Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
Borrowed
08 May 2004, 11:58 pm
Despite my intention in starting this blog, which was to separate church and state (aka work and everything else), I found myself writing the following in my other place and thought it probably merited reproducing here:My coordinator was impressed with the extent of my comments in the marking she moderated on Friday, which I was pleased about as I take marking pretty seriously. I like the student to feel I have really read and thought about what they've said or have tried to say, and I try and communicate this with as many comments and as much feedback as possible. In my first year of teaching, back in 1997, I unexpectedly had the chance to do some lectures for a third year class and mark the essay based on my teaching. The course convenor, who wrote a reference for me based on my work, described some of the comments I offered as "supererogatory". That's a great word and the only time I've heard it used. I must try and get it into conversation some time soon.
Until tomorrow, when the marking marathon will continue to limp along, I bid you goodnight.
Isms
08 May 2004, 3:48 pm
There are few better ways to highlight gaps in your practice than seeing something you have explained rendered back incorrectly understood, as in the assertion that "Fowler becomes anti-Americanism" following the bicycle-bomb explosion, from which I infer that my account of how "ism" is applied to a state of mind was not all it could have been.Reflection_1
08 May 2004, 3:16 pm
On the basis of these students' folios on Greene's The Quiet American, a case can be made (or, in reality, remade) for the key to success not being solely the ability to follow instructions to the letter, but to use those instructions as a starting point for individual reflection and writing.So naturally, those students for whom this isn't a culturally new idea have it a lot easier than those who spent the first weeks of the course in the cold light of realising, as one put it, "that I can actually use my own ideas and opinions".
Quickening
08 May 2004, 2:14 pm
Okay. I've been for a walk around the neighbourhood to pre-empt the day being spent sitting around, the dogs are fed, the sun is shining and I have an open 1.5 litre bottle of Diet C*ke beside me.Now let's mark, b*tches. These papers are going to get the assessing of their little lives.
Moving
07 May 2004, 7:52 pm
A meeting with my coordinator reveals the arts teachers are shortly to relocate to an older and arguably crummier building, therein to dwell with the language and study skills teachers.I can live with any kind of housing as long as I have my computer, network access and a big pinboard.
Having said that, I'm rather attached to the splendid isolation I've carved out for myself in this newer, prettier building with its fifth floor view of the mountains and well-appointed bathrooms that are always empty.
Mark-k-k-k-king
07 May 2004, 3:13 pm
The literature essays are good so far. And yes, I know that three out of twenty-seven is no representative sample. But I'm just saying.Marking well-written work is such a rush, especially when you know they've done it themselves. And of course, the literary essay is the highest form of writing.
Admirer
07 May 2004, 2:12 pm
A conversation at today's prep programme staff meeting reveals I have an attendee at my literature lectures who is not enrolled. I had started to think this was the case given that I had two students to fit one student photo, which appears not resemble either of them. But of the two it resembles this gentleman the least.He sits with his friend, who is enrolled, I might add, laughs variously with me and at me, and occasionally heckles.
Example: I referred last term to Auden and Isherwood's Journey to a War as "Wystan and Christopher's excellent adventure, like the Bill and Ted movies". When I mentioned this text again in a later lecture, this student shouted out "Bogus Journey!"
He doesn't seem to be enrolled in the programme at all, so must be making a special trip to see my class. I suppose so long as he doesn't turn up at my house, I needn't worry.
Let this be proof that Studying Literature is Fun, ladies and gentlemen.
In other news, I have so much marking to do this afternoon and this weekend, it's no wonder I'm a-bloggin' instead.
NZS2
06 May 2004, 4:36 pm
I have been thinking more about the question of why students don't like New Zealand Studies. I have another reason which is somewhat hard to express without sounding derogatory to the students, but here goes: they don't like it because they have to think.Let me explain it a bit further. Most of the students who take this course come from east Asian countries, where education systems place considerable emphasis (indeed, exclusive emphasis, it could be argued) on memorisation of material, and which includes such a volume of material to be remembered that there is no time to reflect on it critically. Indeed, in many of the cultures that our students come from, critical reflection is not encouraged, and there are various institutions of government that make it very difficult indeed to mount the challenges to authority that critical thought often leads to.
So when they are in classroom mode, they are locked into their learning patterns, long-established, which are to have their minds open and ready for the receipt of knowledge, not for the creation and challenging of ideas. This of course has links to the Confucian Heritage Tradition as well, where a transmission model of knowledge complements the valuing of the authority and dignity of one's elders and ancestors.
So in New Zealand Studies, which is all about focusing on critical thought and cultural reflection, we are asking students to do something which is in many ways not only anti-educational according to their heritage, but also anti-social. No wonder they see it as something that retards their practice and wastes their time.
