Tomorrow is week six of my “Web Development with HTML” class; it should have been week seven, but a blustery forecast convinced the adult school to call a snow day two weeks ago.
Last week was the greatest disappointment of my short teaching career. I didn’t write about this at the time because there were too many other things that were gnawing at my psyche. Only two students showed up for class, one of them arrived a half hour late.
The enrollment for the class is twelve. On an average week about eight show up. I realize that these people have other obligations in their lives, but if I had paid $75 for twelve hours of instruction, I would make damn sure that I received twelve hours.
At least the two who showed up learned something (I hope). Ironically, it was probably the most important week of instruction. I introduced them to the world of cascading style sheets (CSS). Tomorrow’s hands-on exercise will draw heavily upon the previous week’s material.
I am somewhat torn. If only two show up again, I will probably be devastated. However, if the rest do show up, I will feel bad for my two faithful students because I will have to reteach much of last week’s lesson so that everyone can do the exercise.
The premise of the class, itself, is somewhat flawed. Hand-coding HTML pages is not really a skill for those who do not even possess basic Windows skills. However, in last semester’s class, eleven of the twelve stuck it out for all eight weeks, and I would like to believe that they walked away with at least a modicum of useful knowledge.
This semester, though, has left me wondering what I did wrong. Did I alienate my students in some way? Did I pace the class too slowly? Was it a mistake to post extensive materials on the web for those who legitimately could not make it to class?
At any rate, I will not be teaching this course (or any course) next semester. This seems to be just one more indicator that I need to move on to bigger and better things.
I’m sure it’s nothing to do with you, they’ve probably all got things going with the holidays/Spring Break coming up. I wouldn’t re-teach stuff you did last week because they saw the syllabus at the beginning of class, so they should understand that it has been covered and they’ll need to figure it out on their own.
I want to believe that it has nothing to do with me, but still…
A total of four showed up tonight. Since the last three weeks all hinge on last week’s instruction, I spent about fifteen minutes reviewing the material from the previous week in a way that I hope was beneficial to my two faithfuls as well.
Just two more weeks.
How annoying. I’ve had a problem trying to decide how much material to rehash when students are absent; or rather, I don’t intend to cover it again but it comes up. This has happened repeatedly on my Fiction class because we discuss one story on Monday, one on Wednesday, then have a group discussion on Friday talking about both stories. Invariably, people who were absent on one of those days will use the Friday time (intended to dig deeper) broaching subjects we discussed the day they were absent.
I have mixed feelings about it as well. On the one hand, discussions, even though a repeat, will often shoot out into a new thought so that makes it worthwhile. On the other hand, those who participated in the prior discussion are sitting through a lot of “revelations” they’ve already experienced.
Yup, really annoying. The other thing I have mixed feelings about is how much effort I put into providing supplemental learning materials on the web if they don’t even show up for class. Of course, I don’t want to penalize those who do faithfully attend.
My university (my day job) is debating similar concerns trying to decide whether to videotape lectures and place the streams online.
Unfortunately, this adult school doesn’t have any metric to determine whether the students actually learned anything. So if they don’t show up…if they don’t learn anything…eh.
Oh well, two more classes, and then my next time in a formal learning environment will most likely not be as a lecturer, but as a student going back for my masters.