Technology – Page 3 – College Ready Writing 1.0

Memories: Old-School Social Media

I was just in Sherbrooke where I did my undergraduate and Master’s degree. I started (wait for it) 15 years ago this fall.

Shudder.

When I started at Sherbrooke, I moved into residence and two important improvements had been made over the summer: networked telephones and high-speed internet access in each room. Previously, if you wanted a phone or internet in your room, you had to pay to get a phone line put in and pay for dial-up access. But our university was known for its engineering and computer programming degrees at the undergraduate and graduate level, and many of the students lived in res. It just made sense.

Keep in mind that at this point, no one owned a cell phone or had high-speed internet access at home. Few people had email addresses, and the internet was in its infancy. My father, in an attempt to entice my brother and I to spend more time at his place, had had dial-up internet access (through AOL) for a few years. He found these things called BBS‘s. I didn’t understand any of it, but he totally geeked out over them.

When I arrived in Sherbrooke, I was assigned an email address (at first, my student ID number – so much for privacy). My friends back home, as well as my mom, all had email addresses through school or work. It was amazing. We could “talk” with one another almost instantaneously. We forwarded endless joke messages to each other and just generally kept in touch with what was going on in our lives. Most of us remember the sound our computer made when we would get email; the university gave us Eudora. Da-da-dum-da-dum.

And then, we discovered ICQ.

The little green flower in the bottom right-hand toolbar that would squeal “Ah-Oh!” when you got a new message and flashed yellow. You knew instantly when one of your friends was online and you could talk to them in real time. Eventually, everyone moved to Windows Messenger (why? Why did we do that? Oh, right, because we all got hotmail accounts), but I won’t ever forget the excitement I felt when I heard the two noises indicating that someone had wanted to “talk” to me through the miracle of the internet.

The network phone (you called one number and each room had its own extension) was coupled with the drastic drop in long distance costs. By my second year, we paid $20 a month for unlimited long distance within Canada. And our phones had a little red light that flashed when you had a message. It didn’t matter what time I came home (and in what condition I was in), I would check for that red light, then check my email and ICQ to see who had said what.

During my degree, I took a course in basic web design, worked on an government intranet newsletter, wrote for a blog before it was called blogging (it started as a listserv newsletter), and had a professor who tried to integrate online discussion boards into his graduate course on Canadian drama. I learned how to first use physical indexes, then CD-ROMs, then online databases to do my research. While I didn’t have the most technical education when it came to social media and learning about how to use the internet, but I was exposed, and exposed myself, to many of the early social media tools.

I was reminded of all this when I stayed in residence while in Sherbrooke this past year. The phones were still there, although probably used much less now that everyone has a cell phone (although you still have things like roaming and long-distance in Canada). Strangely enough, even though there was wireless internet access all over campus, we were limited to a hard line connection in residence. I had brought an iPad, meaning I couldn’t access the internet once I got to my room.

It was actually kinda nice. After spending five years in a res room tethered to my computer (a massive black tower and monitor, then a seemingly 10 pound ThinkPad with a 10 minute battery life), I liked that once I got to my room, it was time to either read a book or go to sleep. I guess I’m just getting old.

Innovative Education for Me, But Not for Thee

Whenever I read Cathy Davidson, I am find myself moving from being inspired and invigorated to very, very depressed. Take her latest, for example, “Going Interactive in a Big Way: How Can We Transform the Lecture Class?” I read it and thought, yes, this is what I want to try and do in my classes! This is, indeed, the future of education! We should be asking our students to think critically about the Internet and electronic medium(s)! Why can’t students take responsibility for their education in my class? Onward and upward over the summer in order to reimagine (yet again) my classes!

And then doubt starts creeping in. I remember all of the requirements and limitations that are imposed on my because I’m teaching general education courses. I remember that I don’t have tenure, nor am I on the tenure-track, so I am in a vulnerable position, making it that much riskier to be daring in how I teach my (supposedly) standard and increasingly standardized courses. I also fear letting go of control of my class, allowing my students more input and control. I fear giving up lecturing, the only way I really know how to teach, after all. And, above all, I fear failing.

