Category: Guest blogger

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Let’s Be Really Honest: Dealing with the Difficult Student

Liz Fox is a graduate instructor in the Writing Program. She has taught Basic Writing, College Writing and she is currently a Resoruce Center staff mentor.

“Can I be really honest with you about something? I’m only in this class, because it’s required and I have to take it!” – 112 Student, First day of class

Welcome to the unifying attitude of every difficult student I’ve encountered so far. As teachers, we need to be honest: there are students who challenge us, make us miserable, make us laugh with the very shenanigans we tried to pull as undergrads, and who make us doubt our ability as educators. And if we’re being “really honest,” these are the students who force us to grow the most as teachers.

The biggest lesson I learned about dealing with difficult students came when I least expected it, in my fifth semester teaching for the Writing Program. I had a student whose animosity toward the 112 gen ed requirement was misdirected at me. Each class he arrived barely on time, with his lunch, and with his hair in such disarray that he had clearly just rolled out of bed. His overall attitude was that I was wasting his time and he couldn’t be bothered with my class. He would complain about grades and quibble over first draft comments. I let this behavior slide; on a day-to-day basis he never did anything so egregious that it warranted calling him into my office for a meeting. I wasn’t intimidated by the confrontation — I’d confronted students before.

My second semester teaching I had to meet with a student. On the first day of class he made it clear to everyone that he was a JUNIOR and that meant he didn’t really need this class anymore, but his advisor was FORCING him to take it. This student dominated each discussion and although he had rich contributions, he presented his thoughts in such a combative manner that it was difficult for other students to respond. When I met with this student, I told him he could either help the class or hinder it – and at present, he was hindering it. He needed to stop or it would affect his final grade regardless of his writing skills. He apologized and promised that it would not happen again. From this point on, my Junior was a model student: he would pair himself with students who were clearly struggling in the class during peer review and in class discussions would volunteer the seed of an idea and allow his classmates to run with it.

Another semester, I met a different brand of difficult. This student was there to blatantly make trouble, distract the others from doing their work, and clown around. When other students began to follow her lead, I brought 15 copies of the UMass Code of Student Conduct to class and we discussed the Code of Conduct as a text. In our discussion, I slipped in that anyone who did not comply with this code during class would be asked to leave immediately and be marked absent for the day.

Clearly, I have no problem dealing with the difficult students, so why did I not intervene with this particular student? Because I thought he was only affecting himself and at most, it was only annoying to me. I thought that ignoring his asides and not giving him the attention he sought would be the best way to diffuse him and I ignored him the entire semester only to find out I was wrong.

I was surprised to read in one Unit Five Reflection essay that the student whom annoyed me was the only thing the writer disliked about my class. From reading his classmate’s writing, I learned that his behavior did not just affect me. His demeanor permeated my classroom and although he was not overtly disruptive as other problem students are, his smoldering attitude was palpable and interfered with the class as much as one who acts out.

In hindsight, I realize that I should have stepped in earlier in the semester and done something. I learned from this student that in a classroom community, my job as a teacher is not only to educate, but also to ensure that no one hinders a student’s ability to learn in my classroom.

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The World Comes to Bartlett

Deirdre Vinyard is the Deputy Director of the UMass Writing Program. She teaches the first-year writing courses (College and Basic Writing) and directs the Basic Writing Program.

It’s the first day of class and students are doing the usual introductions. When Kensuke* introduces himself as an international student from Japan, Mitch, a freshman from Wrentham, brightens and tosses a couple of phrases in Japanese across the room to his new classmate. They both smile. The other students in the class look on with interest. There’s a touch of internationalization in my classroom. I know I am going to love this semester.

For the past two decades, American universities have actively worked to internationalize their campuses, and attracting students from around the world is a big part of this process. UMass recognizes the importance of providing its students with a global experience – through the curriculum, study abroad, and a diverse student body. The university is now actively recruiting international students, and this effort is starting to become apparent in our classes. This fall, UMass enrolled 120 new international undergraduate students, a twenty percent increase over enrollments from the previous fall. The change is palpable.
An increased number of international students is a positive change for the campus and the classroom. International students bring new perspectives and provide a window to the outside world for the rest of us here in Western Massachusetts. It is said so often that it has become a cliché, but our students are preparing to work in a very small world. When I was going to college in the 1970s, those of us who wanted to have an international component in our careers majored in foreign languages. Today, every field has a global element, from engineering to business to the hard sciences, and having an opportunity to live and study and play with peers from around the world is an important part of the preparation for this.

