dramaturgy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dramaturgy) wrote2010-12-07 01:50 pm
dramaturgy) wrote2010-12-07 01:50 pm
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So for my Teaching Practicum, my final project was writing a teaching philosophy. I don't even know half of what I said, I kind of went into a trace like state and just said a bunch of stuff, but my teacher liked it. So I don't know, there are a lot of teachers on my flist, so maybe someone else will get something out of it.
Before this semester, I had never been the teacher. Sure, I had taught Sunday school for a few years to kindergarteners, but telling a few bible stories and singing "Jesus Loves Me" isn't exactly being responsible for an aspect of someone's post secondary education. There is a whole different set of rules and guidelines to follow and different things expected of both students and teachers. As a student, I had formed ideas and opinions on teaching, as all students do whether they know it or not. But ideas and opinions are not a philosophy -- opinions are subjective and extremely changeable, ideas less so but still not quite solid, and will eventually harden into a philosophy.
After four months -- really, closer to three -- I'm not sure that I am qualified to give anything that could be categorized as a philosophy, but I have some solid ideas that need more testing:
1. A little fear is healthy. (Theirs, not yours.)
2. Teachers should be teaching students how to think, not just "facts."
3. When you have made a mistake, admit it.
4. Balance is everything.
5. Ultimately the onus to learn is on them and not on you.
I think this is pretty representative of the things that have been solidified for me this semester as a teacher.
1. A little fear is healthy. (Theirs, not yours.)
I had a lot of teachers that, as an undergrad, were frightening on the first day of class. They seemed rigid, inflexible, and to a point, unapproachable. In all but one case I stayed with the class ("History of Medieval Europe" I dropped for reasons having nothing to do with workload), and when I was a junior, Dr. Nordmann let me in on the secret: "We are intimidating on the first day to scare out the kids who don't want to do the work, and lighten up as the semester goes on so you like us." (Of course, this was also the man who gave us the advice, "If someone asks what you're going to do after you graduate, say, 'I was thinking about law school,' even if you weren't. Ninety-five percent of the time, it'll shut people up," so a grain of salt should be taken.)
I am not an intimidating person, nor do I consider myself rigid and unmoving, but I decided that I was going to try and take a leaf out of Machiavelli's book -- this book being The Prince. The very watered down version of one thing that appears in the book is that it is better to be feared than loved, and this has to do with keeping control of the populace. If they are afraid of you then the likelihood that they are going to mutiny is lessened. I haven't decided if this is an effective plan for a classroom or not.
I started by being inflexible, giving Hard Looks to students who moseyed in late like it was no big deal, did not credit reading quizzes taken by latecomers, all those things that I said I would do in the syllabus, but eventually, I relaxed. Then something strange happened -- they caught on. They smelled my fear of them, and of the responsibility that teaching gave me. They had to, it's the only explanation I have for some of the things that they asked me (or flat out told me -- "I think we'll work better if we're allowed to choose our own groups," in a tone so condescending my hand itched to smack them). I don't think that all of them had more money than sense and entitlement than both those things, although I'm sure for a couple of them that may have been the case. The point is, they knew that they made me nervous and they pressed this button like a deranged lab rat presses the happy button. What resulted was an unarmed Mexican standoff where about ten or so students had their "guns" pointed at me while I hid behind the desk and the other twenty-five were disinterested.
That said, I can afford to show less fear and maybe instill a little bit more in them.
2. Teachers should be teaching students how to think, not just "facts."
I come from a liberal arts background, so it isn't surprising that I think this. In general, I think we as a country are too concerned with remaining "Number One" with Asian countries whizzing by us in math and science, and at the risk of sounding clichéd, are on the verge of producing generations of people who are just machines. Instead of raising people, and citizens with diverse interests and talents, we are putting people in boxes where having "the right answer" and pleasing your teacher is important. I am all for math and science, don't get me wrong, but when I can't even get a response from a person on whether they liked reading a play or not (even as a "yes" or "no!") then something is wrong. These are kids whose right to an opinion has been stomped on by quantitative rather than qualitative education. The fact that there can be more than one right answer (or no right or wrong answer) seems foreign.
There are numerous things at fault here; No Child Left Behind is a popular one in this day and age, and I'm not going to discount it, but it is not the only culprit. Tied to NCLB (appropriately referred to by education majors in my undergraduate institution and others as "Nickleby," as in Nicholas Nickleby) is a lack of resources for public schools, and in the face of all this, a sense of apathy from both students and teachers. I will be the first to admit to fighting this dragon time after time and only seeming to keep it at bay, never killing it outright. Teaching is a thankless profession on the best of days -- on the worst, it can be a kick in the face.
