Tag: learning

A Japanese Study Routine

YouTube is full of videos with titles like “How I Became Fluent in Japanese in 4 Days!” or “My Journey to Knowing 10,000 Kanji Even Though Japanese People Ask Me Why I Bother,” or even just “Study Japanese Like I Do and Soon You’ll Be Really Jouzu [good at it]”. I watch these videos occasionally. They seem to be mostly by people who have made Japanese study their whole lives, or who live in Japan, or who live at home with their parents and so have limited responsibilities. They sometimes involve gauzy lighting, a massive collection of kawaii notebooks, and a pretty young woman with an ASMR voice writing perfect hiragana with a feathered pen.

As an obsessive but middle-aged person with a full-time job who lives in Canada and has terrible handwriting, I sometimes find useful resources in these videos but can’t relate whatsoever to the study routines. First of all, I’m in no rush and have no lofty goals. Also, if there’s one thing I’ve taken away from the ones I’ve watched, it’s that effective study routines are intensely personal.

I’ve found a method that works well for me. I can’t vouch for this being a good method. After a year of study, I still struggle to put together a simple sentence orally, I can’t read a newspaper article, and I can’t watch Midnight Diner without subtitles. But after a year, I still look forward to practicing a little bit of Japanese every single morning before work. And when I get the chance someday to immerse myself in some serious full-time learning, I will have a good head start.

(Please note that no one is paying me to mention any of these resources; I’ve found some stuff that works for me right now, and that’s it.)

Things I do every day:

  • Duolingo: I do one review lesson and one new lesson on Duolingo every morning. This takes 5-15 minutes. When I have more time, I do more. I currently have a 439 day streak, unbroken since my first lesson. I use the website, and not the app, which I find full of distractions. I haven’t tried the paid version, nor do I intend to.
  • Wanikani: This is a kanji-learning website. It is an SRS (spaced repetition system), meaning it introduces new kanji and then has you review them at longer and longer intervals until they are “burned” into your memory. Every morning I complete all my reviews (usually about 30 radicals, kanji or vocabulary) and then do one new lesson (5 radicals, kanji or vocabulary). This takes me around 15 minutes. Then I complete reviews as they pop up during the day, whenever I have a moment. I started using it in December, and have used it every day since I started. It costs money, but for me it has been well worth it.

Things I do most days:

  • Reading practice: If I have a bit more time in the morning, I do some reading practice. I’m currently working my way through a manga that’s often recommended for beginners, called Shirokuma Café (Polar Bear Café). It’s a very cute, quiet story about Shirokuma-kun and the customers at his café (Panda-kun, Pengin [Penguin] -kun, and so on), who go on adventures like becoming a part-time employee at the zoo or learning to drive, so it helps me start my day happily. (There’s a nice review of it here if you’re interested.) I started by reading the first volume from beginning to end, understanding very little but trying to glean meanings from context. Then I went back to the beginning, and I now reread a page each day, using Jisho.org to look up vocabulary and, when necessary, Google Translate and/or web searches to try to understand unfamiliar grammar. I have a Word document in which I list the new words in kanji, then hiragana, then English translation; this list won’t be of much use as a reference, but the act of keeping it helps me focus.
  • TV/Movies: For the past year, I’ve mostly watched only Japanese programming. Netflix is a real treasure box for this. They have almost all of the Studio Ghibli catalogue, as well as plenty of anime series and a bunch of reality shows (I just finished watching Love is Blind: Japan, which is fascinating; this review reflects many of my thoughts about it). I still haven’t found any J-dramas that I much like, but Alice in Borderland is next on my list to try. I don’t love anime enough to subscribe to a service like Crunchyroll or Funimation, but I do occasionally buy DVDs of series I can’t find elsewhere (Steins;Gate, for example) or things I can’t rent from AppleTV in the original language with English subtitles (a strange number of their films are only offered dubbed in Canada, like Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You). I have also found plenty of Japanese movies through my local library.
  • Music: I only listen to Japanese music these days. See this post for details.