I realize that it is a total failure of imagination at this point that I either can’t conceptualize how to make my writing classes more interactive, or I can’t imagine it being successful. Which is total crap because I know that it works. But there is a persistent message about the students that I teach, which is that they aren’t prepared to learn this way or that it doesn’t really benefit them (hence the increasing standardization of the curriculum). They don’t know what they don’t know, they don’t know what they need to know, so it is up to us to preach it to them. But in a writing class, where the goal is to improve reading, writing, and critical thinking skills, won’t just about anything do?

Other challenges that I am trying to overcome are that a) the classes are lower-division and b) required. In my mind (and, again, this might be totally false), upper-division classes that the students willingly chose to take are easier to make interactive because the students are more experienced and there because they want to be. Convincing these students to be innovative would appear to be less work. A freshman who has no idea who I am, what college is about, or what to expect (or the wrong idea of what to expect) might not look to kindly on a teacher who walks into class and says, we need to learn how to write, how do you want to do it?

I feel like an old dog. Can I learn and teach these new tricks to my students? And why do I think that my freshmen/sophomore non-traditional/first generation students are any less capable than upper-division students at highly selective colleges? Why am I helping to perpetuate the myth that innovative teaching is only good for the best and the brightest? I want to be braver, and I am ashamed that I am not. I talk a big talk, but when it comes time to walk the walk, I falter. I pat myself for the (minimal) work that I have done, but when confronted with the reality that I am just simply repackaging the same old pedagogical framework, I am left unable to respond.

My students deserve an innovative and non-standardized education as much as anyone else, perhaps more. One of my projects for this summer is figuring out how I can combine the requirements that are imposed on me and my desire to do better for my students. I know it’s going to be a struggle, but I have to try.

Lesson Learned: Using Corkboard.me and Letting Go of Lecturing

My 100-level students are currently reading and writing about the future. I’ve been depressing them with apocalyptic and dystopic visions of our world, starting with Fahrenheit 451 and ending with the short films at http://futurestates.tv/. Don’t worry, there were some essays in between, like if Google is making us stupid, why we love robots, or how living longer impacts our morality. Yup, it’s been a real happy time over the past two months, culminating in the creation of a persuasive essay on their vision of the future.

Taking comPOSITION’s advice, I used corkboard.me for brainstorming ideas about the essay and then about how they thought they could best persuade their audience about their vision for the future. I have to say, I was blown away by the results (which you can see here). They all not only had clear ideas about the future, but they also had clear ideas about how to write their essay. I had nothing to add. Class dismissed.

If I had done the same thing in the classroom, I know I wouldn’t have received half the answers that are now living on corkboard. Because it is anonymous and spontaneous, students were free to try, fail, and post again. Usually I write their answers on the board, but they have to be willing to share them. Usually, they just wait for me to give them the answer. And, seeing as how I can’t stand silences, I’ll answer the question myself. But this experience has really forced me to realize that I don’t need to lecture as much as I do, and in fact I am potentially wasting my students’ (and my) time by telling them things they already know.

This is not a minor revelation. I’ve now realized that over the summer I need to find a way to more fully incorporate corkboard, twitter, blogs, and other social media tools in order to not just engage my students, but get an accurate snapshot of what they know so I can spend my time on things they don’t. It allows me to finally turn my classroom into a more dynamic space of give and take between myself and the students. The challenge becomes when I don’t have regular or consistent access to a computer lab in order to use these technologies.

Thankfully, I have all summer to figure this out. And while I knew I lectured too much, I don’t think the practical reality of that knowledge really influenced how I approached teaching. So, thank you corkboard.me for making me reexamine my teaching and ultimately improving my approach to the classroom.

I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks after all.

Student Ethos and Email Etiquette

I’ve been silent this past week, in part because I got sick, fell behind, prepared the house for weekend guests, planned my soon-to-be four-year old’s birthday party, partly because while I had a whole list of planned posts, I couldn’t concentrate on writing them. No, I was distracted by trying to come up with a way to write the following posts without impacting my own ethos as a writer and a teacher in higher education.

I received a number of emails from my students all at the same time that really, really got under my skin. Now, I am (still) a regular visitor to College Misery, and I talk to my colleagues, so I know that my students are not an anomaly and professors all over the country are dealing with emails from students that are…frustrating in any number of ways. What really bothered me was that we have just spent an entire semester talking about ethos in writing – how a writer is perceived and how students want to be perceived as writers, students, professionals. We are even doing a blog assignment so they can really start to think about how they are seen by people other than their professor.

