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Enjoying the Holidays

Today, I finished my grading. It's been a long semester and I'm more-or-less pleased with how everything turned out. It's usually a pleasure to read the reflective essays. Now and then a student seems to try to convince me that they didn't learn anything all semester and -- if they did -- it was in spite of me. Some students seem to be trying to tell me what they think I want to hear. No matter what, I always love to hear their voices. It's remarkable how different students sound when you get them to write about something from scratch -- without sources to start from. A lot of students can construct an excellent essay if the can draw from a variety of sources and just paraphrase everything. Many of these students stumble and struggle heroically when put in the position of having to decide for themselves what might make an effective argument or how to organize their thoughts. Paragraphs? Ha. But by the end of the semester, I'm genuinely pleased with the progress most of them have made.

I went to a workshop on assessment earlier in the week. Its always a little shocking to me when I see what other faculty are doing and remember just how different my class really is from most of the others. Not that they're horrible or anything. Many faculty, however, have scripted pretty much every minute of classtime: filled it up with lectures and activities. Similarly, for many faculty, the curriculum of the class is also entirely derived from their opinion about what students need to know. In my class, I have mapped out a set of goals, but I leave achieving them relatively open to the students and we address what we need to as we go along to help them get there. It transforms my relationship with the students, because I become an ally toward helping them achieving goal. Some students never really figure that out. Most do, however, and some say really charming things about the experience. One student told me that the class involved "a lot of constructive banging-of-heads-against-walls". That's what I like to hear.