Things I do once a week:

  • Language course: Monday is a very long day of classes and meetings, and then I have to stay at work to do my online Japanese course, because I don’t have time to get home first. I don’t mind. The course itself is not even that fun – we’re struggling beginners, we’re learning basic rote stuff, and we can’t even be in the same room together. Nevertheless, I look forward to it. It’s my only chance to speak the language, it reinforces things I’m learning elsewhere, it provides me with grammar explanations, and I get to hang out with people who, like me, are mostly learning Japanese for no other reason than that they love it.

Things I do occasionally:

  • Writing practice: I have a couple of kanji practice books that I dip into once in a while. I have a repetitive strain injury that makes all handwriting difficult for me, but I do find the repetition useful for memorization, and it can be quite fun to do a bit of copying while I’m listening to something.
  • Grammar study: I have the first volume of Genki, which I use more for consulting than studying, but when I have time I work through a lesson. More fun, though, is Japanese the Manga Way, an exploration of basic grammar through examples from manga. I take this book with me whenever I know I’ll be stuck somewhere for an indefinite period of time, like a doctor’s office. (Its ancestors, Mangajin’s Basic Japanese through Comics 1 & 2, are harder to come by and more focused on vocabulary, but they are also great).

Things I’ll Do When I Have More Time:

  • Sentence-a-day diary: As I continue to struggle with speaking and writing, I come across more and more recommendations to do something as simple as writing a sentence or two about my day as a regular practice. In fact, my very first Japanese teacher said that, given that I had a little more prior knowledge than my classmates, I could start doing this to speed up my learning, but I balked because it still seemed out of my reach. I’m ready to do it now, and it will be a good way to use the genkouyoushi notebooks I’ve been accumulating but haven’t found a use for.
  • Bunpro: I don’t have time to add another online practice tool to my routine right now, but as soon as summer vacation starts, I’m planning to look into Bunpro, a grammar practice resource. I’ve heard very good things, and grammar is my weakest point, so this seems like a good next step.
  • Individual tutoring: Several places in my city offer Japanese courses beyond the absolute beginner level, but apparently they are often cancelled due to lack of enrolment. As I approach this level, if I find myself without courses to do, I’m going to look into finding a tutor, either in person or through an online resource like iTalki, which comes recommended by a lot of people and is affordable.

My whole life I’ve had a hard time thinking of any of my activities as “hobbies.” It was as if I needed to believe that everything I did was leading to some great goal and therefore shouldn’t be diminished by such a term. Thinking of Japanese study as a “hobby” has allowed me to have a joyful and pressure-free relationship with it. I honestly love every second I spend with it, and that love has been my only objective and my only motivation. If that love starts to fade, I may flounder in my routine, and maybe even give it up – or maybe I’ll find another impetus. For now, though, spending anything from 15 minutes to a couple of hours on Japanese study every morning is a joy and a respite.

If you’re working at learning something – Japanese, the saxophone, tennis, cabinetmaking… – do you have a routine? Do you have experience with the resources I mention above, or recommendations for others? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Posted on by Siobhan Curious 0

Old Lady Studies Japanese

The other day, someone I don’t know well wrote me a short message in Japanese. He’s not Japanese, and I don’t know how he knew that I can read simple words in hiragana (“ありがとうございます” = “Thank you.”). The delight I felt over this tiny connection turned my day around.

Last week, my Japanese teacher asked about my favourite anime. I told her it’s currently Yuri!!! on Ice. She didn’t seem to know it, but during pair work later, my partner excitedly pulled out her Yurio doll and we squealed about him together. Part of me thinks that being in my fifties and bonding with someone over an anime figurine is unseemly. But it was a true shared little joy, like the moment I discovered that the Japanese equivalent of the Facebook “Like” is “いいね！” (“Ii ne!” or “Isn’t that great?”) and immediately texted my one colleague who is also studying Japanese and who I knew would understand how charming I found this.

