So, in one of my classes, I've assigned what I think I will call The Paper Assignment from Hell (TPAH), both for the students and for me. Now, in the context of the course, it makes sense to have the students do TPAH. It's really the only way for them to demonstrate that they get the point of the whole freaking course. That said....
Well, I'm reading the proposals for TPAH now, and in spite of my best efforts to be incredibly clear about the expectation for the assignment, well, let's just say that there are some cognitive roadblocks that I'd not really anticipated. Or, rather, I guess I did anticipate them, which is why I designed the assignment as I did, but the assignment design didn't necessarily knock those roadblocks down for all students. It occurs to me that this is why one might avoid such assignments, however valuable they are and however intrinsic they are to certain courses, because motherfucker is it going to be hard for me to get some of them where they need to go with TPAH in order to do ok. Now, I anticipate that I will be fairly lenient in my grading for this assignment, and I also am thanking my lucky stars that some of them have withdrawn from the course before embarking on this assignment. But even with that... there are certain compromises I just can't make in order for the assignment to have any meaning.
Here's the thing: the ones that aren't getting it.... it's because they really don't get it. Not that they didn't do the work, or that they don't have an intuition about what my expectations are. It's just that they're cognitively not getting what they need to do. It's quite literally just not clicked into place. And they *know* they're not getting it. So I suppose that's something, but in some ways that's even more horrific for me as an instructor because how do I get them there?
I suppose I may just have to accept that I won't be able to do so. Maybe it's not about getting them where I want them to go but rather about getting them as far as they can go. We'll see. But I'm feeling daunted, and that's not at all a good sign. Not at all.
12 years ago
6 comments:
Oh, I feel for you. I've had something like this happen once before, and it wasn't pleasant.
I feel I am in a very similar situation right now with teaching literature reviews. I apparently incorrectly assumed that they knew how to do one, because grading them is making me want to scratch my eyes out -- and although we went over HOW to do it, complete with examples and everything, several of them just don't understand how to make an ARGUMENT from literature rather than simply re-articulate what was researched. *sigh* Good luck to you!
Oh yeah. I cannot count the number of times I've hit that wall. And that after being soooo careful in crafting the assignments, the rubrics, the helps.
Thanks for the moral support, everyone! If I have one little bright spot it's the fact that I'm realizing this *now* - on a pass/fail portion of the assignment sequence - and so I can do things over the course of the next month to give the clueless ones a bit of a leg up. If there's another bright spot it's that three of the proposals were so kick ass that I'm beside myself with joy. And you know, some of them may just not do great. But that's ok, really. As long as they really push themselves beyond the point at which they now stand.
There really is only so much you can do. It took me a few years to realize that not every student is going to get it. It's not the kind of thing you want to face but you can't kill yourself over it either. If you did the best you could in explaining the assignment, then that is cool.
What I find more frustrating is when you give them a nice clear assignment and they don't even try to follow the guidelines. That is my hell at the moment.
I have been there before, too. Recently it involved trying to teach the difference between observations and an actual argumentative thesis. Oy. Good luck with yours!
(Also, I just found this blog via RYS and I'm so glad! I've been meaning to find more prof blogs, and yours -- with your extensive blogroll, too -- is a great find.)
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