Do the Reading

This is what happened in my class today after half of the students failed the reading quiz:

First, I made a little speech: "We need to have a talk. In any class, you have two choices. You can do the reading every day, take notes, try to figure out what's important about it, and come to class--and we can have great discussions that I promise you will be much more interesting. Or you can do what some of you are doing, which is skipping or skimming the reading, coming to class, and saying things that don't make sense, so that the students who have done the reading get confused and wonder, 'oh, wait, was that in there?' Which is detrimental to everyone's learning experience. So, those of you who have failed the quiz, I'm going to dismiss you, and I'd like Students W, X, Y, and Z to stay."

So the rest of them packed up their bags and left, and the five of us had a great class (even if one of the students who had gotten an A did say, "I almost threw up! I'm still shaking!").

If Hollywood produced action movies about teaching, the story would begin with that death-defying moment, and then there would be a flashback to Two Days Earlier. So here's the backstory: their first batch of essays this semester had been almost uniformly miserable, so this time around, for the second essays, we spent two class days going over their drafts and having conferences to help them write better. Alas, here are actual remarks from the conferences about the final drafts two days ago:

"I'm not even going to write on this book; I think I'm just going to start over. Is there a direction you want to point me in?"
"To be honest with you, my paper is really terrible. I didn't spend much time on this at all."

On top of it, in this class of junior and senior English majors, only one student out of 9 has been doing the reading regularly. So on today's announced quiz, when half of them got, oh, two out of ten questions right (what's that about a stopped clock being right twice a day?), instead of banging my head against the wall (again), I decided the best thing for them would be to give them a kick in the pants. I did try to be nice about it--I told them before they left that we would start fresh on Monday. But the book we're reading is a mystery, and I wanted them to puzzle through it together and experience the uncertainty and curiosity, not just get "the answer" from their classmates' comments.

I just can't wait to see my evaluations at the end of this semester!