The Only Way to Teach

My, oh my! The days in this service learning course just keep getting better. I find I am teaching less and less and the students are learning more and more. This course is covering everything from academic writing to professional behavior.

Students are finishing up their narrative essays, and our peer reviews were great! I overheard numerous groups problem-solving how to use personal experience to prove their assertions (analysis and synthesis). They are also starting their major research projects and have been gathering research before I ever discussed it in class. The level of self-motivation in this course is amazing. One of my community partners, who met with his student group, said that students attributed their desire to work so hard to their commiment to the course topic: Hunger in America and Abroad. Finally, on the academic front, students are writing newsletter stories for Conscious Alliance. They have begun to see how hard it can be to write 75-150 words instead of 20 pages.

Onto professional writing, Students, as mentioned in my previous post, are writing grants, donor letters, and SOP manuals. In addtion to this, they are learning how to effectively email different types of coworkers, from superiors to peers. These are skills that I find most of my students lack, and these students weren't much better to start (forgetting to use subject lines; writing long, rambling messages, etc.) However, with a small amount of feedback, each email is better than the last.

Finally, professional behavior is a huge part of this course. Students must schedule meetings, arrive prepared, preface the goals of the meeting for those who will attend, write minutes of the meeting and the progress made. All things I had to learn on the fly when I started working.

Alright, I gotta get back to reading, writing assignment sheets, and (of course) grading. But really, I needed to put down all of the great aspects this course incorporates. I really feel most of this is either absent from my other courses or not as well addressed without the service aspects.

One final note, everyday I am in this course, we are never short on things to do, we almost always have to cut discussions short due to time, the students always arrived prepared, and I leave exhausted but feeling like I really am apart of something great!

All for now,
Neal