Teach 'em a Lesson

Over the weekend I spent a few hours grading timed writes for a developmental composition class. I realized after the first few that these timed writes were really, really abysmal. "WTF?!" I shouted to the cat (who is on a diet and constantly begs for food) after an essay by one of my most thoughtful writers didn't get past her first paragraph and a half in the 90-minute exercise. 

Again and again I saw the same problem. Despite lots of time spent in class developing ideas and learning techniques for communicating ideas clearly in writing, students were not writing with a sense of purpose. Their papers, at best, were a collection of loosely-related and poorly-integrated examples that were not used in service of anything.

What was especially interesting is that many students had a traditional thesis. My lesson learned? The form doesn't mean anything if there is no purpose behind it.

This brings me to today's November blogging challenge question: What is the most important ‘lesson’ you want to teach your students?

A lot comes to mind: as a writing instructor I want students to express themselves clearly in this medium. I see now, though, that if they don't have content to convey, all the form, style, and sentence-level skills won't add up to a burp in the face of a tornado. Knowing our purpose gives us power.

The students had known their potential topic before they sat down to write. As a class we walked through example-finding. But I forgot to draw out the students' innate need to establish a purpose for writing this assignment. I think next time, I'll go at it backwards: propose some topics and let the students establish a need to investigate them further in writing. 

It'll turn out perfectly next time, right? 

 

Reflective Teaching Challenge: Day 1

Hi! Eat the Yolk is surfacing... to talk about teaching! My colleague over at bayanprofessor.blogspot.com encouraged me to participate in a Reflective Teaching Blogging Challenge for the month of September. It being a little crazy around here I am already behind, but I am committed to seeing this through as best I can, so here goes!

The first prompt asks us to write our goals for the school year. As this is college, and as I'll likely be gone in spring on maternity leave, I'll keep the goals to a semester. So here goes:

Goal 1: Be Fearless in the Classroom... at least once a week!
I admit it: I crave routine. Teaching is a wild and whimsical process, and I spent much of my first 8 years (or has it been longer?) trying to tame the classroom and figure out perfect lesson plans, assignments, and readings that can be eventually constructed into The Perfect Composition X class.

The thought of constructing Perfect Composition X class is a dreamy one to the woman who goes to bed at more or less the same time each night. But I also know that spontaneity and relevance are key to keeping students engaged. What is one of the ways a student can be engaged? When they see an instructor who is excited about the material. Excitement is infectious, so for me, finding that zone where the materials are familiar without being stale is key.

At least once a week I will commit to trying something new, whether it be bringing in an article on the Ferguson shootings to walk through a successful article summary and response, or playing a song as the students walk into class, or lecturing from the middle of the room instead of the front.

Goal 2: Tighten up on organization. At least a little bit.
Goal 2 might seem in conflict with goal 1, but I gotta be honest: dates and long-term planning have slipped through the cracks so far this semester. (Maybe it's the pregnancy brain.) Example: I set out to plan for my afternoon composition course. I started with the syllabus schedule, saw what was due the next class period, and worked my way back from that. The problem? I was looking at the wrong week. It wasn't until the end of class that a student politely pointed out that I was a week ahead of myself.

(Students are very forgiving about pushing assignments back. But if you ask them to do something early? Uhh, no, that's not cool. Nor is it fair to them. Gotta tighten up on this kinda stuff.)

Goal 3: Continue to work on connecting with students and making sure they feel heard. 
There have been some great articles lately about the need for students to feel connected to the class and the instructor. I can't emphasize enough how much I believe in the need to really connect with students. To do so requires constant self-reflection: what went well about that encounter? What didn't go so well? Why did I feel the exchange was so great with her but not him? What biases might I have that are getting in the way?

I've found that I've gotten better feedback from students the more I learn to ask them good questions and take time for a one-on-one exchange, ideally once a week.

One idea I've incorporated into my online (or in this case, hybrid) course to build community is to give weekly "shout-outs." Yes, I give them for your eyes only feedback on their work at least once a week, but after perusing quizzes or discussion boards, I can easily copy/paste a few key ideas from students who have really got it and email them to the course as an announcement. Since it's all online, it's easy to see who I've given shout-outs to before so I can vary them.

