Housebreaking the Students

In Socrates Wake directed me to this article, which has a wonderful line about teaching:

“My view is that you really fall into a trap when you start allowing what you believe about your students to dictate how you teach your discipline,” he answered. “Too often these days we end up setting up our courses in light of what we believe about our students and we end up not teaching them. At best, we end up housebreaking them.”

I'm not sure I agree with the sentiment, although the principle is sound. In general, we cannot say that a student has successfully learned, for example, how to write, unless he attains an absolute level of proficiency. This measure must ignore what level they started at. While our students arrive in the class with a variety of backgrounds, skills and talent, they should leave the classroom with some uniformity of proficiency.

It is derelict in the extreme to excuse poor students because "they started off too weak".

That being said, we must first meet our students where they are, not where we would like them to be. I may have a goal for the end of the semester, but I cannot begin the semester losing half the class because I speak in ways incomprehensible to them or use terms that they don't understand.

I, however, would love to explore ways to avoid housebreaking my students.

Personal statement

One of the eight bagijillion things I've had to do this month was write a personal statement regarding my work at AUC.

The guidance we got was that it should be 12 pt font, single spaced and we should try to keep it to under one page. I laughed. I've been working there for 18 months. I didn't think I could write a meaningful paragraph, let alone most of a page. Well, guess what? It was almost a full page, and I had to leave stuff out. After I finished writing it, I was pretty pleased with myself. I mean, I'm actually doing stuff!!

I am, after all, just about the laziest person I know (and that's saying a lot). So anyway, just to toot my own horn a little bit more, I thought I'd post my personal statement here:

I first came to AUC in 2003 as a TEFL MA fellow. Because of the collaborative and non-competitive nature of the faculty and administration here, I decided that this was the ideal environment for me to mature as a teacher and expand my skills into as many aspects of education as possible.
Since being hired as a full time English instructor in 2005, I have taught nearly every possible section, including all five of the skills areas at the advanced (99) level as well as Academic Writing (100) and Reading in the Graduate Module (124). Prior to graduation, I also spent one semester as a student teacher in the Writing Program teaching research writing(103) I am currently exploring the possibility of teaching a Core Curriculum course in 2008.
In addition to teaching, I have been working hard to participate in the various duties of the department and in the university. I have edited the ELIte, a publication of student work from our department. I am an active member of the ELI computer committee, where I have organized a sub-committee to keep our website up-to-date and have also joined the ELI assessment committee.
Additionally, I am a member of the AUC Faculty Services Committee where I participate in a number of functions, including new faculty orientation and faculty library acquisition and maintenance. I regularly participate in TEFL MA research projects, student training, and research work of my colleagues.
I also participate in the department activities to enhance our materials and teaching tools. I have recently been working to develop a number of audio materials from online sources. I have also been working to develop a WebCT template for the entire program to use and conducting training sessions for teachers to help them use WebCT.
I also work outside the university to enhance the profession of ESL teaching in Egypt. I am an active member of EgypTesol, and sit on the Education Technology special Interest Group, which organizes occasional workshops as well an annual Electronic Oasis at the main EgypTesol convention, where I have presented workshops every year. I have helped develop an online application process and database to help organize the activities of the Electronic Oasis and the rest of the convention. I have also volunteered to be the Webmaster for the EgypTesol website.

After reading it over, I realized I've left lots of stuff off! Hmm, oh well. I'll try to boast more later.

Well, I never wanted to be the type of blogger who would disappear for weeks at a time only to post a note about how busy he was and then disappear for another long bout. Given my frequency of posts, however, it looks like I’m creeping dangerously in that direction. That said, I would like to boast about the stuff I’ve been doing in recently:

I had a HUGE winter break, over five weeks from the end of classes to the first day of Spring Semester (last Tuesday). With that in mind, I gave myself an enormous list of projects for the month. Ah, how naive. Here’s how January actually went:

Week 1: visit with mother and father-inlaw. Lots of fun, no work done at all.

Week 2: J returned to work, I hung out with Mk. No work done at all (I had actually planned on doing work during her nap time. What I didn’t plan on was that I would need that nap time for…napping.

Week 3: I caved and had the girl go into School with J. Woo hoo! Freedom! No, wait, Mk got an ear infection and had to stay home, see week 2.

Week 4: “That’s it!” I decided and made sure I went into the office to work. Turns out I can play Cyber Nations just as easily there :( Also, turns out I had completely miscalculated when the semester would begin. Although I still had another week to go before classes started, I had agreed to conduct a workshop and student orientation for

Editor's Note: This post was written three weeks ago, just as the semester was begining. As you can see, I didn't even have enough time to finish my sentence. I've been THAT busy. I've got lots more to say, but its 1am and I want to sleep. I'll try to write more soon, I promise. Thanks to all of you who've asked for more.

Oh, and by the way, since one simple blog is obviously too much for me, I'm giving up trying to use live journal for now. I will remain at e-blogger.

Teaching Writing the Hypocritcal Way

I teach writing at a very basic level. Often times, I have to spend several weeks teaching the students what a sentence is, that it must be a complete sentence, and not a run-on sentence. I tell them how many clauses to put into their sentences (3) and that at least one of them should be a subordinant clause. I do this because our teachers who grade essays are sentence nazis. They will fail a student for having a few comma splices, or for stringing a number of clauses together with a bunch of subordinant conjunctions. To be fair, I also do it because, at the level these guys are writing, they need all of the structural clarity they can get in their sentences. The meaning is so often difficult to interpret because of the weak vocabulary (this is aside from the fact that they rarely have anything to say in the first place).

Anyway, I'm feeling a little guilty for this tonight, especially after looking at the completely haphazard way I string clauses together. I actually got an e-mail from the diecter of our program a few years ago, mildly suggesting that, as an English teacher, it might be better if I didn't have comma splices in my e-mails. Whatever.

So I want to have a contest:
For all my devoted readers (both of you), see if you can post an example of a comma splice in the comments section. If more than fifty percent of the comments do have a comma splice, I won't feel so bad about sucking all the life out of my students. Doesn't this sound fun?

Electronic Oasis

Well, November is almost over and what amonth its been! Our Electronic Oasis was last weekend, it went off rather well. Every year it seems to go smoother and smoother. I hope I have something to do with that. Here's our organizing committee (minus Ahmed who was fluttering in and out of our area because he was rubbing elbows with the convention comittee. In front, from left to right: Ahmed K, Dina, Maha, Randa and Gini. In the back, its Andy, Me, and Inas. The weekend left me exausted, but satisfied. The big highlight was that Jessica's and Grainne's presentation (which they wouldn't have made unless I encouraged them) was a smashing success! I know i'm biased, but that girl really can speak. She was authoritative, interesting, well organized and very fun to look at. So there's a bunch for me to be thankful there. Primarily, that it went well, and its over (plus I have a cute wife).