Classroom Victories

[mamselle]

Somehow, I've never noticed this thread, and reading through it is heartwarming. I'll share the best comment I've gotten on student evals in a while " This course contextualized the different parts of this degree so well that my grades in other courses improved because of the skills and critical thought patterns Dr. Fringe reinforced in this class."

Wow.

Someone 'got it.'

M.

[RatGuy]

As I've vented elsewhere, I have an Argumentative Student in an otherwise wonderful class. He's admitted to not doing any of the reading, but once a class he'll explain why the text is "bad" or "wrong" and how I'm a bad person for assigning it. I've noticed that the other students don't like him much either, and do the heavy lifting of defending the texts when he gets on his soapbox.

Today I learned that one student deactivated the class GroupMe, and started another just so she could exclude Argumentative Student. I was told that the class resents him getting the benefit of their hivemind when it comes to studying, especially since he's so belligerent. I'll take that as a victory.

[the_geneticist]

Sort of an anti-victory, but it's turning out OK.

The dratted new LMS is horrible when it comes to calculating grades!  I much as I hated blackboard, at least the grade book made sense.
All students who were excused from assignments have incorrect scores.  Their scores are too low.
Every.  Single.  One.
Now, it's only ~2% of the class, but when you have 500+ students, that number gets really big really fast.

I manually calculated their scores, triple checked, wrote apology emails, and filed the paperwork for the grade changes.

Every single student has sent the nicest emails in reply!  I mean, their scores all went up, but it was entirely my fault that their grades were reported incorrectly in the first place.

[mamselle]

That's so cool.

Good to know they can be appreciative indeed.

Today's victory....another live wire has surfaced. The youngest of my three theory kids was all fired up to download the music-writing software, MuseScore, as soon as class was over so he could contribute his 4 measures to the chorale we're starting to write.

I had told them I'd work with them in their lessons on it; he came with a fully formed 4-measure phrase that's a bit wild/out-there in its tonalities, but they work and he's a true heir of Kabalevsky and Bartok in hearing truly odd intervals that fly to the sky, then bringing them back to earth in a reasonable final chord by the end.

He's also heard his older brother playing the chromatic scale straight through, with strengh, and now he's doing it--walking up and down along the keyboard because he's too short to sit on the bench and play it from there, but--no hits, no runs, no errors, he nailed it.

Little character.

M. 

[Biologist_]

Sort of an anti-victory, but it's turning out OK.

The dratted new LMS is horrible when it comes to calculating grades!  I much as I hated blackboard, at least the grade book made sense.
All students who were excused from assignments have incorrect scores.  Their scores are too low.
Every.  Single.  One.
Now, it's only ~2% of the class, but when you have 500+ students, that number gets really big really fast.

I manually calculated their scores, triple checked, wrote apology emails, and filed the paperwork for the grade changes.

Every single student has sent the nicest emails in reply!  I mean, their scores all went up, but it was entirely my fault that their grades were reported incorrectly in the first place.

I have gone through multiple LMSes* and have never trusted them to calculate grades. I just add a column with a weight of zero, call it something like "Overall Course Grade," and upload the real grades from my Excel spreadsheet there. Our system allows us to transfer grades from the LMS to the roster at the end of the term but I enter them manually instead.

(* ...or is the plural just "LMS" with an implied "...s" concealed in the "S"?)

[OneMoreYear]

Day 1 of our Comps process is complete. All eligible students showed up on time and submitted on time.  Nobody accidentally deleted their work part-way through. Nobody submitted a corrupted file. Nobody had a complete meltdown. A look through before distribution to raters indicates most students may be headed for at least a bare pass. Calling it a victory at this point, as they have been few and far between this year.

[apl68]

Congratulations for all the recent good news!

[AvidReader]

(* ...or is the plural just "LMS" with an implied "...s" concealed in the "S"?)

LMSi.

AR.

