As I read the final exams and essays in my literature course, I come to realize that there are things I should have said but failed to do so because it simply never occurred to me that this needed to be pointed out explicitly. For instance, I should have stated clearly (and made the students write it down) that if today somebody writes a novel or makes a movie about, say, the Renaissance, that novel and that movie will not be Renaissance works of art.
In class, we discussed at length a literary movement called tremendismo that was popular in the post-Civil War Spain. Now, whenever students see a film or read a work of literature that came out very recently and that have anything to do with the post-war Spain, they immediately classify it as tremendista and engage in very earnest searches for evidence proving that these recent works belong to a movement that has been dead for decades.
I guess it's too late to send out an email to all the students explaining things I somehow didn't manage to bring across in class.
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4 comments:
Maybe you could insist more on these topics the next time but I think students should not make these kind of errors. This seems to be a misunderstanding from their part.
Or you're sarcastic...
No, no sarcasm here. I'm ready to do whatever to make this work at this point.
Okay, that's a classy move from your part. I like it!
Almost every time I teach a course below the senior level, I find out later that some students have left it with misconceptions. I modify my approach sometimes based on this experience, but it seems to be impossible to fix everything, and fixing something the next time I teach a course often either causes another different misconception, or else slows down the course to the point that I don't manage to finish everything I wanted to.
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