Adopting Trees and Other Calendar Items

At Spartanburg Methodist College, first year students take a required, one credit class that trains/reminds them of the techniques that can make them successful:  academic techniques, meet and greet techniques, involvement techniques.  There are many reasons why I love being at a liberal arts college, and this commitment to student success at every stage, and with a wide definition of success, is one of them. 

One of my colleagues teaches one section, and on Tuesday, she asked me, "Do you have your students adopt a tree?"  I smiled and said yes.  She said, "I saw that written in the calendars of a few of my students, and I knew they must be in your class."

I felt like I had been paid a great compliment.  Even better, I knew that my colleague meant it as a compliment.  I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it--it's WONDERFUL to be at a place where my creative approaches are seen as normal--admirable, too, but normal.  It's WONDERFUL to be at a place where I'm not the only one doing creative approaches.

These days, even people who aren't inclined to take creative approaches are experimenting, often in an attempt to come up with assignments that can't be fed into generative AI.

Today I will begin using the green, brown, and gray paint swatches that I got on Tuesday:

My English 100 students will take the swatches outside with them, to help them learn to describe the colors of their tree more precisely.  My English 101 students will do that, and we will also talk about the names of the colors on the paint swatches, in a way to think more poetically/with more imagination about colors.

Earlier this week, I had my classes try to write instructions:  get us from this classroom to the tree.  Don't just say, "Go outside."  What if we go to the door on the other side of the building.  They wrote directions and then tested them and then wrote about what they learned.

Granted, they weren't as tough testing each other's directions as I would have been.  But they seemed to be learning what I wanted them to learn, and they worked in different small groups than the peer editing groups.  This year, I am looking for ways to have them be in small groups occasionally, since I do think it has benefits, even if I'm not as big a believer in some of the practices, like peer editing, as I once was.

It's good for all of us to move away from the traditional model:  students in desk, teacher at the front, no one moving, not much student talking, too much teacher talking.  As the fourth week of classes comes to an end, I think I'm doing a good job of mixing up activities:  some individual writing, some instruction, some group work, some inside work, some outside work.