I want to blog a little today about Chapter 7 of the Curzon and Damour. Working in the Writing Lab has given me a lot to think about, in regard to the value of individual interaction between students and instructors.
When I tutor, I frequently feel like a therapist. It seems that a lot of what students need in a tutoring session is reassurance and encouragement. Often students come in on the verge of tears; others show up feeling angry and frustrated. I know that English 1000 instructors work hard to connect with their students, and to give them the one-on-one time that is essential to their progress, yet it feels like there’s just not enough time to give each student the time and attention they seem to need. I was surprised to find that many students just don’t learn the way I do (I shouldn’t have been surprised about this) and that they need the individual attention that I always tried to avoid when I was an undergraduate.
Curzon and Damour were very helpful to me; I felt like they raised a lot of points that I had not yet considered. I hadn’t thought about students misusing office hours and I thought the suggested responses to this type of student (pg 109) was really helpful. Curzon and Damour were careful to highlight the importance of recordkeeping; from previous jobs I know how essential it is to maintain a paper trail, in case a conflict or situation gets out of hand.
I liked the section on page 114 to 117, in which C&D talk about students with personal problems. The supportive-but-fair policy seems to sensible in theory, but I imagine it’s much harder to tell a student they must confront their own problems, than to make excessive accommodations for student problems. I’m attached to the idea of logical consequences, so I hope I’ll be able to keep this up in the classroom.
Finally, the section on antagonistic students was both reassuring and frightening. I’m afraid that I’ll wind up with problematic students, and I know that I will, so it was kind of nice to hear that yes, these things will happen, and here are some practical ways to deal with this situation.
2 comments:
I totally agree with you Claire. I know that antagonistic students exist, as a matter of fact I was one, and probably still is, however I often worry how to handle them as well. C&D was not as beneficial to me as they were to you (I’m a sucker for Bean), nonetheless they did have some good insight. I do wonder though what is the university’s policy on disruptive, hostile students? I would really have to kick a student out of class like in elementary school, but what are our other solutions?
It seems that having clearly stated rules in your syllabus will deal with most of the problems brought up by Curzan and Damour, especially regarding absences ,etc. Some students really try to abuse the absence policy, especially if you don't state that no absence is considered excused.
But no matter how well you plan, there will sometimes occur a situation you never expected. The very first class I ever taught was a playwriting class. To help the students learn how to write in the proper format, I brought in a play I was working on for the Senior Adult Theatre Program to use as an example. The first student to present a play to the class, a few weeks later, was a senior adult student who had taken offense to my play and decided to write a parody of it and present it to the class. In the academic sense, he was plagiarizing because he was using my own characters and scenario in a play that was supposed to be of his own devising, and he had the gall to type on the top of the manuscript a quote from the supreme court which said that "parody is not plagiarism." I recognized immediately what he was attempting to do, and therefore did not do our normal procedure of reading the play out loud. Normally, I would have dealt with something like this one on one after class, but he'd handed out the play to every member of the class, so he forced my hand, making it a situation where I had to make clear that this sort of behavior would not be tolerated. I let him know that the project would get an F. He said that it wasn't plagiarism and smugly pointed to his quote. I told him it may or may not be plagarism, but what I knew for certain was that it did not fulfill the assignment, and refused to argue with him any further about it. He stormed out. The class actually applauded the fact that I'd stood up to him, and I'd successfully dealt with my first, and probably most overtly antagonistic, student.
I suppose, however, that having clearly stated rules did help me out in that situation. I was able to go to the assignment sheet for their first play and clearly point out how his play was clearly an F based on what the assignment asked for. Though really, when it came down to it, the situation was more about maintaining control of the class than anything else, which is what I think we worry about most with antagonistic students--we worry that somehow they will take control.
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