If my congested head is upright today, I must be administering final exams.
This puts me in mind of a question that has not come up this semester (and, with luck, will not), but that has come up on occasion in the past.
I frequently teach multiple sections of the same course in a given semester. On the one hand, this simplifies things, because it means that I have fewer exams to write. (A single final exam works for both section of Philosophy of Science.) But, since our final exams are scheduled based on the regular meeting days and times for the courses, there are then necessarily multiple sittings of an exam for courses I teach in multiple sections.
In practice, what this means is that the first group of students taking the exam can end up being your beta testers.
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
A downside of the fact that faculty members are not fully interchangeable.
In response to my post yesterday considering some of the difficulties in restaffing a course when its professor falls ill, Leigh commented:
Sometimes nothing can be done. Last winter I had to cancel my evolution course, which doubles as a laboratory in the philosophy of science, because of a serious illness. (I had already given the course in the fall; I voluntarily added the winter one because the fall course was doubly oversubscribed.) Fortunately this happened just after the course started, so the students were minimally lurchified. The course is quite idiosyncratic, with no actual lectures after the first class, and there just isn’t anyone who could have taken it over.
My first thought was, “I would love to take that course!” My next thought was that Leigh raises another key issue that makes it challenging to reassign a course to a different faculty member, even if you have lead time: our syllabi, teaching styles, and skill sets are not fully interchangeable. This is a fact that rears its head not just when a department is making course schedule, but when that course schedule needs to be remade on account of faculty work other than teaching.
Changing professorial horses midstream.
In comments on my earlier post about what happens to a college course in progress when the professor teaching it dies, a lot of folks raised interesting questions about what would be the fair policy to adopt with respect to student grades. I think actually implementing whatever we might agree was a fair grading policy could be complicated by practical considerations, like whether the professor had left behind updated grade records that were accessible to his or her department, whether he or she had already written a final exam (and a guide to grading that final exam), etc.
It’s an interesting set of questions, but that’s not the subject of this post.
Something else that came up in those comments was that a goodly number of commenters had actually been in a course where the professor died, or fell ill, or had to withdraw from teaching the course to deal with a pressing emergency of some sort. In such situations, someone either has to jump in to take over teaching the course — sometimes without much information from the original professor about how to teach it, or with very different views than the original professor about how the material ought to be covered — or the course ends up being concluded prematurely. I think this, as much as the issue of how to calculate grades at the end of the term raises some big questions, many of them connected to what the students enrolled in a course are owed.
Friday Sprog Blogging: swordfish.
The younger Free-Ride offspring’s third grade class is involved in some independent research about animals.
Hazards of paper grading.
One is that my hands are tired from writing all those comments, which means I don’t feel like typing.
Another is described in this brief video.
What happens when your prof doesn’t make it through the term?
At the end of one of my class meetings today, one of the students noted that her professor for another of her courses this term died about a week ago.
Not that anyone said out loud that this semester is what killed him.
Under the weight of the semester.
It’s the last day of November. I have three more meetings with each of my classes before finals. I have oodles of grading to do before finals. I have one big administrative task and at least a dozen smaller ones to do before the end of the semester.
And, at the moment, I feel as though the weight of the semester is pressing down on me, like the stones used to press to death that one man so sentenced in the Salem witch trials.
Death is not an option: optimizing academic performance edition.
Let’s say you’re a college student.
You have a class meeting today at which a short essay (about 400 words) is due. The essay counts for about 5% of your grade for the course.
At that class meeting, your instructor will be lecturing on the reading assignment upon which that short essay is focused. The material from the reading assignment will likely appear on the final exam, which is only a few weeks away.
Grades for sale?
Steinn apparently knows how to get me riled about wrong-headed middle school fundraising initiatives, since he nearly derailed my efforts to push through my stack of grading with his recent post about one such initiative. He quotes from a Raleigh News & Observer story:
Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro… will sell 20 test points to students in exchange for a $20-dollar donation.
Students can add 10 extra points to each of two tests of their choosing. The extra points could take a student from a “B” to an “A” on a test or from a failing grade to a passing grade.
Rosewood’s principal Susie Shepherd rejected the idea that extra points on two tests could make a difference in a final grade.
Shepherd said she approved the idea when a parent advisory council presented it. “Last year they did chocolates and it didn’t generate anything,” Shepherd said.
However, this cash-for-points fundraiser didn’t last long:
Wayne County school administrators stopped the fundraiser, issuing a statement this morning.
“Yesterday afternoon, the district administration met with [Rosewood Middle School principal] Mrs. Shepherd and directed the the following actions be taken: (1) the fundraiser will be immediately stopped; (2) no extra grade credit will be issued that may have resulted from donations; and (3) beginning Novermber 12, all donations will be returned.”
Steinn despairs at this whole situation. I’m not liking it so much either.
An observation about the student papers I’m grading.
Because, as it happens, I tend to notice patterns in student papers, then end up musing on them rather than, you know, buckling down and just working through the stack of papers that needs grading.
In my philosophy of science class, I have my students write short essays (approximately 400 words) about central ideas in some of the readings I’ve assigned. Basically, it’s a mechanism to ensure that they grapple with an author’s view (and its consequences) before they hear me lecture about it. (It’s also a way to get students writing as many words as they are required to write in an upper division general education course; sometimes assignments need to serve two masters.)
Anyhow, because these papers are focused on the task of explaining in plain English what some philosopher seems to be saying in the reading assignment, there are plenty of sentences in these essays that contain phrases like “AuthorLastName {claims, thinks, argues that, writes} …”
And, in at least 5-10% of the papers turned in to me, the author’s last name is spelled incorrectly.
Among other things, I’ve noticed: