Deflation

My class is impossible.

I essentially teach a year-long course in fifteen weeks, and student rightfully resent it. I have spent almost five years refining my class so that it's manageable, so that students won't freak out, so that they won't turn on me when I introduce the first paper. I have designed a logical, perfect sequence from summary to rhetorical analysis to Inquiry paper.

But we still need one more week. Yesterday should have been devoted to invention: to refining the inquiry to a solid research question, to freewriting, to explaining the dinner party, to introducing the quote sandwich. I love the activity K came up with that we didn't have time for: students would pair up and conduct one-minute interviews with each other. Then, we'd introduce the quote sandwich, and then we'd guide students to create a quote sandwich with a direct quote from the person they just interviewed, and then they'd exchange paragraphs to see how their partner represented them in text. It's a really good exercise--paragraph building with each other's quotes.

Yet we didn't have time for it. Instead, we spent forty minutes workshopping the sample Paper 1 as a class--which went well, at least in two of my three classes--and then fifteen minutes going over the paper itself, how it grows out of the Rhetorical Analysis that was due last night, and how the full draft of Paper 1 is due this Saturday morning (which was changed to midnight in my second two classes).

Students aren't ready. They haven't refined their inquiry question. They don't have all of their sources. They have no idea what they're writing about. It's an impossible task.

My class is impossible.

Students have every right to resent it. Yesterday, I watched as their expressions shifted from openness to shock to deflation to resentment. Tomorrow's asynchronous class has them watching three back to back video lectures that were never designed to be viewed in one day. They're all mine--they will be sick of hearing my voice by the time they get to the Voicethread. It's a boring class, activity-wise, but they need all of that content tomorrow so that they have what they need to finish those drafts.

My class is impossible to like, which hurts me deeply.