Edited by Kate Blackham, Wednesday, 6 Nov 2024, 12:26
I'm marking my students' first TMA this week. There's a group project really early on in SM123 and I decided to 'force' them into groups right from the start with the hope of getting them engaged and on-board and (if I'm honest) being a little manipulative and hoping that their sense of responsibility to their team members would give them the oomph to keep going and do the project and not drop out early on. That seems to have worked well, I have lots to mark.
I offered students the option right from week 1 - group or alternative activity (for those whose social anxiety was an impediment). The students were supposed to reply to my personalised email stating which they preferred. Well some of them are not talking to me. So for those I just decided to send them the alternative activity anyway. And you know what, some of them did it.
You see I decided to try it this way, this year, as I'd been thinking about the possible reason for students not interacting with me. I'd assumed that students who were not comfortable working in a group would be comfortable directly contacting me and saying they wanted to do the alternative. I assumed because I don't think of myself as scary that they wouldn't either. But I'm their tutor. I mark their work. I already have the qualification they're working for. Perhaps I am scary after all.
And this idea that maybe I am scary to a proportion of my students has really crystallized for me this week. Especially since I learned of my being blocked. I mean, it doesn't matter what the reason is - it's not the first time I've been unfriended and blocked on social media. I've known people who have lost jobs or whose marriages have broken down who have included me in a mass unfriending. When I announced my autism diagnosis on social media, a woman who had come to my wedding immediately blocked me. Humans rarely make sense, especially to autistics. What matters is our reactions to these events. Autistics feel the sting of social rejection much, much more fiercely and for much, much longer. Somebody else may have been blocked by the same person and just shrugged their shoulders. But I was already relunctant to reach out to people I actually know and hope don't hate me on social media sites before all this happened, so my reaction to that rejection was to just withdraw completely from LinkedIn.
So I've been thinking I did the right thing in not assuming a lack of interaction from my students was due to a lack of interest. And the extra TMAs this time speak for themselves.
Proactively interacting with students
I'm marking my students' first TMA this week. There's a group project really early on in SM123 and I decided to 'force' them into groups right from the start with the hope of getting them engaged and on-board and (if I'm honest) being a little manipulative and hoping that their sense of responsibility to their team members would give them the oomph to keep going and do the project and not drop out early on. That seems to have worked well, I have lots to mark.
I offered students the option right from week 1 - group or alternative activity (for those whose social anxiety was an impediment). The students were supposed to reply to my personalised email stating which they preferred. Well some of them are not talking to me. So for those I just decided to send them the alternative activity anyway. And you know what, some of them did it.
You see I decided to try it this way, this year, as I'd been thinking about the possible reason for students not interacting with me. I'd assumed that students who were not comfortable working in a group would be comfortable directly contacting me and saying they wanted to do the alternative. I assumed because I don't think of myself as scary that they wouldn't either. But I'm their tutor. I mark their work. I already have the qualification they're working for. Perhaps I am scary after all.
And this idea that maybe I am scary to a proportion of my students has really crystallized for me this week. Especially since I learned of my being blocked. I mean, it doesn't matter what the reason is - it's not the first time I've been unfriended and blocked on social media. I've known people who have lost jobs or whose marriages have broken down who have included me in a mass unfriending. When I announced my autism diagnosis on social media, a woman who had come to my wedding immediately blocked me. Humans rarely make sense, especially to autistics. What matters is our reactions to these events. Autistics feel the sting of social rejection much, much more fiercely and for much, much longer. Somebody else may have been blocked by the same person and just shrugged their shoulders. But I was already relunctant to reach out to people I actually know and hope don't hate me on social media sites before all this happened, so my reaction to that rejection was to just withdraw completely from LinkedIn.
So I've been thinking I did the right thing in not assuming a lack of interaction from my students was due to a lack of interest. And the extra TMAs this time speak for themselves.