mostly inactive

Too many I know, give more than asked and run themselves ragged.

in the capstone class of my MASTER's degree, I had to do a group paper with fellow students who had all done 6+ years of collegiate study to get there

we shared drafts of our portions and they had no citations and i was like???? and they were like "it's a draft i'll put the citations in at the end" and i was like ???????

because by the time you're done writing the thing you're not going to remember what you got where and whether you synthesized information together! this is how "i thought i thought of it" plagiarism cases occur!!!!

anyway i told them at the bare minimum any time they referenced a numerical figure they needed to cite it, and since it was a paper on accounting fraud that mostly worked out. but i could tell they were citing stuff simply because i'd told them to cite where numbers came from, because they didn't bother to cite some non-numerical things that definitely needed it.

anyway this is why when you have classes that have multiple assignments for a paper to teach you how to write it, annotated bibliography comes before drafting. because you're supposed to have your sources and know what's in them when you start writing.

ask them lots of questions to get them to analyse things. if they seem unsure about how to tackle the question, make the question more specific. if all else fails, make it an either/or or a yes/no question, then ask them to justify their answer.

"[paraphrase of their response to the question], is that what you mean?"

"there's no right answer—you could think about this in a few different ways, I'm just wondering what you think"

make it clear that your analyses and opinions are not the 'correct' ones ("the way that I thought about it was—"; "I'm not entirely sure what the author means here, but what makes the most sense to me is—")

"well-spotted! I hadn't noticed that about this text before"

if you have to explain something, tie it back to something that they said wherever possible ("I think it has to do with what you said earlier about...")

"how do you think this character feels about x? do they have a good reason to feel that way? why are they behaving the way they are?"

"why might the author have chosen to write x? how would it be different if they had written y?"

"what underlying assumptions does the author's argument rely on? do you agree with those assumptions?"

"today, we're going to learn x. this will fit into y and z, which we'll be learning in the next session. x, y, and z are all part of the broader skill A. this way we can practice these skills in a simple form, and then once we start getting into p and q (which are part of the broader skill B), we can transfer the A skills we learned to that new, more complicated context."

this gives a student structure so that they know what part of their overall goal is being worked towards, and why they're learning what they're learning, rather than feeling awash in a sea of information whose larger structure they don't understand. it also furthers trust that you are, in fact, always thinking of and working towards their overall goal.

try not to list off a bunch of stuff by rote without talking about why it matters and why they're learning it. this might sound like:

shout out to disabled people who dropped out! you’re not worth any less than someone with an advanced degree.