English 505

Yes, yes . . . as I was just beginning to think that I understood my students . . .

Thursday's class was terrible. This was the best and most detailed lesson I had planned. I found an article in the Indianapolis Star which they were to read in class and give their gut responses to. We were then to discern the strategies the writer used to make his point and discuss whether it was effective or not. This discussion would then lead us into Ethos/ Pathos and Logos. I thought it was a brilliant idea. . . . Boy was I WRONG!!

I think I may have been speaking Greek (or maybe it was French Creole). They were more interested in paraphrasing the article than responding to it. When I clarified that, only a few gave their responses while the others reverted to the summarising idea. Then we turned to the devises he used to make his points. It would seem that only factual points qualify as devises, and word choice and organization are non-existant. The two last points had to be told to them. And this activity which was just supposed to take 10- 15 mins. took practically the whole class, after which time we finally came to ethos, pathos and logos. After all the teeth pulling, they were able to define and then identify examples of each in the reading and come up with the one which seemed more dominant. By that time, I was exhausted and throughly disappointed.

The morals of this story for me are:

1) My students will always surprise me (and not necessarily in a good way)

2) The inductive approach does not work with my class.

2)I will not put together such a detailed plan again.

P.S. I do hope that everyoneelse's (yes, my word) classes went better than mine did.