As an older person embarking on learning an (almost) new language, I face some obstacles. In my Language Acquisition classes in university, much was made of how unlikely it is to achieve full fluency once one is past a certain age. There are some factors that make things a bit easier for me: I have learned one language (French) as a grown person, and this experience is supposed to have made my brain and ear more flexible. I already have some familiarity with Japanese; I lived in Japan for a couple of years in my twenties, although I was a lazy student and came away ashamed of how little I had absorbed.

I sometimes think with regret about that missed opportunity, but that regret is softened by two factors: I’m having so much fun studying Japanese now, and throughout my life, I’ve always learned things better the second time around. I pecked away at a typewriter with two fingers and a self-study book for years until I finally took a typing class and aced it. I failed my childhood beginner’s swim class three times, but when I finally passed, I flew through the next-level course with no problems. I even hold out hope that when I decide to take driving lessons again, I will come out actually able to drive, and maybe even to park. I’m a slow learner, but if I care about something enough to do it more than once, it starts to stick.

What I do regret about my time in Japan, however, is how closed-off I was, not just because I knew no Japanese, but also because I felt like a helpless and ignorant child in a world that made no sense to me, and this made me defensive. These days, treating the people and events around me as curious and interesting universes to investigate and connect with, rather than threats, is my main psychological project. When I go to Japan again someday, I will go with this goal.

It’s been a long time since I last posted here, because I felt I had little left to say about teaching. Where learning is concerned, though, I’ve barely begun. If you are interested in learning, or Japanese, or exploring curious universes with an open heart, then please stay tuned.

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 2

How To Be a Teenage Girl

If you haven’t yet discovered Tavi Gevinson and her webzine Rookie, it’s time you did.  If you know any teenage girls, you need to send them a link to Rookie, because every teenage girl needs to think about the stuff Tavi Gevison and her writers think about.

In her original editor’s letter, Tavi explains that she did NOT conceive of Rookie as

your guide to Being a Teen. It is not a pamphlet on How to Be a Young Woman…Rookie is a place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringe-worthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl. When it becomes harder to appreciate these things, we also have good plain fun and visual pleasure. When you’re sick of having to be happy all the time, we have lots of eye-rolling rants, too.

Despite this disavowal, I wish every teenage girl I know would take Rookie as a guide.  Exhibit A: this article entitled “An Actually Useful Article About Dressing for a Party” and subtitled “…without any mention of your body shape or your style personality.”

Gevinson has been clear that Sassy magazine – a fond memory to women in my age bracket – is a major influence.  I loved Sassy, but what she’s doing is so much better.  Sassy was fun, and smart, and acknowledged that some teenage girls have sex.  It was revolutionary, but it was of its time (and it spawned, indirectly, the horror that was Jane magazine.)  Rookie takes what Sassy did and makes it fresh, immediate and interactive, which is exactly what an Internet mag should do.

(The fact that Rookie makes regular references to River Phoenix and [see video above] Stevie Nicks doesn’t hurt, though.  Do teenage girls know who these people are?  Is Gevinson really a 43-year-old woman in 16-year-old eye makeup?)

The mag posts three times a day and has monthly themes like “Transformation” and “Power”.  Sound all second-wave feminist to you?  Well, yes, but so much more.  For example, March’s theme was “Exploration” and included articles like “Literally the Best Thing Ever: National Geographic” and “How to Look Like You Weren’t Just Crying in Less than Five Minutes.”

The ONLY reason I wish I were fifteen again is so that this magazine could rock my world as hard as it should.

I know a lot of teenage girls.  Wait – I shouldn’t say that.  I don’t know them.  I spend a few hours a week with them for fifteen weeks, and maybe fifteen weeks more if they like me enough to look me up again.  They mystify me and enthrall me and make me crazy.  Why are they walking around wearing things that resemble pants but ARE NOT PANTS?  Why do they all, down to the very last one, insist on straightening their lovely frizzy hair?  Why are they all reading those awful Twilight books or, even worse, watching those awful Twilight movies because reading the books is too hard?  Why are they dating that boy?  Yes, that one, missy – he’s just going to drag you down!  And while you’re at it, do up your sweater!

