The blogs have gotten weaker as the session has gone on. Student apathy sets in quickly. Early signs of the disease include three sentence paragraphs, one or more skipped short answer questions, and forgetting essential school supplies. It rapidly progresses to entire missing paragraphs, lost homework, and sporadic napping. In its final stages mental faculties are severely diminished to the point that they create false memories of turning in work or have paranoid delusions that teachers intentionally lose their work. For now there is no known cure. The disease can be managed with innovative lessons, occasional movies, and a Snicker bar.
With the limited resources of summer school I am not having a lot of luck in stemming the tide. The novelty of blog writing isn't enough in and of itself. Some of the students have been derisively referring to it as the "blogger" either from a misinterpretation of the website blogger.com or ridicule.
Today I provided them with a list of questions to guide their comments. I need to do some research into how to stimulate metacognition. I think cognition is pretty good. I was pleased with the results when they blogged from the point of view of one of the characters in Fences, but am still looking for that big breakthough in insight into and analyses of their own thoughts.
We will see what we get today.
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