What are struggles in your courses? For you? For your students? Disengagement? Burn out? Lack of reading? Other?
Post your reflection on this topic as a comment below.
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What are struggles in your courses? For you? For your students? Disengagement? Burn out? Lack of reading? Other?
Post your reflection on this topic as a comment below.
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16 thoughts on “What are the struggles in your course?”
One of the main challenges I faced in my Introduction to Literature 201 course was motivating my students to read lengthy stories or plays outside of the classroom. This became especially apparent after spring break when it became clear that many of my students had not completed the assigned reading, which was focused on drama. To assess their engagement with the play “Doubt: A Parable” by John Patrick Shanley, I decided to give a pop quiz. Unfortunately, I received numerous apologies from students admitting that they hadn’t bothered to read the play over the break. While I appreciated their honesty, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed and question the effort I put into the class if students weren’t going to be equally invested. This temporary frustration weighed heavily on me.
This is so true. I have found that getting my students to read anything outside of the classroom is an uphill battle, especially post pandemic. I basically have to do the majority of the class readings for 201 during the class time. The only time in the past year I was able to get the majority of students to complete a reading outside of class was when I gave them a short story that was only a page long and repeatedly emphasized how they could read it on the train ride home.
There are so many struggles. The biggest is the reality of BMCC students’ lives. I have, for many years, taught a 7AM class. As a rule, people don’t take class at 7AM for fun. They take it because they have a job and a family. This is also true for students taking class at more reasonable hours as well. Balancing school with these responsibilities is difficult for the most committed student, so for a more marginal student it is that much harder. Another issue is online teaching. My classes requires I play music for my students and sometimes fairly long excerpts — in many ways that is the best part. In person, I can see and gauge how a work is affecting a class, but online…it is much harder to know.
And of course there is the subject matter –– Western Classical Music — the vast majority of students come in with a mind set, conscious or not, that this is not music for them. Much of the semester is spent trying to overcome that prejudice.
This reminded me of the concept “mirrors & windows”, which our Teacher Education faculty mention in relation to culturally sustaining pedagogies and is often talked about in relation to K-12 and literacy/reading. Rudine Sims Bishop wrote the originating article, I believe: “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”
I wonder if this might resonate in teaching music and other arts as well.
(Source: Rudine Sims Bishop, “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” originally appeared in Perspectives: Choosing Books for the Classroom. Vo. 6, no. 3. Summer 1990.)
In LIN 100 – Language and Culture course offers opportunities for students to engage in practices in which they learn to collect and analyze linguistics phenomena. Although there are three major assignments, I get students ready to submit the three major assignments by giving shorter assignments that would lead them to compose their first draft for each assignment. In other words, shorter assignments lead to longer assignments. One of the topics we discuss is language and gender; in other words, how gender affects language production in various topics and contexts.
The following are the two major course student learning outcomes:
• To be able to collect real-world linguistic data as related to social and cultural factors/variables (including appraising linguistic identities and language use).
• To analyze linguistic practices and to use prior research findings and literature in the interpretation of data.
As the requirement of this linguistic observation project, I provide options to students to write this research paper. It requires them to select a segment of a movie, a soap opera, a YouTube video, or text messages/email messages from male and female friends or relatives. They can also interview a male or a female friend and analyze the collected data using genderlect domains.
In Spring 2023, my class was engaged in a COIL project that required students to interview a person in their community about discrimination. My partner professor and I provided the questions. The topic was related to United Nations Development Goal # 10- Reducing Inequalities. The COIL project would help students to collect authentic narratives about discrimination. However, very few students were able to do the interview. My COIL partner professor and I did a mock interview to provide an example. Whenever I give this option to collect linguistic data to students, most students do not conduct the interview. Therefore, I always give them the option to select my mock interview and analyze the data using the genderlect domains.
Aside from the small (1-2) but consistent number students who have been using AI over the last few semesters, I’m struggling with the way students do not read outside of class. Perhaps I adapted to that too quickly by doing a great deal of reading in class; maybe I should resist their resistance and continue assigning readings to be done between classes? I’m not sure. I also struggle with extremely late submissions, often from students who attend class and participate in discussions. Though I have set up a fixed end-of-semester date after which I will not accept work, I don’t have it in me to punitive about late submissions. But I wonder if there’s something more I should be doing to help that handful of procrastinators (and, as a result, myself)?