Our writing classes, always a place for collaborative learning, are wonderful spaces where students learn from each other. The more diverse the makeup of the students, the more possibility for engaging exchange. During the first week of classes when my students shared moments of their writing histories, they commiserated on the toil of the MCAS prep-class, recalled with pleasure writing in diaries, remembered writing song lyrics for a junior-high band. But this year they also shared memories of learning to write with Japanese kanji and of making the transition to writing in a second language. Or a third. Or, in the case of one student, a fourth.

Now in the fifth week of class, my students seem less surprised by the wealth of world experience they represent than they did the first day—in fact now they expect to find it. And it’s more than Mitch seeking affirmation from Kensuke on a Japanese phrase. Yesterday when we talked about the range of literature required in school curricula, we had examples from high schools in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey as well as examples from a high school in Seoul and one in Mumbai. When this happens in a class discussion, the world of my students gets a little bit bigger, and I think this has to be a good thing. The world, at least a little bit of it, has come to Bartlett.

*Student names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

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Do We Have to Be in the Same Room?

Anne Bello is a PhD candidate in Rhet/Comp at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently the Technology Coordinator of the UMass Writing Program where she also teaches College and Basic Writing. She is also a former member of the Writing Program’s Resource Center.

In the “Teaching with Technology” practicum, one issue some instructors brought up is marking student work. If, say, a student hands in a paper copy of a homework assignment, the instructor can easily mark the assignment with a check and hand it back to the student. It’s clear to the student that the instructor has read and acknowledged the work – even if the instructor just glanced over the work to see if it was done. With submitting work online, this process can become murkier. If instructors don’t write extensive comments, students might not know for sure whether the instructor read their work or not.

Fortunately, there are ways to work around this situation. Moodle, for instance, has a number of features that make it easy to “mark” student work. One option is to set a grading scale for an assignment or create a custom grading scale to quickly mark submissions as received (or satisfactory or whatever scale you’d like to use). Choosing the Quick Feedback option can make this process even easier. Another option is to create a checklist. If you want to acknowledge student work, you can set up the checklist so you update it; if you want to put more responsibility on the students, you can set it up so that they update it. Moodle can update it automatically as well. Of course, there are always low-tech solutions. For instance, you can refer to what students wrote for homework in class, making it clear you read their work.

While teachers have many options for acknowledging student work, there are some larger issues at play. How much marking and responding to texts do we, as teachers, need to do to help students learn? Is it enough for students to do an assignment and learn from the experience, or are we obliged to respond in some way? How can we encourage students to value the work they do independent of our feedback? When I first started teaching, I thought I needed to respond to everything: drafts, homework, in-class writing, etc. I’m at a point now where I mostly just comment on drafts, though I still feel a need to mark most of the work my students do. When I taught College Writing, I had students submit every piece of writing they did in class or for homework as part of a portfolio. I didn’t grade or comment on most of it, but the completeness of the portfolio was part of the grade. Since I’ve started teaching Basic Writing, I’ve moved away from this method. While I have my students submit some in-class writing online (we’re in a computer lab), there are some activities they don’t submit at all. I wonder if the students value the work I don’t collect as much as the work I do mark, but to be honest, it’s a relief not to have to sort through it all. And the fact is there are some writing assignments I don’t value as much. As long as they serve their immediate purpose – giving students something to think about and say in a discussion, for example – that’s enough.

Another issue involved in all of this is the degree to which learning needs to be an exchange between teacher and student. The other day I was conferencing with a student, and he had one of those “aha” moments that make teaching feel so worthwhile. This student had been rather dismissive of the class, acting as if he already knew everything there is to know about writing. Through our discussion of his draft, he finally seemed to get that global revision meant more than just fixing errors. It was as if he suddenly realized, “Oh – this isn’t high school. College-level writing is a lot of work. College is a lot of work.” After the conference, I congratulated myself on helping this student reach a more complex understanding of writing. There’s been a lot of coverage in the press of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are often held up as a new future for higher education. As I left my office, I thought, “Oh yeah, online learning? Let’s see you do what we just did here! There’s no way the Interwebs can replace me.”