But nonetheless, I think it’s important that students realize how their emails impact their ethos with their professors. This, of course, should be expanded to face-to-face meetings and any assignment, written or otherwise, handed in to their professor. And I tell them this. I had hoped that the lessons about ethos, even though not explicitly taught, had been applied by my students to other facets of their communications with me. Namely, their emails.

But I guess not. This troubles me not because their emails communicated to me that my class was indeed not a priority, but because they haven’t applied what they have learned beyond the classroom setting, beyond what they were “told.” And again, I can imagine an undergraduate reading this and complaining, I didn’t mean it that way. And I get that how a student understands the ethos they are (trying) to present versus what a professor may actually read and receive.

For example (and this is an example based on an email I received this week), a student emails explaining that he has an opportunity to go hunting but it would mean that he would miss two [out of three] of the classes this week. Would it be ok, and he promises he’d make up any work that he missed, especially if I let him know now, before he leaves.

Now, some additional context. They have a paper due next week, and the classes missed are peer review/writing workshop classes. This student is pretty good; not the best but also not the worst. I can imagine the student thinking that they were doing the right thing by a) letting me know they intended to miss class, b) not lying about why they were missing class, and c) showing initiative by proactively asking for the work to be missed.

For me, all I read is: your class, in fact, university, is not that important to me. And that may be true. But why, then, should I, someone with over 100 students all taking writing-intensive classes from me, make you a priority, or devote extra time to you? I also wonder about how serious a student he is when he claims he can keep up with the work while outdoors trying to shoot animals.

Critical thinking. We, as professors, want our students to develop the skill. Employers want employees with that skill. But my students can’t think critically about their own communications with their professor, the person, for better or for worse, who holds their future (through their grades) in their hands. It’s frustrating. I don’t care that the student doesn’t care about my class. I care that they don’t see what that might be a problem.

This email will become a unit on ethos, on digital communications, on email etiquette, and on why my students are even in college to begin with. I’m sure I’ve opened a can of worms by writing about it, but it’s been bothering me for a week, and I needed to get it off my chest.

What do you think? Why do students have such difficulty recognizing how their communications with their professors impacts their ethos?

More Thoughts on the Standardization of Higher Education

My post on the standardization of higher education from earlier this week was a hit, so to speak, driving traffic and stimulating some interesting discussions on Twitter. I’ve decide to address some of these concerns and continue venting on what I think is going to be the undoing of higher education in this country.

I received two tweets (one from @qui_oui and another from @rwpickard) about how a certain degree of standardization is necessary for transfer and the like. Look, I’m all for standards. We should all have a clear idea of what a 100, 200, 300, or 400 level class should contain within a discipline (how much to read, write, and the level of ideas/concepts expressed). I also understand that in other disciplines, you need to know a certain set of skills or concepts before moving on to the next level; I completely understand that Cal I has to come before Cal II, and that there has to be some standards in order for a student to make progress in their education. But, these standards would seem to grow organically from disciplinary requirements. Sometimes they are imposed by professional organizations, but often in the name of safety; I’m glad that my nurse has a standard set of skills that are required of her before being accredited.

It’s when we get into the “softer” disciplines, like English, where I live, that things get dicey. I have written already about my experience teaching an upper-division Modern Literature course. I appreciated the fact that, within a set of clear guidelines (400-level class on English literature written during what is known as the Modernist period), I had the freedom to teach the texts that I wanted to using the approaches that I thought would work best. I was able to “create” arches, comparisons, contrasts, and evolutions with the works we studied. Modern literature is a huge field (much like any field in English) and each professor will teach the course differently, according to their biases and expertise, but also based on the make-up of the student body and institutional culture. What works in a Modern Literature course at Yale won’t necessarily work in a Modern Literature course at Regional State U. But we can safely assume that given the guidelines and descriptions, a student coming out of an upper-division Modern Literature course should be able to do a certain set of things, from identify the major authors and features of the movement, as well as write a lengthy, in-depth research essay on a work from that period. How we get there will vary wildly.

