I must say, it has been a *while* since I have been online. I am going to stop promising to come back and blog more because - well, because I cannot keep my promises. So I figure, if I do not make promises, maybe I will post more. The irony of everything, right?
Grading has, in effect, taken over my life. Grading and lesson planning, of course. I preview the material, try to think of an interesting way to present it to my students and try to find good problems to work on that are challenging enough to get their wheels turning.
The biggest problem I have is that my students do not want to think about problems, they are obsessed with answers.
Who can blame them? I mean really, they have been taking standardized tests all their lives and if they get the answer wrong, they are wrong. On standardized tests there is no partial credit, if they cannot come up with an answer then they must feel as though all is lost.
Why should they believe that I am different? Why should they believe that this particular math professor is different from all the others and will look at their work and judge whether or not the answer is indeed correct? Why should they trust me?
I have only tried to help them and made myself completely available. My office hours are completely open door and I have never shut a student away when they came. Most of the students who leave depart with a better understanding of the material - should they trust me because of this?
I have changed, partially, the way I conduct class in order to suit different variations in student understanding - although I still do not feel comfortable with this and feel as though I hold their hand too much. Is it too much to ask that they struggle for a little bit with the material? I do not think so.
Maybe it is because I am trying to get them to think that they believe I am the enemy. I am, apparently, some sort of "Math Guru" that is holding the answers from them. I am the one who will not spill the beans, why won't I tell them that there is one and only one way to do this particular problem?
Well, because there isn't. There is more than one way to do this problem and most other problems also have multiple representations and multiple ways of looking at it. Sure, there is some ambigiouity and sometimes the answer seems too simple, but sometimes that is correct and sometimes, unfortunately, that is wrong.
I do not know who will read this, or whether anyone will read it for that matter, but I do know that I am in for a long semester, although we are already really far in and I am getting sucked into an abyss of grading that I do not want to be stuck in right now. I just wish someone could help me grade, but asking for help is beyond the question right now.
I really want to understand what my students are thinking, and that emplores me to look at all of their work, which unfortunately is time consuming and life consuming.
Someone get me out of the black hole of grading, please.
By the way, the title of this post was actually in reference to the user interface on blogger. I do not know what happened to the way it used to look, but I certainly miss all of my nice little tabs that looked cool, etc. I do not like this blogger facelift, or really facedrop, so I just wanted to say that. It was the first thing that popped into my mind when I started the post, which really became about something else entirely but oh well. I am sure you understand.
No comments:
Post a Comment