And then I read Rookie.  I know some of the girls I know are reading it too.  It reminds me that teenage girls are just amazing.  Even the ones who aren’t reading it…even the ones who wouldn’t like it if they did read it…even the ones who are wearing those things that ARE NOT PANTS…they’re amazing.  There’s so much going ON when you’re a teenage girl.  Life is so full of STUFF.

No way I’d go back there again.  But Rookie is a delightful, painful, funny travelogue.  Spread the word.

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 3

Cold Call

Are you willing to put your students on the spot?

A reader, Damommachef, has asked me to discuss a problem that can arise with classroom dynamics: the Constant Commenter.  She says, “Some kids want to constantly comment, but the smartest are often the quietest. How can we get them more involved? How do we subdue the chronic commenters?”

One solution is the cold call.  We call on students randomly (or perhaps not so randomly, but it may appear random to them.)  If students raise hands or call out, we say, “I’m cold calling for this one, so no volunteers.”

A few years ago, a Masters teacher of mine said that she never cold-calls students because when she was a student, the idea of being “picked on” without warning made her sick with anxiety.  She never put her students through it because she hated it so much.  At first I was puzzled by this – Really?  You never ask students for answers unless they volunteer? – but I then realized that I rarely cold-call in its strict sense.  I often call on students, but usually they’ve had a chance to prepare responses beforehand, often with a partner or group so they don’t bear sole responsibility for their answers.

I’ve been reading Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov (thanks to my friend Sarah for the recommendation!) and he believes in real, honest-to-God cold-calling, asking students to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that they are mastering the skills and content they’re being taught, at a nanosecond’s notice.  This technique, he explains, has several benefits.

…it allows you to check for understanding effectively and systematically…increases speed both in terms of your pacing…and the rate at which you cover material…[and] allows you to distribute work more broadly around the room and signal to students not only that they are likely to be called on to participate…but that you want to know what they have to say.

Lemov also encourages teachers to use techniques like “No Opt Out,” in which a student who answers with “I don’t know” must eventually give a correct answer, and “Format Matters,” meaning that students need to respond in complete, grammatical sentences whenever possible.  In Lemov’s world, there is no escape: you need to be present, engaged and ready to respond at any time.

I am more inclined to Lemov’s view than my former teacher’s.  At the beginning of the semester, I use the excuse that I need to learn their names, and call on them randomly from the attendance list to answer questions.  As time goes on, though, I find myself getting soft, and allowing a few eager students to dominate discussion.  And, as I said, I rarely ask students to think on their feet – if they’re nervous, they can just read answers they’ve prepared with their group, although they may have to stretch themselves if I ask for further explanation.

I feel like I should do it more.  I believe that if students know they can be called on at any time, they will be more engaged and feel more responsibility for the material.  I’d like to create an atmosphere in which students feel that it’s safe to make errors, but that they at least have to take a stab at things, and that they need to be ready to do so at all times.  But I don’t want students to sit stewing in fear, petrified that they may be asked to speak.

Do you cold-call in your classroom?  If so, how do you make students fell okay with that?  If not, why not?  Does cold-calling improve the classroom dynamic, or is it a detriment?  I want my students to rise to the demands cold-calling creates, but I don’t want to poison their learning with terror.

Image by Sigurd Decroos

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 40

What If They Don’t Do the Required Reading?

It’s a perennial problem for teachers.  You plan a great lesson around today’s short story, but it turns out two-thirds of the students haven’t read it.  What do you do?  Do you kick out the slackers?  Give them class time to read it?  Give up and do something else?  As a follow-up to last week’s post on how we can teach students to be willing, if not enthusiastic, readers and writers, I’d like to throw a question out there from frequent commenter CrysHouse.  She asks, How can we use class time effectively if students don’t do the reading before they come?

I have a couple of techniques.  I have them do some written homework based on the reading, homework that they must then use for the class activity.  It counts for credit, they have to show it to me before we begin, and if they haven’t done it, they have to leave class, because they can’t do the day’s work.  Of course, I’m in a privileged spot here – most teachers can’t throw students out of class – but you could have students work on their own to complete the homework, and receive no credit for the class work they miss as a result.

