Not surprising. The same reason why a lot of people want to WFH. At the office, they at least have to pretend they’re doing something.
Yes it is. Another poster (not you) stated that “The vaccines don[']t stop you from catching nor s[p]reading the virus.” And my response is that percentage wise the booster does help in a way that an all-or-nothing framing does not.
Guy
Instead of catching it on Monday, you catch it on Tuesday.
I’m just panicking about them wanting me to get number four in the future.
Number three is my line in the sand.
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Or depending on the way the class is run, they can log in and go back to sleep!
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Sadly not that different from a fair number of their on-campus classes, judging from what I see walking the hallways.
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My uni is 國立，but that doesn’t always make such a difference.
Honestly, I started out with higher expectations that I should have for my first year of teaching. I was teaching things like social-cultural theory/social constructivism in the course which was meant to be focused on the design of language learning activities. From student feedback, which was fair and frank, I realized that this depth of theory was not something they could handle in their junior year. I’ve gradually kept on scaffolding students to the point where I am integrating more elements from the K12 Curriculum (核心素養) earlier and earlier. Now starting in the second year.
I do believe it is a fine balance between setting high expectations and attempting to guarantee opportunities for each student to attain a degree of success and fulfillment. I found that the higher I set my expectations, the better students perform. However, these expectations need to be tempered with the reality of teaching, in my case, in a foreign language (90%) and the students who, to be very frank, do not always “choose” their major.
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Precisely! When asked directly, students will often say that they need concrete examples of what they’re expected to perform/produce. In the beginning I didn’t have such examples. As such, it took a couple of years to gather exemplars of high quality student performance to give Taiwanese students what they (based on the way they have been taught up to this point) require for confidently completing tasks.
I used to answer students questions regarding how many words are required with a response like “as many as required: no fewer, no more.” That just didn’t fly. Now when asked I will just give them a number off the top of my head. Based on their many years of formal education, particularly in high school, they simply need this kind of template/standard in order to able to make any progress towards meeting their goals.
In a class last semester, which I taught for the first time, I just simply had to produce content to show them what was expected. In this case it was in terms of language assessment, so I provided examples of test items which met certain criteria (validity, reliability, practicality, authenticity, wash back, etc.).
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Could you PM me? I wanted to ask you about something related to this, but you have messages off, but then you brought it up!
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No problem. PM sent.
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If employers can’t trust their employees and think there would be problems shouldn’t hire them in the first place. Just saying. Some people are old-fashioned coming to work in person is what they think is productive and efficient. The way I see it employers think people are only “working” if you can control and observe how they work. Of course, some employers are more anal about this than others. There are pros and cons with both online and in-person classes but having some flexibility won’t hurt.
As for students being unmotivated can’t expect every student to like or care about the subject you’re teaching. Teaching is my responsibility but learning is their responsibility. Whether they want to learn anything or not is up to them. My two cents no one needs to agree.
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Don’t know why some people get so angry never said vaccines would save everybody. It’s not a miracle cure you can still get infected but it wouldn’t take a deadly toll on your health compared to not being vaxxed. If the kids are vaxxed at least they won’t be sent to the hospital like now–talking about the infected students at the school I work at.
My school has moved to online teaching but all teachers STILL have to physically come to work “so we can assist if there are any issues.”
BS, it’s because you’ve spent a fortune on renting an office space and don’t want to ‘waste’ it by having work from home.
Such rubbish having to commute and then do a remote class. Wtaf.
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Someone should do them a favour and introduce the concept of “sunk cost” to them.
Guy
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I guarantee you had students memorize exactly what you gave them as examples with no consideration of the meaning. I had a few Taiwanese people ask me to tutor them so they could pass IELTS like that. They just sat down and copied the sample essays until they could actually write the whole thing without looking. They didn’t want me to tutor them after I suggested we might need to practice producing one’s own work. God I hate the test culture here. It absolutely contributes to the lack of trust for employees who wfh too…
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Question based on this, do you not have difficulty with student engagement online? I find myself saying names and questions over and over again with no response for long periods of time.
Cooperative assignments for material remain stagnant with students collectively boycotting work. It’s like pulling teeth to get any kind of participation online. I’m sure the students are mostly just logging on,outing the lesson and doing something else. I get some to respond/listen/participate but it’s less than a third of the class at best.
I’m teaching high school though. Any suggestions?
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This is common but I won’t tutor that way it’s just plagiarism. I refuse to contribute I don’t care if lose business (in the past when I informally did it not for pay even, just as a favor, plus one buxiban class on actual essay writing where students hated me because I forced them to erase entire essays of copy and paste and rewrite from scratch)
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Damn you are actually committed to teaching them how to, you know, write and not just mimic or parrot existing model essays.
Kudos to you sir. 
Guy
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Exam week (university) coming up, and today I’m getting emails about how two department students (neither of whom I teach, I think?) are positive cases, so a whole bunch of students for my Tuesday exam are supposed to isolate, and they’re asking what’s going to happen for the test.
This is going to be interesting.
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Well it’s interesting to know, at least, how they’ll handle the situation. If only close contacts, then it seems the approach will be piecemeal. The previous “2 cases and the whole school goes onIine” rules no longer apply. Having portions of classes isolated (unpredictably) will certainly make fair assessment nearly impossible.
Everyone might already know, but it’s the MOE (for political purposes I can’t quite figure out) that are denying universities the choice of autonomously going online. Many parents, students, and teachers are complaining about face-to-face teaching, but the MOE won’t budge. Not sure how hard my university tried, but I know of one that had hours of back and forth on the matter. It’s a three strikes policy, if schools choose online or hybrid instruction. After that, punishment.
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That’s my biggest concern for this week. I’m fine with emailing out the test to everyone, and them all emailing it back to me within two hours. But half the students proctored in the classroom, writing on pen and paper, and the other half doing what they please at home - I’m not happy with that, even I do allow the half in the classroom to do the test open-book. Given how recently they were in high school, writing on pen and paper versus typing may not make a big difference for them, but I know it’d make a huge difference for me.
Actually, I didn’t know this, so thanks for pointing it out. Personally I’m mostly in favor of face-to-face teaching when it’s, I dunno, 10%-15% or fewer of the students who are online via Teams. But when it gets above that, class management becomes more difficult - especially for my speaking classes! - and I’d prefer to just be entirely online. And I want to use my good home computer, with webcam and headset, rather than the low-quality classroom computers with awful microphones.
I also don’t yet know what happens if (when!) I’m a contact and need to isolate, and I could run the class from home no problem. Oh well - it wouldn’t be the first time I have to run a make-up for a class I already had, but I didn’t do adequate paperwork, so I tell the students they don’t need to show up, and I sit in the classroom and get some marking done.
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