Teaching Thursday: What a Mess

I’ve been thinking rather randomly about teaching this second week of the semester. In part, because I’m overwhelmed, and in part because I lack discipline.

In any event, my thoughts about teaching these days center on my teaching of a four-week Cornerstone sponsored class that is called English 100: Seminar in Citizenship and Communities. Mostly what we do in the class is chat about readings for a fixed syllabus. The class started with Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” and this week we read Toni Bambara’s “The Lesson.” These are good stories which expose students to different ways to think about education as well as race, gender, and class.

The classroom discussion have been short (we meet for only 50 minutes), but vigorous and diffuse. I think a good bit about slow practice when I prepare for this class. I want to give the students time and space to talk about the readings and think about them without feeling like we’re being rushed from one topic, lesson, or assignment to the next. When I slow class down, I’ve found that some of the usual student resistance starts to abate. I’m coming to think that student resistance stems as much from the relentless pace of education as the pressure that comes from the sorting and ranking of students as part of the grading process.

That issue is, of course, that students have come to expect this kind of pressure and are prepared to resist and accommodate it in various ways. This resistance and strategies to subvert it structures so much of the classroom encounter from required assignments to explicit learning goals and benchmarks.  

Without those things, the classroom can get messy. Once we strip away the coercive power of grades and scheduled structure of clear learning outcomes, the classroom becomes a space where affect, emotion, and creativity dictate how and what we see in the texts. This isn’t meant to be the only way to read a text, but it is a way to read a text that stresses its potential and multiplicity rather than its limits or utility.

So far, this approach has been moderately successful (if messy) in engaging students in this class. Rather than getting bogged down in analysis or even (the dreaded) interpretation, we’re soaking up the texts and thinking through and with them. I sometimes think, in the best moments, we’re even starting to feel them.

And that’s been fun.