Tomorrow’s the last day of my heavy twelve weeks. Next week I’ve exams to supervise, final essays to mark and only about four hours teaching, then it’s non-teaching weeks till late June in time for the good señor to move in.
All I have to do tomorrow is run an afternoon revision session for my tired and worried preparatory students, before which I’ve promised to take my departing literary studies students to morning tea. But I’m tired and worried too, and don’t feel the levity you might expect at the prospect of a lessening of my workload for the rest of the year. I just want to be done and dusted, and send on, with good grace, those whose next task is to sit their exams.
[click to continue…]
This week I have been doing final marking for my Wisconsonians, who will shortly be returning home or elsewhere. (One said he plans to spend the northern summer vacation in Tonga; I believe him.) They have been a challenge and a learning experience. When two groups (teachers and students) are both native speakers of English one can be tricked into thinking there won’t be significant cultural differences. There were: expectations around contact hours, due dates, the nature of assessment and even things like how you address your lecturer (on the one hand, “professor”, on the other, “when are you going to bring us some candy?”) warred in my understanding for much of the first half of their programme.
[click to continue…]
Once the hard grind of initial administration is done, it is a pleasure to teach the cohorts of exchange students that dominate my first semester. My Wisconsonians finish their programme this week. The usual building of teacher-student relationships that I rely on to get my courses kick-started was retarded in our case by the students’ considerable course load, including at least one course with continuous but discrete assessment, meaning that for our first few weeks together their focus was scattered elsewhere. There were also various cross-cultural mishaps based around not understanding each others’ accents, and a succession of underlying assumptions about assessment that meant we were talking past each other for a while. But things have settled now into happy fun learning times, right on cue for their programme to finish. I have been impressed with their hard work and the quality of their prose even as they have been under particular stress of workloads.
[click to continue…]
I feel frustrated sometimes when students blurt things out in class, especially when the lecture is flowing well.
I only have to reflect a little, however, to remember how as a student I was a chronic blurter. I would get so caught up, in smaller classes, in what was happening that I wanted to get into a conversation with the ideas.
When I think of it in this fashion, it’s likely something to feel good about. Once or twice today I wondered if an argument was going to break out between contributing students. That’s no bad thing either, if a little tense. It makes me feel like this material matters.
The garden environs and dreaming Brutalist towers of Concrete University do not magically open to accommodate students in the late summer as once I might have imagined. No, that process of accommodation is long, arcane and multi-faceted. Its administration has consumed both me and my colleagues for the last fortnight. Indeed, in pushing paper towards the end of last week I may even have described myself as going a bit mental. As you know, with psychochemistries such as mine, that is not necessarily a metaphor.
However, I am nothing if not resilient, apparently, and seem to have resiled this afternoon. My new responsibility is teaching the group of exchange students whom I mentioned here, and who were on first meeting bright, organised and charming. It occurred to me, following our first session today, that I may have been expecting some variant of this, this or this. I am deeply unimpressed by the capacity of my unconscious for conjuring the stereotypical and the bizarre.
DandyID
Blogger
Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Vimeo
Twitpic
Tumblr
Linkedin
LiveJournal
Mobypicture
Facebook
Picasa
Google Profiles
Google Reader
Posterous
A minor clash of civilisations
2 May, 2008
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,teaching & learning
This week I have been doing final marking for my Wisconsonians, who will shortly be returning home or elsewhere. (One said he plans to spend the northern summer vacation in Tonga; I believe him.) They have been a challenge and a learning experience. When two groups (teachers and students) are both native speakers of English one can be tricked into thinking there won’t be significant cultural differences. There were: expectations around contact hours, due dates, the nature of assessment and even things like how you address your lecturer (on the one hand, “professor”, on the other, “when are you going to bring us some candy?”) warred in my understanding for much of the first half of their programme.
[click to continue…]
{ 0 comments }