Interesting times

Yes, I finally met my students and saw that most are in my class not because they were interested in the topic (though some may thought the topic sounded cool) but they had to find a class because they had to drop out of their first classes. As I suspected, the advisors did not enforce the GPA requirement that we asked them to do. But that's beside the point. The most interesting thing for me was to see that most of my students never experienced a teaching envirionment quite like this. Most did not go beyond browsing the internet, most never blogged, most never attended forums, most never read any fiction online. I get the opportunity to teach them, for the first time, these topics. I will have to rewire their brains to be more compatible with today's world. Force them to think in a totally different way, which I never thought I'd get a chace to do. Everyone seems so tech-savvy these days, so familiar with the ways of the digital world. Of course by the time they graduate, they will have already experienced these things and the initial innocence would be gone.

When I explained to them the syllabus and what was required of them, all I saw was bewildered faces, looking at me as if I were insane, that this could not be happening in a real classroom envirionment. They were literally unsettled. No one asked questions. Finally, after the break, one bold gentleman dared to ask, "So what is the difference between forums and blogs?" I knew everyone had the same question in mind. I told him that it was a great question and asked him why he hadn't asked this question before. And he said "Well you looked so serious..." I about died of laughing. I think the main reason was it took him some time to fully comprehend the content that I was throwing at them. Once that was registered, he was ready to ask the question.

I went home, thinking this was going to be long semester. By the time I was in front of my computer, the forums were already in use, the blog URLs and usernames were already entered into the class wiki. I did get some frustrated e-mails asking me how to do things, and I replied back. Then i received e-mails saying "Hey this wasn't that hard!" I read the blogs, left some comments on some.

Now students are concerned about the difficulty of the readings. Well it is college, not highschool, so it has to be hard somewhere so you learn new things, otherwise it wouldn't be called education. These are the most interesting times indeed.