And yet here we teachers are, standing on the other side of the culture gap (mind the gap!) demanding that they do these very things as part of their education here.
I guess that we ought to be amazed that so many of them do make it through the course rather than that a few of them don't.
Gracias
06 May 2004, 4:14 pm
intheory27 left me two most kind notes, the first notes for this blog, validating my existence in cyberspace. (I have a feeling that "cyberspace" is now a most unfashionable term, but in the 90s we graduate students were all over it. My one-time flatmate wrote a masters thesis on gender, technology and writing, when the notion that we were on a fast track to cyborg-hood, at least metaphorically, was in the ascendent.)So thank you, say I. Incidentally, the template she uses for her own journal is one I looked at myself (before settling on the lo-fi wonderland of my own design), coming as it does from the creative stable of not that ugly, whose blog as inconsequentiality I link to from my other place. In Theory's choice of title, "Mind the gap, yo" puts me in mind of Missy Elliot, bobbing about in one of her extreme tracksuits waiting to head into town from, I don't know, say Seven Sisters?
Crash
06 May 2004, 3:49 pm
Thursday is my non-teaching day at present, and during the first half of the week my diary fills up with a list of marking, preparation and admin to do on this day. But inevitably, when the day arrives, I find myself exhausted and usually spend at least part of it unconscious on my bed.Today has been an example of this in the extreme. I woke up feeling as if a heavy weight was sitting on my chest (over and above the standard dog-wake-up). Clearly, collecting AV gear for film screenings over the last couple of weeks has put an added drain on my energy.
One thing that I didn't realise about teaching before I ended up in the midst of it was how physically tiring it gets. Your back hurts, your neck hurts, you dwell in a land just this side of a cranking headache most of the time.
However, I'm semi-grateful for some enforced rest, and since I'd kept the day free anyway for administrative catching-up, I'm not having to cancel anything to try and get my groove back.
I've just heard via the arts teachers' secret grapevine that my literature paper won't be offered in the second half of the year. O mature students, why must ye gravitate towards the social sciences? I feel pretty disappointed, but on the other hand I had a fair idea it was coming. In our programmes, which are largely market-driven, it doesn't pay to get to attached to any avenue of teaching nor to want too much for things to happen that are outside my control.
There's talk of offering this particular programme three times across the year, instead of the original one that has now been augmented to two. What I think might work well would be to offer the literature paper in one intake, cultural studies in the next (in the one aimed at mature students, since this would dovetail well with the other social science papers) and film studies in the third, especially if the third is to be a summer school, since this would condense the number of reading hours involved, assuming it takes less time to watch a film than read a novel. The themes running through each would basically be the same, in that we are training students in reflection, critical thinking, and the analysis of texts, but the vehicles for this teaching could change.
I'm going to keep on tugging at the cuffs of the people who have the power to make this happen, since it will help me considerably in my project of diversifying my own portfolio and getting to teach material within my actual fields of training.
Shout-Out
05 May 2004, 10:41 pm
Thank you to Des of the famous bladet for sharing the template to give each of my entries an individual home on the internet.When in doubt, friends, ask a mathsperson.
NZS1
05 May 2004, 10:01 pm
The first subject I taught when I started this job three years ago was New Zealand Studies, and indeed it's still inscribed in letters of fire in my contract, although this semester I have managed to negotiate a break from it. It's a course that started in a fearfully ad hoc sort of way, designed by a phantom staff member who shot through when it didn't fly in the classroom and inherited first of all by my former nominal head, a man so old-school he would turn grey at the thought of the threat cultural studies posed to decent scholars, and then by me, the oft-kicked Azriel to his unstable Gargamel. A few changes of staff later and it is a much-revised, well-planned programme of cultural orientation and dojo-style training in reflection and critical thinking, those skills whose existence a number of my colleagues fear we are cloaking in a mist of indoctrination. (I still don't know what it is they think we are indoctrinating them in exactly--a levelling egalitarianism at worst, and even that is not a police state).In general, the students don't like New Zealand Studies. They find it asks a lot of them, and because they can't perceive an immediate correlation between what it's about and what they think they need to learn, they drag the chain, collectively and individually. This makes it wearing for the teachers.
I was talking about this with a couple of colleagues yesterday. I think that in order to work, we have to make it as if Elvis refused to leave the building, by which I mean, stay there with the students in all their resistance and exasperation, their angry remarks (by which New Zealanders are rendered fat and lazy, and according to the requirements of Chinese high schools, they may well appear so) and do nothing except work with what they bring into class. The only thing that's impossible to work with, apart from absence, is those students who hold themselves aloof (as a number do), refusing to do work, refusing even to bring pens and paper sometimes, resisting and resisting as Jane Fonda exhorted us to in those unfortunate exercise videos supported by bulimia and allied pills.