Except it's not that these students don't think they're allowed to have opinions -- they have opinions, in spades, whether I want them or not. They for some reason think Jersey Shore is the bomb, Superbad was robbed of an Academy Award, and that Beyonce is "smoking." They think their friend's mustache is stupid, their scripts suck, the quiz was hard, and Fritos are the height of cuisine. I think it's that they don't know how to have an opinion about the arts.
From the cradle we're taught that theatre is something arcane and inaccessible; Shakespeare writes in "Old English, or something," the Greek playwrights have nothing to say to us, and musicals are stupid because who just bursts out singing in the middle of nothing anyway? Theatre is expensive and rare in places with small, widespread populations (i.e. most of this country) and when it is neither of these things, it is usually so bad as to be thought as a waste of your time. But it is also one of the oldest forms of art known to man that, compared to some things, has changed remarkably little. If it's so hard and inaccessible, why is it still around?
I'm aware that arts teachers have their work cut out for them, now more than ever. Subjects like science, for instance, can have an immediately measureable impact on peoples' lives. The arts is less easily detected. How do we know someone, anyone's life is improved by going to a play, or seeing a painting hanging in a museum? We can write about it as it happens, and trace trends and movements in mediums, but ultimately the effect of arts on human activity as a whole is understood in hindsight. Therefore it is seen as less intrinsically valuable.
Remedying this is not just up to me, as a university lecturer/TA or university faculty as a whole, but to all teachers everywhere. Instead of education being a series of facts to be learned and spat back at the teacher, it needs to become a collection of information that forms arguments and controversies, and encourages students to see the relatability between events -- this is why I am a big believer in teaching history and using the Socratic method where the teacher and students have a dialogue, rather than expecting the students to listen to me blather for forty plus minutes. In history you encounter everything: science, mathematics, arts, politics, and geography, but it all comes together in learning about people and how they function as social animals.
3. When you have made a mistake, admit it.
I am not perfect. There, I said it.
Now that you've recovered from your shock, let me say that making a mistake is not fun. I know, I've made a lot of them. It's not so much that I love being right, it's just that I really, really hate being wrong. If I'm reading a mystery novel or watching a crime procedural, I don't even guess at "whodunit" because I would rather wait and see than put all my money on one horse, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor.
That said, even if I really don't like it, I can admit when I'm wrong. I have had some really poorly worded questions on quizzes. Instead of trying to worm my way out of it, I just said, "Yeah, I screwed up here. I'll give you that point free." It's not a big deal, and I'd like to think that ultimately they respected me in the morning for it.
I may have made a mistake in admitting that I was a first time teacher (see my first tenant of this philosophy), but that was a tradeoff I was willing to make. While that may have made them less fearful of me, I think it also made them more understanding. It sort of put us all in the same leaky rowboat, even though I was clearly still driving the bus. (Again, forgive the mixed metaphor.) I think the lesson here is that owning up to your mistakes shows the students that you respect them enough to lower yourself from the godlike pedestal of professorship (or, uh, TAship) and show your humanity, and that respect from them will (hopefully) soon follow.
4. Balance is everything.
There are times when I have to talk at them for a good solid half an hour or so. But there are also times when I let them talk at me for a half an hour or so. (You know, if they choose to do so. Otherwise I can sit there for half an hour waiting for them.)
There are also times when I have to draw on the board. Whether it is my awful attempt at three dimensional drawings to show the stage, an awful character map of Hamlet with stick figures, or a list of names and terms, sometimes I have to be boring and use the chalkboard. Other times, I can tote in my laptop and a projector and their eyes light up when they say, "Are we going to watch something?" like they never left kindergarten. Then I show them a clip from The Producers and we talk about how this displays the duties that an actual producer must actually do (or, how it doesn't).
You don't want your kids to be bored, but at the same time, sometimes you just have to infodump at them. I don't think that there's shame in either of those things. It's finding the happy medium between the two where engagement buys you time to blather.
5. Ultimately the onus to learn is on them and not on you.
The first time a student asked me if there was a curve, I was flabbergasted. A grading curve? Grading curves are for high schoolers and science majors! And then I remembered that a lot of these kids WERE science majors, and it all made sense.
