Skip to main content

Consistency is everything

One of the first lessons I learned as a teacher was the importance of setting student expectations early, making it clear from day one what students can expect from your class in terms of workload, schedule, learning outcomes, etc., and then being consistent. Students may not be happy about everything but my experience is that they will accept a lot as long as it isn't unexpected.

Unfortunately, I didn't do so well with that this semester. For various reasons, I found myself making changes mid-semester and I know that many of the emails I'm dealing with now are because of that inconsistency. There are certain changes I think are justified and I don't think there's anything wrong with making mid-semester adjustments when something I'm doing isn't working for a majority of students (like adding the online quizzes). But what's bumming me out is that some of the changes I've needed to make are things I should have anticipated. For example, at the beginning of the semester, I counted up the number of days when we would be having lectures where the students would be using clickers, coming up with a total of 31. I make each day worth 5 points so I figured I would drop the 6 lowest scores and they would have a total of 125 points from clickers. My mistake was putting it on the syllabus that I would drop 6 scores, rather than saying I would keep the top 25 scores because as you can probably guess, stuff happens and we ended up with only 29 scores, 2 fewer days than I anticipated. So I could a) still drop 6 and have clickers worth 115 points instead of 125 (which would make their performance on clickers worth slightly less in the final grade and mean a different point total than is in the syllabus), or b) drop 4 scores instead of 6. With either option, I'm going to have students who want to know why I'm doing something different than what's in the syllabus, though I suppose the former will get fewer complaints than the latter, simply because it won't be as obvious to students if/how it hurts them.

What annoys me is that I should have known to leave room in the syllabus for stuff to happen. Just as I should have known that there's no way to have 500 students on a rotating schedule for weekly posts without a huge number of students being confused about when it was their turn to post. Or that I would never have the time to give students sufficient feedback on those posts.

Fortunately, semesters do end eventually!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What are the costs?

I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p

What was your high school economics experience like?

As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu