For each of the classes I teach (community college math), I create a website on my personal domain. I post all of my lecture notes there, I post the daily homework, I post the solutions to the homework problems after the due date, etc., etc. The idea I have here is that I am providing my students with a place they can find anything they need related to the class.
The website is one of the first items mentioned in my syllabi. Each syllabus has the URL printed in three different places. On the first day of the quarter, I spend a good ten or fifteen minutes just talking about the website. I bring it up on the projection screen. “This is the website. This is what it looks like. This is how you get to it. Note that the first homework assignment is already posted. Yadda yadda yadda.”
And… wait for it… several times per week I get emails from students saying “I missed class, can you send me the homework?” or “I forgot to write down the homework, can you give it to me?”
It’s getting harder and harder to not be completely snarky in my response. I try to be somewhat nice, saying something like “as I talked about on the first day… here is the link to the website. Again.”
But now that we’re almost halfway through the quarter, what I really want to say is GO TO THE FUCKING WEBSITE!!
Why, oh why, is this such a difficult concept to understand?
How certain are you that every student has access to a computer and the Internet?
Do you have students who are economically disadvantaged? Case-in-point: I have a new neighbor, a single mom with 3 kids (age 3, 11, 15) who is stone dirt-poor, they’re always behind on the rent, utilities; no car; getting food-stamps, the struggling single-mom-and-family whole story. Mom is underemployed and underpaid (part time McDonalddroid).
Think they have computer access? The 11-year-old (I think she’s 11) camps out at my place to do her math homework. (And the 15-year-old too, now and then.) Sheesh, it’s 4th grade arithmetic! WTF? Why does that need to be done on-line? (Don’t even get me started on the problems with that.)
I like the way you use the web site. It’s amazing that so many students don’t get it.
How long have you been teaching at a community college? I graduated from one when I was in my 30s back in 1988. From what I remember, in most of my classes there were a couple of people for whom community college was going to change their lives (I was one of those). The rest of the people were just applying the same dipshit attitudes and aptitudes to school that they applied to the rest of their lives.
I took a psychology course at the CC taught by a retired psychologist. On the first day, she was explaining a homework assignment that involved working with some data: adding numbers, calculating some percentages. A dipshit raised his hand and said something like “I thought this was Psychology 101, I didn;t think we’d have to do all this math.” The teacher said “This isn’t math, it’s arithmetic, and if you can’t do it, you don’t belong here.” I was too stunned to applaud, but I should have.
But since CCs need butts in the seats, your gentle approach is probably the best one to take. Good luck, and look for those people who came to change their lives.
I understand Senegoid’s point, but yes, it’s always by email the students contact me. My feeling is, even if they only have access to email by using a computer on campus, they could just as easily use that computer to check the class website.
GESancMan: Dude. First, you’re using complete sentences for this shit? Second, these are freshly composed, bespoke, wordsmith sentences? [shakes head] No.
What you do is have a canned email that contains nothing but a cryptic bitly url and your sig. That points to all the shit you’ve told them and that your web site explains. It’s the high tech yet still satisfying way of saying ‘go fuck yourself.’
I teach a vocational trade at a college in the Uk and have the same problem. With over 70 students including apprentices I have created 6 separate websites and only one has been accessed by a lone apprentice. Several times at the start of the year I give detailed instructions, both verbal and written, on how to access the websites but all to no avail. I update the sites as the OP does at the end of each day. There are computers for them to use in the library.
Why do I do this? It ticks a box for management in Equality and Diversity and covers my own arse. It is no longer about teaching them anything or them learning anything but about keeping bums in seats and off the government’s unemployment role. Quotas once again.
A few years ago I received a reference from a high school teacher who said “he cannot read, write or do maths but would make a good carpenter”. And I am supposed to teach him how to lay out a roof or stairs??? I was quite offended by their lack of respect for my trade.
Having said all that there are a few gems and some fantastic victories that make it all worthwhile and that I keep fighting for. But somewhere along the line, the schools have lost the ability to teach children how to learn.
I would post a weekly quiz on the website, uploaded on Friday afternoon, and due by Monday (or whenever your next class with them is held). It was an open book quiz and I didn’t particularly care if they shared the info and answers, but it got them used to going onto the website on a regular basis.
To drive home the importance of the website, the first few quizzes had questions like,
“What information can you find on this website?”
“If you miss an assignment, where is it located on this website?”
I let them know these weekly quizzes were 10% of their final grade, and considered “Participation” - the same as asking and answering questions in class.
For those idiots who rarely, or never, completed the quizzes, it was quite easy for me to determine if they got a B or C in the class, or a C or D, etc.
As it was clearly noted on my syllabus, and specifically mentioned each week, the majority started to catch on this was an easy way to up their grades.
Then again, some just didn’t give a shit, and to be honest, when it came time to grade them, neither did I - and I had no problem dropping their grades by one letter grade.
Have each student create an account on the website and log in as part of their first day’s assignment.
Bear in mind that the student that contacts you may be feigning ignorance in order to have an excuse to contact you after missing class. It’s a way of acknowledging that they were not there, while saying “See, I’m keeping up with the work, I didn’t just blow off class,” and gauging how much you care about attendance from the tone of your response.
A lot of kids have figured out that the more contact they have with teachers, the harder it is for the teacher to fail them, since it looks like they are trying. It’s a way to be lazy and “get away with” not making actual effort.
Does your college use an online learning management system, like Blackboard or Desire2Learn? If so, your students may be used to checking there for information like you describe, rather than your own personal website.
I would use a three step approach
Step one: URL in email sig
Step two: respond to email with “See URL in sig”
Step three: (if they send you a second email) attach a URL for a McDonalds employment.
No shit. I TAed Perception, and it involved some light algebra/trig, stuff like sine/cosine, calculating visual angle, finding fundamental frequencies and harmonics of sound waves. I’d get complaints from time to time. This isn’t the wishy-washy side of psychology.
Yes, and if they DO have it, you might get into some legal hot water if your personal website hosts any information considered sensitive. I think a login would be especially suspect or a network the school doesn’t consider secure. The relevant law is FERPA, and it means that you can’t tell parents, coaches, friends, etc. anything about the student’s grade, nor post grades publicly with partial SSN or student ID, etc.
In general, community college students aren’t exactly the academic cream of the crop. In my experience having taken summer community college courses (Houston Community College) for credit at my real university, I noticed that (like Crotalus points out) of the non UH/UT/Texas A&M students, maybe one or two per class were pretty competent and struck me as having just had a bad roll of the dice originally and that they’d do fine in school with the rest of us.
The other full-time community college students seemed to be listless fuckups who were neither hard working enough to go get a real job, nor were they smart enough to actually make it at a real school either. Not being bothered to look at a web site, or accidentally throwing their syllabus away, or other dumb-shit stuff like that is about right for that particular crowd.
Just to make everyone feel [del]better[/del] worse…the same exact thing happens as DePaul University. It drives my ex batty. “Check the goddam website!” has become the new, “Read the goddam syllabus!”
We use D2L, which is a big pile of steaming shit. I finally got fed up with it and started hosting my own sites. On the first day of class, when I introduce the site, I make it crystal clear that it has nothing to do with D2L.
I code my sites from scratch, using Notepad++. I am, at best, at the intermediate level of ability with HTML and CSS. Doing something like creating accounts for the students is way beyond my abilities. I wouldn’t want to, anyway; my sites are merely places the students can get lecture notes and assignments, I don’t want to screw around with sensitive information.
