Conferences

All this week I've had conferences with students. Next week they have a project to present. Although the assignment and it's due dates have been in the schedule since the beginning of class, we didn't go over them until last week. Since we're in a kind of time cruch, I decided not to require them to bring a draft of the project to the conference. Now, about the conferences.

I know you should not assume students know ANYTHING...even their own names, but I kind of thought pencil and paper was self explanatory. Or, that maybe when your teacher tells you how to do an assignment you might listen. Nope. Not at all. One girl got out a notebook to look at her outine, because I cannot make her understand this project requires her to read an essay, not give a speech.

All in all they are a pretty good class, but "oh the dum-dum-ativity."

Getting to know each other...

This semester's schedule is set up so that on Tuesdays and Thursdays I am ostensibly working on my dissertation. So far, well, you saw the ceiling. Today there is no dissertation work because I'm holding student conferences.

You might find it confusing that I'm holding student conferences right now and posting at the same time. It would appear to be impossible, but that is only true if student's actually show up for their conferences. Now, I guess I cannot be too hard on them. I did cancel class yesterday. However, even in the cancellation announcement, I made it clear that conferences today would go on as scheduled.

About that class cancellation. This is the first time I have cancelled class unexpectedly. It sucked to have to do it the second week of classes, but I didn't feel like showing up full of fever sweat and shaking with the chills. Actually, for a group of first-year students, they did a pretty good job of figuring out the discussion board assignment for the day.

Each semester it's tough to decide whether or not to do these beginning of the semester conferences, but when I'm teaching 101, I think they are helpful. It makes the students find my office and helps them realize that nothing terrible will happen to them when they come here. (Well today it might get them sick, but I'm making them sit far away and using a lot of purell.)

***I just got my first "Why I couldn't make it to the conference" email. The student said he rode his bike around campus and couldn't find our building. It could be legitimate, but our building is pretty big and brand new and shiny.