Hildegarde

I wasn’t going to write a blog post today.  I’m really very aware of the fact that I tend to be crabby and unreasonable during exam weeks, and that there really isn’t a whole lot of point to it.

But it’s very early in the morning, and I woke up to find an e-mail from a student in one of my upper level classes that just floored me.

This is, remember, an upper level class, and the student who wrote me is probably the best one in it.  I suppose that that explains why she wrote, and nobody else did.

Our exam is today, and the questions for that exam are up on a site called Blackboard, where serves as a kind of website for the course while it’s going on.

I have used Blackboard extensively over time, but I’m getting less and less enamored of it.

More and more students seem to think that there’s no point in coming to class or doing the reading, because “it’s all up on Blackboard,” and they can get anything they need from there.

The question concerns a section on the final about how different kinds of mass media are funded–lots of different kinds of mass media (music,  movies, broadcast television, cable television, web sites, etc)?

I spent three days going over this stuff in class, because it’s very complicated, it differs depending on the media type, and it’s often counterintuitive.

(For instance:  first run movie theaters receive NO money at all from ticket sales for the first two weeks a movie is in their theater.  Any money they make for those first two weeks must come out of popcorn and other snacks.  That’s why a small coke in a movie theater costs more than your hernia operation.)

Anyway, I went over and over and over this stuff, and kept telling them on and on and on that it would be on the final–and it just didn’t matter.

Not only did the student who wrote me have no notes, but none of the other students in the class that she’d talked to had notes, either.

Now, this class is not a required course. It’s an elective.  Nobody has to be there.  Nobody requires this and only this for graduation. 

Theoretically, at least, students are there because they want to be there.  They’re interested in the material. 

Or something.

I spend a lot of my time telling myself that the problems I have in Composition courses arise at least partially from the fact that they’re required, that students are not automatically interested, that  they often don’t know why anybody at all would be interested in what they’re required to learn.

I don’t understand people any more. 

I can pick up a stray textbook left behind in a classroom and become totally absorbed it reading through it.  For all the carping I do on this forum, I’ve at least given a shot to most of the things I THINK I’m not interested in when they’ve crossed my path.

I don’t think I ever signed up for a course I then totally ignored for the semester, whether it was required or not.

I don’t know what is going on with my students, but I do know that the more of it I have to put up with, the less pleasant I am as a human being.

And now I have to go make sure we remembered to put the garbage out, because those are the garbage trucks coming down the hill.

Somehow, it seems like a metaphor.