Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
Bridged
15 November 2004, 3:13 pm
For my February students, the bridge is almost built--or not built--since they sat their exam today. They were just a few faces in a large lecture theatre of students. They looked calm enough. I had no feelings of needing to drive any ambulances to the bottom of any cliffs.
Later I gave a lecture to a different class on managing your work/study/life balance and coping with difficult learning situations, at which eight of around forty students were present. In that case, the ambulance may have stayed in the terminal too long.
dearest doctor birdie
11 November 2004, 11:20 am
Yo-ho-ho, I pulled out of the salary review after reflection on the sudden administrative turn for the worse that occurred directly above my head. An email to the big boss outlining my concerns about the process was emotively ducked, no more than I expected, and I spent an evening with a headache vowing I'd never do this again. If I really want the extra money, I could sell my car and take the bus everywhere, and I'm not going to do that.But on the same day as this old-school blow-up, my February arts students gave me a card they'd made themselves, on a sheet of A3 paper I'd given them to make a revision handout. On the front was a cartoon and inside a series of post-it notes with individual messages to me. My favourite: UR de best teacher eva! [spelling in original], or perhaps the one that said Dearest DR. Birdie...
Watching me open it, they leaned round expectedly.
"Are you going to cry?" they said.
"Yes," I said, but didn't.
Today we're having an end-of-term lunch and on Monday they sit their exam. I'm reluctant to let them go, having achieved with most of them so many of my goals for their learning.
Chercher Choice
09 November 2004, 11:36 am
Further tales of salary reviews: in putting together my application, I included extracts from students who had sent me positive feedback about my teaching once their courses had been completed.Sadly, it was suggested to me that the most cherished of these emails wouldn't translate well to the context of a formal application, meaning I had to delete it from my letter. But that doesn't mean I can't reproduce it here, gentle reader:
first, i just really wana say thanks for your help and support and teaching last semester. i would also like to congratulate you [...] on being the bomb-diggity (wassup?), being a chercher choice lecturer and delivering my favourite [...] paper (despite what the texting and occasional siesta during class may have led you to believe). your sense of humour and the ridiculous is so, i dunno... yeah nah, i dunno. lets just say its awesome. for real.
Anytime I need to feel like a million bucks, I now have an entry on this blog to which I can go!
Courting Largesse
09 November 2004, 11:19 am
I have, perhaps rather foolishly, applied for a salary review, for which I have an interview with the most senior of my many managers tomorrow. My coordinator is to be present to provide independent commentary, and a conversation with her about this has reflected back to me some interesting habits about how I work.Concerning the academic quality of my work, she says, there are no quibbles or concerns. But, if she is asked to provide any critical feedback (and I mean critical in the everyday usage of talking about limitations and negative qualities), then she will be obliged to mention the fact that I don't always get resources ready by when they're required, and that when I speak in meetings, it's academic and/or eloquent to the extent that others may not get a verbal look-in. In short, I take on too much, and I don't always deliver by the time it's needed [my paraphrase].
This is all quite true, and will, I suspect, likely count against me to the extent that I won't get my desired promotion (as will the fact that I am paid slightly more than my going rate anyway). I can see the truth of these comments and I know that I am improving a little in this regard--certainly, as my coordinator says, I am better at organising my work than in the past.
What this tells me about myself are some things I already know: that life as I live it in my head is largely about ideas and the possibility of ideas, and that practical considerations and realities take a very distant second to these. I also know that when I am talking with others, what I say is conditioned by what I expect of myself, which is to say I expect my ideas to be as incisive as possible, that I have to maintain the rigour I still fear this job may, over time, erode. I don't expect by any means the same standards of other people as I do of me. It's interesting that this might be coming across as hogging the discussion and firing out thoughts at a rate that precludes the participation of others.
Certainly there are some changes I can make that may make life easier for my long-suffering colleagues (who are shortly going to run out of years with which they can explain away my fighting talk on the grounds of youth). But what this also tells me about myself is that I am what I think I am--a writer and a thinker who teaches, and not a teacher alone. If the teaching were to disappear overnight I would still be me, but if the writing and the thoughts vanished, I imagine I might vanish with them, or at best become a living shell.
It's an uncompromising position for me that might well be frustrating for others, and I'm aware in writing about it I risk sounding like, well, a wanker. And while it might count against me in the terms by which I wish to ask for more money for what I do, mediating some of the difficulties it causes should be possible without altering what I am. Presumably I can get resources written by agreed deadlines and shut up a little more in meetings without eroding the lights by which I live more generally.
The Mystery of the Big Chicken
09 November 2004, 10:31 am
In the test described in the previous entry, one student twice wrote, in two separate answers, "The Chicken was very big [capitalisation in original]". Given that his answers related to the changes in lifestyle arises out of economic changes in New Zealand in the 1950s and 1980s, I was more than puzzled. Consultation with colleagues only increased the mystery. Our pet theory was an idiomatic expression from the student's first language, translated directly into English. Perhaps the size of the chicken was equivalent to the size of the pie in English?Consultation with the student this morning resolved the mystery. No, no, he said, the word was "kitchen". The kitchen was very big. When I pointed out what he had spelt was "chicken", he was as confused as I.
The trouble is that, while increase in the size of houses did indeed take place here in the 1950s, with an accompanying rise in appliance ownership leading to larger kitchens and greater domestic comfort, the same is not true of the 1980s. In fact, I think the student may have been thinking of the design of older houses which did indeed have large kitchens, contrasted in the students' textbook with more modern designs in which the living room was the main room in the house.
Another day, another misplaced aphorism.
Testy
09 November 2004, 10:20 am
This morning, the return of a ten percent test in which eleven out of my class of twenty-one failed.When I finished marking the papers yesterday, a feeling of dismay and dread settled on me that was hard to shake.
All through the class were expressions of disbelief, as students measured their perception of their own effort against their results. And I don't dispute that some of them did try hard. But the combination of elaborate avoidance strategies as far as in-class learning and completion of homework goes, with that old bugbear of answering some but not all parts of the question, extensive mixing up of decades (the 1950s interchanged with the 1930s and the 1970s) and written English in which adjectives do for verbs which do for adverbs, meant that for many students, passing was never an option.
One student cried. How can I explain to her that major contributing factors in the habits that led to her failing grade include the extensive support she provides for her devoted but academically freeloading boyfriend, completing his classwork and homework at the expense of her own, not to mention giving the answers to her best friend as well, without alienating her even further?
This class is usually my first class of the day; no wonder I don't always sleep well.