I Teach

I made the students rearrange their desks into a circle today. It's amazing what they'll say to each other when they feel comfortable with one another. Especially when they can see each other and not necessarily me. I think this was really important. I positioned myself outside of the circle and though I was leading the discussion (anytime I spoke everyone listened), we had a lot more conversation between students. They even challenged one another. I will say that the hard part is when a student says something that is blatantly wrong, such as, "If we have so much inequality, then why does everyone want to live in the U.S.?" I haven't taught long enough yet to know for sure when I can expect another student to challenge this or when I should step in. In all cases, I would rather have another student be the one to make the counter-argument, but in cases like these where a correction is necessary I need to be ready to step in if nobody else does. The flip side of this is that I think there is only a limited number of times I can step in before they just start expecting me to do it all the time. In other words, I have to pick and choose my battles, and that's hard when you're also trying to manage everything else in the classroom.

But you know, I really believe in this. It's so much better for them to learn to talk to one another and challenge one another in a healthy way. If they don't learn it in my class, I'm sort of afraid that they won't necessarily ever learn how to talk to one another about difficult or touchy subjects. When all is said and done, learning how to talk to one another might just be the most imporant thing we do in this class.
> 0 comments