I Teach

I had three students come and talk with me about their papers on Wed. Every time I have one of these encounters I always expect it to be tense. I anticipate that the student's will be challenging my grading and make me justify every point they lost on their paper. I think I feel this way because that is exactly the way I approached faculty when I was an undergrad. I wanted to argue my point, and I wanted to know their justification. But you know what? It never turns out that way. I mean, if you read the archives of this particular blog you'll see that it does, sometimes, work out in that manner, but the vast, vast majority of these encounters are positive experiences where the student just honestly wants to make sure he/she understands what went wrong and how it can be fixed. Unlike in some other classes I've been a part of (teaching, taking or TAing) I don't have a problem with students in my class just trying to get a better grade. I'm reasonably confident that the way I distribute grades mitigates this issue by more closely tying comprehension to the final outcome. This is in large part to the number of papers I make them write, and I understand that as I begin to teach more than one class per semester, my grading scheme will have to be altered, but I hoping that the priciples I learn in this envrionment will help guide me in my preparation of an adapted version which includes less writing.
> 0 comments