Teaching is a divided sort of profession. It's a dangerous condition, or at least one that can be deeply ensnaring, leading to a sort of mental bifurcation or even schizoid state.
Good teachers, I would bet, find a good balance between content and metacontent, between the subject knowledge they teach and the way they teach that subject knowledge, between thinking about subject and thinking about the learning process.
I know why I got into teaching: because of the ideas I get to think about. In this I am not different from many--perhaps even most--teachers. Because this is my orientation, the way I desire to set up a class is this: Hmm, these are the works (poems, stories, novels) I want to talk about; we'll read them in this order and talk about them; I'll walk into class and say, "So what did you think?"; then we'll talk about them; the end.
Then comes the meta. The above "process," if one could even call it a process, is no doubt "teacher-centered." It doesn't take into account at what level students are reading, whether they have the vocabulary to discuss a given work, whether they've been introduced to the ideas of the work or are encountering them for the first time, etc.
Thus, a teacher must enter the kingdom of Chun King: the land where teachers break down, even in the study of literature, the smaller chunks that students need to be able to build toward the biggest ideas, the higher level mental processes that will illustrate true learning. The meta.
I would prefer never to leave the land of content for the kingdom of Chun King. I'm tempted to say one can get lost in the kingdom of Chun King, that one can spend so much time considering the Meta as to lose sight of the palace of content there on the hill in the distance, though I know this most often false. Some of the best humanities teachers I've had keep their Chun King forays to a very few practices--creating an inviting classroom, asking good questions, making much of mundane or even lacking student answers, all the while leading the class toward the higher content ideas. Some of the panic over online teaching no doubt results from the fears that suddenly because of the new medium we will get lost in Chun King.
"Chunking" content is the most blessed of teaching words I've ever learned. It's a way to talk about the Meta of teaching without making it feel like a teacher must get lost in the kingdom of Chun King. Of course we're going to break this gourmet meal down into chunks; it can't go down whole. However, when you're a teacher who is in love with the content that's exactly what you want to jump to--to after meal discussion rather than enjoying every bite along the way.
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Sunday, February 22, 2015
The Written or the Spoken
You know them early in a class: the speakers. Once they out themselves, some categorizing is in order: the verbal processors, the salesmen, the cover crops. Some students process verbally while the rest of us wait for them to find their thought; some take the topic and sell it back to you, for a grade; some are just trying to cover and they expect that volunteering anything at all will float them through, but the oats they sow in what they say burns up under the sun of cross-examination since the soil underneath is all clay and stone.
Some teachers are big on the risk needed to learn--everyone talks, everyone must process aloud and join in this group endeavor. I dreaded classes where I would be outed. I came to the study of literature due to that dread. Sometimes, I didn't know what I thought, found those who did to be messengers of God himself. I was forced to try my hand and it worked out for the best but man was it uncomfortable.
But write my responses--that was a piece of tiramisu. Give me time and a pen or keypad, however, and I was much more at ease. And found I did, in the end, have thoughts. What can you say in twenty-minute class discussion compared to a five minute writing exercise? A lot more. I process as a writer.
A colleague of mine recently taught The Things They Carried, a Vietnam war book. He failed to call on the one Asian kid in the class--rightfully so--to see if he had any "special" knowledge on the place. Then, after the fact, the student volunteered that indeed he had been to Vietnam and scene the tunnels dug by the Vietcong.
How could he have gotten the student to volunteer this information? We speculated as to how it might have been done--and whether it would have happened more easily in writing.
As I enter online teaching, I know the written response will play a major role. I like that idea; then again, that's how I process, in the written word--and, more specifically, as this blog shows, in one form of the written word which is increasingly the long written form.
But that should give me pause as well--as I consider the speakers and those for whom the written word, the keyboard, the long form is forbidding and ominous.
And this brings us back to all the intuition that's central to teaching: to figure out quickly who your students are, how they're trying to manage, what's their natural language, the written or the spoken.
