The beatings will continue until morale improves
OK, so my scintillating charm and wit, along with some serious attention to careful lesson planning, have me in comfortable territory with two of my three classes.
And the other seems to be slipping away. An exercise that goes gangbusters in one section is a bomb in the next, always for a different reason. Teacher-centered classes are met with bored stares, quizzes seem not to be provoking reading (the quiz average is abysmal), and de-centered strategies (of which I am generally most fond) are getting responses from resentful silence to a sense of outright betrayal.
My midterm evaluations from this group of students asked specifically and consistently for more lessons "where we copy notes from the board." I attribute this attitude to the "will-this-be-on-the-test?" mentality propagated by No Child Left Behind (Since None of Them Will be Really Getting Anywhere), but it doesn't make the dilemma any more real. They want to be given the answers, they don't want to read, and they want class to be fun.
I'm not happy with designing lessons for an engaged class and using them to horrible effect in the other class, because a) it's not good teaching, and b) It's an hour of agony three times a week.
So this week's dilemma with the plegmatic class: keep plugging away? let 'em sink? do more tap dancing?
Comments
I think that I'd go with option #3, which would be "you all say you want things written on the board more, but I think that's because you want me to feed answers to you and you don't want to have to work to learn in here. As things stand right now, you as a class are not succeeding. The responsibility for this does not rest solely on my shoulders. We are partners in this class and I've been dancing around like a monkey trying to get you all engaged. It's not working. I see that. But I am not going to adopt ineffective pedagogy to satisfy your desire to be spoon-fed. It's up to you. Decide whether you want to learn something in this class. Decide whether you want to be engaged and active learners. Decide whether you want to get your money's worth. If the answer is no, then perhaps you should drop before the deadline passes."
Or something like that.
The thing is, you are not responsible (or not solely responsible) for what's happening in there. And their "advice" about what they'd like to see in the class is crap, and I don't think there's any harm in telling them that (albeit in a more politic way than I just expressed it).
And if taking the hard line with them doesn't work, I would stop beating yourself up about the class, do your best to make it through to the end of the semester, and pat yourself on the back for surviving it when it's done. It's not worth agonizing over - some classes just suck - for whatever reason.
Posted by: Dr. Crazy | October 31, 2005 2:13 PM
I say, tell them what the evaluations said and why you are not doing that in class. At the very least, they should understand exactly why you are doing what you are doing and why what they want does not work. I tell my students they may not like why we do what we do but they will know why we do it.
Posted by: Nels | October 31, 2005 2:55 PM
I've done almost precisely the sort of post-evaluation talk that you both suggest, and the effect seemed to be a higher attendance attrition rate. So whatever about that: those students aren't likely to pass.
Ultimately, I may be overreacting to a certain degree. After yesterday's class (which occured right after I posted, and went fairly well) I learned (fairly clearly) that it's not that they're sullen, lazy, passive and pissed off at me. Just passive. Which I suppose is better, since I can at least walk in without expecting hostility.
Posted by: RMC | November 1, 2005 7:41 PM