Monday, November 14, 2005

Ventilation

I am in the middle of teaching a GMAT class (that's the admission test for business school). This is an intense class - 3 hours long once a week for 7 weeks (8 weeks this time because we don't have class Thanksgiving weekend). I cover a lot of information each class, and there is a lot of homework for the students to do between classes. The good news for the students is that there are only 3 of them in this class, so the student:teacher ratio is good.

I gave them a midterm evaluation to fill out last night, and I guess that got them thinking about what could make the class better. That's good. I welcome constructive criticism (actually, I don't welcome it, but I do tolerate it).

So after they filled out the evaluation forms and put them in an envelope so I wouldn't look at them (I'm totally going to read them before I send them to the office, but that's okay because I did warn the students I would be reading them), one of my students told me what would be beneficial for him. He says it's hard for him to focus on the homework in the week between classes, and he tends to procrastinate. So he thinks it would be helpful if I could get together with him on Wednesdays to make sure he's keeping up with everything.

This sounded unnecessary to me, so I clarified his plan. He doesn't want me to break the class material up into two classes, he just wants me to meet with him in the middle of the week so that he will have incentive to get his homework done.

Now it sounded really unnecessary. Keep in mind that these are college graduates who have been out in the real world working for several years (this particular student manages a title company), and they are applying to graduate business school. I shouldn't need to check up on them mid-week to make sure they're doing their homework.

It seems like there's one difficult student in every class. And this guy is the one.

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