Later, though, I thought about my other students. At some point over the past few weeks, most of them have probably realized, “College is not like high school.” For some, this realization might have come in my course or another class. For others, it may have come while they were talking with friends at the dining commons or working alone in the dorms. I just happened to be in the room when this particular student had his realization. I might have helped, but this student would have probably learned the same thing another way.

The incident reminded me of something my undergraduate advisor once told me: He thought the most important learning took place as a student was reading on her own, seeing connections and disjunctions between different ideas and her understanding of the world. A professor might only get a glimpse of that learning, he said. And that was okay.

His vision of teaching and learning is appealing to me, but it’s also hard to buy into completely. He saw the careful selection of readings as being an important element of his teaching, even though his effort might be less tangible to students than the comments he wrote on their drafts. He had tenure, and he also had years of experience giving him the confidence that his students would learn whether he put check marks on their papers or not. As a grad student with only a few years of teaching experience, it’s harder to feel so secure.

I’d be interested to know how other teachers feel about acknowledging work. What do you choose to respond to and why? What don’t you collect? I’m especially interested in what it’s like to teach an online course, when you’re never “in the room.” Do you get the same kind of sense of student learning that you do in a face-to-face teaching situation?

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Early Morning Musings: Teaching at 8:00 AM by Deirdre Vinyard

Deirdre Vinyard is the Deputy Director of the UMass Writing Program. She teaches the first-year writing courses (College and Basic Writing) and directs the Basic Writing Program.

Ok, I’ll admit it. When I ended up teaching a section of Basic Writing last spring semester at 8:00 AM, I hadn’t actually requested that early hour. After I had assigned all the Basic Writing sections based on teacher preferences, the one section left over was at 8:00 AM. A little resentful, I took it and vowed to avoid scheduling classes this early in the future. I was sure that my students would come to class late, or worse, comatose, and that I would be fighting with them all semester about my attendance and late policies. The class I taught was one of five sections of Basic Writing that semester, so the students had little choice, and I thought they would be annoyed about the time. I also feared that discussion would languish at that time of the day, with everyone’s system just barely waking up by the end of class. I pictured myself lugging an espresso machine to my classroom on the first floor of Bartlett just to get through the semester.

The first day of class, I took an extra early bus, to make sure that I arrived on time. That winter (remember winter?) was cold and bright with snow. The sky was still a bit dark as I boarded that Amherst-bound bus in mid January. As we rounded the corner onto Massachusetts Avenue to the UMass campus, the morning sun was just coming into full form, lighting up piles of hard, white snow. It had begun, my 8 AM semester.

I arrived at class that first day prepared to wait for my students, sure they would drag in late. To my surprise, more than half of my students got to class at least 10 minutes early. An even greater surprise was that about half my students consistently arrived at class earlier than I did. As the semester progressed, they took the time before class to chat, listen to songs on each other’s I-pods and amuse each other with tales of dorm life. I found out at the end of the semester that three of them had taken to going to breakfast together after each class. I had assumed that my students would be mute with fatigue. They were anything but.

As the semester progressed and the sky at the bus stop each morning grew lighter, the students in my 8 AM class continued to get to know each other. A few snuck in late on occasion (I did have to talk to one student about lateness) but in truth, my students were tardy no more often than they were when I taught at 11:15 (a time considered very much before his preferred rising time for one of my students that semester). So my fears about the perils of the eight o’clock class were allayed.

But then I realized that something else had happened, having nothing to do with my students. My teaching was over by 9:30, leaving me the rest of the day to work on other things. I find that even though I have been teaching for a long, long time, I still mentally prepare for my class a little bit up until the time I teach. By finishing so early, I felt that I was more focused on my other work (and had longer stretches of time to do it).

