When teaching reality sinks in…
Cliff March 24th, 2007
Alas, I have yet again taken off my teacher’s rose-colored glasses. When they’re on, I believe that all students have a thirst to learn (if you merely engage them), and that it’s not all about the grade. That, of course, is not the case.
As I reported before, my students informed me about the pointlessness of the core curricula. And yet, I thought that my class was different, because I was trying to engage them in the material, by reaching out to their experience. I thought I was different. I thought I was special. I thought I was Katherine Watson. (Ok, maybe that’s taking it a bit far…) But, the truth is I’m not different. My class is just another requirement they must fulfill before they can start taking classes that they’re interested in. I wonder how English 101 teachers do it year after year.
And when I look back, I was the same way in college. I was only interested in Religious Studies classes. I’ve never used those history or math courses beyond the rare reference question. The required public speaking and computer courses felt redundant. And to be honest, I really don’t remember the cross-disciplinary classes that I took (which is the same type of class that I’m teaching).
Have I given up hope? Not completely. I believe that some of my students are engaged with the material, even if only for a nanosecond. A few of them will walk out of my course having learned something, even if it’s only that some insane librarian won’t stop yakking their ears off about this “2.0″ stuff that’s old hat to them. And in the delusional-Katherine-Watson-wannabe part of my brain, I imagine one of these students perhaps becoming a librarian some day, and coming back to thank me. Hey, a guy can have a dream, right?
But for now, I’ll scale back my in-class exercises to something a little more reasonable than trying to get students to engage in a full-scale fake search committee. We’ll use the one example cover letter I got (thanks “Donald Duck”), and a couple of my own design to have them evaluate together as a class. I still believe that making the connection between their online impression management and real-life job searches will help them in the future (even if they don’t know where they thought of it).
Having come to all these depressing conclusions, I will no doubt go through the same thing again the next time I teach this class. For we, the hopeless optimist teachers of the world, have a tendancy to keep reaching for those rose-colored glasses again no matter how many times we promise ourselves we won’t.