The Last Leg of Spring

In Japan in July, the weather is extremely hot and humid. This also has an impact on one’s

motivation and the type of activities a person might want to do. People try to avoid venturing out into the heat during the middle of the day, people sweat and feel easily tired. The Japanese word natsubate describes the type of lethargy that overtakes people around this season. In lesson 112A on Friday 04/07/2014 we worked on our essay introductions. The class was supposed to be a peer-review workshop using the Moodle workshop module, but only 15 out of 25 students managed to upload their introductions for peer-review. This hints

at the possibility that high motivation was actually a strange attractor for the CLERAC class, as I will discuss in section 6.3.4.1.

I had somehow managed to create all the marking criteria for the assignments, and I was

much better prepared for the class, having also made a very strict plan to ‘get me through to the end of semester’. It was a survival plan. During the lesson, because very few students

had their essays ready, we worked on the video projects. I had a moment of inspiration and told the students that they needed to create a project trailer of 10 or 20 seconds in length,

but it should quickly show the rest of the class what each group’s project is all about. I did a

demonstration on the screen and made a handout as I went with instructions. I felt this task timely and appropriate because it made the video suddenly very tangible. I was beginning to worry that the students had done very little on their projects, and I was also concerned about their digital literacy, as many things can go wrong when making a video project. The trailer was a chance to iron out any such issues before the actual assessments were due. Like with the introductions, very few members of the class were able to complete the task on-time, so these two things became homework. By lesson 112B on Wednesday 09/07/2014 I was very disappointed to note that Mr Nintendo, Mr Dawn and Mr Cleyera had still not finished their introductions, and that only 4 out of 10 groups had managed to create a project trailer.

I began to feel like we were ‘drowning’ in assessments, and the CLERAC course had become

a very different animal to the one it started out as. This is actually very common with university courses, certainly my colleagues also have very similar complaints, but it is

inevitable and so both teachers and students have to just ‘get on with it’. I attempted to avoid this in the autumn by introducing staggered assessments, which led to its own problems. However, due to my eagerness to collect rich pedagogic data, I believe I may have had an excessive number of deadlines, which was made worse by the missed class. Furthermore, the CLERAC students had not actually submitted anything for me yet to assess or give feedback on, so I reflected that they were ‘working blind’ which is why they might feel like they had been ‘smacked in the face with all these assessments’. It was around this time that I realised that feedback seemed to be vital for creating a culture of authenticity, and especially for establishing positive motivational synergy. The teacher-student motivation was still synergised, but at this point I felt it was in a negative phase of synergy. In other words, the energy I was investing did not have a high return (EROI). The attractor state of the class was one of low motivation, and high motivational orientation seemed to be a strange attractor that we often gravitated towards but never quite reached. In part, I think

this was because I was still investing high levels of energy into the class, quite possibly because I knew it was for my PhD. Reflecting back, I realise that feedback is an essential component in creating the synaptic crossings to positively charge motivation between teacher and students and facilitate social authentication, and although I was investing energy in the teaching, I had not done enough by way of feedback.

In lesson 113A on Friday 11/07/2014 the students finished their 400 word essays, which were all on the same topic as their video projects. The lesson was a final workshop and review, and the deadline was set for the end of the day. Ms Lovehouse was the only student who submitted late. I also found some evidence of plagiarism (an entire paragraph copied and

pasted) in Mr Po’s essay. Both these students were reprimanded and their grades were adjusted accordingly. The next day was a Saturday, but this was the class we had set as a make-up lesson, so lesson 113B was also held in the CALL room. Not all the students could attend, which meant that those who could not work in their groups on their video projects (such as Mr Charge, whose partner, Mr Fly, was absent) were given a ‘fun task’ of watching an entertaining YouTube video which was an animated history of the universe in three minutes. They were then supposed to write down the sequence, basically creating a summary of their own very fast observations. Mr Charge and Mr Wind (who had already finished their video projects anyway) both enjoyed the task. I spent the rest of that day marking in my office. My plan was to have the entire semester marked by the last day of class, not just for CLERAC but also the other five courses I taught. There were just two lessons left until the end of semester.

In the last week of Spring Semester, on Wednesday 16/07/2014 in lesson 114A we watched

the students’ final video projects together. We could not watch them all because 3 out of 10

were late. Mr Wind was late, as was Mr Nintendo because they submitted the wrong type of file (a .wlmp project file instead of an .mp4 video file). This is exactly why I had wanted to do the trailer project, I was disappointed in this and gave both of them a late penalty as I had been very clear in my instructions. The dance group, Ms Oldriver and Mr Dawn, were also late and I recorded that they ‘couldn’t even explain why’. They were given an even harsher late penalty. In the lesson, we watched only 4 of the projects because each one took about 15 minutes due to questions and answers, plus a large amount of class was used on administration and submissions, and reprimanding those who were late. I noted that overall I felt ‘very disappointed’, particularly in terms of the quality of the videos.

In lesson 114B on 18/07/2014, the last lesson of the spring semester, we watched the last of

the video projects and I went around the class with a chart, ticking off everybody’s name and

ensuring I had each of their assignments. Some people had not yet finished mid-semester reaction papers or diagnostic essays for either the mid or end of semester, and I ensured everybody knew what I had and what was missing. The class ended well, and I recorded that it had been a really good class. However, overall I was quite disappointed with the low quality videos. I reflected that even though my expectations were not particularly high, the results were still lower than I had hoped. I felt that, given the large amount of class time dedicated to the projects (10 lessons, 35% of the semester) the final videos were rushed, with some groups seeming to have basically done everything on the Saturday make-up class. In terms of the quality of the work, the DCT class had not (and still has not) ever been duplicated, except in some standalone cases for other classes. I was particularly upset that the Koshoku

and Projection Mapping groups’ videos were both under 2 minutes long, although the class

average was 05:16 (see Table 4.1. for summary). This struck me as evidence that they had not worked hard on their projects and had not worked hard during the classes, indicating a much lower level of motivation than I had originally credited many of them with. However, I

must bear in mind CLERAC’s overall lower language ability than DCT, as I am inevitably

comparing these two classes. I discuss this more when I expand upon motivation as a strange attractor (see 6.3.4.1).