Ah yes. I think everyone who teaches English at BMCC has these same struggles. If I stopped accepting late work or severely penalized it, I think less than half the class would be able to pass.
As mentioned in person last week (and echoing some of Katherine’s et al. comments below), I struggle with a basic disinterest by a fair number (read too many) students who do not want to read. Anything. Never mind that the readings for the course are quite short; many students do not even seem to consider how instrumental reading is to college, in general, and a writing course, in particular. Of course we read in class and will continue to, but there are basic concepts that a number of students fail to get early on because they simply don’t feel like reading is for them. Or something. It’s mind-boggling. Somehow, their education up to now has failed them by not highlighting the importance of reading. This is probably my biggest struggle. The failure to read for some even goes beyond the unit readings and into the homework instructions, and so I receive work that does not satisfy the assignment’s requirements.
I have experienced most of the same struggles that have been expressed by others here. I teach a Writing Intensive class and about half of the students do not keep up with the writing assignments, which include reading responses and close-looking responses each week, as well as one short essay and one larger term project. I have experimented with including more of the writing assignments in-class, rather than as homework. I am hoping that the open pedagogy assignment I create in this seminar will provide intrinsic motivation for students and support them to respond to the assignment in their own voice.
Similar to both Katherine and Crystal, I also struggle a lot with students not completing work outside of the classroom in a timely manner. Since the pandemic, I have developed a greater sense of empathy for my students, and I try to communicate with them to better understand the reasons as to why they are not completing work. But when students do not do any reading outside of the classroom and wait until the end of the semester to complete all of the assignments at once, it severely hinders the learning potential of any class. I try to remind myself that my students are often in imperfect situations for academics and that their behavior is not a reflection upon me.
In addition, post pandemic the biggest struggle has been students no longer seeing attending class as necessary. This leads to a lot of students not understanding assignments and readings. It also is discouraging for me as an instructor who likes lively discussion to come to a classroom with only a handful of students present.
Adrienne—I agree! I like when you said: “…when students do not do any reading outside of the classroom and wait until the end of the semester to complete all of the assignments at once, it severely hinders the learning potential of any class.” I tell my students this all the time. I let them know how imperative it is to read and annotate on their own so that we can discuss the reading(s) in class. It does impact the learning experience in the classroom if students are not willing to read the assignment and complete any additional work. Waiting until the end is counterproductive.
As I mentioned in the other thread, my classes are very open with lots of fun and open conversations occurring. This can also lead to students forgetting that it’s still an academic class and that we do need to discuss material and complete the assignments we agree to. This can look like conversations that struggle to be redirected back toward the discussion of course material, skipping assignments for their “real classes” (a real statement I hear shockingly often), and occasional disengagement.
The struggle in my course are the added websites students have to pay in addition to their already expensive textbook for homework assignments mandated by the dept. The intended purpose is to cover the topics in the chapters that cannot be covered in class due to time constraints. Students are angered because they’re forced to pay an additional amount for homework assignments. This sets an immediate tone of disconnect from me as the instructor because my lectures and lecture exams are complete do not include much of their department mandated assignments. It’s confusing and unnecessary in my opinion.
The struggle is in that not all participants complete their assignments within a reasonable time frame. It is difficult for them to submit a high stake written assignment if they don’t complete the previous low& medium stake assignments.
Appathy
I’m still processing and thinking about the ways to engage students more. Last semester was my second time teaching HUM 101 on Wednesdays and Fridays for 75 minutes which was significantly different than previous semester which was scheduled on one day of the week for 3 long hours. On both experiences, students were not as engaged as I thought they’d be. Among the struggles, the most challenging part was how I had to explain each graded assignments throughout the semester which were available and explained in greater details in the syllabus, on BB, and before each class. I modified and redesigned assignment formats and requirements based on the students’ feedback. There must be something I’m doing wrong. I’m really looking forward to learning better ways to engage students moving forward 🙂