I taught my last classes yesterday; today I spent writing and grading portfolios submitted by various students. About 1/3 of my students stopped coming or doing any work sometime in March. (I haven't done an actual count.) This will give me less to grade, clearly, but I'm still bummed about it.
I reached out, repeatedly, to students who weren't coming to class or doing the work. Those who responded told me about their workloads, or illnesses in their family (sometimes Covid, sometimes other illnesses), or problems with lost jobs which made it difficult for them to drive to campus/keep their laptops and internets working. Several are also suffering from depression, which, no shock there.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I offered to work with them, showed them the work they needed to do to at least pass the class, and sent follow-ups. Only a few of them got back on track.
We're going back to f2f in the fall. Here's hoping that will help.
4 comments:
Same story here--way more students who checked out early, way more bad grades, way more excuses. I keep hoping that everything will get back to normal eventually, but I wonder. Meanwhile, I hope a break will do us all some good!
Same!
My deep hope is that this whole year+ goes down in history with a giant asterisk by it, and so whatever behavior the student had in 2018-2019 and/or 2022-2023, etc, ends up being what they're assessed by, and no one cares too much if 2020-21 was the pits. My fear is that employers use 2020-21 to weed out the have-nots from the haves.
I think everyone should get a do-over. Or yes, we could just ignore this year. What a disaster it's been.
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