Sorry I'm so late, all.
Here are just some random thoughts in response to Chapter 9:
Yay, Meta.
I'm planning on using anonymous feedback. I really wanted to use 1-minute papers as a way to do that, but I really want the feedback to be as anonymous as possible. While I like the idea of getting feedback after every class, I think that I would rather have the feedback be honest and as untraceable as possible. Therefore, I'm going to do something digital. I need to check and see if Blackboard will allow for anonymous feedback and if so, I will use that. Otherwise, I will build something into my course website to allow for that.
I really liked what they said about reading evaluations. I really expected all my writing lab evaluations to be awesome last semester. When I went in to read them, though, I left feeling awful. There were some that praised my services and rated them as excellent, but there were a surprising number that didn't. Similar C&D's example, I got one that said that my services were poor and that I had made her feel stupid and that I was obviously ridiculing her. It's as if that one bad evaluation canceled out all the good ones. Uggh
Anyway, Court's post got me thinking about the Theater of the Oppressed and I thought I would share this with you guys. The troupe came to my College Teaching class last week and did the same skit. Only, this time we picked up from where the instructor left off, rather than replacing the instructor. It was awful! I tried to diffuse the situation by having the students move their chairs into a circle and discuss what had happened. I apologized for my inappropriate behavior and asked that we construct a shared vocabulary to use (trying to get around to discussing the "Indian" vs "Native American" vs "American Indian" vs "Indigenous North American") and the entire thing flopped horribly. The April character was way too upset to want to talk about it, the Davy Joe character still didn't seem to really understand what he said, and the other two really didn't care about it at all. I had said before that in any other class I would have made it a teaching moment but when I actually tried to, the students weren't really interested in it.
This experience has coupled with my attempts to put together a semester's worth of material
to actually make me really scared of teaching. I have been really looking forward to it for a long time, but now I'm really nervous.
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3 comments:
Bri,
I don't think you need to be worried. I think you'll do just fine. With regards to the skit, I can understand where it might have flopped to try to take it up where the prof left off, simply because he'd let it get to a pretty terrible spot. Most of the time, I think, the type of situation that he let develop can be avoided. There will be times, of course, when bad situations like that are unavoidable, but I think that in situations like that it's important to remember that the ultimate responsibility doesn't always rest with you. Our students will be adults; they are responsible for their own words, actions, and reactions. We are responsible for doing our best to provide a good learning environment, but we can't control every aspect of that environment.
Sometimes a bad evaluation is not the result of bad teaching. Sometimes students are frustrated with the material. Sometimes the personality of the instructor doesn't click with the personality of the student. There are other factors. Even the best teachers get bad evaluations that aren't entirely their fault.
I think that you can't take what happened in the skit seriously. For one, like Leta said, that situation was too far gone to fix at that point. Plus, it wouldn't have happened in your classroom to begin with. After teaching high school for 6 years, I only remember one situation which was almost unrecoverable (is that even a word?). I know I tell stories a lot, but there was only one truly bad experience in 6 years, which I will gladly share if you'd like. The point is, the skit is supposed to make teachers more aware of possibilities, but those usually don't happen. I was told when student teaching that I would be the worst teacher ever b/c I was too smart and the boys would hit on me and the girls would tell me when they were pregnant instead of the counselor. Needless to say, my supervisor was wrong. Be confident!! You have a lot of strong skills.
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