Goals! Teaching! So exciting!

It's What I Know.

The school's absence policy is strict: two weeks of missed classes and you are out.  Armed with this reassurance from the dean, I walked into class, prepared to go to the mat on this issue.

"I've been recovering from surgery. I have a baby. I'm a veteran. If you drop me, I'll lose my stipend." The student stood in front of me as I prepared for class to begin, his arm wrapped in a cast. Persistently, he repeated his reasons for staying in the class as he washed a Percocet down with soda. My resolve buckled. I told him to sit down, and I caved to his every request for missed materials and laborious recounting of past lectures.

As I left class, I felt myself slip into a familiar pattern of thinking: trapped between my "take a hard line" self and my "Yes! Limitless compassion for all!" self. Fueling this vacillation was my old self-loathing, angry and ashamed that I had been unable to take the stand I'd committed to.

On my way home from work, a stanza from Ani Difranco's new album stuck out like a neon vacancy sign blinks at weary travelers:

"I walk past my own self-loathing
Like I walk past animals in the zoo
Trying not to really see them
And the prison they didn’t choose."

One of the reasons I love that stanza so much is because it pictures the self-criticism so aptly as a series of traps. It is like a prison, but, as a friend once told me, it's a prison with an open door; we can walk out at any time. "How frightening it could be out there!" we think, and cling desperately to the bars of our own cells. Because there's something familiar in those old negative patterns, isn't there? We grasp onto our suffering, afraid that if we let it go something new and more terrifying will replace it.

In the past few years, I've cultivated technique after technique for dealing with this, ah, problem. Yoga provides me with a baseline of strength and awareness from which to address this stuff directly. Meditation, prayer, and biofeedback training arm me with methods for interrupting these thoughts mid-stream. But sometimes I get too tired to fight, and let's face it: these techniques don't provide an easy 180 out of suffering. And fighting means facing the fact that those old patterns are still there.

So, fine, I'll say. Let the student stay in class. Let nepotism continue. Let me continue to lie awake at night, haunted by streams of self-criticism and doubt. I may not have chosen this prison, but it's what I know.

I've never been much of a gardener, but I imagine this is what folks mean when they say it's like getting stuck in a rut. It can be so easy, so comfortable, to keep pushing your wheelbarrow forward on that familiar path. But a rut is a rut; at some point, we've got to get the strength to heave our barrows up and out and to continue on, forging a new (if bumpy) path forward.

Wheelbarrow/ "So much depends..."

The Fort-Builders

When I was a kid, my brother was my favorite person to play with. We'd enter into our own world, fashioned typically of boy things like sticks, Star Wars toys, and GI Joes, and everything else would drop away.

When he and I were really young, one of our favorites was to build a fort out of the couch in the spare room. I think it's a common experience for fort-builders: ironically, they're kinda frail. My brother and I would take the cushions off and rearrange them very meticulously so that they surrounded the couch with just enough room for us to slide in on one side. Once we were inside, we had to move very carefully so as not to collapse the walls surrounding us.

There was always something so thrilling about that activity. The joy was in the doing: in the placement of the cushions, the imaginative reasons for making the fort, and the cautious entrance. Honestly, I've forgotten moments after we actually got inside. I imagine we looked at each other, reveled in our creation, and then got bored and punched our way out. Or maybe we started fighting and it all came crumbling down ;-)

I think most of the fun was in the acceptance of the cycle: you build, you love what you're doing, you appreciate it for a moment, and you let it all wash away so you can build it up again. This is particularly easy for kids to do, I think. Think of the way a toddler passes his favorite toy back and forth with you. He trusts that what you take from him, you will give back. (Maybe it's harder for us adults, but I digress...)

