Engage in discussion about something that captured your attention over the past few weeks in the course. Relate it back to specific class discussions, readings, and your grading/teaching when possible.
For this week's blog post, I'd like to invite you to go on a journey with me into the perilous world of flashbacks.
The year is 2011. In about a month, I will graduate high school and make my first faltering steps into academia. But for now, I'm stuck in my hometown, counting down the days I have left in my concrete box of a high school. And I am a theater kid.
Every year, the advanced theater class puts on a student written show, composed of various scenes and vignettes written by the students in the class. Aside from the evening performances which we have for every play, we are also performing several times throughout the school day for students from classes whose teachers decide to take them to the play. It is my first experience with a captive audience, and though I am happy to get out of class for the day in order to perform, I am also nervous, wondering how my peers will receive the play. My fellow actors and I make snide comments backstage about the lack of culture in our fellow students, but really, we all want to be liked.
We make it through the first couple of performances and on break, getting ready for the next one, when one of our star actors comes bursting into the room. "Guess what I just heard in the hallway!" he says. "I heard a couple of guys talking and one of them said 'I thought it was going to be lame, but it was actually pretty cool'!"
We laugh, triumphant, joking about how we should make that our new slogan. But really, each of us is very pleased. Our show is doing what we'd hoped it would- entertaining. We're getting through to people!
Flash forward to 2015. It's been a while since I trod the boards in my high school theater, but I'm facing the same problem as I did then. How do I get through to people? How do I get them to care?
As I document instructor this year, I am not actively teaching. Yet as I look around me at the classroom instructors, and look forward to the teaching that I will be doing next year, I see many similarities between my situation back in high school, having to perform a show for people who are not necessarily interested, and the plight of the composition instructor having to teach a class full of students who are required to be there.
We've discussed many times in class the problem of getting our students to care about their composition classes. This would be much easier, I think, if each instructor had a bit more autonomy with regards to what assignments they required. But as this is not currently an option in our program, the best solution I can come up with is the one that I've carried with me since that day in the theater.
Our fellow students liked the show because we liked it. We were invested in it, and did our best, and stayed late and showed up early in order to put together a show that we were proud to be in. We cared. And because we cared, we got other people to care too.
This will be a "huge" shock to you, Mary, but I also was a theater kid in high school. Meaning that I've been exactly where you were in regards to caring about a show enough to actually make that show work to a specific audience. Teaching seemed different to me for a long stretch of my life, but after experience acting in school plays and involvement in college theater classes, teaching doesn't feel any different from acting. The stage is different, but you still have an audience that wants to be at least slightly entertained.
ReplyDeleteAh, I like flashbacks. The plays the thing. Do you find when you teach that you're on a sort of stage? Or that you're a director and students are the actors? You're tweaking the script, redesigning the blocking, adjusting the screen changes... You are teaching as a DI, it's just a different kind of teaching, or a piece of it. When I teach, including both the classroom and document, I do my very best to challenge every student in every way I can that makes sense. My comments here in your blog, for instance, I work hard at. I definitely call it active teaching. It is much harder to teach a syllabus someone else designs, I've always thought.You have a good metaphor here. I want to challenge you to get a lot out of your experience, and if there are things you'd do differently, in addition to some of the sound approaches you've no doubt seen, use your experience to think through those things even more carefully. I hear what you're saying, and I'm challenging you, because there are many students who need you to teach, actively.
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