Thread by @AmericanStudier

I'm finishing my 16th year at FSU & 21st of teaching overall, so I've had the full spectrum of experiences w/classes, including some where the whole group has for one reason or another (incl my own failures) struggled. But I've never had anything like my Am Lit II this semester.+

~3-4 of 29 students have done the short (1-2 sentence) reading responses each week. Paper 1 was due 2 weeks ago (& ungraded, so turning it in = full credit), & 11 of 29 have turned it in. This past week we paused all work to allow for catching up, & I got no responses or papers.

Obviously I get it, & I know there's nothing I can do about much of what's happening. ~15-20 of the 29 are generally on the weekly synchronous Google Meet convo, so maybe it has to be enough to think that they're taking something away from our texts & convos. But man.

A student-centered (rather than content-driven) pedagogy means that each student's voices, ideas, work are what matter most to me. & in this class, to this point, for well more than half of them it feels that I'm utterly failing to draw those out, engage them, connect to them.

I don't have a main point here, much less answers. Obviously I'm not done trying (gonna try to emphasize 21C connections more as we move forward, for example). Just sharing in solidarity w/all of us as we try to make it through this toughest of all semesters.