[paddington_bear]

By tomorrow, students have to upload their video presentations (slides with a voice-over narration) for class.  I wasn't sure how they'd turn out since I didn't give them any class time to work on them. And, while I know how to narrate slides using one of the video platforms our campus uses - Panopto - and I can record slide presentations on Zoom, I could only point students to YouTube videos or other sites to explain how to narrate Google or PowerPoint slides if they didn't already know how to do it. (Or they could record it from their Zoom account.) But I've looked at a few and, at least technically, they're okay! I only encountered a problem with one presentation; the audio wouldn't play with the slides because the student hadn't made the audio file accessible, only the slide deck. (And the only reason I knew the solution was by looking it up.) I probably should have asked to see if students already knew how to do it or if the instructions I pointed them to actually helped; I should do that tomorrow.  Anyway, the actual content might be a hot mess, but at least I know that students are capable of doing it!

[mamselle]

Sounds like a definite win-in-the-making!

M.

[paddington_bear]

I might have spoken too soon. Another student emailed me to say that the file was too big for the CMS and they couldn't get the link to post in the text box. Then the student emailed me to say that they could post the link but that there was no audio on their slides. Now I have to go back and look at the instructions I shared with the class to see if they mention that you need to set the audio file so that it's accessible to people. And I need to start making a list of issues so that I can include this info on the assignment for next time.

[mamselle]

Sort of an anti-victory, but it's turning out OK.

The dratted new LMS is horrible when it comes to calculating grades!  I much as I hated blackboard, at least the grade book made sense.
All students who were excused from assignments have incorrect scores.  Their scores are too low.
Every.  Single.  One.
Now, it's only ~2% of the class, but when you have 500+ students, that number gets really big really fast.

I manually calculated their scores, triple checked, wrote apology emails, and filed the paperwork for the grade changes.

Every single student has sent the nicest emails in reply!  I mean, their scores all went up, but it was entirely my fault that their grades were reported incorrectly in the first place.

I have gone through multiple LMSes* and have never trusted them to calculate grades. I just add a column with a weight of zero, call it something like "Overall Course Grade," and upload the real grades from my Excel spreadsheet there. Our system allows us to transfer grades from the LMS to the roster at the end of the term but I enter them manually instead.

(* ...or is the plural just "LMS" with an implied "...s" concealed in the "S"?)

Same here; do it in Excel, then move it in (the LMS I used at one place had "Import from Excel" as an option for the grading pages, as I recall; I could also just cut-and-paste the cells, I think, if I just wanted to show 2-3 things instead of all my interstitial calculations).

M.

@Paddington: Ach, nein!!!!

Hope it gets sorted without too much more pain...

M.

[mamselle]

Somewhere between Jedi mind tricks and classroom victories...

A friend who taught American history had a standing assignment: each student had to get an NPS "Liberty Passport," visit some certain number of sites, (say, 4), attend an official, site-offered tour, and write a 2-page reflection paper about it for two of them, then turn in the papers and stamped passport a week before classes ended.

Because all the sites are online, the papers were easy to check, both for accuracy and plagiarism (which the students were warned of, in advance); the 2-3 best were asked to read their papers and discuss them during the last day's class review session.

This was obviously pre-Covid, might be possible to revive sometime.

M.

[Puget]

For the final two classes of my seminar, we do a couple activities that build on what they've learned through the semester and let them work in groups to apply it in fun ways.

This was the first time since the before-times when we've been able to do it as intended, in person with students physically grouping up so they can really engage with each other, and it was wonderful!

They get prep time at the start in their groups where I just sit back and stay out of their way, and it was such a joy to overhear them-- they were intensely engaged and taking it seriously, looking things up in their notes and online and discussing and debating, but also having a blast together-- lots of laughter and creativity. And they came up with great stuff that showed what they'd learned.

I need to recall all this when I slog through their term papers next week.

[Istiblennius]

My students do a series of low stakes reflections on "science and society" where they connect the human element of science to our broader topics. One of the topics this week was how diversity of perspective strengthens science and they had a reflection question about finding role models.

One of the students responded: "I've never wanted to speak up in class before, but you have made me feel so comfortable and you make such a point of encouraging us to talk about our ideas that I think you are a role model. I am going to be a future teacher, and I'm learning a lot from you about how to make my students feel welcome and supported in class".

Of course they could just be blowing smoke, but this isn't a particularly grade grubbing student and even if they are blowing smoke, it was a much needed boost this week!