Things to do before class gets too far underway:

• Go to the mail room and get a box of 100 6x9 inch envelopes. You'll need these to return student evaluations.
• Ask Marsha to send out a print order for more student evaluation forms. You'll want these printed landscape, 2 per 8.5x11 piece of paper.
• Get the instruction forms from Marsha. I recommend adding the following fields to her form if they aren't there already:
  • Good: write at least 3 good things about the presentation
  • Bad: write 3 bad things about the presentation
  • Class: If at least 3 people in the class reviews said something, mark it down.
  • Section
  • Date:
  • Um count: I kept track of the number of times a student said Um for each presentation. It helped to have a good strong metric when evaluating students.
  • Suggested Grade: You'll want to suggest a grade while the presentation is fresh in your mind.

Things to do every week:

• Monday: print out the attendance sheets for the week, one for each section. Change the date on the attendance sheet.
• Thursday: Email the students who have presentations but no topics the following week. Remind them they need to sign up or they loose points.
• Thursday-Friday:
  • Meet with Marsha (see below)
• Saturday: take the grades she's emailed you and mark them in Compass
• Sunday: do student evaluations (see below)

Things to do every class:

• 5 min before class,
  • Write down how many student presentations there are on the board
  • Turn on the projector.
  • Hand out student evaluations from the previous week
  • Help students upload their presentations
  • Archive the presentations from the previous week so there is no confusion
• 10 min into class
  • pass around a stack of the student evaluation forms and the attendance sheet, starting at the front. Thsis way you don't have to pass out the evaluations yourself. The number of sheets they take should be on the board.
• when the attendance returns to you
  • mark anyone's name that's blank so they can't sign the sheet for full credit while you are looking.
• At the end of class when there is extra time or immediately after class
  • read through the student evaluations
    • keep two stacks of evaluations: ones that are too sparse and ones that are good enough
    • If 3 people in the class comment on something, write it down on your instructor evaluation sheet.
  • after you've done this, place the two stacks on top of each other, one rotated 180 degrees on top of the other so you can tell where one stack ends and the other begins.
  • suggest a grade for the student. Do this as soon as possible after class, because I promise that you'll forget the presentations after a busy week.

Meet with Marsha: This should take an hour once you get into the swing of things.

• show her all the student responses you thought were questionable. If you have these in the rotated format described above, she can easily judge whether the students need to be warned.
• show her your summary of the student's comments that you collected after class, so she doesn't have to read them.
• show her your comments
• show her your suggested grade.

Student Essays:

• Keep a stock list of things you can write back to the students.
• If you're going to take off points, save that response until later. When you take off points, you should write back a verbose explanation of what they need to do in order to get 100%. This will save you complaining emails in the end.
• If a student writes you a personal note, write one back. This will make sure they don't write boring responses in the future.
• Open up a text document with your stock replies and the section numbers on separate lines.
• Keep a copy of notepad open. If someone writes something that can be quoted, lookup their section number on your role sheet and copy their quote under the appropriate section number.
• Go back and delete quotes that aren't good, and upload those quotes you kept to the wiki.
• I advise the students to write at least 2 paragraphs that would look like they belonged in an intelligent blog post.