Saturday Snapshot -- Class Selfie

Join West Metro Mommy for this weekly meme of photos people have taken and share on their blogs.
This semester, I had a small class of advanced composition. We started out with about 12 students, and they were a lackadaisical bunch, except for two very devoted girls who came every time.
Even though I constantly nagged them to work harder, we had a good time.
I raged at them one day that they might be a good class to hang out with, but I wouldn't want my pay based on their grades. (That's something they're talking about doing for elementary through high school teachers in Ohio. Their pay would be based on student performance.)
So on Friday they gave presentations based on the persuasive papers they wrote.
For some of them, it was like defending their doctoral thesis because the other students challenged their premises.
At the end of class, the students said, "Let's take a selfie!"
"I'll take a picture of all of you," I said.
"No, you have to be in it," Madelyn cried.
So we all lined up, and Dan, who is very tall with very long arms, snapped a selfie of us.
What a fun class and a fun memory.

We have one more class, but since they've finished their finals, we make take a field trip to Starbucks, which is within walking distance.

Studentwriting

Here it is, the beginning of another quarter at college.
I teach an online class, and everybody who forgot to register sends me an email asking if they can get in my online class. If there are openings, I let them join -- first come, first served.
Luckily, all the spots were gone when I got this email:

Good afternoot my name is jennifer mxxxx, iam interesten in taking your web class and iam asked for a signature from you please let me know what i need to do next.
thanks in advance

I emailed Jennifer back to tell her that I already had a class full of students, and suggested that some of the other teachers had openings. She should ask them.
Then I added a P.S. to her email.
"You may want to correct your spelling and punctuation before you ask another teacher."
Today I heard back from her, "thanks"
No punctuation. No capitalization.
I hope she gets in a class.

Choices

While Grace was home last weekend, we talked a lot about choices. She hates to make decisions. Even when we're shopping for clothes, she'll say, "I can't choose." Choices aren't right or wrong, I told her, they're just different paths.
As Grace ventures out into the world, she is facing more and more paths. The problem with choosing one path is that the other path gets rejected. Most of the time, once we start on a path, we can't go back and try the other one again to see how that might have turned out.
I tried to illustrate my point by telling Grace that shortly after I moved to Clearwater, Florida for a job with the Tampa Tribune, I was offered a job at the New Orleans Times Picayune. If I had pulled up roots and moved to New Orleans, my life would have been totally different.
I met my husband at the Tampa Tribune. Marrying this particular man led to the paths that we have taken. The fiesty kids, the soujourn in Michigan and then back to Ohio.
Would I have settled in New Orleans? Would I have developed a southern accent and improved my French? Would I have married a man who lived on a bayou?
I don't look back and wish I'd taken another path.

Rather than being helpful, I think this example terrified Grace. Now all of her decisions seemed to be crucial and life changing. The choice she faced was whether to continue swimming. We avoided the word "quitting."
At college, she spent about 22 hours per week swimming. She wasn't loving it. She stressed about the classes and the labs and the grades. She saw her friends only in passing. She went to bed early and rose in the dark to ride her bike to the pool. She longed to go to swing dance class and spend more time at the theater learning to apply make up and hem costumes.
Her path seemed clear. Swimming, although a part of her life for the past eight years, was not going to be her career. When it stopped being fun, when it stopped being the place she socialized, she needed to let it go.
Letting go is hard.
On Monday, hidden in a stairwell in her dorm, she called me sobbing. "What have I done?" she wailed.
She met with the coach and told him, slipping into tears right in his office. When she asked if she might be allowed to return to the team her sophomore, junior or senior year, the coach said, "We'll have to talk about that."
So she swiped at tears as she crossed campus and searched for a private place to cry. It's not easy to find solitude on a college campus.
As the days have passed, her mood has soared and plunged.
"Sometimes, especially at night, I think what have I done? I have to go swim," she confessed in one whispered phone call. She thinks about going to talk to a counselor on campus, but in the morning she feels good about her decision.
As the day wears on and the darkness slowly surrounds her, this path looks unfamiliar and she wonders if she can still run back and try that other path, the one that she was on for a very long time.

Aaargh!

No, it isn't talk like a pirate day.
I'm so frustrated with my Friday night class. Only two more and I can put those non-motivated students out of my life.
Tonight I thought I was being observed. The last time I was observed, the supervisor just showed up and I continued with my class as usual. This time, the supervisor contacted me last week to say he was coming this week. That, of course, made me nervous. I made sure the students were assigned an essay that we could discuss. They've been fairly good at that.
I talked to another teacher who said she is really just a "facilitator" for her students. She breaks them into small groups and let's them figure things out.
So, I started tonight with small groups for parphrasing practice. I gave them an Urban Legend about Bonsai Kittens (kittens that are grown in bottles to be bottle-shaped. No, it's not true, it's an urban legend.)
I broke them into groups of four and told them to paraphrase the legend and the explanation of the legend.
"What if we don't want to collaborate?" one boy asked.
"But I want you to collaborate. You can learn from each other."
"I work better on my own. Don't take this personally," he said, turning to the other members of his group.
"Oh, I'm taking it personally. I will not collaborate with you," said an older woman with grown kids who should definitely know better than to take an 18-year-old seriously.
Then she refused to work with him.
I was just praying my supervisor didn't appear soon. Then we discussed an essay by Martin Luther King about the oppressed. Hello? Does anyone know who Dr. King was? I got blank stares. What's oppressed? What acquiesance? What's nonviolent resistance?
We played a grammar game for extra credit. Some of the students talked incessantly about nothing. They should have their own Seinfeld episodes.
I explained the same things over and over.
I told them about logical fallacies and showed them youtube videos to reinforce the fallacies. I showed them the hilarious Saturday Night Live skit about Joe Wilson who yelled, "You lie!" during Obama's speech to illustrate the bandwagon fallacy.
Finally, I tried to discuss an entertaining essay on when it's okay to lie. It was obvious none of them had read it. Fine.
I gave them a writing assignment and wished them good riddance (in my thought bubble). Then I looked in my mailbox and saw a reminder that students deserve good customer service. Well, you know what. I'd like to see a little more effort before those students get good customer service from me.
I'm working like a dog to entertain them, tap dancing as fast as I can in a four-hour class on Friday night. Did they know the class was on Friday night when they signed up for it?
I'm tired of teaching. Physically and mentally.