And it should. Some may point to my characterization of the class as a disaster as a reason why we need more, not less, standardization. The argument goes that I was not to be trusted with coming up with the class, and instead I should have been given the syllabus and reading list to teach in a prescribed way (hey, just give me the script while you’re at it). I say that my failure is an indication that the institution needs to invest in professors, not temp workers, to teach class. If the administration continues to undermine and devalue what goes on in the classroom, no amount of standardization and accountability measures are going to improve student learning. Saying that we should teach all students the same things in the same way, all in the name of accessibility, is not the answer.

Which brings me to the next point of contention. Faculty, then, should then take it upon themselves to develop the accountability measures. We do already; it’s called the syllabus and grading. Apparently, that’s not good enough anymore. But is that the faculty’s fault or the fault of an administration that continually undermines the classroom experience (and professor’s authority) in the classroom? I just came across this essay about how we, the faculty, are increasingly pressured to let learning slide in the name of “customer service”:

Faculty members were being asked to be responsible for students instead of creating a system within the classroom that makes the students responsible for themselves.

This is what I am talking about when I say that the administration often don’t support what professors and instructors are trying to do in the classroom, but then blame us when learning doesn’t happen. Students are seen as tuition machines, and we are told they are to be retained, at all costs. When a student isn’t happy, we hear about it and need to adapt to keep the customer satisfied.

I say, get our backs, get out of our way, and let’s see what happens.

Money is being invested everywhere on campus except in front of the classroom, illustrated by increasing class sizes, the increase in online education, and the over-use of adjunct faculty. Students get the message; the professors (and learning) are the least important component on campus.

And even when faculty are involved in developing the accountability measures, it is usually because they are being required to do so and have to follow narrow guidelines with the demand for very prescriptive (and arbitrary) outcomes, in order to feed the data machine. Yes, cosmetically, faculty came up with the measures, but our hands are tied, impacting the results. Rather than having measures and standards that are organic to a given discipline, we have data driven measures that give us stats, but little else.

Time and resources are also a factor. Often, it is an already over-worked tenure-track faculty member (or committee of tenure-track faculty members) who is tasked with coming up with the measures. Those measures are then imposed on even more precariously positioned instructors and adjuncts, who are already burdened with the demands of teaching intensive introductory courses to larger and larger numbers of students. But none of that comes into the minds of the administrators requiring the extra work from their instructional staff (tenure-track and contingent). There’s no course release, no reduction in class sizes, nothing. Something has to give, and it is either dropping other elements from the syllabus or devising the “easiest” measures to implement.

There’s a win-win situation for student learning outcomes.

The Standardization of Higher Education = #FAIL

I was at an institutionally-mandated get-together for those instructors who taught the various developmental classes (math, reading, writing) at our institution a few weeks ago. We were hearing about the educational technology the math department was using to get students up to college readiness when the instructor presenting told us a disturbing little anecdote about how she caught a cheater last semester. “It was just like Big Brother!” she exclaimed excitedly. Ugh.

Now, I’ve already voiced my thoughts about our over-reliance on ed tech as the savior of education, but this statement made me think about one of the unintended (or intended) consequences of the move to standardize higher education, heavily facilitated by educational technology: the constant monitoring of all activity of both instructor and student. If we can standardize and record every instance of learning in a student’s academic career, then we can certainly pinpoint where learning failed, exactly which teacher or advisor is responsible for derailing a student’s career.

The more we standardize, the more we continue to infantilize our students and undermine our faculty. We are basically telling students that they aren’t responsible enough to learn and professors can’t be trusted to teach. Think about that for a second. Students can’t learn, and we can’t teach, so you need to be constantly monitored to make sure that these things happen.

How does this move towards standardization and assessment actually help students? What happens when institutions and accrediting boards rigidly dictate when and where learning happens in higher education? When instead of facilitating “informal” moments of learning, the university is required/requiring rigid reporting/return on investment data on campus talks, meeting spaces, and optional (but really mandatory) activities? Or that students (and eventually instructors/professors) measure success exclusively through test scores?

