A bit of the end of the quarter rant.

I thought I had a really good novel class this quarter...until I got the final essays. So disappointing. The frustrating thing is that I know that these students can do better because they have done better in my class.

I think I might have made a couple of mistakes this time around. One, I moved the proposal date for the papers back a few weeks to give them more time to read a larger amount of works. Second, I dropped the minimum requirement from 12-15 to 10-12 pages.

what did I get?

One 3.5 page paper. Two 9 page papers. One 7 page paper. One zero page paper. Out of 12 students. Almost half of the class decided that they did not need to meet the bare minimum requirements. And like seriously, can you be an English major in a 400 level class and NOT be able to write AT LEAST 10 measly pages? Furthermore, I know these students know how to write research papers. I think I got three actual, for true, essays that would qualify as research essays. The other nine were "This is what I think. Close reading. Part of a quote by someone. Then this happens in the novel." Some didn't bother to cite the work. How do you get to a 400 level class and not do parenthetical citations for a research paper?

And when I ask for 5-7 annotations, including the primary text, I don't mean four annotations and no primary text. I don't mean two annotations.

This is what happens when you adjust the requirements. You get shitty work.

Even though the next two quarters are gong to be busy and a bit stressful and full of lots of stuff, not to mention two new upper division preps, one of which is so far out of my comfort zone, I may as well be teaching math*,  I need to make sure that while it might suck to have a limited amount of texts to write on (one thing that sucks about the quarter system), the proposal needs to be done at midterm, and they will be writing a 12-15 page paper.

Email from the student who turned in a 7 page paper: "I was wondering why my grade was so low in your class. I thought I was doing well. Was it my final paper? Did it bring it down?"

Me: Yes, you failed to meet the minimum requirements for the final paper. It's 25% of your grade, so yes, it did bring it down.

Email from student who didn't turn in a paper: "I didn't turn in my paper because it wasn't done. I was hoping to turn it in today, but you've already done grades. It's been a tough quarter. Any way you could give me an incomplete?"

Me: I have until Monday to fix the grades. You're paper will be docked 10% every day it's late.

Really? It was due yesterday. You didn't bother to talk to me. You just assume I have nothing better to do than to sit around and wait to do grades while I wait for your paper. Meh.

I'm a little bit angry. I expect more out of my majors.

In other news... I've gotten my first entitled football player. I've been pretty lucky all these years. But this kid...
Stu: Are my absences for my surgery going to affect me grade?
Me: Nope. But the other absences you have around the surgery are going to affect your grade.
Stu: Yeah, but the surgery is excused.
Me: The only thing an excused absence does is allow you to make up an exam or an essay.
Stu: Well I didn't know that.
Me: I went over it on the first day. It's in the syllabus.
Stu: I guess I missed that part. Is my grade affected?
Me: You get four absences before you lose points. You have five. You were out for 3 for your surgery and then you took two other days.
Stu: Yeah, but I didn't know that the surgery was going to take three days when I missed the other two.
Me: And??
Stu: It's not fair that I'm going to be penalized for that. I wasn't planning on missing three days.
Me: I don't know what to tell you.
Stu: So now I'm going to get a D.
Me: Are your grades that bad?
Stu: Well, can I turn in some late work because I have that D on one assignment and I wasn't planning on having my grade lowered for absences, so I didn't do a fourth assignment to make up for it.
Me: Nope.
Stu: So what??
Me: I guess you just learned a valuable lesson in planning.

Also, seriously, how hard is it to follow directions. Essay question: "Define X in your own words. Use two texts from X unit to support your definition."

What did I get? A paper on how Poe is actually a turn of the 19th century writer. (Someone's been watching Anonymous for "ground breaking" ideas). And another arguing that O'Connor was actually a contemporary of Twain. Really? Perhaps you should show up to class every once in a while and you might realize how these arguments are ridiculous.

I've have some good quarters. This was a disappointing one as far as most of my students go. Perhaps it's because I've been sick off and on most of the quarter. Maybe some of this is more my fault because I haven't been up on my game. But still, it seems like many just phoned it in.

Maybe it's the sophomore slump.

*it's either teach this class that's out of my zone but upper division and gets me a better schedule, or I end up teaching Spring comp which is historically full of students who failed or made a D comp in the fall and winter and get a bad schedule. I'll opt for upper division new prep and better schedule than a bad comp class.