Like I said earlier, I am from a liberal arts background. A theatre and history double major, I come from two disciplines where if you do crappy work you get a crappy grade. That I am not willing to compromise on. When I was a senior, I took my last general education requirement, a lab science in Holography and Optics -- Physics. The first test I had, I received a low B. I was surprised, because I admittedly had not studied as hard as I should have. But then Dr. Feller began explaining the curve, and my stomach sank. I had, in reality, received a D. Not a barely passing D, but still, a great deal lower than anything I'd received in a great while. That's when it all hit me. I thought about the adage about not wanting a C doctor operating on you, and then I realized: they're all C doctors. They're A's on a curve.
Once I stopped panicking about the transcripts of every doctor I've ever gone to see, I calmed down and decided that I simply preferred getting the grade I'd earned -- of course, this is after a lifetime of being the student who usually blew the curve for everyone else, so my experience is admittedly not typical. So first, I had to get myself out of the mindset that all students are A students, because that's simply not true.
Second, I had to look at bad grades (on quizzes or on tests) and figure out if it was my fault or their fault. I had an occasion where twenty-five of the thirty students who had taken the reading quiz had missed the question -- it was about which artist (of four choices) had authored a certain piece. I had chosen this question because I needed a tenth question to round out my quiz, which is admittedly a crappy reason to chose anything. I threw the question out and gave them all the point because I realized that wasn't the information I wanted them leaving the classroom with -- I wanted them to have broad ideas rather than specifics about who wrote what. So that was my bad.
But quizzes that were in three and four point ranges out of ten when most were eights and nines? That was not my fault. It was always easy to tell when someone had not done their reading, or had not read the question carefully. But still, I can't help but feel like a bad teacher. Was the reading too boring? (There were a few occasions when I selected the readings myself from other sources.) Was it too hard? Was I asking too much? Was I being too harsh?
It took me awhile to step back and realize that while I am a teacher and can motivate, cheerlead, and otherwise urge students to take initiative, it is their fault if they do not do the work or get help if they are having trouble. Content and testing I can control, but the actual learning has to come from them. The old cliché goes that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Well… you can lead college undergrads to Introduction to Theatre, but you can't make them learn Aristotle's six parts of a play or read The Sea Gull.
I am a perfectionist. I don't like to be wrong, and I don't like to fail even though I know it's going to happen. I don't like disappointing others and more than that, I don't like disappointing myself. While I wouldn't say that I am a disappointing teacher, I am by no means a perfect one with perfect technique or methods -- or even really a workable philosophy. What I do have is my experience, and what I can base on my experience. I am a work in progress as a person, and one more facet has just been added to that work: teacher.
Before this semester, I had never been the teacher. Sure, I had taught Sunday school for a few years to kindergarteners, but telling a few bible stories and singing "Jesus Loves Me" isn't exactly being responsible for an aspect of someone's post secondary education. There is a whole different set of rules and guidelines to follow and different things expected of both students and teachers. As a student, I had formed ideas and opinions on teaching, as all students do whether they know it or not. But ideas and opinions are not a philosophy -- opinions are subjective and extremely changeable, ideas less so but still not quite solid, and will eventually harden into a philosophy.
After four months -- really, closer to three -- I'm not sure that I am qualified to give anything that could be categorized as a philosophy, but I have some solid ideas that need more testing:
1. A little fear is healthy. (Theirs, not yours.)
2. Teachers should be teaching students how to think, not just "facts."
3. When you have made a mistake, admit it.
4. Balance is everything.
5. Ultimately the onus to learn is on them and not on you.
I think this is pretty representative of the things that have been solidified for me this semester as a teacher.
1. A little fear is healthy. (Theirs, not yours.)
I had a lot of teachers that, as an undergrad, were frightening on the first day of class. They seemed rigid, inflexible, and to a point, unapproachable. In all but one case I stayed with the class ("History of Medieval Europe" I dropped for reasons having nothing to do with workload), and when I was a junior, Dr. Nordmann let me in on the secret: "We are intimidating on the first day to scare out the kids who don't want to do the work, and lighten up as the semester goes on so you like us." (Of course, this was also the man who gave us the advice, "If someone asks what you're going to do after you graduate, say, 'I was thinking about law school,' even if you weren't. Ninety-five percent of the time, it'll shut people up," so a grain of salt should be taken.)
I am not an intimidating person, nor do I consider myself rigid and unmoving, but I decided that I was going to try and take a leaf out of Machiavelli's book -- this book being The Prince. The very watered down version of one thing that appears in the book is that it is better to be feared than loved, and this has to do with keeping control of the populace. If they are afraid of you then the likelihood that they are going to mutiny is lessened. I haven't decided if this is an effective plan for a classroom or not.
