Posting early

I'm in Advisement right now (and probably will get interrupted several times to help students or whatever), but I'm working an extra half hour today to make up time I gave over to the first round of conferences with my 101 students. I will have to do that again--cancel time in Advisement during a conference week and then make it up later--but only once. I'll be seeing all three classes in the same week, I think, but not only will there be fewer students at that point, conferences will be optional--and I know a number of students will opt not to take advantage of the opportunity.

Shifting gears to today, two things stand out that I want to record. One is a student in today's 101. My sense of her has gone back and forth a bit; she seems to want to participate, but on the other hand, she clearly expressed her lack of interest in the education topic, asking me if we'd be working on that all semester. I assured her we wouldn't--but I also said I couldn't guarantee that she'd be any more interested in the other topics, and explained that as adults, we don't always get to do just what interests us. "True," she admitted. But then she didn't have her essay for peer review--though she still wanted to participate in the review process--and she was AWOL after that. She's barely turned in any work, and that with her absences led me to believe she was one of the students who just vanishes. But no: she was there today. I pulled her out of class for a moment to explain that I really didn't think she could pass, and she explained that she'd been having the same problem in all her classes--because her mother had kicked her out of the house, which cut her off from access to a computer, and cut off her phone service. She'd been living out of her car until just a few days ago when a friend invited her into her home, but now, she says, she can be back on campus and attending class and being a good student. OK, I said: sorry to hear about the problem, glad you're in a better situation, let's see how things go; maybe you can squeak out a D.

And to my delight, she was fully engaged in the work of the class today. The students wanted to watch a video instead of talking about the articles (which a bit more than half of them had downloaded and read as homework, having gotten my email about the canceled class on Monday)--but at first, there were technical difficulties, so I put them in groups.They were working at least a little in their groups, but after a few minutes, I got the tech sorted out--and we watched part of the video (not as much as the other class got to watch, but still). I stopped a few times to explain some of the issues that either were hard to hear or that went by too fast for students to get the import--and at least a few of them actually had picked up on some of the important details and asked some good questions.

But--and this is the other thing I want to record about today--I'm looking at the "reflection" essays for the T/Th class (little essays in which students simply riff on what they already know about a topic), and the extent of their ignorance and confusion about food, farming, the environment, all that, is so profound I hardly know where to start to get them sorted out. But I can only try--and hope that some of what they read helps.

That said, I do want to try to get the stack of stuff I have from tomorrow's class (not including their essays) marked before class tomorrow, so I'm going to sign off on this post. More tomorrow.