It's a shopfloor kind of course in a shopfloor kind of programme. The gap between staff and students whereby staff have the knowledge and students have nothing has to be demolished, otherwise the aim of giving them the skills and strength to make sense of what the hell is going on, eight thousand miles from home, and sharpening their mind for what's going to follow, will be an aim in vain.
Films
05 May 2004, 9:49 pm
It was my intention last night to watch and make teaching notes on The Hand of Death, the 1976 film by John Woo I was screening for my Foundation arts students this afternoon. Instead, I played with the format on this blog until after midnight.When I was still studying and worked a few hours a week as an undergraduate tutor, I had a teaching practice largely based on content knowledge, liking people and winging it. I suppose those are the fundamentals of any teaching practice, really, but my point is that I didn't always worry about peripherals, like viewing the film before screening it for students. I have been thinking lately that I need to get back somehow to the feeling of it all being rather fun I had when I was a part-time teacher, at the same time without giving up the pedagogical content knowledge (ie how to teach what you know) I've gained since then.
So I toyed with the idea of not staying in this morning to watch the film, but I'm glad I did for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact the plot of the film was quite different from the synopsis on the box, which was of another film by the same name.
So much for the distributors cherishing the heritage of Hong Kong action directors' early works!
Whenever I plan a lesson for my arts students, it's always a case of deciding what I'm going to leave out, since I have so many ideas when I'm looking at a text of one kind or another and to try and fit even a small number of them in is pointless, because most of the students need one clear concept at a time so they don't get an overload of content and vocabulary at the same time.
I try and give them one or two things to think about or keep an eye on before the film begins. In this case it was the idea of these three pairs: good guys/bad guys (very informal), heroes/villains (formal), protagonists/antagonists (very formal). I asked them to make a note of who was which and why as they went along. This was not too challenging for this film as the characters were types rather than fully-developed people (although extremely entertaining, kung fu-fighting, grimacing-with-suppressed-emotion types, one of which was a very young Jackie Chan), but even so, one or two students didn't do it.
In fact, it's the same two students who usually don't complete any work where I'm not standing over them. One is able, and considers himself better than all of this, and the other has limited English, and considers himself better than all of this. It's tiring sometimes, trying to give them opportunities to take part and to learn without actually waving my arms around or confronting them.
Indeed, my unwillingness to go head-to-head with students is one of many reasons that I have stayed well away from high schools, although lately I've stopped saying that in front of high school teachers since I've not doubt it's bad manners.
Comments-Are-Go!
04 May 2004, 9:16 pm
The comments feature is now up and running.So please make yourself known and feed back as much or as little as you wish.
Thanks to the good people at HaloScan (linked to from the bottom of this page) for the free service.
This blog is also linked to from harvestbird now.
Meeting
04 May 2004, 7:46 pm
Okay, not doing too badly. I haven't quite been able to use the fancy fonts I'd like (curse my rudimentary knowledge of html) and I'm having problems with the archives page, but apart from that, Pedablogues are go!
Today was the lunchtime meeting for the Foundation arts teachers and coordinator, which consists of three people eating and talking about nine students. One issue arising at the moment is how to engage reluctant students in group work. Most of our students from Asian countries haven't done group work since nursery school and associate it with "being treated like babies". In addition, within the arts classes, students who have better English skills (including one or two native speakers) are reluctant to be asked to work with those whose skills are poorer, and those with less English tend to withdraw and not participate. What to do, what to do? It seems to be a case of striking a balance between activities that students like and those they don't, in the hope that the former will offset the latter.
Then I gave a lecture on The Matriarch to my prep literature students, among the most poorly attended of lectures I'd given. Those who were there variously took power naps or avoided eye contact, except for a hard core of three or four who asked questions, which I found quite challenging. I'm hard pressed to call it on this novel--does it work or not? I sometimes wonder whether it's wise to tell students at this level I can't make up my mind about something, or whether it'd be more helpful to give an opinion and see if I can get them to disagree.
First
04 May 2004, 6:35 pm
Good evening, friends!If you've reached this page via its parent, then you may well know me already. This new blog-within-a-blog is an attempt to isolate and reflect on my teaching practice.
I'm never sure that the various components of my life fit together terribly well, and since my harvestbird site exists largely for me to write about art, love and dogs, I thought I might be more satisfied if I devoted it to those things alone.
But enough about that blog! Here, I intend to create a journal of my experiences as a university teacher in bridging programmes, a record of what goes on in the classroom and in my mind. Trials and tribulations there will certainly be, but I hope through maintaining a record in this forum I will give myself some space to develop and grow in my day job, just as keeping the Harvest Bird journal has led to development and growth as a writer and artist.
I intend to install a comments function once I'm happy with the template and will let you know when that's up-and-running.
Excuse me while I check on whether this thing works.
harvestbird.