Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

Today three of my students turned in nearly identical papers.  One of them only included about a third of what the other students’ did and was handed to me several minutes into class by another one of the students.  If the handwriting hadn’t been different on every copy, I would suspect the student who handed it to me of going so far as to transcribe each copy.  This student, incidentally, is one of those who thinks that using “big words” makes him an advanced student, even though he fails to use them accurately or to use the simplest grammatical structures correctly.

Unfortunately, since other students don’t know these terms, they believe that he’s more advanced than they are.  It seems likely that the other two students believed that his work was better than anything that they could produce.  In fact, this tripled paper is the only one of those I’ve read so far to completely miss the point of the assignment.  I asked for a synopsis; they gave me a character description.

To be honest, I found this whole thing a bit insulting.  Did they honestly believe that I wouldn’t notice?  Perhaps they suspect that foreign teachers don’t actually read their assignments.

It’s strange to think that it’s Sunday night.  Afterall, I taught three classes today and two yesterday.  Because the National Day holiday that begins tomorrow only lasts three days officially, the college has us teach our Thursday and Friday courses the weekend before our seven-straight free days.  Given that each class meets once  a week, however, the result is that those classes that meet on Thursday and Friday end up getting ahead of the others– which is irritating when you teach multiple sections of the same course.  And, of course, a seven-day week is long for students and teachers alike.

So I didn’t teach real lessons this weekend.  I showed my movie classes a silly movie with little discussion (though I did tell them to pay attention to the slang), and I gave my senior functional composition classes a quick-and-dirty creative writing workshop.  I was surprised to find that they lost interest in the fiction-writing portion after the pre-writing steps, though my demonstration of an earthquake as an inciting force startled them to attention.

With the poetry, they were intimidated at first (which I expected), but by the end, some of the less-skilled students wrote passable cinquains (and volunteered to share them).  The procedure I followed to  achieve this result was remarkably simple.  First, I had them brainstorm nouns, verbs, and adjectives related to a topic.  Then, I introduced the syllabic form by writing out the first three lines and then illustrating how a word list could be used to generate the conclusion.

Anyway, I’m off to Shanghai in the morning, so don’t be surprised if posts are minimal to nonexistent until Sunday night or Monday morning.

Apparently, all it takes to make my students terribly nervous is to refuse to give them a target wordcount for their papers. I’m having my film classes write a synopsis of the most recent movie we watched (having gone through an example with a few words left out for the previous one.  When they asked about length, I told them that their goal should be to make it as short as possible without excluding anything important.

This led to a few rather vocal sighs, so I explained to them quite directly that giving them a required length wasn’t going to help them do well on the assignment.  The tendency some students show to fill extra space with empty phrases is often worse with advanced EFL students who are much more likely to pile on awkward and incorrect modifiers to reach the required length.  Most of the errors I see my students make come about because they’re trying to make things too complicated.  Of course, giving maximum lengths in my writing classes (since we’re working on job-search correspondence) hasn’t really helped much with that or else I’d give that sort of restriction for every assignment.

This morning has been a morning of great clumsiness even for someone as typically clumsy as I am. First, I slipped coming out of a toilet stall in the foreign language building. (I have a bruise on the palm with which I caught myself, and I’m sure the story had made its way around all to all the students in the department.) Then, I nearly toppled over my chair in the teachers’ office while wheeling it around to talk to someone. Naturally, this led to a lot of kidding about how I need to stop drinking before class, to which I responded that the problem was that I insisted on teaching sober. It’s like how it takes a while to shake off your sea legs when you get back on land, right?

In fact, I’m surprised that I managed to avoid falling down in front of my classes given the kind of morning it was. In both rooms, I teach from a slightly elevated platform, and in one of them, the platform runs out before the chalkboard does, which has led to a couple near misses already this semester (and the second week isn’t even complete as yet).