Survey Results (10-15 min)
I try to always do a survey between the fourth week and mid-term in all classes I teach (or, if I forget, I at least do a “check-in” discussion with my classes about adjustments we might need to make).
Some great stuff in these surveys! Let me show you what was there and then let’s discuss if we want to make adjustments to our class.
Here are the two things that came up the most (by a lot):
- HVAC system in room is loud, hard to hear. Potential solutions: speaking louder (duh), keep going with lesson plans (you should follow along yourself if you don’t), repeating student comments from front of room to back of room, having activity directions be more clear on website, and you all letting me know if you need something repeated. What else? Any thoughts?
- More in-class time for writing/revision. Agree, we keep having that time cut short. Part of the reason why I rearranged the schedule is so we could work more in class on your projects today. Will do a better job making sure you have, say, 20-30 minutes in class on a given day rather than just 10ish.
There were other things that came up a couple times. Here they are below (along with some that only came up once but I felt were worth addressing):
- Technical issues. I am grouping these issues as: working with data at the level of spreadsheet and at the level of analysis in Jupyter Notebook here. For spreadsheet stuff, the August 29th lesson plan has a lot of helpful information on there (to include links to different resources). If those are not helpful, please let me know and we can meet to see where you are having issues. For Jupyter Notebook, computers aren’t smart. They do exactly what you say. So, even the slightest error in how you input something might cause you to get an error message. The biggest culprit will be adding the wrong file title or column title. Secondly, the another issue could be not following the instructions. Try to follow instructions after the # symbol at the top of each cell, don’t forget to run the first cell or two in the notebook where the important libraries are imported, and please let me know if you are struggling and I can come help. Also, the 8/29 lesson plan and other lesson plans on JN should also be helpful to review. In conclusion, a lot of this stuff (to include the data science principles and statistical concepts we talk about) takes Googling and bashing your head against the computer until you get it. If you feel “stupid,” you should know that everyone feels that way when working with technical knowledge…like, very much so. It is hard until it isn’t. I was AWFUL at this stuff for a long time (not to claim I’m awesome at it now).
- Statistics. We will talk more about this later in class, but the stuff we did with standard error, the sampling distribution, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing was to think about: 1. common statistical expressions we see prevalent in data-driven public and professional writing and 2. getting used to thinking about how we write about non-intuitive calculations. My point was not that you should feel like you HAVE to know these like you’d take a test on them nor that you HAVE to use them in your writing for this class. Just wanted to give you some practice thinking about this stuff in terms of analysis in general and writing that you might do or encounter. Now, I got one comment that made me think I might have left the wrong impression: me saying “don’t worry about getting this stuff absolutely correct” while we are learning concepts and testing them out is not the same thing as using things incorrectly if you decide to use something in your analysis for a draft (especially for final). That matters! I expect you to get things right (in terms of appropriateness of tool) and in any explanations of your analysis by the stage of a final draft. But, before that, when we are first learning things, it’s cool to not get it right.
- Discussion rut. Someone mentioned that we have been in a little bit of a rut the last few classes in terms of discussion and activities. I agree! What should we do about this? I think since (after 10/17) we will be getting away from the heavier technical knowledge that we’ve been doing the last couple classes, this should help organically. But, I think we need to make more of an effort to participate overall and one thing I can do as a teacher is some things I usually go to when this comes up: giving you all about a minute to silently collect thoughts before opening up discussion, doing a little bit of freewriting before discussion, more think-pair-shares tasked with having a response ready, etc. What else might we do?
I think the only other thing worth addressing was one question about grades. You have your tentative grade for your first draft of the PW assignment, which gets replaced by the final grade on the second draft. You also have your LN1 grade. And, for journals, I treat these mostly as pass/fail. If you had a “fail” or some other issue with the quality of your journals, you would have heard from me.
Anything else need addressing? Happy to talk during office hours, as well.
In-class time on PW and LN2 (30 min)
Let’s work on your projects due on 10/17. I would strongly encourage you to work with a partner to get their feedback on your draft. Remember the work on revision plans that we did the past few classes, keep the prompt/rubric for the assignment nearby, and also the comments you’ve gotten from peers and from me.
See prompt, but here is gist:
- aligning your piece for a specific publication or organization you are representing
- attention to elements of design and accessibility
- style elements for emphasis and readability
- how do you use language and visuals to help signal interpretations of your data? REMEMBER: data by its nature of being drawn together invites a story or interpretation to be made–what is the interpretation you are pointing to? How do you use rhetoric to help you here?
- “big picture” elements drawn from comments from me and your peers (e.g., contexutalizing your data, what you can actually say about the data you have, how the piece is organized in terms of argument or narrative, the quality of the argument or narrative you are constructing)
- new possible directions to go in (more granular analysis? more secondary sources? a different direction for the argument or narrative?)
For LN2, you are keeping track of what you are learning (and will use this for one of the final projects to reflect on what you learned). But, most important, you are looking at your own writing as evidence for the claims you are making. How do you join your claims of what you are learning to the evidence gathered from your writing? Paying attention to what you revised, how you revised it, and why you revised it can be very helpful here. Having a solid revision plan, too, would make this work easier. And, of course, keep in mind the prompt/rubric.
PROCESS:
- First person reads there paper aloud.
- While reading aloud, listener silently takes notes on elements that are really effective and elements they think could use more work. The listener also has specific reasons why they feel that way.
- Also, while reading aloud, the author is encouraged to pause to take notes about things they noticed.
- After author is done reading aloud, the listener repeats back to the author what they think the general story or argument of the piece is (i.e., the “big picture”).
- The author and listener discuss how much or little this impression aligns with the author’s view of the “big picture” of the piece.
- Then, the listener discusses the “effective” things and the “work on in revision things” they noticed. The author responds and takes notes.
- They check in for next steps the author will take based on discussion.
- Switch roles and repeat #1-7.
NOTE: Don’t be a jerk! Consider how you would like to hear feedback. That being said, don’t be too general and non-confrontational either…constructive criticism!
Next Project (20 min)
Let’s go over the prompt for the Scientific/Technical Writing project (first draft due 11/7 and final draft due 11/24) and the prompt for the proposal (due 10/22).
If time, let’s use class time to figure out what you might do with your data in terms of advanced calculations.
Questions to consider:
- What do you still want to know about your data that you don’t quite have figured out from the first project? What sort of analysis can help?
- How can you strengthen your analysis? Do you have a sample of data? Can you use inferential statistics (e.g., random sample)?
- What other research could you do to support your analysis of your data?
- Do you want to work with a new dataset? Are you interested in something else? Or, are you having trouble imagining a rhetorical situation for this assignment with your current dataset?
Thursday we will go over correlation statistics, which some of you might be able to utilize. We will also start talking about genres you might write in.
Next time (5 min)
-I took the chapter 9 reading off the schedule. Instead, review chapter 3, especially the parts on causality in the beginning.
-Get your final draft of the public writing assignment submitted as well as your LN2 by 11am on 10/17.
-Start thinking about what you might do for the next major project: work with same dataset? what genre? what calculations? secondary research to consider? who is your audience? why?