Week 6 – Hope and disappointment

Here we are carrying out our final Project or trying to at least…

It seems so early and so little time for doing so. In fact, I cannot imagine a two or three-week project. It’s unreal to think that I can change much in such a short period of time. If I want my students’ writing to improve, I need a lot more time… and I will give it to them. This is a project to continue. I just feel sad I won’t be able to present real results in my final report.

Before the week even started there was a lot of hard work trying to narrow a bit more my options and settle on the tools to be used. Then some red tape: informing parents and the school board, emailing students the first instructions, setting up an extra class to make them a bit more familiar with the tools and to explain the tasks.

The expectations are high, but the first day I suffered the first disappointment with two students complaining heavily about the extra work, almost as if they were sorry to be in the project. They are really good students and I understand they have now lots of tests and need to study, but still, it made me sad. I just hope they will see the fun and point of it all once they start.

But yesterday evening I felt better when two students joined me in the chat. One of them is rather weak at English, but he made an effort and that was good. It brightened things a bit. They are also starting to participate in wallwisher, so maybe there's hope.

I decided to do the same as my students: I’m using penzu as my log book. I started yesterday and this is what I wrote https://penzu.com/p/3c26684f.

I feel I need some motivation. Things never seem to be good enough for me. I always wish I could do some state-of-the-art project, but I don’t have what I need to accomplish it. I have to be realistic. Let’s hope it will be elegant and simple!