Both of my parents taught school in Oklahoma City and American Samoa, and I've listened to them talk about their students my entire life. They are both retired now, but every so often, my mother agrees to substitute because she misses having a regular group of students. It surprises me that they aren't both teaching night school, because they did that, too, and liked the challenge of helping students earn their GED.
I had the great good fortune, or extremely bad luck, to have both of my parents as teachers --my mother was also my fifth grade teacher at Fia Iloa, and my father volunteered to teach at Samoana, my high school, so that I could have the benefit of his in-person teaching, instead of his televised lessons beamed all over the island to village school children. Was I appreciative? Not really--I think it warped me for life. I was, however, able to observe up close and in person the teaching styles of both parents and in later years chose their best techniques to use in my own classroom.
The biggest difference between them was their teaching style--my father could lecture for hours without notes on any of the historical times we studied, disclosing juicy tidbits about historical figures and helping all of us think about and understand what motivated the people in history to behave as they did--and how their behavior changed the world for better or worse.
My mother's approach to teaching was more individualized, but less engaging. My father cajoled us into learning by letting us peek behind the curtains of history. My mother didn't cajole. We all had work to do, and we'd better get to it! We churned our way through the fifth grade textbooks and in our spare time individually worked our way through the box of SRI reading resources. We finished the spelling book by Christmas, so we started on the 6th grade book and were more than half-way thorough it by the end of school. We did do several art projects, and it wasn't entirely grim, but I would have much preferred another teacher, as my friends complained bitterly to me when they were in trouble for not doing their work. My mother's philosophy towards classroom behavior/finished work was consistant throughout her whole teaching career--but fortunately, she had not yet implemented the pink chair cure. Looking back, there should probably have been sanctions against pink chairs in the documents drawn up by the Geneva Convention, but this form of torture somehow escaped notice. Her pink chair method was simple: when she taught first or second graders, anyone in trouble was required to sit in a pink chair outside while everyone else enjoyed recess. She had three pink chairs. Strangely, this method of behavior modification seemed to work. Only one child needed a second pink chair experience--once was enough for everyone else.
How is this relevant to English 1000? I've noticed that teaching undergraduates is not much different from teaching middle or high school students--and while pink chair use is verboten, there are "tricks" you can do to engage students in their own learning, even though they balk at active participation with more resistance and energy than would be required to successfully complete the assignment. Somehow, students may feel that their job is to be a funnel head--and my job is to pour information into the funnel while they check their e-mail, text their friends, and mutter to their classmates about how much effort it will take to finish assignments. I think part of the problem is that teachers do not continue to learn and grow with their students--and do not see the need to vary their methods of information delivery in order to help all learners learn.
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