I'm not alone

Catching up on some blog-reading, and turns out authority-issue-blogging is in the air: Here's Dr. Crazy's take.

While the issues she describes don't necessarily involve my specific complex of fidgety-energy/blurting/joking/overly complimenting my students ("Yeah! Good job! Awesome!" I tend to say when they answer a tough question right), she similarly describes issues based on the fact that many students don't simply "grant" respect and authority to "girl-women" (as Crazy dubs us late twenty-somethings).

So, in other words, some of what I've been musing about is in fact not simply specific to me. (It would be interesting, then, to know a bit more about the psychology experiment Gladwell described, which I discussed in my earlier post. For example, was there any gender bias in the snap-judgement that certain professors were "effective"? )

During my SAT training, I fell totally in love with one of the trainers. I respected and liked the other, but I was really agog over the one. This is because she was hilarious: she told tons of little funny stories about herself. In spite of this, she seemed to move us through the material quickly and effortlessly. So I loved her because first of all, she made me laugh, but second of all, because she seemed like a clarified, refined version of ME in my most effective guise. I love it when I have room to tell little personal stories, and where those serve to amuse the students, make them feel involved, and get them interested so that then they turn to the material with zest. This hasn't felt right in a lot of my classrooms lately -- for me, it seems to work best in creative writing classrooms, which I like better and which I've always thought of as being more about the teacher having a COMPELLING PERSONALITY. In my experience, students want their creative writing teachers with a big helping of eccentricity, so nervous tics and funny jokes are a BOON not a bane. There's also more opportunity for them to be dazzled by your wit, which then makes them think you know what you're talking about when you talk about writing. Wit doesn't transfer so directly to, say, the resumes and cover letters I taught to my tech writing class. (If you're interested, this renewed commitment to teaching creative writing is one reason I'm seriously considering allowing myself to default on my Ph.D. so that I can pursue writing a book so that I can pursue getting a job teaching creative writing and writing more books.)

Having training -- where we prospective teachers were put in the position of students -- was useful, as it reminded me that *I* have preferences, too, which have nothing to do with relative preparation. Training was also useful, as the trainers watched us teach and then "coached" us. It was pointed out to me how I'm a bit OVER complimentary ("Great job!"), which was a really useful thing to see, and was something I wouldn't have noticed on my own, that mode being habit picked up, I'm sure, in one of my more reluctant and slow classes along the way.

It was also useful because, having teaching experience myself, it was blindingly obvious to me how good this one teacher was: how well she managed telling us we were wrong without shaming us, how quickly and easily she made our progress look, and how she defused tension (I felt lots of it in the math section) by acknowledging it's hard to do math on the spot and that she understood but that she wanted us to do it anyway.

AND YET SOME OF THE OTHER "STUDENTS" IN THE CLASS DIDN'T LIKE THIS TEACHER. I think mostly people DID like her, but I heard a few people complaining that she wasn't friendly and she was "mean."

So they didn't like her personality... or, and I suspect this is a big component, they didn't recognize what she was balancing.

IF EVERYONE WHO WAS ASKED TO JUDGE A TEACHER FIRST HAD TO TEACH A FEW CLASSES, I think evaluations would be much more fair and informed. What we're doing up here in front of the class? Is hard. Because just about all of you wants/needs/responds to something different. So we have to find some way to reach MOST of you. And that, my friends, is hard.

And, in addition, deserves a good deal more money. Teacher salaries might be subsidized, for example, by some of the virtual money being deployed toward the military.

If highly paid, teachers would be seen as highly skilled. Authority issues would evaporate. The world would be a peaceful place.

Or so I can dream.

I love you, SAT trainer, come and help me learn to manage my class. And tell the stories again about China, about the hibiscus tea and the laundered underwear returned to you in sealed vaccuum packs.

Alright. Off to return my mother's call -- CV tells me she was "irritated" by the fact that I was not here last night when she called. BECAUSE I WAS TEACHING MY CLASS. My mother is another of those persons who, I suspect, does not think what I do involves that much skill or takes that much time.