OK, a little bit of whining
My students are driving me to drink.
I gave them their final exam last night and after 3 solid hours of grading their final projects, I started grading their exams at about 10PM. I quit at 10:15 and decided that not only was I hungry (and as an aside, I learned that diesel trucks are incompatible with drive-throughs …) but that 10 at night and sober was no time to be facing these exams. Sigh. Now admittedly, when I took this class as part of my master’s degree, most of the students did badly on this exam. It’s hard. I knew that. But still!
Obviously these are first time teacher woes, but I think my experience probably shows up the worst and best of higher education here in the US. The best part is that I actually care about these kids. They are young, idealistic, most of them first or second generation immigrants and they have day jobs and families so they go to school at night. I support them. I want them to succeed. Given the fact that they got up somewhere between 4-6AM to work all day, rush home to feed their kids and are still awake at 9PM at night trying to absorb the finer points of Western fashion history, I salute their drive and discipline.
However, the worst – in my opinion – is that I have no teaching certificate (and I don’t need one since I have an MFA degree) which means that I’m teaching this stuff by trial and error. And I always feel slightly ashamed admitting that. “Yeah I teach. Nope, no real training. Yeah, they let me do it anyway. Who knew?”
And never having taught this class before, it’s a tremendous amount of effort on my part (like 10+ hours per week of preparation and 4 hours of being engaging and charming in class, which is EXHAUSTING :) and I can’t always tell what they are absorbing. I don’t think their lower education experience has really prepared them for college. They don’t write well and it seems that language in general is a huge barrier to them understanding me. It’s frustrating, from a teacher perspective, to go over something several times in class, write it down on the exam sheet and go over it again before the exam and STILL have a few students doing it wrong. I feel like I need a whole other way of communicating because words don’t really do it. My instinct is to come down hard on myself because it’s my responsibility to make sure they understand me.
But who came up with this class room teaching model anyway? Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to put a bunch of people from disparate backgrounds/languages/cultures etc. in the same room and expect them all to learn from one person? Given what we know about the vast differences in the ways that people learn – visual vs. auditory vs, kinesthetic – doesn’t that seem like a recipe for failure? The teacher is going to teach the way that they themselves learn and the only people likely to pick it up are the ones that naturally learn that way or the ones that are extremely adaptable.
So, point being, I have 14 tests to grade and I’m coming up with new and interesting ways to be lenient so I that they will pass it. And it’s only 10 in the morning so I can’t really start drinking yet. I’m starting to have a lot of sympathy for Mrs. Krabappel.
I gave them their final exam last night and after 3 solid hours of grading their final projects, I started grading their exams at about 10PM. I quit at 10:15 and decided that not only was I hungry (and as an aside, I learned that diesel trucks are incompatible with drive-throughs …) but that 10 at night and sober was no time to be facing these exams. Sigh. Now admittedly, when I took this class as part of my master’s degree, most of the students did badly on this exam. It’s hard. I knew that. But still!
Obviously these are first time teacher woes, but I think my experience probably shows up the worst and best of higher education here in the US. The best part is that I actually care about these kids. They are young, idealistic, most of them first or second generation immigrants and they have day jobs and families so they go to school at night. I support them. I want them to succeed. Given the fact that they got up somewhere between 4-6AM to work all day, rush home to feed their kids and are still awake at 9PM at night trying to absorb the finer points of Western fashion history, I salute their drive and discipline.
However, the worst – in my opinion – is that I have no teaching certificate (and I don’t need one since I have an MFA degree) which means that I’m teaching this stuff by trial and error. And I always feel slightly ashamed admitting that. “Yeah I teach. Nope, no real training. Yeah, they let me do it anyway. Who knew?”
And never having taught this class before, it’s a tremendous amount of effort on my part (like 10+ hours per week of preparation and 4 hours of being engaging and charming in class, which is EXHAUSTING :) and I can’t always tell what they are absorbing. I don’t think their lower education experience has really prepared them for college. They don’t write well and it seems that language in general is a huge barrier to them understanding me. It’s frustrating, from a teacher perspective, to go over something several times in class, write it down on the exam sheet and go over it again before the exam and STILL have a few students doing it wrong. I feel like I need a whole other way of communicating because words don’t really do it. My instinct is to come down hard on myself because it’s my responsibility to make sure they understand me.
But who came up with this class room teaching model anyway? Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to put a bunch of people from disparate backgrounds/languages/cultures etc. in the same room and expect them all to learn from one person? Given what we know about the vast differences in the ways that people learn – visual vs. auditory vs, kinesthetic – doesn’t that seem like a recipe for failure? The teacher is going to teach the way that they themselves learn and the only people likely to pick it up are the ones that naturally learn that way or the ones that are extremely adaptable.
So, point being, I have 14 tests to grade and I’m coming up with new and interesting ways to be lenient so I that they will pass it. And it’s only 10 in the morning so I can’t really start drinking yet. I’m starting to have a lot of sympathy for Mrs. Krabappel.
posted by KBARRETT at 11:41 AM
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