I started by being inflexible, giving Hard Looks to students who moseyed in late like it was no big deal, did not credit reading quizzes taken by latecomers, all those things that I said I would do in the syllabus, but eventually, I relaxed. Then something strange happened -- they caught on. They smelled my fear of them, and of the responsibility that teaching gave me. They had to, it's the only explanation I have for some of the things that they asked me (or flat out told me -- "I think we'll work better if we're allowed to choose our own groups," in a tone so condescending my hand itched to smack them). I don't think that all of them had more money than sense and entitlement than both those things, although I'm sure for a couple of them that may have been the case. The point is, they knew that they made me nervous and they pressed this button like a deranged lab rat presses the happy button. What resulted was an unarmed Mexican standoff where about ten or so students had their "guns" pointed at me while I hid behind the desk and the other twenty-five were disinterested.
That said, I can afford to show less fear and maybe instill a little bit more in them.
2. Teachers should be teaching students how to think, not just "facts."
I come from a liberal arts background, so it isn't surprising that I think this. In general, I think we as a country are too concerned with remaining "Number One" with Asian countries whizzing by us in math and science, and at the risk of sounding clichéd, are on the verge of producing generations of people who are just machines. Instead of raising people, and citizens with diverse interests and talents, we are putting people in boxes where having "the right answer" and pleasing your teacher is important. I am all for math and science, don't get me wrong, but when I can't even get a response from a person on whether they liked reading a play or not (even as a "yes" or "no!") then something is wrong. These are kids whose right to an opinion has been stomped on by quantitative rather than qualitative education. The fact that there can be more than one right answer (or no right or wrong answer) seems foreign.
There are numerous things at fault here; No Child Left Behind is a popular one in this day and age, and I'm not going to discount it, but it is not the only culprit. Tied to NCLB (appropriately referred to by education majors in my undergraduate institution and others as "Nickleby," as in Nicholas Nickleby) is a lack of resources for public schools, and in the face of all this, a sense of apathy from both students and teachers. I will be the first to admit to fighting this dragon time after time and only seeming to keep it at bay, never killing it outright. Teaching is a thankless profession on the best of days -- on the worst, it can be a kick in the face.
Except it's not that these students don't think they're allowed to have opinions -- they have opinions, in spades, whether I want them or not. They for some reason think Jersey Shore is the bomb, Superbad was robbed of an Academy Award, and that Beyonce is "smoking." They think their friend's mustache is stupid, their scripts suck, the quiz was hard, and Fritos are the height of cuisine. I think it's that they don't know how to have an opinion about the arts.
From the cradle we're taught that theatre is something arcane and inaccessible; Shakespeare writes in "Old English, or something," the Greek playwrights have nothing to say to us, and musicals are stupid because who just bursts out singing in the middle of nothing anyway? Theatre is expensive and rare in places with small, widespread populations (i.e. most of this country) and when it is neither of these things, it is usually so bad as to be thought as a waste of your time. But it is also one of the oldest forms of art known to man that, compared to some things, has changed remarkably little. If it's so hard and inaccessible, why is it still around?
I'm aware that arts teachers have their work cut out for them, now more than ever. Subjects like science, for instance, can have an immediately measureable impact on peoples' lives. The arts is less easily detected. How do we know someone, anyone's life is improved by going to a play, or seeing a painting hanging in a museum? We can write about it as it happens, and trace trends and movements in mediums, but ultimately the effect of arts on human activity as a whole is understood in hindsight. Therefore it is seen as less intrinsically valuable.
Remedying this is not just up to me, as a university lecturer/TA or university faculty as a whole, but to all teachers everywhere. Instead of education being a series of facts to be learned and spat back at the teacher, it needs to become a collection of information that forms arguments and controversies, and encourages students to see the relatability between events -- this is why I am a big believer in teaching history and using the Socratic method where the teacher and students have a dialogue, rather than expecting the students to listen to me blather for forty plus minutes. In history you encounter everything: science, mathematics, arts, politics, and geography, but it all comes together in learning about people and how they function as social animals.
3. When you have made a mistake, admit it.
I am not perfect. There, I said it.
Now that you've recovered from your shock, let me say that making a mistake is not fun. I know, I've made a lot of them. It's not so much that I love being right, it's just that I really, really hate being wrong. If I'm reading a mystery novel or watching a crime procedural, I don't even guess at "whodunit" because I would rather wait and see than put all my money on one horse, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor.
