This Blog Not Dead Yet

At the end of last quarter, I took my History Club students on a field trip to Tamastslikt Cultural Institute in Pendleton, Oregon.  It's a nice museum.  I've taken students there before (unfortunately the main exhibit there has not changed in the last ten years, but they do have a temporary installation that changes: we saw some Mayan artifacts).

Anyway, on the way home, I had a conversation with one of my students who told me that he did not perform well in his math class last quarter.  When I asked him why, he explained that his professor didn't require that the students turn in the homework.  The professor assigned homework, and it was up to the students to keep up with it, but since it was not "required," my student's math homework began to take a back seat to everything else.  We all know that we never have enough time for everything.  We do what seems most pressing.  In this case, his Spanish homework (which had to be done) got done, while his math homework languished.

We can all understand this.  We have busy lives.  We are creatures of externally imposed deadlines.  The self-imposed deadlines (like "I'm going to write a blog every week!") get pushed to the bottom of the pile when things get busy (which is always). 

Of course, teachers cannot collect and grade homework everyday--it's just impossible, given that we all teach more than 100 students per quarter.  And many faculty believe that, since this is college, students simply need to be responsible for learning the material.   So what's the solution?

I can think of a lot of impractical ones: all classes should be taught as seminars with ten students per professor, so that professors can devote themselves to working intensively with each individual student.  But, alas, this is not Sarah Lawrence College, but CBC.  We need to pound through the FTE just to survive.

Of course there all kinds of things we can do in the real world, the most obvious being the use of technology.  Since this was a math class, I'm sure that the professor could have assigned online homework that would be graded automatically.  And on and on. 

Anyway, this is my way of explaining why I haven't posted a blog in so long.  I've been piling up the notes and ideas for blog posts, but, alas, no one was requiring me to post blogs--not even myself.  During the fall quarter, I made my students post blogs, so I HAD to do it also.  But now I have no mandatory deadlines, just my own hopeful aspirations to write about teaching, which periodically become crushed under the weight of exams, papers, little league games and household projects (and the repressive strictures of the space-time continuum). 

So I'm beginning again.  Now that I've driven my entire readership away with my long hiatus (even Mom), I will begin afresh (like spring!).  I promise.