Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
Lures, Reels, Novelty Hooks
09 December 2004, 11:57 am
Yesterday my prep study skills students had their final exam. I was struck by the difference between how I felt about this and how I felt when the first intake of prep students sat their exams.I'm sure a primary reason for this concerns my relationship to the content of the two courses respectively. In the first semester I was teaching New Zealand Literature, my field. This meant that the teaching/learning relationship I built with the students was through something I cared about, over and above whether they engaged with it or not. This had the effect of buffering me from their periods of disengagement and intensifying the experience (for me at least) when they did pick up and run with the new ideas. It also, I suspect, brought an edge to the classes in that most students were keen to please, to show accomplishment in an area that they could see mattered to me.
This semester I have been teaching study skills (the literature paper wasn't offered). The content of the course was directed not towards textual analysis or even the receipt of factual material, but towards outlining and developing skills. As much as I care about what an essay is and believe in why students should have to write them, these things are not on their own sufficient to get me into a high octane kind of teaching mode. Classes had a more leisurely, ruminative feel. Attendance was poor (across all courses). It was hard to build relationships with students because so few of them were regularly there.
It has been interesting to see the extent to which students don't get caught up in a course when (I'm inferring a causal relationship here that may of course be bogus) there isn't content to hook them in. Study skills in themselves don't have the lure of novelty or the shock of the new. Leading students into writing a researched essay of their own devising was unexpectedly harder to implement than giving a topic and saying "go, do it". That inner kick, that inner drive that powers successful university students, hadn't yet developed in many of my class and, without the bright shiny function that new ideas have for new students, it was hard to reel them in.
Peacetime
08 December 2004, 10:51 am
With the tap of teaching time almost turned off for Christmas, I've turned to lecturing myself instead, on a not doing much/therefore lazy logical fallacy. Which makes me wonder, have I invested some of my sense of me-as-a-hard-worker in the fact I'm usually rushed and rushing, living life between classes in a swirl of photocopy paper and meetings?This week I drink coffee, I walk down the corridor on minor errands, I read things I normally have no time to read. It's like shifting from wartime to peacetime, and I'm still in transition, resenting the teaching I still have to do and berating myself for this and that when I'm not in the classroom.
The fact that a maxillary sinus infection and a truckload of penicillin are fighting it out inside my head and digestive system isn't helping, I suppose, nor is the fact that this building feels like a ghost town at the best of times, albeit one usually filled with busy, needy ghosts.
Out of Mexico
06 December 2004, 2:43 pm
So what happened, in the end, between me and the students with whom I found myself in a pedagogical and curricular staring match?I'm sad to say it was a visit to the student advisor's office where I acted strategically to divert the conversation from the matter of what consitutes having thrown your books on the floor when asked to remove them from the desk, and merely having placed them on the floor.
But it cleared the air in the sense that those whose non-participation is intentional have distinguished themselves from those who have just been mucking around.
More than this, however, has been the galvanising effect of a twenty percent essay, due tomorrow, requiring students to draw on much or all of their learning in this subject. Most of the games of deferral and distraction have ceased, and those who have made the teaching the most taxing are now regularly emailing me progress updates. I note that one student has the word "commence" in her email signature, where she means "commerce". I'm petty enough not to have pointed it out.
Might it be too late for this hard core of chain-draggers? I'm keeping an open mind, despite an email from another student from which I extract below:
Another question is: do i must write something is in text book or if i don't want i am not have to.
Mexican standoff
24 November 2004, 4:27 pm
Last night I watched Moon Child (2003), in which there were a number of Mexican standoffs.This morning, while repeating to my hard-core of four resistant students what the consequences of their doing no classwork in this subject will now likely be (not having the understanding to complete the major assessment, failing the course and potentially lowering their overall average below the "C" grade required to pass), I thought how working with these students is something of a Mexican stand-off in itself.
The trouble is, if the analogy is extended to reflect the reality of their situation, they only think they have guns. I'm the only one with a gun, and I'm not going to use it.
So we eye each other across the classroom as they perfect their routine of quiet fakery and I pleasantly and repeatedly remind them that I know they aren't working and this is getting them nowhere, and that, since they are adults, I won't be forcing them to do anything.
But oh, it's tiring, and oh, it's so unbecoming for us all.
Frown lines, worry lines
21 November 2004, 12:58 pm
"This year," I said to Mariella yesterday, "my hair has gotten grey and my face lined. And it's all down to teaching colliding with the ageing process. I get frown lines when I'm in the classroom and worry lines when I'm not. I'm going to end up with a knife-scored face by the time I'm thirty-three if I carry on at this rate.""The secret," she said, "is to be too lazy to worry."
