Teaching Day

Another gray Bay day. Nervous since it feels I have two lectures' worth of material on Arendt and Fanon to cover in a single lecture. Dropping an in-class exercise they would enjoy which I had planned would help me manage the time crunch but I have to resist this temptation as I would not have done in the past. In the past I would have just firehosed them with two lectures' worth of material and stunned them with my breadth of knowledge and left them gasping with a series of rapid-fire illuminations with lots of dramatic entertainment value but perhaps less likelihood of abiding understanding and usefulness of application in their own lives... In-class work is crucial to the community of the classroom, I have come to realize; it provides a context for students to process ideas in small groups together rather than just having me drone on and on at them for three hours... I used to really resist group work and even brief silences would be enough to send me out of discussion mode into fully-controlled lecturing. I liked to feel I was working harder than my students were -- I guess because that felt like earning my keep or looking like I know what I'm doing by keeping everything under control. Although Chatty Cathy remains my default lecture setting -- ask any of my students -- with each passing year I realize more and more how wrongheaded I have been -- that students learn best when they're working harder than me, that students learn more by working their way to their own compromises than hearing my luminously polished arguments, that a silence isn't a reproach but a communication of discomfort or difficulty that it is useful to dwell in, nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. It's not that I don't have things to say that they need to hear and some of which they won't hear if they are doing in-class work instead, all of that's as true as it ever was. But it's no less true that there are things they can only bring themselves to hear after they process them together through in-class work and discussions and I just need to set aside the ego that used to make me think my job was to fill every second of time with the sound of my voice rather than to facilitate learning for a diversity of students with a diversity of histories, aims, learning styles via a diversity of pedagogical strategies...