Boing Boing links to a website that started as a project by one of my students in Introduction to Humanities Computing at Maryland in 2001. Jenny Miller hits the Boing Boing big time!

An anonymous correspondent asks me to post the following:

I need feedback on a course that’s not going very well this semester. I have a small class of young, very quiet students. Some of them spend the entire class fidgeting and apparently thinking about something else; my perception of their states of mind might be distorted, but I’m put off by the fact that they don’t make a lot of eye contact. Rather than ask questions about the content of the course, engaging with the subject matter, they are always (take “always” with a grain of salt) asking the same sorts of questions about assignments: “I’m confused. What are we supposed to do again? I don’t understand what you want. Why are we doing this?” I’ve taught this course a half-dozen times, and I’ve never had this much difficulty teaching it before. The assignments are explained in detailed handouts and by me in class discussion.

Yesterday, my buttons got pushed towards the end of class when I was trying to talk about one of the projects they’re working on, and and a couple of students chimed in with “I’m confused. Why are we doing this? What do we get out of completing this?” I was quiet for a bit, looking down at my hands and then said, with ten minutes left until the end of class, “Okay, I think that’s enough for today.” I knew I was either going to dismiss them early or I was going to say something I’d regret.

Is there any way to salvage this course? Do I address what happened yesterday at the end of class? We have about 5 weeks left. I’ve tried to address their engagement (or lack thereof) with the course material before but without success. They’re not surly or anti-intellectual, just more obsessed with grades than with actually learning. I’d appreciate any advice.

So…any thoughts?

Okay, academic blogosphere, correct me if I’m wrong. Here’s an email I sent to my students:

On Tuesday, we talked about incorporating quotations into your papers. Many of you thought that a quote could be a complete sentence within quotation marks, without being incorporated into one of your own sentences.

I said, instead, that you should make a quotation part of one of your own sentences, and that your sentence should introduce, explain, or provide context for the quotation.

Take a look at section 3.7 of the MLA Handbook (6th edition), which says, “You must construct a clear, grammatically correct sentence that allows you to introduce or incorporate a quotation with complete accuracy” (109). Look also at all of the examples of the use of quotations in that section.

I’m not dreaming, am I? When quoting someone else in an essay, you do not simply plunk the quotation down between two sentences of your own composition, even if those sentences explain the importance of your quotation. You have to incorporate the quotation into one of your own sentences in a grammatically correct fasion fashion…right?

My students were adamant that I am wrong.

Those of us grumbling about our students as the semester ends might want to read this.