Morning Pages: July 16, 2002

Today I'm supposed to be putting, in order, those critical incidents I wrote about yesterday that are distressing to me. This forced me to go back and think about the critical incident I wrote about and to define it more clearly. The class itself wasn't a critical incident. The critical incidents were me laying out invitation after invitation for my students to join me in untangling certain obstacles as they presented themselves. I found it even difficult to identify the obstacles, perhaps due, in part, to some changes I had made from previous semseters. In an effort to reduce the paper load for myself I decided last semester to have students make concept maps based on their readings instead of the usual reading log. The first week we did one together to provide a model for them to follow. There was, in this class, either a resistance to or inability to complete these as instructed. Where I wanted students to identify key concepts, they tended to focus on details. Where I wanted them to group and categorize key concepts in a system meaningful to them, they followed the outline the sub-headings in the text provide to them. I'm certain, given the manner in which they completed these assignments that the concept maps were nothing more than busy work to them. This failure on my part to grab hold of this problem early on meant I was not going to get a hold on it later. I should say that the four seniors taking this graduate class did "get" how to do a concept map and, if I recall correctly, they had some of the best work overall in the class.

Another thing that just popped into my head had to do with KM and her project. I divide the semester project into parts and have the students submit drafts of the various parts along the way. I review their work looking for particular patterns of problem areas and give feedback. When submitting her ifnal project KM admitted she had put virtually no effort into the project for the various checkpoints, essentially causing her to start over after spring break-redoing the whole project. I was upset about this (mad? sad? disappointed?) because she had, I felt, taken advantage of me and a good opportunity. I often remind students that they must submit the best possible work when submitting drafts. This ensures they will get the best possible feedback. This student didn't do this. I'm quite certian I took more time in providing feedback on the checkpoints than she did in preparing each of the checkpoints.

This kind of thinking is a mystery to me. I can't quite grasp this line of thinking, especially in graduate students. So, what is the critical incident here? Where are the disconnections? I think that the disconnection lies in the way that I and the way that my students define scholarly work and scholarly attitudes. There's a disconnection in how I believe students should respond to learning invitations and how they really respond to them.

Now, the thought keeps crossing my mind that I cannot change anyone else - only myself - but, do I have influence over others and in what way can that influence be parlayed to reduce or eliminate the disconnections I saw last semester? Does realizing that I cannot change others mean that I must give up my dream of what learning should be about and how that might look? I don't think so, but what does it mean? It means I must look at myself from different angles to get different views of the same thing. It means that with different ways of seeing the same thing I might also begin to see different ways to respond to the same old situations.