Over the past eight weeks, I’ve been teaching two sections of Basic Writing with about 30 students between the two classes. I’ve thinned out those numbers now. Sure, I forced their hand a bit, but there are things that I feel need to be made crystal clear to students early on in their college career. What I did was completely fair.I failed them in the middle of the semester.

Now, you may be thinking that is extremely tacky and unthoughtful of me, but I was completely within the boundaries of my syllabus and the bounds of what I would do in any other FYC class. I had students who had not turned in assignments that were due in the middle of September and the beginning of October. So, I posted an announcement on the website, made announcements in class and set a deadline of Friday at noon for students missing assignments to get these assignments to me. They needed to have these assignments back since we began the Midterm Portfolio today and they were needing comments from me to begin their revisions. Now, before I go any further, let me set up the numbers for you. I’m combining the two classes so the numbers are overall instead of individual.

30 students enrolled

- 3 students I’ve never even seen (but haven’t dropped the class)

-3 students who have stopped coming to class (but haven’t dropped)

- 4 students who dropped because they felt they were “misplaced”

-3 students I dropped over the weekend

So this puts me down to about 17 students. But, I have another 3 (what is it with threes in this class?) who didn’t show up for the peer reviews for their Midterm Portfolio. So, I may well be down to 14 students.

Whether 17 or 14, I’m going to use the smaller class size to focus more on the needs of the students that I have left. These students, in my opinion, are the ones who are working hardest (with a few exceptions) to actually pass this class and get on with their regular classes. So, I’m making the class even more student-centered. I’m doing this in three ways:

• Discussion Board posts that allow students to express their areas of concern in writing so that I can focus more on the concerns students have, not concerns I expect them to have.
• Roundtables that allow us to talk as a group, not as teacher-student. We’ve done this a time or two in the past and the students loved it. Perhaps more of this structure will allow students to feel better about communicating their concerns and discussing class material
• More in-class writing time to allow for more student-teacher time

I’m hoping that shifting will help me make the students who are still devoted to the class more successful in their final weeks. I’ve seen all of them make significant improvements over the past few weeks, and I’m hoping that having more time to devote to this small group’s needs, I can improve on their previous work and get them prepared for college life. We’ll see!