Resist, resist
19 November 2004, 10:31 am
This morning, I set out for my NZS students a guide to dealing with unfamiliar vocabulary in short stories and gave them some tasks to complete, based around it. I asked individual class members to read out the instructions. One student was unable to pronounce the word "verb"; another couldn't work out what the abbreviation "etc." meant.The student nearest where I was standing remained inanimate, with his head down on the desk. I said his English name quietly, and he looked up, waiting for me to hand him my copy of the photocopied anthology, as he clearly didn't have his. Instead, I said, "do you know what you have to do?"
Waves of anger passed across his face and he turned his back. When the rest of the class sat awkward and silent for another thirty or so seconds, I asked who had read the story (as set for homework). No-one, out of twenty-two, had done so.
Then I went down to the staff room to photocopy another set of four anthologies for all the students who hadn't brought them.
Ten minutes later I noticed about half the students were reading the wrong story, despite the correct story being written on the board. When I pointed this out there were groans and giggles.
After twenty-five minutes of reading time, most students had read about half a page. Set to do the vocabulary exercise, almost all of them gossiped in Chinese instead.
I stopped the class to remind them that they are required to cite this work as part of an essay worth twenty-five percent, due in two weeks' time. They nodded, looked vaguely worried, then went back to playing with their electronic translators.
These are nineteen, twenty and twenty-one year olds who want to enter university in three months time.
I walked over to the nearest cafe and bought a tall latte and a chelsea bun, worrying a little at the way I follow most classes with these students with food and drink.
We have six more teaching weeks together. It's been like this since the first day of this twenty-eight week programme.
Contrasts
18 November 2004, 10:19 pm
This morning, four students from my NZS class ham and mug their way through a group presentation to the point where I'm wondering if it might be in the best interests of their learning for me to show some anger at their actions.And then a few hours later, as I'm walking in the rain across the other side of campus, a student from a different class unexpectedly appears and presents me with eight or more DVDs of Chinese films he wants to lend me, original copies stored together in cheap plastic CD envelopes.
"Use your remote control to run the subtitles," he says. "You'll have to try the different options because the headings will be in Chinese."
This evening, I watch Beijing Bicycle (2000).
On Frustration and trading off
16 November 2004, 11:43 am
La Lectrice describes a recent class in which "[keeping] the unspoken behavioural contract that has enabled us to co-exist, to begin to work together, to open the path to learning ... paid off", but at some cost to herself. This post in turn reminded me of a rather less visceral but still unsettling experience earlier this year with the group of students of whom I've spoken so warmly in the last few entries.I continue to turn over in my mind the question of the relationship between what is acceptable to us as people (political people) and what is needed in the moment for learning, the trade-offs between the personal, the political and the pedagogical that can make classroom teaching feeling like tightrope walking.
Adjacent to this is an issue with which I don't normally have too many difficulties, which is my emotional state prior to entering the classroom impinging on what I need to do in there. ("Emotional state"--is that a gendered choice of language? And is considering it a gendered consideration?) While what's going on in my life might make me feel averse to going into the classroom at any particular moment (today is a good example, with a difficult email from a friend arriving just minutes before I left the house for work), those emotions usually get set aside when I enter the room itself. Except, sometimes, frustration.
Frustration with people--with friends, with students--wears me out faster than any other emotion. If I had to describe my relationship with my NZS class, in particular, I would say, "wearying", and that weariness is almost entirely brought on by frustration. The continuing polite but opaque deferrals of opportunities to engage, the occasional muttering of things to each other in students first languages, the slow slow pace and the need to explain everything repeatedly, repeatedly, waiting for one or two students' expressions to flicker, the tears at the return of assessments ... it is an exercise in disconnection. They are so proud and vulnerable and certain of my inability to understand them or their situation.
After almost six months, they still respond to questions posed by rifling through their papers looking for a handout that will tell them the answer. At least once a lesson I have to sacrifice the process of inquiry for the necessary content they'll need for assessments, hoping at the same time that they don't notice I'm doing this and resist even more the next time in the hope of forcing the right answer out of me. Because that's the thing: they can recite back to me the importance, the necessity, of independent inquiry on cue, but underneath they still believe that I have the answers and their job is to intuit them from me and feed them back to me.
So, if I come into the classroom already frustrated, I'm effectively standing at the top of a downward spiral, with balance that's not looking that great.