I feel like I'm on a similar cusp. I feel this especially strongly today. This morning, I took a step back and looked at what I've been building as I was recognized in a special tenure ceremony. For those who don't know, tenure is kind of a permanent position granted to teachers after you put in some dues and demonstrate you're qualified for the job. (Please note, not all teachers who deserve tenure are afforded an opportunity to get a job, especially these days.) It was such a lovely experience, and what was especially interesting about it was the reminder that the times we're most honored are the ones in which we're the most humbled. I stood on a stage with 12 other faculty members, feeling those two extremes pretty profoundly. I allowed myself to recognize that I've spent the last six years lovingly, joyfully (mostly) building this little fort, all the while knowing I was dependent on all those who continually show me the way and build with me. I may have "done it," but, at most, all I did was combine ideas I pretty much stole from everyone I've befriended along the way. That's the way it is. We build together, and when we're doing it right, we love the process.

It's so like yoga, isn't it? The teachers tell us over and over that it's not the degree to which you exemplify the posture, or whether you get your forehead to that knee. The more joy and compassion we bring to our practice, be with the posture, and are able to let go and happily embrace the next, well... I can't help but thinking those forts will become just a little more solid.

College. Yeah.

"College, huh?"

Tonight, I was reminded yet again how our multitude of neuroses can be reflected right back at us in the hot room. I must warn you: even as I blog in the cool evening from the comfort of my captain's chair and sip from a cold glass of water, the neuroses are flying off the shelves. I think they're forming a tornado in the middle of the room.

I slunk into my Monday evening yoga class, dreading the experience. It's pretty warm in San Diego this week, and the studio seems to absorb that extra heat. Plus, it's Monday, y'know? Blergh.

The hardest part of tonight's class, though, was not the heat. It was the bitchy comment this fellow practitioner made to me in the changing room before class. OK, OK, it was probably my reaction to the comment that got me all worked up. Damn, though, did I get worked up.

I've talked to this yogi before. She's a teacher, and she knew I was a teacher, too. When she learned I taught at the college level, she raised her eyebrow and said, "Really?"

Tonight was more of the same. She walked into the dressing room, took one look at me as I was changing, and said, "College, huh?" Uhh. I look young. I know I do. Fine, OK, I am young. And I probably don't deserve my job. And I'm probably just scarring the 120 students that come into my class each semester. I'm a giant waste of time and money. I'm such a loser. I should be kissing this teacher's feet. She has every right to question my existence on this planet.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who knows this downward spiral.

Class started up right away, and I didn't have time to ask her what she meant by her question. I spent the class in a mental tug-of-war: "What was her problem? She doesn't know me. I'm a good teacher. No, I suck, I don't deserve this job, I want to be eating salad. Blah!"

The balancing series reeeally sucked today.

Then, right between the first and second set of Triangle, I got it. What a perfect mirror this yoga is. Yeah, I guess there's a possibility you could question the motive behind her comments. But I torture myself with those negative thoughts about my work all the time. I don't need an actual human to get me going on 'em. Until I excavate through those thoughts that are already there, they'll come back, again and again.

After class, I dragged myself to the locker room and managed to gasp a request for explanation of her "College, huh?" comment. She didn't answer directly, but she did share that, like many teachers across the state and nation, she's been pink-slipped. If, by some miracle in the state budget, she does get to keep her job, her class size will increase, and funding for their materials and activities will drop. And even more than getting that "don't judge" reminder, I saw she was a really nice person. She was just fuckin' worried about her life.

The conversation was really humbling. Seems I got a double message: some people have a right to bitch. Also, I'm as quick to judge myself as I am others, and that's just never helpful.

What Makes a "Good" Teacher?

I've been appreciating good teachers lately.

I've been thinking of the qualities the teachers I value as "good" have in in common. When I was still in school, I thought good teachers had to have an air of confidence and a developed ability to read the room. I thought they had to be brilliant--many steps ahead of the students they taught. When I started teaching composition, I thought this, and I also thought a sense of humor would endear the students to me and thus, learn the material better.