How do we teach and learn through experience, experiment, trial and error, and failures when Big Brother is always watching us? Does $44 billion really buy the Federal government the right to dictate to us how and what we teach, or how and when students can learn? As I put in the comments of Mary Churchill’s post “Can We Afford to Play,”

As we discover with young kids, we can spend all the money we want, but at the end of the day, all they want to play with is the empty cardboard box. I think the same thing goes for higher education, especially on the side of the professors. If professors didn’t have to worry as much about constant accountability measures, measurable outcomes, and reporting, we might be more likely to relax along with the students. If more people in front of the classroom had job security and more time, they may be more invested in the students outside of the classroom. If it didn’t feel like Big Brother was constantly monitoring all of us, we might relax, let loose, and really, really, learn.

At a certain point, the institution needs to get out of the way and just let learning happen. I have been critical of the type of “leisure” that takes place on (or rather off) campus, but is this behavior a result of the high states, high pressure environment we’ve created on campus? Most faculty and students can’t wait to get off campus at the end of the day; why is that? Universities have invested billions in creating “spaces” for students, faculty, and sometimes even community. Some have been very successful, but I wonder how many of them developed organically, and how many of them were responses to accreditation board requirements (having gone through two at two different universities, this is an important component for any re-accreditation)?

We may end up passing whatever tests they put in front of us, delivering more mandated content in increasingly rigid ways, but at the end of the day, we have failed.

What Ed Tech Can’t Do

In Fahrenheit 451, one of the characters describes what school is like in the near future:

But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and then telling us it’s wine when it’s not.

Now, read a Tweet from a teacher in LA:

f2f is going 2 end up being security aka paras 2 make sure kids dont get on facebook in jr college f2f will disappear.

If Sir Ken Robinson (and many others) are right that the way schools are set up now was to prepare workers for factories, what are we preparing our kids for now, increasingly relying on computers to teach them? How to follow orders from a machine?

This is, of course, a dystopic view of the future, fueled in part by the fact that I am currently teaching Fahrenheit 451. But, I can’t help but wonder, are we really helping our most vulnerable students when we increasingly rely on technology rather than more traditional face-to-face instruction. Where are the mentorships, the relationships, the systems of support, of learning how to “think with others“? Certainly, we need to prepare students for a world that is increasingly interconnected through technology, but when do we say, enough, and start valuing, really valuing, personal interactions, rather than seeing it as an unnecessary cost, a budget line that is easy to eliminate.

Apparently, technology and online education is the real disruptive influence in education, allowing us to offer degrees for less than $10k. Having written about this very issue for the University of Venus recently, I remain skeptical. In the comments, the author of the post on creating a degree that costs less than $10k addresses my concern about teachers needing to eat with a response of only wanting teachers who are truly passionate about teaching. Great. More about how teachers are supposed to sacrifice everything for the greater good of “education. ” I am all for a more entrepreneurial approach to education, but I think we are trying to think bigger, rather than the true disruption coming from going smaller. If anything, money is being spent in the wrong place, in infrastructure instead of people.

I’m starting to see the movement in education as analogous to industrial farming; we all embraced farming technologies because food got cheaper, safer, more plentiful, and easier to grow (ok, education hasn’t gotten any cheaper, but isn’t that the goal of increasingly using technology?). But we now see that it might be cheaper, but it isn’t any healthier (and in many cases less healthy), it is more devastating to the over-all environment, and only economically beneficial to a handful of massive multi-nationals. Is this really the kind of education we want to offer our children, particularly our poorest and most vulnerable? In poor neighborhoods, they’ll be fast food and private online edu.

The disruptive innovation in farming and food isn’t in technology; it’s in scaling down, finding balance, quality, and over-all sustainability. Organic farmers, growers, and animal ranchers, urban farmers, and others are changing the way we think about food. We might see disruption coming from similar sources in education. Take for example a movement in England where people have taken over abandoned buildings and turned them into schools; curious people, some smartphones, and voila, learning. No bells, no whistles, no nothing. That’s disruptive. Not providing standardized pre-packaged education online offered by underqualified individuals with little to no support. Government, school boards, and universities need to reinvest their money in the people who teach and create knowledge; the rest can clearly fall away and not impact education. In fact, it may facilitate it.

