BCMU Students Surprise Me

On Tuesday, one of my remedial writing classes at BCMU classes sucked. They universally failed to do the 27 pages of reading that they'd had a week to do (one of our classes last week was cancelled, so they had two whole classes worth of reading to do, poor lambs). When I asked them questions about what they were supposed to have read, they sat there and stared at me. When I put them in small groups to discuss another part of what they were supposed to have read, they sat there and stared at their textbooks for thirty minutes. It was one of the worst classes I've ever suffered through.

Today, I opened my class with a little sermon about how they won't learn anything in this class if they sit there like lumps on a log, how I get paid the same either way, so it's no skin off my butt if they don't learn anything, but they should think hard about if they want to waste their time and money taking a class and not getting anything from it because they were too lazy to do their part.

And with one or two exceptions, they responded well to it. Participation was the best its been all semester. They worked during the group work--and stayed on-task, except for a little bit at the end when all of the groups except one were done--and I checked the groups that said they were done, and they actually had done a reasonably thorough job of what I asked them to do.

So now I know, next time they stop working, they respond well to ranting.