Those of you who know how much cats generally love vacuum cleaners can guess the rest. Anyway, the deep scratches on my arms healed after a month or so, but I was never quite so trusting about some kinds of advice again.
Dean Dad has a post up about a similar "it looked good on paper" moment: treating first-year students as an incoming cohort, putting them all in the same classes, and so on. What happened?
It was one of those (retrospectively) glorious exercises in perspective. From the college’s perspective, the idea of group bonding, integrated instruction, and deliberate exposure to extracurriculars should have added ‘good’ to ‘good’ to ‘good.’ To the students, though, it felt like High School II. In high school, they saw the same people over and over again from class to class; they were actually eager to break away from that at college.The commenters at Dean Dad's say the same thing happened at their schools.
My "it looked good on paper" moment (apart from the cat experience) has been with rubrics. I believe in them, and I've developed what I think are some good ones. But when I've asked for feedback on courses where I've used them for some assignments, the students say things like "I like the comments you give us better than the rubric" or "I like it when you write a long comment." Part of this is doubtless my fault for not using rubrics all the time; maybe if they didn't know they could get long comments, they'd be happy with the rubric.
Have you ever had an experience like this, where something ought to work well based on all the theories, but it just didn't work in the classroom?
