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.Tuesday, December 13, 2005
On the one hand, I'm worried...
On the other hand, I'm just concerned.
First, I think the final assignment I gave my students (see below) is hard. It's interesting and a good test of their knowledge and skill, but it's not easy. So I'm a tish worried that only 5 of them have come to me asking for help/clarification. I don't want to read a class full of poorly written 12 page essays.
On the other hand, I'm just a little concerned about what has been going on in my head lately about this past semester. Now that there is a little distance between myself and the day to day preparations of the class, the story that I tell myself is beginning to change. I'm engaged in what Bush (erroneously, surprise surprise) refers to as "revisionist history." I've already started telling myself that it wasn't really that bad and that I actually really enjoyed the whole experience quite a bit. When in fact it was that bad, and I certainly didn't enjoy teaching this semester. I didn't hate it either, of course. My feelings about the enterprise are much more complex than that, but the narrative in my head is deceptively simple right now. The highlights, the good classes, the interesting discussions, the assignments that provoked honest though from my students remain embedded and tangible while the poor decisions, and ineffective exercises are slowly banished to the nether regions of my mind, forced to survive on their own with no outside nourishment. We never remember accurately, because accuracy is subjective, but I think there is a real danger not in inaccuracy but in extremity. Remembering this semester, and in turn making future decisions based on those stories, as either extremely good or bad will have equally poor outcomes.
> 3 comments
First, I think the final assignment I gave my students (see below) is hard. It's interesting and a good test of their knowledge and skill, but it's not easy. So I'm a tish worried that only 5 of them have come to me asking for help/clarification. I don't want to read a class full of poorly written 12 page essays.
On the other hand, I'm just a little concerned about what has been going on in my head lately about this past semester. Now that there is a little distance between myself and the day to day preparations of the class, the story that I tell myself is beginning to change. I'm engaged in what Bush (erroneously, surprise surprise) refers to as "revisionist history." I've already started telling myself that it wasn't really that bad and that I actually really enjoyed the whole experience quite a bit. When in fact it was that bad, and I certainly didn't enjoy teaching this semester. I didn't hate it either, of course. My feelings about the enterprise are much more complex than that, but the narrative in my head is deceptively simple right now. The highlights, the good classes, the interesting discussions, the assignments that provoked honest though from my students remain embedded and tangible while the poor decisions, and ineffective exercises are slowly banished to the nether regions of my mind, forced to survive on their own with no outside nourishment. We never remember accurately, because accuracy is subjective, but I think there is a real danger not in inaccuracy but in extremity. Remembering this semester, and in turn making future decisions based on those stories, as either extremely good or bad will have equally poor outcomes.
> 3 comments
