I graded my students' oral recordings last weekend. We use an incredibly great thing called Horizon Wimba Voice Tools which we have access to on WebCT whereby students can create voice recordings in the lab or at any internet-ready headset-endowed computer; the recordings are stored on the Wimba site and links for each individual recording can be emailed. A huge step up from the tote bags full of cassette tapes we used to drag around when I first started teaching, believe you me.
Anyway here in 1st year, we used to do 5 of these each semester and though they are supposed to help round out the oral production facet of the students’ coursework, they are a gigantic pain in the cul to grade. They (only) take somewhere from 5 to 45 minutes on the students’ part (per student) to complete (depending on how much they practice – you got it, usually it’s the 5 minute end) but they take about 2 hours per class to grade. Since we only had 5 on the syllabus (one per chapter) they were only worth 1% each (as we already have about 6 million different components on the syllabus so not much extra is there to stick onto each incredible well-meaning and worthwhile but labor intensive new idea our team and/or coordinator used to come up with…) The bottom line is students didn’t put much importance on them and therefore they didn’t really put much effort into them either, which made for a Really Really Really Really boring, 5-6 hour, chew-my-leg-off bout of grading every chapter. (OK sure it would have gotten old even if the students had been putting much into it, but still.) Furthermore a lot of students blew them off since they were worth so little, which I didn’t really mind but which could be pretty detrimental to their grade at the end of the semester when they realized the 5 zeros added up to exactly that.
This semester since we were allowed to use Our Own Heads to oversee Our Own Classes I decided that as much as I hated grading these recordings, I still wanted to use the tool and didn’t want to let go of the exercise entirely. So I cut the 5 down to 1, and I made it a poem (instead of a random passage as we used to do). This way I could really stress how I wanted them to perfect the pronunciation but also to work on expression and intonation just as much. My theory was that with one single exercise being worth 5% of the grade, students would take it more seriously plus as the instructor I was all the more justified in treating it as a special presentation instead of just a pronunciation test.
We practiced the poem in class 2 or 3 times, I had two different models posted online, one for pronunciation and one for expression, I reminded them sans cesse to come practice with me, yadda yadda yadda. Almost no one took me up on the practice, just like in the past. Slightly more recordings were turned in on time than in the past but not enough to make me really have a Eureka moment about the whole idea. So when I dug into grading them I admit I wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic and was dreading it just as much as ever…
The first two or three recordings did nothing to change my mind and I thought I finally had proof that these students are no longer capable of rising to any challenge whatsoever. I was already thinking that I might as well remove the recording entirely from my fall syllabus… Getting further into the recordings, however, more and more people showed that they had really worked quite hard on the assignment. I graded half on pronunciation and half on expression and delivery, and I was pleased to note that lots of people who have iffy pronunciation worked on the presentation and intonation extensively and it helped compensate for their pronunciation. (Certain others of course who have great pronunciation because of multiple years of déjà French study tried to rest on those laurels instead of working on the expression and ended up somewhat lower than the top grades they could well have achieved with very little effort but… you guessed it, not exactly crying over them.)
Three different recordings actually gave me chills at the end (a particularly sad part); they did an impeccable job with the phrasing and expression. For the first time in years (since teaching Le petit prince in 2nd year French out west in 1992 in fact where one class decided it would be fun to treat Ch. 21 [the fox chapter] as a play) I had one of those can’t-stop-smiling-crazy-proud-of-my-students moments. These are pretty few and far between at the college level in core teaching, at least for me. It’s nice to see that (some) students still really can exert a fair amount of effort and take pride in something. It’s cool, too, to know that I can still come up with something from time to time that - for whatever reason, points, interest, the stars aligning a certain way, I don’t care - inspires them to break out of the standard Do What’s Necessary (or sometimes not even) mold.
So anyway… all of you out in the teaching void… we must not lose all hope yet, not even in core classes in Footballville.
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