Engagement

Being engaged in a class throughout the entire semester is something that does not happen very often, but when it does the results can be sensational. However, after reading the blog post about Engagement vs. Grades I'm surprised to hear that engagement doesn't always lead to good grades. The more I think about it the more it makes sense. Just because you enjoy learning about something does not necessarily mean that you will get the perfect grade. I learned this last semester in my CORE class. I hadn't been extremely interested in most of the book and my engagement level was relatively low. When we finally got to a book that I was excited about and enjoyed discussing during class it was such a relief. I no longer had to be bored in class. When it came time to write the paper on this book I was excited to finally be writing about something that interested me. When I got my paper back though, that ended up being my worst grade for the semester. How could this be? I was involved in the class discussion, understood what was going on, but it just didn't end up being my best work. If someone just looked at my grades they would have thought that was the time that I was least engaged when thats was not reality. I'm still glad I got involved in class though and realize that grades really aren't everything.

How May I Help You?

After reading Yother's article about helping students write literary analyses it became clear to me what my biggest fear involved with being a peer tutor. Yother discussed how graduate students were having problems deciding how much was "too much" help in their consultation sessions with younger students. Those graduate students knew far more about the literary works being used than the students did and needed to decide how to help the students fix their incorrect work without giving to student too much help. This was a serious dilemma for those graduate students, however, I am far more nervous for the exact opposite situation.

What do you do when you have no idea what the literary work is even about? Sure you can look at the organization of the paper and other grammatical errors, but I'd imagine it would be hard to tell if a paper was well focussed if you had no idea what the paper was even talking about. I get reminded of this fear some days when my roommate reads me the prompts she gets from her CORE class. We both are reading the same books so I would think that I would at least be able to understand the prompt given to her. However, some of those prompts are extremely difficult to even understand, let alone write about. I'm hoping there are some "tricks-of the trade" out there that I will learn in this class that will help to deal with this particular situation.

Do grades really matter?

When considering the question of whether or not grades truly matter in the grand scheme of things I initially found myself torn. I would like to think that grades do not have as much of an effect on me as actually learning the material the course covers. I would like to think that no matter how poorly I did, I would still enjoy the experience of being challenged. However, when I think about this in a real life situation I find that this is not necessarily the case. Last semester I took an Intro to Psychology class to find out if I liked the subject because I had never taken it in High School. I ended up learning a lot in the class and got an "A". I am now considering Psychology as a possible major and feel excited to explore different career paths in Psychology. Looking back on the past semester though, I have to ask myself, if I had not done well in the class would I be as excited about pursuing a future in the subject? Would the pure satisfaction of learning lots of new information make me as excited? This ideal that learning is all that matters would mean that getting a "B" or a "C" in a class would have no effect on me as long as I felt I had learned and retained useful information. As much as I wish this were true, it absolutely is not. If simply gaining knowledge would be enough to satisfy me, my academic life would be far different from what it is now.