Student Anxiety

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It seems to be running high in my lower division classes.  Holy cow.

I must have answered six times today that yes, if something is on the syllabus for Wednesday, that means it should be ready to go by the time you walk into class on Wednesday.  If it's a written assignment, it should be ready to turn in.  If it's a play, it should be read.  And so on.

And yes, that means the whole play.

If you're a lit faculty type, you're thinking, wait, they won't have read a play until Wednesday, and they've already had a week of classes?  I know!  And still, somehow, it's shocking that they need to read a whole play!

(We've been doing a performance project and also read a chapter of Russ McDonald's beyond wonderful companion to Shakespeare.  He really met a need with that text.  Do other people love it as much as I do?)


When I look at my colleague's class outlines, timelines, calendars, whatever, they all seem to show something on a given date, and we all seem to think that means that students should have that done for class on the given date.  But students must be learning something else somewhere else?

The only place I've seen it done differently is when I go to the Gathering for Incompetent Teaching place on campus, and the people who've never actually taught pass out "sample" calendars that have days for when students "should" do the work.  [Seriously, if you have a Tuesday Thursday class, do you REALLY think you get to mandate that the work gets done on Friday and not on Tuesday morning at 2am?]

But maybe high school teachers organize their calendars that way to help students manage time?


It wouldn't be so noticable if I didn't basically get the same question repeated several times about the calendar.  I try not to be snotty (really, I know it's hard to believe, but I do), but there's a point where I want to ask if they realize they're asking the same question that the person in the room with them asked within their hearing barely a minute ago.


All of my classes have now had an opportunity to turn in a small assignment (it's one of a group, so they can choose to turn in which ones they want, so no single one must be done so long as they do a certain number in total).