I have been known, if it seems like no one has done the reading, to designate today’s work as a graded test.  They have to work alone to answer some questions or write a short response.  This, of course, makes more work for me, because then I have to grade the things.  It also doesn’t sit well with my most idealistic principles about separating grades from behaviour issues.  However, it’s pretty effective in impressing the importance of the reading on them, and at least then we can do some work with the reading the following class.

I don’t like the coerciveness of either of these approaches.  What’s more, because we do a lot of group work, the fact that some students haven’t read is often obscured, because their group mates cover for them and resent both them and me.  If all work were individual, it would be easier to allow natural consequences to reveal themselves – you won’t get much done if you haven’t read before class! – but this is not always possible, and I hate structuring all my lessons around the contingency that some students aren’t pulling their weight.

Do people have other techniques?  Is this problem solvable?  I wrote three papers on Robinson Crusoe in high school and college, and to this day, I haven’t read the damn book and don’t intend to – so who am I to fault them?  Is it possible that this is one more thing  we’ll just have to let go?

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Image by Davide Guglielmo

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 39

Willing to Read and Write

Yesterday, I told my college students that they need to read the next 150 pages of the novel we are studying, Life of Pi, over the next seven days.  This is not news – they got a reading schedule on the first day of class, and were told to read ahead.  Nevertheless, there was a collective gasp and more than a little laughter.  A few moments later, during a close reading exercise, I asked them to talk about a passage with a group and come up with a point that they might focus on “if you had to write a couple hundred words about this piece.”  Around the room, students looked at each other with horrified amusement.  A couple hundred words?  About this?  What does she think we are, writing machines?  There were quiet snorts and groans, subtly and not-so-subtly rolled eyes.

It’s early in the semester, and I still have reserves of patience that I won’t have in a few weeks’ time.  By October, I may break down and say something like:

“If you’re not sure you can read one hundred fifty pages of clear, simple prose in a week, or if you’re not sure you can write two hundred words about a two-page passage, that’s ok.  It’s not a problem if you don’t know how to do it – you can learn.  However, if you don’t want to learn how to do these things – if you don’t want to practice and get feedback and meet that challenge, and if you resent me for asking you to – then college is not the place for you.”

The previous class, I’d asked students to interview each other about their reading habits, and write a paragraph about their partners’ reading lives.  A predictable number of students said that they don’t like to read, never read for enjoyment, and last read a novel in the ninth grade, because it was required.  (The number was predictable to me, that is – anyone who doesn’t teach college might be astonished by the number of college students who have absolutely no interest in reading.)

I would like at some point to ask similar questions about writing, but they seem redundant – surely people who don’t read also don’t write?  However, “writing” has become a much more complicated phenomenon in the age of digital communication, and many would argue that our students “write” all the time, although a middle-aged fuddy-duddy like me might be reluctant to call much of the texting, messaging and Facebook posting they do “writing,” any more than I’d call a to-do list “writing.”  Maybe what I’m talking about is long-form writing: long emails in the spirit of “letters,” diary entries that go on for pages and pages, poems and stories and even stabs at novels, blog posts.

A few weeks ago, an article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading.”  In it, Alan Jacobs explains that

“‘deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.”

Jacobs points to the American GI bill, and the influx of soldiers into American universities after WWII.  From then until now,

“far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.”

 Once, only a tiny minority of people were expected to get a post-secondary education; now almost everybody is.  However, it is still unreasonable to expect everyone to enjoy reading, even though a university education – at least a traditional one – is difficult to pursue if you don’t.

Jacobs divides people into those who love reading, those who like reading, and those who don’t.  Universities, he says, are full of

“…often really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive. For lovers of books and reading, and especially for those of us who become teachers, this fact can be painful and frustrating.”

