I would certainly do it differently.
That's what I've been thinking about my new Visual Rhetoric class as well as this quarter's face-to-face interpersonal.
I'm not sure why I'm unhappy with the results of the Visual Rhetoric class when I was very happy last spring with the Rhetoric of Film. In this winter's class they needed to make a still image while last spring they were required to make a short movie. It was obvious to me that most students did more work last spring, and not just because movies are more work than photographs. I was over-the-moon about last spring's student movies. This winter, however, several of their final project visual texts looked thrown together at the last minute. Then there were the analyses they did on them. Right there in the directions I wrote that As would be applied only to essays with researched sources in them. I provided several examples of those possible sources in class. But how many of my students had sources, even googly ones? ONE. That's right. Just one!
Ack. And after I showed them in class and in their homework how to super-fast-find supporting evidence on the web?
Well, at least I got to teach the class. And teaching it gave me the chance to return to the work of John Berger and readings I enjoyed even though my students didn't. And, yes, because of my own obsessions the class was too theory heavy and if I taught it again I would place much more emphasis on the performative aspects of visual rhetoric and communication so that it was more closely related to our advertising and marketing classes rather than a replication of my own ancient graduate student interests. (In my beginning is my end . . .)
And then there's the face-to-face interpersonal. I wasn't happy with it for a variety of reasons. First, I didn't do my work of memorizing their names very well. It was a once a week class and what with the day lost to fake snow danger and my own trip out of town my mind just wasn't sticky enough to keep the names present to me. Second, a good chunk of them didn't have the textbook in a timely manner (i.e., by midterms, for f---'s sake) and so they didn't keep up with the material. I've faced that issue for 2 1/2 decades, however, so it "shouldn't" have ticked me off but for some reason it did. Maybe because this was the last time I was teaching the class live and I was hoping for more. Finally, I'd changed one of the assignments in class from writing/thinking to thinking/test-taking. I made this change to get the live class more parallel to the online sections. Big mistake. It saved me the time usually spent in reading and grading but it didn't push them to think through the material as much as written homework would have done. The quizzes also did not do their job of encouraging reading before class meetings.
Oh, well. It's all done except for the complaints. I've given my online interpersonal communication students until 5:00 pm this afternoon to write to me with any complaints they may have about my assessment of their course projects. They need to read my assessments first, however on Grademark. I sent out two course emails with links to how to find the Grademark materials and even then I received an email from a student who continued to read Grademark as "GradeBOOK" and kept looking for comments where they weren't. So I'm not the only one with "technirritation."
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