That said, even if I really don't like it, I can admit when I'm wrong. I have had some really poorly worded questions on quizzes. Instead of trying to worm my way out of it, I just said, "Yeah, I screwed up here. I'll give you that point free." It's not a big deal, and I'd like to think that ultimately they respected me in the morning for it.
I may have made a mistake in admitting that I was a first time teacher (see my first tenant of this philosophy), but that was a tradeoff I was willing to make. While that may have made them less fearful of me, I think it also made them more understanding. It sort of put us all in the same leaky rowboat, even though I was clearly still driving the bus. (Again, forgive the mixed metaphor.) I think the lesson here is that owning up to your mistakes shows the students that you respect them enough to lower yourself from the godlike pedestal of professorship (or, uh, TAship) and show your humanity, and that respect from them will (hopefully) soon follow.
4. Balance is everything.
There are times when I have to talk at them for a good solid half an hour or so. But there are also times when I let them talk at me for a half an hour or so. (You know, if they choose to do so. Otherwise I can sit there for half an hour waiting for them.)
There are also times when I have to draw on the board. Whether it is my awful attempt at three dimensional drawings to show the stage, an awful character map of Hamlet with stick figures, or a list of names and terms, sometimes I have to be boring and use the chalkboard. Other times, I can tote in my laptop and a projector and their eyes light up when they say, "Are we going to watch something?" like they never left kindergarten. Then I show them a clip from The Producers and we talk about how this displays the duties that an actual producer must actually do (or, how it doesn't).
You don't want your kids to be bored, but at the same time, sometimes you just have to infodump at them. I don't think that there's shame in either of those things. It's finding the happy medium between the two where engagement buys you time to blather.
5. Ultimately the onus to learn is on them and not on you.
The first time a student asked me if there was a curve, I was flabbergasted. A grading curve? Grading curves are for high schoolers and science majors! And then I remembered that a lot of these kids WERE science majors, and it all made sense.
Like I said earlier, I am from a liberal arts background. A theatre and history double major, I come from two disciplines where if you do crappy work you get a crappy grade. That I am not willing to compromise on. When I was a senior, I took my last general education requirement, a lab science in Holography and Optics -- Physics. The first test I had, I received a low B. I was surprised, because I admittedly had not studied as hard as I should have. But then Dr. Feller began explaining the curve, and my stomach sank. I had, in reality, received a D. Not a barely passing D, but still, a great deal lower than anything I'd received in a great while. That's when it all hit me. I thought about the adage about not wanting a C doctor operating on you, and then I realized: they're all C doctors. They're A's on a curve.
Once I stopped panicking about the transcripts of every doctor I've ever gone to see, I calmed down and decided that I simply preferred getting the grade I'd earned -- of course, this is after a lifetime of being the student who usually blew the curve for everyone else, so my experience is admittedly not typical. So first, I had to get myself out of the mindset that all students are A students, because that's simply not true.
Second, I had to look at bad grades (on quizzes or on tests) and figure out if it was my fault or their fault. I had an occasion where twenty-five of the thirty students who had taken the reading quiz had missed the question -- it was about which artist (of four choices) had authored a certain piece. I had chosen this question because I needed a tenth question to round out my quiz, which is admittedly a crappy reason to chose anything. I threw the question out and gave them all the point because I realized that wasn't the information I wanted them leaving the classroom with -- I wanted them to have broad ideas rather than specifics about who wrote what. So that was my bad.
But quizzes that were in three and four point ranges out of ten when most were eights and nines? That was not my fault. It was always easy to tell when someone had not done their reading, or had not read the question carefully. But still, I can't help but feel like a bad teacher. Was the reading too boring? (There were a few occasions when I selected the readings myself from other sources.) Was it too hard? Was I asking too much? Was I being too harsh?
It took me awhile to step back and realize that while I am a teacher and can motivate, cheerlead, and otherwise urge students to take initiative, it is their fault if they do not do the work or get help if they are having trouble. Content and testing I can control, but the actual learning has to come from them. The old cliché goes that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Well… you can lead college undergrads to Introduction to Theatre, but you can't make them learn Aristotle's six parts of a play or read The Sea Gull.
I am a perfectionist. I don't like to be wrong, and I don't like to fail even though I know it's going to happen. I don't like disappointing others and more than that, I don't like disappointing myself. While I wouldn't say that I am a disappointing teacher, I am by no means a perfect one with perfect technique or methods -- or even really a workable philosophy. What I do have is my experience, and what I can base on my experience. I am a work in progress as a person, and one more facet has just been added to that work: teacher.
no subject
no subject
And for the record, the questions weren't impossible.
no subject