Jacobs says this is genetic – such people are “mostly born and only a little made.”  A furor has arisen around this assertion – here’s one post that takes it on – but I think he may in part be right.  But if readers and writers are at least “a little made,” what can teachers do to help make them?

According to Jacobs, maybe nothing.

“[The] idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education.”

Now, I’m ok with the fact that a lot of people don’t like reading and writing.  I think they’d be better off if they did, but I also think I’d be better off if I liked playing team sports, going to parties full of strangers, and drinking wheatgrass.  And I’ve written before about the wisdom or lack thereof of pushing your children to love writing.  If it’s possible for me to help my students like reading and writing more than they do, I’d love that – and I dedicate a lot of thought and time to this end.  But if not – if many students will never like to read or write no matter what I do – I can accept this reality.

I do, however, want and expect my students to be willing to read and write.  I want and expect them to see college as an opportunity to practice these activities, and to even be open to enjoying them.  I know that teenagers are not usually “open” by any measure.  Much of their energy goes into defining themselves as “this not that” – athlete, not reader; gamer, not writer.  However, I’m irritated at the prospect of another semester of complaints about being expected to read a lot and write a lot in English class.

Are there things we can do to make our students willing, if not eager, to read and write?  We can try to give them “books that interest them,” but in an extremely diverse class of 42 students, coming up with books that will please everyone is not possible.  We can give them choices about what they’ll read and what they’ll write about, but if reading and writing are themselves the problem, even making such choices can be difficult and frustrating.  By the time they get to college, is it too late?  Do I just have to grit my teeth and say, “I know you don’t like it, but you’re in college”?  Or is it time to start asking less of them?

Jacob believes that we should ask, if not less, then at least different.

“Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about…skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.”

If this is true, then there is no place for the study of literature at college, at least not as core curriculum for readers and non-readers alike.  Can we extrapolate from this that there is no need for “deep writing” either?  That asking students to write longer pieces – which is not to say two hundred words, which they would call long, but perhaps one-thousand-word essays – is asking too much of most, that the ability to do such a thing can only “arise from within,” as Jacobs puts it, and cannot be explicitly taught to anyone?

I would argue that the skills of deep reading and deep writing can be taught to anyone.  The caveat is that students must be, not necessarily enamoured of these activities, but simply willing to engage in them.  They must open to the possibility that they may enjoy them more than they expect, but also to the possibility that they may not.  They need to be prepared to keep stabbing away at them even if they find them difficult, boring or even infuriating, in the hope that they will get better, and with the faith that they will learn something.

Is this skill – openness, or gameness, even in the face of obstacles and possible failure – something that can be taught?  Because if we can teach our students (and ourselves, for that matter) how to be willing, how to relish trying, then we will all truly be learners.

Image by Peter Galbraith

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Posted on by Siobhan Curious 31

Late Penalties?

Throughout the years, I’ve heard a lot of arguments against giving penalties for late student work.

Back in February, Tom Shimmer outlined some of the arguments against late penalties in a post, and they reflect the main argument I’ve heard again and again: students should be evaluated on the learning they can demonstrate, not punctuality.  I don’t, in principle, disagree with this argument.  It would be ideal if I could get a direct measurement of a student’s learning without any interference from other factors.

However, I’m not sure this is ever possible.  Can the learning of specific skills and material in a specific domain be separated from everything else?  This has always struck me as weirdly compartmentalized.  Yes, I know the student is supposed to demonstrate the achievement of competencies – for example, she can identify a specific theme from a text she’s read, or she can write a sentence that correctly uses the present perfect.  But in most evaluations, these skills are inextricably bound up with other things.  For example, if a student can identify a clear theme in her own mind but can’t state it in a way that an intelligent reader can understand, how can she get full points for that criterion?  If she writes a paragraph in which the present perfect is required, and uses the present perfect correctly throughout but botches all her other verb tenses, does she get 100% for the paragraph?

Maybe.  The question becomes murkier when we talk about evaluating skills and behaviours that cross disciplines.  If I am a history teacher, do I evaluate my students’ ability to write correct English in their history papers?  Should this count toward some portion of their grade?  Yes, many educators will insist, because literacy and clear communication are cross-disciplinary skills.

