Thursday, October 25, 2012
I forgot?
I am seeing more and more students coming in and forgetting to bring the prompt, the paper they are working on, or even the article they are writing about. I have one student that has never come prepared and I have explained to her several times that I am not sure about the direction of your essay because I have never seen the prompt. Then when she receives a bad grade for not addressing the questions in the prompt it somehow becomes my fault. So any suggestions on how to convey the importance of coming prepared without sounding like a nagging mother?
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I rarely work with students who don't have a prompt. If I don't know what the assignment is, working on it will probably be a waste of time. If they don't have a prompt, I do my best to help them find it,(including asking around in the WLDC, checking the class portal and/or Blackboard site, and looking to see if they have a class packet on the bookshelf). If my efforts still yield no prompt,I tell them that they need to ask their teacher or find a classmate that can help them locate the prompt and then come back.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that there is a non-nagging way to go about telling a student that they need their prompt to complete the essay properly. This is college and as much as it is great that there is a tutoring center here to help students, it is their job to come fully prepared. You don't want a doctor to give you medicine without first reading your chart to find out what is wrong with you, and we don't want to say what an essay needs to include something without reading the prompt first. The few times that I have had a student without a prompt i have repeated that the prompt was important and without it I don't know if we are on the right track in organizing the paper.
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DeleteYesterday, my client realized he didn't have his prompt with him. I told him that we couldn't work on it without the prompt. Of course, he hadn't even started working on it. Instead, we reviewed an in class essay he had done so that I could help him understand the areas he had trouble with it. One of the things was that he didn't actually write his essay according to the prompt. It seems to me that if a student doesn't respond to the prompt correctly when it's in front of them, then that only confirms that we cannot help them when they don't have it with them.
ReplyDeleteShawn, you're right that we can help them try to find a prompt; but like Catherine said, it really is the student's responsibility to come prepared.
I like how you redirected the session into looking over an older paper. This is also a good thing to do when students say, "I just turned my paper in and I really don't have anything to work on."
ReplyDeleteI have had the same problem and usually tell students that they need to find something else to work on or come back with the prompt at a later time. If they say that the prof. never gave them a prompt then I tell them to check mycampusportal or blackboard to see if they may have missed something. It is pretty much impossible to work on a paper without a prompt.
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