We’re three weeks into the semester and I’m not sure I feel we’re totally in the swing of things. My students may find this, so I will paint this in broad strokes. In fact, I hope they do find this. It would mean they’re doing what I expect.

Last semester, when I taught this course, we really focused on blogging. We didn’t have a heavy-duty reading assignment until 2-3 weeks into the course. This semester, I decided to do both–have the blog and do some reading and leave it up to the students as to whether they blogged about the reading or something else related. The thing is, most students are averaging about 1 post a week, though I’ve assigned 4 posts (two over each long weekend). I know this blogging thing works. The hard part is motivating the students to get going on it. Most are motivated (from my recent study results) by receiving comments either from other students or from other bloggers. I had given them the assignment to find something to comment on and to comment and leave our url so that we might get some traffic to our site. I even showed them how to do this in class on Thursday.

I did my own assignment over the weekend and indeed, we did get a link and a comment. So I modeled what I wanted, and I guess I’ll discuss what I did in class. I’m also planning to do a brainstormin exercise a la jo(e). I feel like I need to mix it up in class a little. The students were kind of dragging on Thursday. Partly, I think the weather was a factor and it was beginning to sink in that college is going to be a lot of work and I think we’re kind of tired of the book. We should have gone through that faster.

The thing that’s hard is that my philosophy about teaching is that the students should take responsibility for their learning. Creating the environment for that is much harder than lecturing, just giving paper assignments and then grading them. I come to class with more questions than answers and I think some students find that unnerving. And if the students don’t wrestle with my questions, there’s a lot of dead air and I find that unnerving.

The kind of teacher I want to be is one who inspires in her students the desire to learn more. I’ve always had a few students like that. Whether I’ve had anything to do with it or not, I don’t know. But I recognize that I’m not always that inspiring. But I want to be, and so I keep working at it.

technorati tags:teaching-carnival, teaching, learning, writing, blogging

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