with them.

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Teachers, Students and Facebook

Posted by Jackie in conversations, education, media mentions, teaching, technology and tagged with , , , , ,
Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

If you are my Facebook friend, you know that I am a frequent user of the site, checking in several times daily, posting pictures, commenting on statuses and syncing my music playlists through Spotify. I utilize all the site’s privacy features, but I definitely do a lot of communicating on Facebook. If you’ve been around long enough, you know that I even taught a university-level course on Facebook Culture for a few semesters, and that I am always looking for new ways to use teaching with technology. Finally, of course, I have been blogging for about eight years, presenting a (carefully curated) continuing portrait of my interests and personality.

All of this might lead you to believe that I have positive views on using Facebook to connect with my current students, and when I was teaching at the university level, I did set up a Facebook group for my courses and use it to communicate with students about course business. However, I was and am firmly opposed to connecting with my current high school students via Facebook, text messaging, or other non-school-related forms of communication.

For me, there are some key distinctions here: my high school students are still children, legally and emotionally, in ways that my college students were not. This means that inherently, there is a power dynamic present that any responsible adult should be very careful not to exploit. We often see this manifested as inappropriate sexual behavior, but what about the teacher who “friends” some students but not others, who sends chatty text messages to Janie but not Jenny? How does Jenny continue to feel fairly treated in that classroom? It also means that they still need us to be adults, to be safe adults in their lives and to draw boundaries for them about what is and is not acceptable and appropriate, including in matters of communication. Just like in parenting, we are not aiming to be our students’ “friends,” or our children’s “friends.” We are not their peers, and when we try too much to be, we erode our ability to continue to act as authority figures.

I feel like it’s important for me to clarify here that I don’t take this position because I’m embarrassed of anything my students would know about me if we were connected on Facebook; it’s categorically impossible for drunk photos of me to exist, for example, and I have no secret past as a sex worker.    Also, one work-around I have seen is for teachers to create separate FB accounts for their “teacher” persona, using the name of the high school as their middle name or simply naming themselves “Mr./Ms.” instead of their first name, so that they can still communicate with students on FB without linking their “real” accounts. If a teacher honestly felt that FB was the only effective way to reach their students, I can see this being useful.

It’s become an end-of-year tradition that once students at my school graduate, I see a rush of new requests and friendships popping up in my FB feed, for me and for my fellow teachers. This feels right and good; these students are moving into the adult world, and I’m glad to connect with them as they move forward. I learn about new music, see pictures of their happy faces in new cities, and ignore the mentions of drinking or the occasional swear. We trade links back and forth, and I love to see them when they come back to Baltimore. But for me, I can only really think of them as “friends,” FB or otherwise, once they are no longer my students, and that is as it should be.

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