Did you ever go to your class and give what feels like a really good lecture on the reading (because the students look engaged, and they’re asking really good questions about both the specifics and the big picture) …
And, it feels like it’s connecting in a really effective way to issues discussed in the last class meeting (simultaneously reinforcing some of those points and challenging them) …
And, you didn’t even really have to dip into your list of half a dozen current situations that raise similar kinds of questions, because the students are all over it and have raised half a dozen such current situations of their own …
Only to discover
… that we were scheduled to discuss this reading Thursday, not today?
That’s me today. Ouch.
Wow! Both you and your students are ahead of class schedule!
That just shows that students can fake it without doing the reading…
Or maybe you usual approach is too much spoon feeding?
sounds like you should shuffle up the sylabus more often!
To be fair, I think it was a perfect storm of students who had actually read ahead (since it’s early enough in the semester that people aren’t too swamped to do so — I could tell they had read the articles by the specificity of the questions) and students who have developed effective strategies for participating in class discussions when they haven’t done the reading (e.g., by zeroing in on connections to earlier material, or to the big picture).
Most of ’em are seniors, so I expect they have some such strategies. (I did.) It doesn’t mean they always skip the reading, just that they can soldier on in instances where they do.