Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
First term reflections
14 March 2005, 1:09 pm
Now that I'm inarguably back in the saddle--in week four of a five week term (universally agreed to be a *stupid* length)--I've been thinking a lot about how the way in which I think about myself as a teacher has changed a great deal in the last year.A year ago I was beginning the long write-up of my diploma research, and in many ways it has been the entry to, and exit from, that research that's altered me.
Studying for the diploma was my first exposure to research methodologies outside literary and cultural studies (or textual analysis more generally), and, for a time, I was quite taken with the idea of pursuing more qualitative research once my diploma work was finished. It seemed a useful way to reconcile the different threads of my job: classroom work, negotiating relationships with colleagues and my own literary critical interests.
Things didn't quite turn out that way. I ended my project feeling ambivalent about my relationship, as researcher, with some of my research participants. The hindsight that it would have been better not to have initiated a project with colleagues as participants descended rapidly. It seemed, in my write-up, that you couldn't after all take literary critical approaches out of the girl, and there was an ill fit between parts of my work and the analytical framework of my external marker.
In the midst of this process my confidence in literary critical inquiry as a legitimate field of research was renewed, since it was in trying something else that I realised where my skills and experience lay. At the same time, the internal workplace dynamics which I hoped to address and clarify in my research were only further muddied by my presentation of the research to its intended audience. In a sense, what I was arguing was proved true: that aspects of my colleagues' pedagogical worldviews are mutually incomprehensible, or at least in ideological tension with each other. But if so, so what?
So the last six months have seen the a recession of the workplace dynamics that used to trouble me so (even a cursory browse through my archives will throw something up on this theme), at the same time as my orientation as a scholar has been strengthened. New writing commissions outside of work have helped this immensely.
As my relationships with my colleagues have come to seem less important and therefore less problematic, so my relationship, as a teacher, with my students has assumed a more central role. Teaching material that students are interested in learning (which I don't get the luxury of doing all of the time) strikes me as a particularly charmed situation. It's a private/public sphere, with much of the emotional weight of a familial relationship yet streamlined of relational difficulties by its constructedness, its artifice. A pairing between a motivated teacher and student, or teacher and class, can be one of the most unsullied settings in public life, in which best selves come out to play, albeit temporarily.
My classroom presence is a persona, and one which intrigues me as if it belonged to someone else, since I don't think of myself as a person who is particularly confident, clear-spoken or adept at anticipating and solving problems. And yet, in the lecture theatre or classroom, there it is. I'm not sure where it comes from.
To see my former students take confident part in university study is a particular delight, as it is to be greeted, emailed or otherwise fondly remembered as they go successfully on. It's a reward I didn't really have as a tutor, where my influence was smaller and my activities more localised, or as a music teacher, where even my longest-apprenticed student quit just as she was hitting proficiency. It's the students that occupy my mind almost completely now, to my greater satisfaction than in the past, but for that to happen, my confidence in my own disciplinary training needed to be consolidated. And that took a while.
Wrong place, right time
21 February 2005, 10:29 am
First day of the new semester, and the academic teaching year.My first class was at 9am.
The student who was the lone New Zealander in a class of south-east Asians and northern Europeans: in the wrong place.
The student who said he wanted to do engineering and then put his head down on the desk when I began talking about the mechanics of the short story: in the wrong place.
Fortunately, "the wrong place" isn't a metaphor, and a quick trip to the office to get them new timetables sorted it out.
Gems from the Exam Mine
03 February 2005, 2:49 pm
One thing that happens quickly when you teach international students is a necessary switching off to the humour of the mistakes they make as they learn how to write idiomatic academic English. The reason I say "necessary" is because to do otherwise is not to give them a fair go; it situates the teacher well outside of the students' learning.Having said that, during periods of intensive marking, it's hard not to laugh under the cumulative pressure of second-language students striving for sometimes misplaced effect. Combine that with the usual factual errors people make in exams, and the effect is surreal.
Thus, a colleague tells me how a student of ours, writing on the causes of World War One, claimed that
Britain went through the industrial revolution in the 1900s and that the war was caused merely by an Austrian prince being assassinated, and that when the Germans invaded Belgium, the Belgians were ready and waiting and advanced on Germany! Also as well as getting the biff from superpower Belgium, "the Germans were ganged down by the French".Apparently at Versailles, Churchill, Roosevelt and Lloyd Clemenceau of France got together. (She got Clemenceau right, except his name wasn't Lloyd it was Timothy.)
The Germans "called it a dictort, because they weren't there and it was dictatored to them."
Then some guy called "Hilter" took power.
(I don't suppose this student has come across the Minehead By-Election Python sketch, but still.)
The errors that come my way are smaller in scale, but the alternating of martial with "marital" and "martail" when writing about martial arts films is interesting. The further the student moves across the page from the original question, the more likely their spelling is to take on other forms.
Likewise, the pressure of writing in the exam room means that habits thought unlearned reassert themselves: a talented, able student's prose is taken over by "R"s at the expense of "L"s as she works faster through her answers and her Japanese accent makes its way into her written English, and the student who wrote so creatively of World War One refers continually to "flim" thoughout the exam answer she wrote for me. The letter "L", it seems, is a fickle companion.
The local students whom I also teach, separately, make as many errors in written expression as my international students do. It's just that theirs, which relate generally to sentence structure and punctuation, aren't culturally loaded in the same way that grammar and basic spelling errors are for any foreigner attempting to communicate in another language.
New Year's Goals
17 January 2005, 10:30 am
A happy new year to all teachers and students. I'm back in the classroom and at my desk now after a proper summer break (including that summer stand-by, the unexpected viral infection), and am contemplating the impending end of one student intake and then, three weeks after that, the beginning of another.It was very flattering and humbling to get a clutch of Christmas and New Year messages from students and ex-students, even allowing for cultural differences in which the sending of such things is more commonplace for my students than the receiving of them is for me. Such little things mean a lot--even the e-cards that have MIDI soundtracks and dancing animations--because they're what remains after all the slog, of knowing when to put pressure on students and knowing when to withhold it, of trying to balance a relaxed classroom with a classroom in which necessary learning takes place, has finished.
I've been thinking about what my teaching goals for the coming year might be. I think they probably arise out of many of the things I did and learned last year. High on the list would be to continue trying to combine intuition inside the classroom with reflection outside it, of being mindful of the students both individually and as a group, of mustering sufficient empathy to get inside their minds as learners. With that, too, I want to trust my own ability to get the job done, to wrangle the subject matter with both economy and flair, and to keep my own counsel with colleagues--let them reveal their thinking first, instead of putting my ideas out there so they have the luxury of reacting to them.
The first few years in this job were lonely and scary and difficult, for professional and personal reasons. I'd like this year to be able to enjoy some of the fruits of my labours, to get the pleasure of knowing that I can do this and that the classroom is no longer a frightening unknown.