I’ve entered my last week of two classes a day, and from next week I’ll have more time in the mornings. I’ll be able to get to the gym and do all my grading day to day. I’m looking forward to it.

I was disappointed to find out today that one of my students has left the university—my small class is even smaller. Another student has been having some health problems, and so I’ve had a couple of classes with only three students. When it gets down to that number it can be hard to keep the conversation going—hard to keep the interest moving along.

I came in today with my movie trailer exercise for the expository writing class. I was interested that the students picked up on exactly how much was being replayed in the trailers very quickly. I had a long list of trailers—and I’d emailed the list to students before class so they would have them to refer back to—and we didn’t get through them all. I feel like the exercise fell a little flat this time around—I’m wondering if it’s that they felt the repetitions were so overt? It strange—watching them not as texts, as a form on their own, has been really interesting for me. Perhaps the students have already got the point about representation and types. Are they one step ahead of me? It’s possible.

I think it’s the smaller classroom. In the discovery class, students who hadn’t previously spoken in class made links between different films. None really started to get into the more mechanical side—the fact that the introduction of the music that sees out the trailer (and makes the viewer excited, supposedly, that it’s “coming soon”) basically adheres to the golden section. I tried to point out the post-MTV changes to the trailers—each seems more like a video clip than they did before MTV. We talked about some of the basic stories. How certain things “signify.” Maybe I’ll bring in a piece from Barthes’s Mythologies to see how his writing helps us think through the trailer. Teaching trailers I certainly find that I’m more interested in them as a form. I don’t know if this translates to my students suddenly being more interested. I do wonder if I’ve chosen too much that might be considered minutiae? I’m interested in everything—but I know that doesn’t necessarily translate. Hmm.

This morning class was watching Dead Poets Society. At the 85 minute mark the real drama is yet to come. I asked students who hadn’t seen the film before to think about the films they’ve seen before, the stories they’ve read before, and what they expect to happen next. To experience the narrative in an accumulative fashion, and think through the conventions. What I think of, after last semester, as a “Ragussian” method.

Grading. Let’s talk about grading for a second.

How do I grade a class where I can’t give the students homework? I’ve been grading on the high side for the discovery class, because in a classroom setting you can’t assume everyone (anyone?) is going to be able to write a high quality essay. I mean, the environment doesn’t work for some people. No-one has access to a computer, and some people do work that way. People work at very difference paces, and don’t have access to all the resources (I’m think of EFL students) they might need to do their best work. I try to make the OED online available, but students rarely want to come to the front of the class to check things. I ask them to peer review, but not all students are able to give the kind of feedback that helps. I put a list of questions on the board for last week’s peer reviewing, and when students wrote reflections about how they might rewrite their paper, they would comment that their peer thought they’d done really well, and they just had to fix some grammar mistakes. It’s difficult to gauge how to approach it.

Mostly I have been emphasising participation, responding the peer reviews in the format required, and making sure students quote and analyse sources in their papers. And I’m really pleased that somehow all the assignments are working on an analytical level.