Now that I've taught for a few years and been a student for over 25, I know of no universal checklist of qualities that one can aspire to. We never get the chance to sigh satisfactorily once they've been attained. I know plenty of people who are intelligent, funny, and who initially appear confident. But the teachers that reach me again and again seem to have a well-defined sense of who they are.

There's a fairly new yoga teacher in town who helped me see this. I remember the first time she walked into the room. She looked young, geeky, and did not have a strong, commanding voice. She didn't force herself to be cheerful or firm. She continued to seem young and geeky and didn't pretend to have a commanding voice. But damn if she didn't get the best class out of us. And I've seen her do that again and again.

This teacher has a particularly gentle way of encouraging us to try. Rather than make it seem like we're rockstars if we do the pose and not trying hard enough if we sit it out, it seems she simply points out that it's possible to do the work. Last week, she singled me out in Standing Bow pose. Normally, I'm falling all over the place in that posture, and teachers who know me don't bother to correct me or offer encouragement. (I don't mean this in a "those teachers suck!" kind of way. Let me make my point.) It takes a real act of bravery to offer them encouragement in just the place they need it.

I think it was the last side of Standing Bow when I realized she was talking to me. "Yep, you've got it, E," she said. "Just keep kicking." I don't remember what else she said, but it was so nice to really feel her reach out to me in just the posture I feel the weakest in. It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I finished the pose pretty strongly.

As a teacher, I too know that it's hard to take a leap of faith like that for a student. I see now that it's because that yoga teacher was not a drill sergeant, because she was being her normal, geeky, joking-about-a-book-I-read-last-week self, I knew it would be OK if I fell out. That was the exact thing I needed to go forward--I needed someone to reassure me it would be OK if I "failed." It was like the criteria for being a good student had dissolved, too.

Like all those self-help messages that emphasize that we should be who we are, we need to give ourselves permission to be ourselves when we teach, when we work, when we parent, etc, even if we are nervous, silly, or irritated. There's no need to force yourself to act a certain way--you're already OK as you are. This is the message we need to hear again and again. Maybe that's why it feels so wonderful to get a teacher who sees this!

Breathing under the Mango Tree

Some days, a few moments of breathing is all you need.

I encountered a pretty challenging situation today at school. Can't go into details, but I had a little confrontation with someone I work with. While I did not do something that was entirely in the wrong, what I said to her provoked a deep and pained response. I was shocked by how I'd obviously hurt her. She rattled me to the core--my way of interacting with students was called into question. I was barely able to compose myself and finish what I was doing before I had a chance to scuttle off.

My main yoga teacher has told us a few times that pranayama deep breathing is the perfect way to combat stressful situations. Until today, I wondered if that was contradictory advice. After all, the dialogue says, "Warming up the body, from the inside out." It always seems to have an energizing effect. Wouldn't that be the opposite of what you want when riddled with anxiety?

After the incident with the person, I had less than 30 minutes to get to an important meeting. Dilemma time: do I go to my office and prepare for the meeting, or go outside and get centered? Some days, I would have just gone to the office. I'd have squished the feelings about the student away to some little corner of my bowels, and they would have probably just come bubbling up again at the most inopportune of times. Probably during the meeting ;-)

But today I decided to take a walk to a lovely garden not far from my office. There, as I stared at the bright the fish in the lilypad-covered pond underneath the mango tree, the tears started up. I couldn't get the incident out of my head. There was this desire to indulge and obsess over what happened, yet, I needed to get to this meeting. I remembered what my teacher said about pranyama, so, as the tears began to spill, I stood up and began inhaling through the nose exhaling, through the mouth. By breath 10, I kid you not, I was fine. Not perfect, but my head was clear and I knew I had it together enough to go to the meeting.

The fishies and mango tree didn't hurt, either :-)

Pranyama, y'all. Did ya know the Sanskrit name means "restraint of the prana (life force) or breath"? It's almost counter-intuitive. Restraining the breath, the life force, awakens and enlivens us, enabling us to connect and be more present.

Stuff still needs to be worked out with this student. I'm still anxious to see how it will resolve, to see how deep the impact will be. But one breath at a time is all we can ever do, right?

Mango Tree