Growth

Hi everyone! I'm back on the blogging scene after a two-week hiatus from posting. Life is slowly getting back to normal. I graded forty-five 8-page papers over the course of a week and a half and man, that was not fun. The problem with having students e-mail me their papers instead of giving me hard copies is that I find myself typing far more comments than if I was simply handwriting them, which means that I spend more time thinking about the comments. All this translates into more grading time rather than less, although I suppose it's good from the students' perspective (and the environment's!).

After e-mailing students their graded midterm papers I immediately received replies from a few students who were obviously concerned about their grades. I have always dreaded the week after returning major assignments ever since I had a student who wrote a 3-page letter challenging me point-by-point on my grading in the hopes that he would get his grade raised. These replies were not of that sort, though. These are students who are genuinely aspiring to be A students but who are B+ students. One of them said that the grade and comments confirmed what he had suspected to be some of his weaknesses and asked if he could write a weekly 1-2 page essay each week to discuss with me during office hours. Knowing him, he is very likely to do so.

Upon reading my student's e-mail, it suddenly occurred to me how to view grades. It's all about growth. On the surface, it seems obvious, but the attitude that so many students take is that if they don't get an "A" all the way through the class then they must be doing something wrong. Instead, they should see the course as a process of pushing, struggle and growth. Of course I have students who are A students all the way and I am grateful that they are there to move discussions to a higher level, but then again they are not going to grow as much as B students who push themselves up to A- or A levels. Who got more out of the class?

One thing that this has also inspired me to do is to come up with a couple of tools to help students' writing. One of them is to write a sample bad paper with my own comments, showing bad grammar, bad spelling, logical leaps, incoherent chains of causation, etc. A second tool is a step-by-step tutorial or checklist of writing an international relations paper, posed in the form of questions (e.g. "Did you explicitly answer the question in the thesis paragraph?" "Did you lay out a step-by-step outline of your arugment in the opening paragraph(s)?" "Did you check your grammar and spelling?" "No, really, did you check your grammar and spelling?" "Did you check it by hand and not just with the spell checker?").

Man, too many things to do and not enough time! It's going to be a busy weekend! Ooh, that reminds me, I'm supposed to head into the city tomorrow to buy the rest of my fencing gear because I'm going to resume my exercise program. So when I come back tomorrow afternoon I should hopefully have my fencing jacket, plastron, knickers, glove and dry foil in addition to the mask that I already have. Haha, can't wait to start stabbing people again! Stabbity stabbity! :-)