Aha.  In that case, could it be argued that carrying work out in a timely manner – as one will inevitably have to do in any job, whether it involve writing memos or changing diapers – is also a cross-disciplinary skill?  Should this be one of the competencies addressed in their course work?

I would argue yes.  However, it occurs to me now that a late penalty is not the same as an evaluation criterion.  Instead of imposing a penalty, maybe I should dedicate 5 or 10% of the grade for each paper to “punctual submission,” much as I do for MLA formatting.  Students who submit papers on time will get the full 10%.  That way, punctuality would be evaluated the same way as all other competencies.

But then, what do I do about a student who comes to me at the end of the term and wants to submit several assignments, when the assignments are cumulative and completing them all in a short time will minimize their benefit?  What do I do when the grade submission deadline rolls around and some students have still not submitted all work?  Do I argue that the administration give me an extension too, or give incompletes (which are not given at my college except for medical reasons) on pedagogical principle?  Schimmer says that he doesn’t receive a “flood” of assignments at the end of term even though he doesn’t impose late penalties.  However, he also doesn’t explain how he deals with individual stragglers (except to mention that students who struggle with deadlines need to be “supported” – how? – and that he contacts parents – not an option when you’re a college teacher.)  How does one run a class without firm deadlines?

How do you deal with late work?  Do you agree that there is no place for late penalties in learning?  Do you have ways of making things run smoothly even if students don’t feel that it’s essential to hand their work in on time?

Image by Chris Gilbert

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Posted on by Siobhan Curious 41

What Have You Been Thinking About?

Whether you’re a teacher, a parent, a student, or just a citizen of the world who believes that learning is important, you may be thinking about new problems or dwelling on old fears or puzzles as the school year begins.  Maybe you’d like to hear what others have to say about your burning questions or personal philosophies about teaching, learning, and living in the world.  Maybe you’d like me to write about a specific topic and solicit input from others.

Are you a teacher who has a concern as you return to the classroom?  A parent who’s been pondering a new situation your child is encountering in school?  A student who often wonders how teachers think about a particular experience?  A blogger who would like to hear more about an educational topic you’ve been writing about?  A career waiter or CEO who is thinking of returning to school and has a lot of concerns?

If there’s a particular topic you’d like me to write about on this blog, get in touch with me.  You can leave a suggestion in the comments; visit my contact page to send your suggestion via a contact form;  or visit my Facebook page, “Like” it if you haven’t already, and post a suggestion on my wall.

My goal this semester is to post every Monday and Thursday.  We all know what good intentions are made of, and this is a goal, not a rule!  However, the more suggestions I receive, the more I will have to think and write about.

Thanks so much for your continued readership.  I look forward to hearing from you!

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Posted on by Siobhan Curious 13

The First Days of School: Then and Now

Today is the beginning of the new school year for me and my colleagues, and many of you will be getting back into the saddle in the next couple of weeks.  As I prepare, my thoughts have returned to three of my past posts that still seem timely.

The first is called “Mean ‘Til Hallowe’een: Classroom Discipline and the First Day of the Semester.” I wrote this in 2007 and return to it at the beginning of every term.  The question: does it help to be strict and unsmiling for the first few weeks?

Another is a commentary on one of my favourite books for educators: Harry and Rosemary Wong’s The First Days of School.  If you have a week or so before you start teaching, run out and get your hands on this book and read it before classes begin.  Even if you’ve already started, the book has many, many valuable insights about knowing yourself as a teacher and being the most effective teacher you can be.

Finally, I am returning to the teaching resolutions I made at the beginning of 2010, and I am renewing those resolutions for the coming semester.  Do you have resolutions for this school year?  I’d love to hear them.

Feel free to leave comments on the posts themselves, or to comment below.  You can also visit my Facebook Page, “Like” it, and leave your thoughts there!