Some teachers are big on the risk needed to learn--everyone talks, everyone must process aloud and join in this group endeavor. I dreaded classes where I would be outed. I came to the study of literature due to that dread. Sometimes, I didn't know what I thought, found those who did to be messengers of God himself. I was forced to try my hand and it worked out for the best but man was it uncomfortable.
But write my responses--that was a piece of tiramisu. Give me time and a pen or keypad, however, and I was much more at ease. And found I did, in the end, have thoughts. What can you say in twenty-minute class discussion compared to a five minute writing exercise? A lot more. I process as a writer.
A colleague of mine recently taught The Things They Carried, a Vietnam war book. He failed to call on the one Asian kid in the class--rightfully so--to see if he had any "special" knowledge on the place. Then, after the fact, the student volunteered that indeed he had been to Vietnam and scene the tunnels dug by the Vietcong.
How could he have gotten the student to volunteer this information? We speculated as to how it might have been done--and whether it would have happened more easily in writing.
As I enter online teaching, I know the written response will play a major role. I like that idea; then again, that's how I process, in the written word--and, more specifically, as this blog shows, in one form of the written word which is increasingly the long written form.
But that should give me pause as well--as I consider the speakers and those for whom the written word, the keyboard, the long form is forbidding and ominous.
And this brings us back to all the intuition that's central to teaching: to figure out quickly who your students are, how they're trying to manage, what's their natural language, the written or the spoken.
Monday, February 2, 2015
Medium?
Technology is not neutral; I know this. It's also not simply negatively charged; I also know this. The computer is a tool for creativity. Okay. Course Management Systems are a medium for great creativity.
That white space is silence.
In my logical mind, I know that our CMS (names of things that need to be made into abbreviations are bad names so let me try again)--I know that Canvas is trying to be exactly that: a canvas on which to create beautiful courses. I see what other people do on their blogs--with pictures and links and multimedia and formatting and such and I recognize it as pleasing, and even, in extreme cases, beautiful.
Heck, as I began to think about my own online course, I thought about pictures and videos and an NPR article that I could link to the course "map," and the idea of it was very--or at least decently--good.
The problem is, I've decided, that I don't respond well to the medium, don't find surfing around and grabbing things and linking them and prettifying them all that compelling.
Then again, it's not that I find the classroom compelling, either--I mean, as a medium. "Medium" implies a lack of immediacy. When you read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in a cement brick classroom with vinyl tiles, it makes you want to wield a sledgehammer; when you read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in Dorset, England, the book is still dreary and maddening, but it makes you sad and melancholy rather than making you go postal.
It was a trip to Britain to study literature on location that sent me, somewhat unwillingly at first, into the classroom. In the classroom, the Herculean effort of teachers is one of transcending medium: to use the mind and imagination to leave the classroom even when you don't. That's hard work.
Now, this summer I'm supposed to take this classroom work into another medium, one that in many respects has more possibilities than a brick-and-mortar classroom: consider this blog as an attempt to convince myself that this is true.
But a cyber classroom is still a medium, just with different walls, and it's still the thing I will be trying to get readers--my students--to transcend.
Perhaps that's my fear of this medium: I know there are people who like its walls, who prefer to stay within its walls. That's dangerous, I think, and perhaps that's one of the reasons I'm hesitant to throw myself into this medium of online education.
Because the point is the immediacy of literature and life; the point is to break through the medium to something fuller and more true.
Then again, that's the danger of literature itself: that people like to stay within its pages. I know that enjoying stories has value in itself, but I'm very much an application person myself. I read so that I might experience differently, better, fuller.
So, I'm telling myself at the end of this blog, the point is not "the medium." The point is "the full,"but you've got to go through medium to get there.
That white space is silence.
In my logical mind, I know that our CMS (names of things that need to be made into abbreviations are bad names so let me try again)--I know that Canvas is trying to be exactly that: a canvas on which to create beautiful courses. I see what other people do on their blogs--with pictures and links and multimedia and formatting and such and I recognize it as pleasing, and even, in extreme cases, beautiful.
Heck, as I began to think about my own online course, I thought about pictures and videos and an NPR article that I could link to the course "map," and the idea of it was very--or at least decently--good.