So this spring I opted for another 8 AM class, this time a section of College Writing. To my surprise, the section filled up very quickly in the registration period, a sign that students were truly looking for an early class—since many sections of College Writing later in the day filled after my 8 AM section was full. This semester, I have almost no lateness. I have not had to reprimand my class or any of my students individually even once. In talking to my students, I have found that they have a number of reasons for wanting to have an early class. Four of them are on UMass teams and have practice later in the day. Two of my students are roommates and wanted to merge their schedules to make getting up and out of the room a collaborative effort. I even have one student this semester who took my 8 AM class in Spring 2011—clearly a fan of the early morning sky.

I recognize that problems can arise from teaching at 8, particularly if the students have little choice in registration. As I said, the students in my Basic Writing class had only five sections to pick from, and I did have to speak a few times about lateness. I think the 8 AM choice works better for College Writing since students have over a hundred options.

Given the boost to my work schedule (and the nice surprise that I do not face a pile of slumbering bodies twice a week), I am definitely going to go for the early morning class next time I teach College Writing. (I’m even beginning to feel a little nostalgic for the cool light coming from a January sky in the early hours before class.)

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Teaching texts that seem difficult but are worth the risk by Kate Litterer

This week’s guest blogger is Kate Litterer a second year MFA student who currently teaches in the UMass Writing Program. Kate is a member of our Resource Center staff and serves on the Writing Program Curriculum and Diversity Committees.

 One of my teaching goals is to help students learn to analyze and respond to what they read so that they can ultimately learn to argue and develop their own points for their own purposes.  In order to get them there we read essays from our common reader, Other Words, an anthologized collection of essays by many different writers on and in many different themes, topics, and styles. What I enjoy most about Other Words is the diversity the texts offer to me as an instructor. I don’t mean just in terms of the topics or themes, either; many of the writers are minorities and their being so offers enriching readings of the essays. 

 Before this year I stayed away from essays I felt were too difficult to teach. Indeed, I hope that I can find ways to teach my students how to read and respond critically to texts no matter the theme or topic, but I avoided essays that I felt might spur challenging conversations about race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. This is surprising, as these things motivate me in my own studies as well as my discussions, my friendships, my research, and my writing, but I was nervous to talk about them in my role as an instructor! However, I decided that it was the important thing to do, and starting with “My Memory and Witness” by Dean Spade and Lis Goldschmidt, I breached the topic of a personal essay about transgender identities and class inequalities.

 There is no way to tell how a class will take a text; fifteen different bodies and minds from fifteen individual experiences affects the ways they will read a text. During that particular conversation one of my students spoke for the entire class, stating, “We don’t have experience with [being poor] so we don’t know what to say about the essay.” I was dumbfounded—much of my identity as a scholar (and a person) comes from my working class family background and reading an essay from and about a working-class experience is not only natural but also exciting and powerful. Of course, I didn’t expect my students to all jump on the personal experience as connection train, though; I just didn’t expect them to speak for one another, to assume they could not enter to text, or to give up on their analysis before they had begun.

What I did and do is take a step back and talk with my students. Sometimes this involves asking them questions: Why didn’t they think they could get into the text? Why did Spade and Goldschmidt write about the topic, then, if not everyone could immediately access the text? Who are Spade and Goldschmidt? Why does it matter that we are reading this text? Sometimes we take a break and they write about their response or their ideas before we chat. This has been instrumental in helping my students to enter into texts that are initially difficult, because they feel they don’t fit into the text personally or as a student (difficult texts can include those that are formally challenging, too!).

 In my opinion, I can say that students enjoyed and benefited from reading difficult texts…sometimes we just had to have a class discussion in order to help them find their way into the texts. With Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place,” I ask my students to share their responses (which are sometimes, if not often, viscerally harsh) before we look at the style of the text. I recognize that they bring their fifteen different feelings and responses to the text and we/they work together to talk through the purpose, style, and rhetoric of the text. What I love most about these discussions is they way students engage with one another, supporting and building on one another’s points, adventuring into the text together, and eventually hitting on the purpose and importance of the text.

 If I had to say what I have learned about teaching “difficult” texts is that it is entirely worth it. Sometimes it doesn’t go exactly how I had planned and I have to extend discussions or offer prompting questions. Sometimes my students challenge one another, the author, or me. But through all of these sometimes difficult situations I have found that my students and I both appreciate our new knowledge about something that is more than just rhetoric, style, and form; we appreciate that we are learning about the world, about what matters to real writers and audiences, and about how writing can express those powerful voices to larger communities.

