A New Semester, A Fresh Start

By the end of the first month of the fall semester, I knew things were not going as well as I wanted them to, and they never improved significantly.  So I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of research to make the spring semester better.

First, I went in to the room with incredibly low expectations. I'm naturally a pessimist, so I'm not sure why I got my hopes up last semester. I used to feel pressure to be an optimist--though it's hard to change your inclinations--until someone pointed out that being a pessimist means you are more often pleasantly surprised when things go well. I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised this semester.  

Second, I'm starting small and easy and working my way to more complexity. Instead of starting with finding subjects and verbs as I did last semester, we started with separating subjects and predicates. They did reasonably well with that in class. I'm hoping that knowing which half of the sentence the simple, single word subject is will help them find it. It felt like small metaphorical stabs at my heart every time someone chose the next-to-last word of the sentence as the subject, double stabs if the word was "the." We may not cover everything I want to cover as thoroughly as I want to cover it this semester, but they will write complete sentences with subjects and verbs that agree.

Third, I'm structuring things to give less choice in classroom procedures and more choice in their writing. I put them in assigned seating. One person complained that it felt like kindergarten, and I later heard from another teacher that they thought I didn't like them because of the seating chart.  Oh well. When a short young woman walks into a classroom of 12 men (I've got only one female student), I'm in support of demonstrations of power to establish who is in charge. So the seating chart was my "big stick" that will allow me to "walk softly" in the future. In addition to being a power play and messing with my students' heads (of which I'm in favor as I previously mentioned), the seating chart will help me take attendance more quickly and will also keep them from choosing to sit by friends who may tempt them to talk. However, I want to stress that writing is about choices. You choose what to say, what not to say, how to say it with sentence rhythms and word choices. So I'm they're doing a portfolio for the first half of the semester. I and their classmates are giving them feedback on the daily writing they're doing. They will pick three papers to talk to me about when we meet for conferences, and they will turn those three in for me to grade over spring break. In addition, I'm scaling back my grammar grading for the first half of the semester so that they will focus on what they're saying more than commas. I'll set a couple of basic things that I'll always grade for, writing in complete sentences, for example. Then they will tell me what other grammar concern they focused on when editing each paper, and I will grade only for that additional thing. We'll see how it goes.