The problem is, I've decided, that I don't respond well to the medium, don't find surfing around and grabbing things and linking them and prettifying them all that compelling.
Then again, it's not that I find the classroom compelling, either--I mean, as a medium. "Medium" implies a lack of immediacy. When you read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in a cement brick classroom with vinyl tiles, it makes you want to wield a sledgehammer; when you read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in Dorset, England, the book is still dreary and maddening, but it makes you sad and melancholy rather than making you go postal.
It was a trip to Britain to study literature on location that sent me, somewhat unwillingly at first, into the classroom. In the classroom, the Herculean effort of teachers is one of transcending medium: to use the mind and imagination to leave the classroom even when you don't. That's hard work.
Now, this summer I'm supposed to take this classroom work into another medium, one that in many respects has more possibilities than a brick-and-mortar classroom: consider this blog as an attempt to convince myself that this is true.
But a cyber classroom is still a medium, just with different walls, and it's still the thing I will be trying to get readers--my students--to transcend.
Perhaps that's my fear of this medium: I know there are people who like its walls, who prefer to stay within its walls. That's dangerous, I think, and perhaps that's one of the reasons I'm hesitant to throw myself into this medium of online education.
Because the point is the immediacy of literature and life; the point is to break through the medium to something fuller and more true.
Then again, that's the danger of literature itself: that people like to stay within its pages. I know that enjoying stories has value in itself, but I'm very much an application person myself. I read so that I might experience differently, better, fuller.
So, I'm telling myself at the end of this blog, the point is not "the medium." The point is "the full,"but you've got to go through medium to get there.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Luddite
I never considered myself a true Luddite; it was more of a posture. Now, the older I get, the more I fear I really am one. That's not a good realization at the beginning of BOLT 101.
Let me clarify "Luddite." I find myself preferring to not use technology, find myself steering away from it. I find myself with a short fuse when I use it. Thus, the tone of voice used by the blogger tutorial almost caused me--yes, it caused me; it was not a choice on my part (emoticon)--to shut my computer and go home for the day. I suppose this should give me pause and alert me to the fact that, when I use videos to connect to students I had better--what?--be myself behind the camera.
Which brings me to another issue of technology: self-awareness. I dislike conference calls, video chats with anyone I don't know, etc., because the technology makes me feel very self-conscious and self-consciously aware that I'm once removed from whomever I'm talking with. That and, like my children--this is not a good sign--I'm very tempted to make faces into the camera. Isn't that what cameras are for? "Say cheese" "Now do a funny one."
All these things make teaching in front of a computer somewhat counter-intuitive for me, which means I'm starting this with an uphill battle.
Then again, I've been trying to imagine doing all of this via written communication. I write better than I speak, so on one hand that's good news. Then again again, I can't imagine writing everything to everyone, so the idea of being able to record what I want to say makes me think, yeah, that makes sense.
In short, I've begun plodding along but I have hope that my plodding will become a more leisurely but directed stroll.
Let me clarify "Luddite." I find myself preferring to not use technology, find myself steering away from it. I find myself with a short fuse when I use it. Thus, the tone of voice used by the blogger tutorial almost caused me--yes, it caused me; it was not a choice on my part (emoticon)--to shut my computer and go home for the day. I suppose this should give me pause and alert me to the fact that, when I use videos to connect to students I had better--what?--be myself behind the camera.
Which brings me to another issue of technology: self-awareness. I dislike conference calls, video chats with anyone I don't know, etc., because the technology makes me feel very self-conscious and self-consciously aware that I'm once removed from whomever I'm talking with. That and, like my children--this is not a good sign--I'm very tempted to make faces into the camera. Isn't that what cameras are for? "Say cheese" "Now do a funny one."
All these things make teaching in front of a computer somewhat counter-intuitive for me, which means I'm starting this with an uphill battle.
Then again, I've been trying to imagine doing all of this via written communication. I write better than I speak, so on one hand that's good news. Then again again, I can't imagine writing everything to everyone, so the idea of being able to record what I want to say makes me think, yeah, that makes sense.
In short, I've begun plodding along but I have hope that my plodding will become a more leisurely but directed stroll.
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