Next fall, I will be integrating a lot more technology in my classroom, in part because of forced standardization and accountability. But part of it is trying to make my class more effective. My job is to teach, but it is also to coach my students, particularly my developmental students. It’s to disrupt their worlds in order to encourage critical thinking or knowledge creation. A computer program might be able to award a student a “badge” (again, what is that preparing students for in their professional futures?), but a computer program can’t look a student in the eyes and tell them that they can do it, they can write, that they truly did a good job, ask them the right questions to get the heart of whatever problem they’re having, care enough to keep asking, or even express sincere disappointment when they let you down.

There’s a reason why the children of professors overwhelmingly go to small liberal arts colleges. There’s a reason why rich and middle-class parents fight to send their kids to good schools with small class sizes and good teachers, and will continue to do so, no matter how expensive it becomes. Technology is a tool, not a replacement, nor a silver bullet, especially for our most vulnerable students.

Maybe none of this matters. Maybe we are training our most vulnerable students to listen to machines rather than people. Workers of the future.

Reasons Why I Blog: An Examination

It’s been a year since I’ve started blogging. It seems like as good a time as any to look back over the year and reflect on how blogging has changed me.

Yes, you read that right, it has changed me. I am more engaged, more reflective, and, perhaps, more militant, in my own small way. I don’t just read about issues on higher education, I think about them in order to write about them here. When I teach (or, more accurately, after I teach), I am forced to reflect a little more carefully about what I am doing and why, because I need something to write about.

I am more connected to the larger community of academics. I write, people read, share, and respond. I know I have not only an audience, but a community of people who read and who I read. We have conversations, and maybe one day will meet face-to-face. Until then, I know more people than I ever did as a traditional academic.

And I know I am having an impact. I figured that between the four institutions I have taught at, I have reached approximately 1100 students (keep in mind, while I was doing my PhD, I only had one class; my other experiences were closer to full-time, but with writing intensive classes with lower caps). At least that many people have read my top post, How Higher Ed Makes Most Things Meaningless, especially considering that it was featured on both Inside Higher Education and Ed Leader News. Imagine my delight to find out that no less a figure than Henry Adams of The Academic Bait and Switch fame on the Chronicle and that he linked to my post in the comments of another Chronicle piece (which I can’t find right now). More people than I have ever taught have read that one post. More people than who have seen me speak at a conference. More people than who have read any of my academic essays.

But it is all of the people I have met outside of academia, those who are passionate about topics, rejecting the status quo of education at all levels, caring deeply about meaningful change. For me, blogging has opened my eyes to the world outside of academia. Does that sound like a sheltered academic statement? Indeed, it is. There is a degree of willful ignorance that an academic needs to have in order to survive the demands of living the academic life in higher education. The best thing that has ever happened to me is that I was unemployed for a time; I was forced to see thing differently and to do things differently. I saw others letting go and being successful, and it has empowered me let go.

Blogging has also, admittedly, fueled the more negative aspects of my personality, manifesting itself specifically as an obsessions with my blog’s stats. Lurking deep beneath my desire to be an academic is a need for validation, and the stats are one way that I can feel that sense of validation now that I am off the tenure-track. I see sites that do better than I do; College Misery gets the same amount of traffic a week as I do a month, if I’m lucky. Then again, misery loves company, and I’m not sure what thoughtful writing on the current state of higher education as well as teaching attracts. Less hits, apparently. Which is also depressing.

Wait, I’m celebrating here. I’m not perfect, and I still have some things I need to work on.

I’d really like to thank a few people: Mary Churchill who has been so supportive and inspiring me with her great work at University of Venus and Old School/New School; @ToughLoveForX who I have no idea how I “met”, but I am amazed at how connected this retired printer is, especially in the world of education; @comPOSTIONblog for founding #FYCchat with me; Worst Prof Ever for just generally kicking ass and doing and saying all the things I’m still not quite ready to; and all of the people who have come here, read my posts, commented, followed me on Twitter, shared my writing, and encouraged me to keep writing.

My goal for the next year? Get big enough to attract trolls. 🙂 I’m only half-joking.

Wireless Weekend Reflections, Part III: Helping Students Find Something Meaningful to Say

One of my fellow writing instructors and bloggers, Laura at Red Lips and Academics, recently wrote about the challenges of teaching students in our culture of over-share. I’ve written previously about why I actually don’t mind assigning a narrative essay, even if it does reinforce some of their more narcissistic impulses. But the post, my own brush with wordlessness, and being in the middle of grading papers, made me think about what, exactly, our students are saying.

