End of Week 3

At this time every year, at the end of three weeks, I feel the weight of being back in the classroom. I have spent about three weeks with students in classes and in the college. I have been struck, overwhelmed sometimes and depressed sometimes by the behaviours of students. As is normal for human beings, I often extrapolate from behaviours to attitudes. That is not necessarily fair, but it is what happens, especially when I am low in energy.

The behaviours I have seen that I do not like include what seems like adisregard for normal courtesy between students and between students and faculty.

• "Hey" as an address to faculty, in person and in e-mail


• Please and Thank you do not seem to exist


• Foul language accepted as part of normal conversation


• Using both sides of hall or stairway, blocking others' movements

When I see and hear students in the hallways and the cafeteria they are usually quite animated. When I seem them in classrooms (mine or other faculty) they look listless, inattentive, sometimes asleep. Their faces change from open and reactive to closed and non-reactive. There are very few who show any desire to learn or even to take notes in most classrooms. I don't know if this is the result of their previous academic experiences. Since I teach mostly first year students I think it must be. Perhaps no one has ever expected them to be active learners, pursuing knowledge instead of just absorbing information.
I wonder if it is a fruitless task to expect to get most of them to participate in their own education. I wonder if their behaviours do reflect an essentially self-centred attitude: "prove right away this will be of benefit to me, otherwise I am going to be mentally absent". Other than marks I know I cannot prove what I teach will be of any benefit to any of them.
What to do, how to deal with this situation?

We have finished two academic weeks and start the third one tomorrow. Observations for the last week:

1. I can get a lot of work done during the mornings when I am not in class and during times between classes.


2. Many first year students are needy, wanting my attention, or asking me to tell them things they could discover on their own.


3. Many first year students want or demand immediate feedback if at all possible.

Solutions:

1. Be thankful, use the time and don't take work home.


2. Help them learn where to look for answers.


3. Encourage and support them to use computer-based training. It is set up to give immediate feedback.

I need to pay more attention to the internal and external signs about my role, my direction and my goals. Can I become a better teacher? What does it mean to be a good teacher or a better teacher? Do I want to be a better teacher?
I also need to know how to adjust the style sheet for these blogs. There is far too much white space.

Three days of classes in the first week. No classes on Monday because of the Labour Day holiday, no classes on Tuesday because of First Year Orientation. I wonder if the loss of classes for all college students is worth whatever is gained in the one day set aside exclusively for First Year Orientation.

My professional development programme includes taking the Kolb self-evaluation test, twelve questions to determine my learning style. After having seen the test and accompanying booklet, it is clear to me the college's whole professional development programme is based on Kolb's work. I did a little research and discovered there is a long list of researchers and research that rejects Kolb's theory. The basis of the criticism seems to be 1) the observations are not repeatable 2) the theory was developed before the observations 3) the theory and observations do not result in predictions. In other words, 1) my test results today may not be my test results tomorrow, 2) my test results will have no effect on the theory behind the tests, 3) my test results as a learner do not predict how I will teach others. I am going to run some tests and do some of my own observations.

First I am going to check the validity of the questions by answering the questions with random numbers. I should be able to write a programme that will generate hundreds of test results fairly quickly. If the questions have no bias then random answers should generate completely balanced results. However I also need to keep focused on my work with students.