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Posted on by Siobhan Curious 10

“Either You Can Be a Teacher or You Can Be the Plagiarism Police”

As the new semester creeps nearer, I’m starting to think about plagiarism again.  My use of Turnitin.com, a plagiarism-detection software, is helping me relax a bit – last semester, the software made discovering plagiarism, and talking to students about it, a lot easier.  However, cheating is a perennial source of anxiety for most teachers, and a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is causing me to re-think my approach yet again.

In Toward a Rational Response to Plagiarism, Rob Jenkins asks if it’s necessary for us to focus so much of our energy on student cheating.

“Of course I care about plagiarism, and I certainly take steps to deal with plagiarists once I have sufficient proof. But I don’t spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about plagiarism or trying to catch students at it. I’d prefer to direct my time and energy toward something more positive, such as actually teaching the subject I’ve been hired to teach.”

Jenkins then goes on to list steps he uses to deal with plagiarism, most of which are common-sensical: put your plagiarism policy in your syllabus, talk about plagiarism on the first day but not only on the first day, design assignments that make plagiarism difficult.  I do all these things.  It’s his final point that really makes me think.

“Let it go. If some students take unfair advantage of the fact that I let them do most of their writing outside of class, or that I don’t use Turnitin, so be it. It’s not that I don’t care. I do…  When I say ‘let it go,’ I mean that in the metaphysical sense. I’m not saying you should ignore clear cases of plagiarism. But the truth is, there aren’t many clear cases of plagiarism. Most cases are borderline, at best. It’s also true that, no matter what you do to deter cheating, some students are going to find a way around it. You can go crazy thinking about that all the time.”

I’m almost ready to embrace that philosophy.  Unlike Jenkins, however, I find that Turnitin.com makes relaxing about plagiarism easier.  Jenkins says he doesn’t use it mostly because it creates an atmosphere of mistrust, but talking about plagiarism at all creates the same problem.

I used to get complaints from students about the fact that I mention plagiarism more than once and have them sign contracts stating that they understand what constitutes cheating and what will happen if they do it.  I think these complaints are warranted, and now, I always reiterate several times that I know most of my students would never cheat, and that they have every right to be insulted by the implication, but that I need to do everything I can to protect people who do their work honestly. That includes having them submit their papers to a program that will help me identify plagiarism.

Turnitin allows me to stop obsessing over every line that is atypically erudite or awkwardly shoehorned in.  If the program doesn’t find something, I usually feel like due diligence has been done.  Also, simply having students submit through Turnitin makes them less likely to copy things, so I feel I can relax a bit about the whole problem.

What’s more, there’s something about the use of a software program that allows me to step away from cheating and take it less personally.  I know, intellectually, that it’s not personal when they cheat, but I can’t help feeling outraged and hurt, especially when I need to waste my valuable grading time looking for plagiarized sources or comparing two student papers line-by-line.  A student who submits a plagiarized paper to Turnitin is not so much saying that he thinks I, the teacher, am a dupe.  He is saying that either a) he believes his cheating skills are invincible (and who knows? He may be right this time) or b) he  feels this is his only recourse, so he’s going to cross his fingers and take his chances, or c) he somehow still doesn’t understand what cheating is or what’s wrong with it, or d) he just doesn’t give a damn.   It’s hard to take this personally, and when I call him into my office, the printouts covered with highlighted “matches” usually head off any attempts on his part to make it so.

A perfect solution?  No.  There are those who object to the fact that Turnitin stores student work, and others who will have noticed that it doesn’t catch everything.  For now, though, I’m grateful for anything that, as Jenkins says, lets me worry less about cheating and more about doing my job.  “Either you can be a teacher or you can be the plagiarism police,” he says.  Well, I may still have to be a bit of both, but I know I’d rather be mostly the former, and the latter only when it’s unavoidable.

What are your plans for dealing with plagiarism this year?  Are you obsessed, or can you find ways to “let it go” so that it doesn’t colour everything you do?

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Yes, plagiarism can make a teacher crazy.  If you’re not convinced, check out some of my real-life cheating-in-the-classroom stories here, here, here, and here.

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