I Teach
This blog is a place for me to debrief myself after my classes. It will serve both as a place for venting and as an archive for what worked and didn't work for me. I welcome outsider comments about teaching techniques or anything else.Thursday, September 08, 2005
Introduction
I teach a sociology class at a private university. My class is like many other basic intro. classes. 26 students, twice a week. I assign readings, they do them (presumably), and then we meet to talk about them or to do some exercises reinforcing the concepts.
So let's jump right into it.
Today was our second substantive teaching day. I started class by giving them some more detail about their paper assignments for the semester, essentially reinforcing that they need to come to class and be prepared to participate because their papers will come directly from class discussion.
I was really worried about class today because I didn't have much to say and I was going to be relying on them to provide a lot of the stimulus for the discussion. I wasn't quite sure that I was going to be able to get them to do this or that I would be able to manage the discussion as I had never done anything like this in a real class before, but my training kicked in (almost subconsciously-it was scary at times), and things went very well.
As this was our first real day of discussion, I was okay with some personal anectdotal type stuff. I just want to get them talking, and I realize there is a danger in doing too much of this. They could start to think that sharing personal stories is enough, that there is no need to connect their experiences to the readings or the theories we're discussing. But at least they were talking, and this was a good thing. We were discussing groups and cliques in high schools as a way to discuss groups and cliques writ large. After hearing 15 different students say "My High School was pretty different..." I was about to scream. You see, they all really came from the same school, with the exception of a few. I don't know why we insist on characterizing our own existence as being unique or special. Regardless, I got a little upset with them when I asked them to connect these stories with what we had discussed on Tuesday-capital. None of them could do it. They just stared back at me with blank looks. Finally, they flipped back through their notes and found what I was looking for. After that they were able to do the work I was asking them to do. It just reinforced for me that students will work only as much as you ask them to, and until there is a reason, they're really not going to come to class prepared. It also cemented how embarrassment can work in a classroom. They were clearly embarrassed at not being able to answer my questions which even they recognized as simple. And they should have felt embarrassed. Hopefully, they've got the message.
Finally, for today, I have been trying to be very conscious of how much I shake up their worldview at any one given time. Thus, we haven't labled and discussed conflict and functional theory. Oh, they're talking about it alright, but they just don't know it. It is my belief that when we do get to it later in the semester and they realize that they have been talking about these things in various ways over the course of the last couple of months that they will both learn them better, and not think that it is just a pointless academic exercise to learn theories that don't really affect people's lives. It's more organic this way. Plus, it allows me to control how much they are able to peek behind the curtain (like Wizard of Oz). Viewing the wizard in his entirety can scare a person into denial, but if they have been exposed to a peek here and a glimpse there by the time they see the whole thing, hopefully they will recognize the parts they've seen before and how have some idea how they feel without being overwhelmed. Here's an example in case I'm being too vague. Today we talked about the education system. Instead of trying to pull back the whole curtain and convince them that the reason we have k-12 education is just to reinforce status inequities and keep kids off the streets until employers are ready for them, we tried to focus on just one way that universities and higher education could operate in this way. Specifically we discussed how universities market themselves so as to be included in a specific group of schools, and not in another. Thus, if Harvard, Yale and Duke all have micronano engineering labs, you can be damn sure that Stanford will get one as well, and conversly if all the lower ranked schools have huge auditorium classes and graduate students as teachers, you can be sure that schools who want to be considered elite will move away from that (regardless of whether or not large lectures are actually effective at transmitting information to students). So now they have a taste of this. They are primed to start viewing things at more than just face value, and even if they didn't agree with the things said in class today (I honestly couldn't care less if they did) at least they know that this perspective exists, and they're starting to get a feel for how to do it themselves. Ah, the power of sociology.
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So let's jump right into it.
Today was our second substantive teaching day. I started class by giving them some more detail about their paper assignments for the semester, essentially reinforcing that they need to come to class and be prepared to participate because their papers will come directly from class discussion.
I was really worried about class today because I didn't have much to say and I was going to be relying on them to provide a lot of the stimulus for the discussion. I wasn't quite sure that I was going to be able to get them to do this or that I would be able to manage the discussion as I had never done anything like this in a real class before, but my training kicked in (almost subconsciously-it was scary at times), and things went very well.
As this was our first real day of discussion, I was okay with some personal anectdotal type stuff. I just want to get them talking, and I realize there is a danger in doing too much of this. They could start to think that sharing personal stories is enough, that there is no need to connect their experiences to the readings or the theories we're discussing. But at least they were talking, and this was a good thing. We were discussing groups and cliques in high schools as a way to discuss groups and cliques writ large. After hearing 15 different students say "My High School was pretty different..." I was about to scream. You see, they all really came from the same school, with the exception of a few. I don't know why we insist on characterizing our own existence as being unique or special. Regardless, I got a little upset with them when I asked them to connect these stories with what we had discussed on Tuesday-capital. None of them could do it. They just stared back at me with blank looks. Finally, they flipped back through their notes and found what I was looking for. After that they were able to do the work I was asking them to do. It just reinforced for me that students will work only as much as you ask them to, and until there is a reason, they're really not going to come to class prepared. It also cemented how embarrassment can work in a classroom. They were clearly embarrassed at not being able to answer my questions which even they recognized as simple. And they should have felt embarrassed. Hopefully, they've got the message.
Finally, for today, I have been trying to be very conscious of how much I shake up their worldview at any one given time. Thus, we haven't labled and discussed conflict and functional theory. Oh, they're talking about it alright, but they just don't know it. It is my belief that when we do get to it later in the semester and they realize that they have been talking about these things in various ways over the course of the last couple of months that they will both learn them better, and not think that it is just a pointless academic exercise to learn theories that don't really affect people's lives. It's more organic this way. Plus, it allows me to control how much they are able to peek behind the curtain (like Wizard of Oz). Viewing the wizard in his entirety can scare a person into denial, but if they have been exposed to a peek here and a glimpse there by the time they see the whole thing, hopefully they will recognize the parts they've seen before and how have some idea how they feel without being overwhelmed. Here's an example in case I'm being too vague. Today we talked about the education system. Instead of trying to pull back the whole curtain and convince them that the reason we have k-12 education is just to reinforce status inequities and keep kids off the streets until employers are ready for them, we tried to focus on just one way that universities and higher education could operate in this way. Specifically we discussed how universities market themselves so as to be included in a specific group of schools, and not in another. Thus, if Harvard, Yale and Duke all have micronano engineering labs, you can be damn sure that Stanford will get one as well, and conversly if all the lower ranked schools have huge auditorium classes and graduate students as teachers, you can be sure that schools who want to be considered elite will move away from that (regardless of whether or not large lectures are actually effective at transmitting information to students). So now they have a taste of this. They are primed to start viewing things at more than just face value, and even if they didn't agree with the things said in class today (I honestly couldn't care less if they did) at least they know that this perspective exists, and they're starting to get a feel for how to do it themselves. Ah, the power of sociology.
> 0 comments
