midterm bombed by all

Well, nearly every student in both classes bombed the midterm, which I find disconcerting, but have attempted to view as a teaching oppportunity. I handed back the corrected exams today and we reviewed them. Hopefully this will enable everyone to take a new exam which I will administer the week after next. Since there were only two marks in the 80's and 3 in the 70's, I view it as a failing on my part to successfully teach the students how to identify and correct illogical shifts, faulty parallelism, misplaced and dangling modifiers, and run-ons and comma splices. I used as the test a combination of materials provided by the writers of the text book we are using. I think I will create my own questions for the next version of the test on those issues.

In a related issue, I've decided to utilize new teaching materials next semester. I am going to go with a program from Newsweek, hoping that the students will actually want to read the articles, many of which are written in formats I teach. Newsweek provides each issue at .59 per week, accompanied by a number of teaching resources, including hard copy guides and online materials. To teach grammar, I found a book at Borders that costs 12 dollars instead of the 40 or so for a used paperback textbook. This particular book, whose name escapes me at the moment, provides online tests and essay correction for people buy it and get a code to use for log-in. The book is very concise and written for regular adults, not students and is billed as learning grammar in 20 minutes a day. A departure for me. We will see what comes of teaching with these materials next semester.