Finished another set of student papers, highly entertaining. This bunch seems to have split sharply between those who got it right on and those who stumbled into a haze of mystification. It’s a function, I’m afraid, of online teaching. If a human being isn’t there, in person, nagging and repeating the nag day in and day out, some folks have a rough time keeping up—especially when the pace is pretty fast, as it is in these eight-week courses.
If I weren’t already in “pause” mode about online pedagogy, this would put me in it. I spent the whole damn summer trying to make this course work for anyone who might sign up. Even after I made them take a quiz on the syllabus, they still apparently haven’t read it, still don’t do the assigned readings, still don’t seem to know due dates.
Another serious issue is that some of them either can’t or won’t buy the book. Their student aid gets to them long after the semester begins, and as a result, they simply don’t have the money for textbooks. Our text is pretty cheap—available today at Amazon.com for around $10 new, less than $5 used. But I still had someone write to ask if they really had to buy the book.
Why do they think I’d require a textbook if I didn’t expect them to read it? And why are they in school if they don’t want to read?
There’s something creepy about how wedded they are to the Internet. They just don’t want to turn it off. Given an assignment that requires some research, they’ll do everything in their power to find enough to suffice online. If a resource doesn’t exist in digital form, they just won’t go to it. They’ll ignore it. Sometimes they’ll ignore it because they don’t know where to find it…and it doesn’t occur to them to look in a library. Or even a bookstore. But sometimes they appear to be convinced that something equivalent or better is to be found on the Web.
It’s kinda sad. As rivers of knowledge go, the Internet is wide and shallow. If it’s true we’re watching the death of the printed word, what’s coming to replace it doesn’t quite seem to be up to the job of preserving a culture and passing it to the next generations.
Well. Despite its barren moments, at least teaching is a living. This morning I figured out that if we can permanently keep the present “modified” terms of the mortgage on the downtown house, I can cover my share by teaching two and two, especially if a miracle happens and I get a tax refund this spring. Three and two will cover it generously, and three and three would give me plenty of money to live more or less comfortably. And to put some cash in savings toward such frolics as buying a new(er) car and being prepared to replaster the pool, when the time comes.
Image:
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
My students don’t listen either. On-line teaching colleagues say the failure rate is quite high.
Food for thought in comment on previous post. Perhaps you could rent out the investment house and write off losses/expenses (from your son’s taxes, which are no doubt higher than yours). Then he could rent a house at the new lower prices.
There are a lot of tax breaks for self-employed people and property owners. I have a colleague who lives in a duplex and the renters pay for his rent too–as well as all repairs. This is 15 years into ownership. But tax LOSSES function as a kind of income also. Not so much for you, now in a low bracket, but for your son.
Really? The majority of our textbooks (both “required” and “recommended”) were actually unnecessary. It was usually adequate to share with one other person or use the library’s copy.
@ eemusings: Argh! Great way for faculty to alienate students there!
I can’t imagine asking students to buy a book that you don’t intend for them to use, or not keying your course tightly to a textbook that the department requires you to use. Here, for example, I don’t like either of the texts for my 101 or my 235 courses, but I don’t have a choice and so I assign readings from them. The 101s have a quiz over nine chapters, and then are required to use information in those chapters in writing assignments. The 235 course…well, I’m sorry, but I can’t sit there and retype material that’s already published in the textbook so they can access it online. I asked them to read many chapters in that book because, even though it’s half-baked and I had to reproduce chapter after chapter out of my own book to supplement it, the book is the only source they have for learning how to write the query letter and several other exploits that form their writing assignments.
I think often students think textbooks are unnecessary, possibly because they have a different agenda for being in the course than the teacher does in teaching the course. 😉