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The Post-Cool-Era-Classroom by Mark Koyama

This week’s post is by guest writer Mark Koyama. Mark is a writer, musician and graduate of the UMass MFA program. Mark taught College Writing and has served as a mentor to first-year teachers.

I’ll wager that if you look out over your fresh batch of 112 students you can count at least half-a-dozen Red Sox Caps. Am I right? Welcome to Red Sox Nation. As it turns out, a Red Sox Cap ain’t just a Red Sox Cap—it’s also a form of protective headgear. Before long, several young men will pull their caps down over their foreheads, slouch down, and in this defensive stance, be thoroughly protected from the chance of learning anything.

I’m making a Terrible Generalization. I’ll do the requisite back-pedaling in due time, but before doing that, let me indulge in another T.G: you know those students who refuse to make eye contact? They aren’t shy. They’re texting.

I know, I know. This is turning into one of those “kids these days” rants. The thing to remember is that they’re not dumb, and they’re not trying to be bad and they may not be really texting. That’s so high school. It’s not that they don’t want to learn. Most of the students are genuinely excited about being in college. What is it then? What makes it seem like they just don’t care? It’s really no great mystery. It’s actually quite simple.

They’re trying to be cool.

The paraphernalia of cool may shift from generation to generation, but the fundamentals remain the same. Since time immemorial, being cool has been a posturing game. To be really cool, one has to know when to fit in, and when to be aloof (and, of course, one must never use the word “one” as a pronoun.) The “fitting in” part involves wearing the obligatory emblem of regional pride – the Red Sox Cap. The “being aloof” part involves pulling the cap down and feigning disinterest in the anything proceeding from the mouth of anyone older then twenty-five years of age (who uses the word “one” as a pronoun.)

As a teacher in the a first-year writing course the “fitting-in” part of the equation is not your concern. It’s the “being aloof” part that you need to worry about. It can be a killer. It feels, at times, like there is direct correlation between the earnest fervor with which one tries express an idea, and how much the students greet that same idea with blithe disregard. Earnestness, you see, is anathema to cool. To be earnest, you must be willing to commit to the truth of an idea. But commitment, too, is anathema to cool. These things – earnestness, truth, commitment – they are probably listed in the thesaurus as antonyms for “aloof.”

But again – the aloof thing is not about the students being bad. No. Remember, the students are in a critical moment of transition in their lives. They are figuring out who they are and what is important to them. They are picking and choosing. It makes sense that they will do this from as safe a vantage as possible – from under the Red Sox Cap.

What’s your job? Do you order them to take off the Red Sox Cap? Do you coerce them to take it off with some grading policy stipulation? Or do you just let them keep it on?

I think it’s important that you try, early in the semester, to establish a culture in your classroom. The best learning, I think, takes place in a culture of discussion. Discussion is the dynamic that slowly, and imperceptibly erodes the aloof culture of cool. Discussion has the power to transform something you think is important, into something we find to be worth thinking about. Discussion fosters an environment in which people discover that it’s OK to let their guard down and get excited about an idea. They may not even know its happening—they may feel uneasy, but that’s alright because real learning happens when students are out of their comfort zones. Learning happens when the students get so worked up about the truth of an idea, that they lose their cool. That’s why the culture of the classroom – your College Writing classroom – should be the culture of the post-cool era.

I think the College Writing 112 curriculum is actually pretty amazing. If you think about it, the Unit 1 essay is the perfect opportunity to begin fostering a culture of discussion. You are asking them to write about themselves – which is risky for them. You are asking them to write about what they believe and why. But they may not know what they believe until they start writing about it. Writing, in this sense, is not about recording who one is, as much as discovering who one is. This surprising reality is a great doorway into discussion. If this strange dynamic elicits even the barest glimpse of honesty from the mouth of one of your students, make sure everyone in the class recognizes what just happened! This will jump start the slow process of engendering the post-cool-era-classroom.

Don’t be disappointed if, at the end of the semester, you look out and see that only a handful of caps have been taken off. You are teaching the entire class – but you may really influence only a handful. Don’t underestimate the power and the significance of that influence – those students may remember you for the rest of their lives, because you showed them something important. It’s a beautiful thing.