The idea that I would be devastated if I were no longer able to talk/write/communicate is predicated on the fact that I believe that I have something meaningful to say. I blog here and elsewhere because I want to participate in the ongoing discussion regarding the future of higher education. I teach because I believe that I have knowledge that can and should be shared with students. People read, comment on, share, and compliment my posts, so I imagine that there are at least some people out there who agree with me. And my student evaluations are usually pretty strong, indicating that my students agree that I have something valuable to share with them.

But let’s look at what our students talk or write about: themselves, and usually not with very much depth or insight. Part of the narrative essay assignment is to get the students to reflect critically on a moment in their lives. A narrative essay has to have a point, and that point has to come from some self-reflection or self-awareness. When I talk about being a disruptive influence as a teacher, I want to push the “whole person” so to speak, to get them to think about what they say and why they are saying it.

But it has to go beyond just pushing the perception of themselves; they have to pop their heads up and take a look at the world around them. And not just look at it and react, but take the time to think and reflect. One of the things that has always startled me (although at this point, it shouldn’t anymore) is the superficiality of the “analysis” I read in their papers. One reason, I know, is that they don’t take the time to really think about what they are writing about; they simply grind it out and get it done. The revision process also seems to reinforce this superficiality; the ideas don’t get any deeper, even if the words and sentences used to communicate them are cosmetically more pleasing and grammatically correct.

This is where I come in as a teacher. I have a responsibility to assign them readings that challenge them, that make them uncomfortable, either because of the difficulty level or the ideas expressed (usually both). We can try to provoke them into thinking differently about their lives and what they consume (pop culture, etc), but unless we give them alternative models to try, then we are essentially dooming them to only ever being able to superficially engage with a subject. Critical thinking is meaningless unless we give students something meaningful to think about and some examples.

I go back to my example of “ancient” texts about education. Point me to a place where students can read contemporary arguments about education that explain its value in something other than economic terms? If I limited my students to contemporary texts on education, they probably would not have been exposed to the idea of education as something other than a way to make money and grow the economy. And that we are even talking about education; if polled, my students would almost universally tell you that this was a subject they had no interest in learning about, yet are all readily (and ignorantly) participating in the system.

I believe that students’ should have some say and control over what they want to learn. At the same time, though, they have to accept that learning moves beyond just simply remember facts and information. My job is to push their learning towards knowledge. This is not easy, but it is how we can help our students find something meaningful to say that isn’t just confessing something about themselves.

Wireless Weekend Reflections, Part 2: Coming Into Language

Juxtaposed with my brief brush with wordlessness is my son’s language explosion. He has just turned two and the language center in his brain finally awoken. All he wants to do is point to things and have us name them for him, then show off all of the words he probably didn’t even know he had locked away in his noggin. His excitement is palpable; he always wants us to read to him so he can point out all of the pictures he recognizes. He’s starting to sing songs.

The process hasn’t been without speed bumps. While his words are much clearer (and there are even sentences!), there are still lots of times where we don’t understand what he is trying to tell us, and he gets frustrated. A frustrated two-year-old who is also trying to assert his autonomy is a force of nature. A really loud force of nature who doesn’t like to hear the word “no.” But he doesn’t give up, for better or for worse.

I marvel at both my kids’ enthusiasm about learning. My daughter is desperate to learn how to write and practices without my prompting. She works and works and works at something until she gets it right. My son has started counting anything and everything while also trying to figure out the letters and numbers on license plates (so far, he really likes “B”). He watches and waits until he’s sure he can do something before really going for it (like talking). They both absolutely adore school and their friends. They want to learn about anything and everything and have a ton of fun doing it.

I dread the day when neither of them look forward to going to school and reading becomes a chore rather than a joy. I wonder when my kids will start looking as disinterested, unmotivated, and frustrated as the majority of the students who sit in front of me. I wonder how much of it is based on my students’ lowered expectations for their educations. Educations that once excited them and now almost repulses them. Educations that should have prepared them and left them enthusiastic for higher education instead of resentful.

At what point will my kids go from learning to speak to having nothing particularly meaningful to say?