it's amazing how quickly I've been able to figure out my students, at least some of them. For example, today for class I came up with an idea that I thought was pretty good. We're doing song lyric analysis, so I picked four songs and put them into four groups. I gave them the lyrics to the songs (one each group) as well as a badly written, too obvious thesis statement about the song. Their goal was to analyze the song (like we've been doing in class for the past several days) and come up with a better, more analytical thesis statement.
Before class I told my fellow TA "I hope that they like this exercise. I can imagine some of them really liking it, and some of them thinking that it's just stupid." As I said these words I had a few students in mind for both sides.
LOW AND BEHOLD... I was right. One group (because they formed their own groups) looked at the thesis statement and glanced through the song lyrics and then wrote a new thesis statement and then thought that they were done. When I told them that they should keep going they were like "with what?" I went back over the reading that they were supposed to have done for class today and that they should try to... oh... I dunno... ANALYZE the lyrics rather than just glance at them and make a decision.
And the other group I kept hearing things like "That's really deep" and "Wow" and other great things like that. They really got into what they were doing and I think that they really enjoyed it. And sure enough, some of the people I was thinking of as liking the assignment were in that group.
I think it just goes to show that you get out of something what you put into it. Also, that people know when you're not going to be into it.
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