I'm trying to get back into the habit of posting something every day, so, without further ado...
something.
Seriously, I'm working on a couple of actual science posts. I was hoping to get one of them up today, but circumstances conspired against it. I got tied up with a car repair, then got home to find my dog missing. He was eventually located in the custody of the Humane Society, but that kind of blew the evening. Then I got to grade papers.
Grading papers, for those of you who have not had the experience, can actually be a very interesting study in human psychology and miscommunication. It's also a very good way to kill off neurons, without all those pesky side-effects that you get using chemical methods of brain-cell elimination.
Tonight, I was grading lab notebooks. This was the first time that the students have had to turn them in, so I wasn't expecting too much from them this time - and I almost got it.
Here's the breakdown:
Notebooks expected: 15
Notebooks received: 14
# of Students who followed
all directions correctly: 2
#of different ways
directions misunderstood: 12
Oy.
2 comments:
Yeah, I remember marking some essays once and I still don't really know what many of the students were trying to say.
When I was a "mature" student returning to college, I took a basic statistics class. To gather data for his own dissertation, the instructor ran an experiment of having the students "rank" one another's papers, which were summaries of our own experiments.
During two sessions, each student got a stack of 5 papers and had to rank each in the top 3 (pass) or bottom 2 (fail). I recall reading one paper that I thought had been delivered to the wrong class. While it was very entertaining, it bore no resemblance to the assignment. There were others that were also way off the mark. I then realized that these same students who had no idea how to follow instructions were going to be responsible for grading my work.
When students totally miss the mark, are you ever able to have a conversation with them and ask "What were you thinking"?
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