Category Archives: Teaching

My teaching workshop is now over, and while I learned a lot, I’m happy to be finished. It was hard to spend all day in a workshop when I had lots of work to do at home. And doing teaching demonstrations for my peers is stressful, and I’m glad I don’t have any more to plan.

But the last one went well; it was probably my best. I did another lesson on metaphors, a follow-up to last week’s lesson, this time looking specifically at metaphors in poetry. This is the poem we discussed, by Linda Pastan:

Marks

My husband gives me an A
for last night’s supper,
an incomplete for my ironing,
a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average,
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes
in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait ’til they learn
I’m dropping out.

This poem worked well because it’s short and it’s got one main metaphor that’s possible to discuss satisfactorily in 10 minutes. I asked the class to write some quick thoughts about the speaker’s feelings in the poem, which we discussed, and then I paraphrased a part of the poem, taking out the metaphor, and asked which worked better, my paraphrase or the poem. The answer is obvious — the poem is much better than my paraphrase — and we talked about what metaphors have to offer a poet.

Another workshop participant did a great lesson on connotations in poetry; she put about a dozen words on the chalkboard and asked us in small groups to write down the associations we bring to them, which we discussed for a while, eventually beginning to make connections among the words. And then we learned she took the words from a poem by Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays,” which we could make almost immediate sense of because we’d spent so long looking at some of its individual words.

I loved that way of approaching a poem — closely considering some of the important words out of their context, so that in context we brought a lot of thought and depth to them immediately. I think that this could work really well with students who are intimidated by poetry, because they can get comfortable with the words before being confronted with the poem itself. It was almost like we were building the poem ourselves, starting with the same building blocks the poet did.

The other great part of the day was doing a social styles inventory — categorizing ourselves into one of four different types: the driver, the analytical type, the expressive type, or the amiable type (those labels bug me because they’re not parallel). The driver is the take-charge person; the analytical type is organized, methodical, and thoughtful; the expressive type is artistic, imaginative, and talkative; and the amiable type is the friendly people-pleaser. The idea is that each teacher fits into somewhere in one (or more) of these categories and each of our students does also, and as teachers we should try to reach out to students with different styles and not always use the style of interaction that comes naturally to us. Analytical teachers tend to teach best to analytical students but might lose the expressive ones, for example.

I was not surprised to find that I fit the analytical type the closest, and am also pretty strong in the amiable category. My scores in the expressive and driver categories were extremely low. That struck me as absolutely right — I’m reserved, introverted, thoughtful, organized, detail-oriented as analytical types are, and I’m also in tune with other people and eager to make other people happy as amiable types are. And I think I tend to lose the expressive type students in my classes, which is something I can work on.

I tend to be skeptical of personality tests — I never feel like my answers to the questions are all that accurate — but the results to this one seemed right on.

I’ve come out of this workshop knowing more about teaching, but also knowing more about myself. It was worth giving up a month’s worth of Fridays for, I think.

Two teaching demonstrations down and one more to go next week. I’ll be glad when this workshop is over, much as I am learning from it and enjoying it. I normally spend Friday madly grading, and I hate having to push the mad grading off until Saturday and Sunday because I’m at the workshop all day Friday.

Yesterday my teaching demonstration went okay. The lesson didn’t go as well as last week’s pace line lesson went, but I was also working with a much harder, more abstract topic: metaphors. The idea was that the metaphors we use shape how we think about ideas, basically the idea in George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By. For example, we think about arguments in terms of war or battle metaphors (“you shot down my idea,” or “you’ve never beaten me in an argument”) and argument becomes war when it doesn’t necessarily have to be so. I like this concept a lot, and the class got it by the end, but there was a bit of confusion as we went along. Perhaps it was just too complex for my short 10 minutes — but a fun challenge anyway.

But the really interesting parts of the day came first when we were discussing my lesson, and the Business and Computer Science instructors thought I needed to spend a little more time defining “metaphor.” They hadn’t thought about the term since they were in college and spent part of the lesson in confusion. That took me a bit by surprise, since I tend to assume that people — adults at least — can produce a workable definition of the word immediately and are ready to jump to more theoretical ideas about metaphors right away.

And then as I sat in the Business instructor’s teaching demonstration, I experienced moments of panic as she introduced the lesson and asked us to do an activity that I had no idea how to do. She gave us a chart with numbers and asked us to analyze the numbers and come up with definitions of terms such as “unit fixed costs,” “total fixed costs,” “unit variable costs,” and “total variable costs.” I sat there looking at the numbers and thinking, “What???” It’s not that I’m bad with numbers. I’m actually good with numbers and I like them a lot, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the instructions and those business terms, and I did my best but didn’t figure it out right away.

We talked in our discussion later about how she could have offered us clearer instructions to help us out, but as we were in the lesson, other people seemed to be getting it without the extra instructions. I sat there thinking, “please don’t call on me, please don’t call on me!! Because then I’m going to have to admit that I don’t get it at all, when I’d really rather just sit here and stare at my paper avoiding eye contact with you and waiting this lesson out.”

Later the Business instructor and I had a moment of understanding: we’d bewildered each other, and now we both had a better idea of what our students feel when they don’t get what we’re doing, and the rest of the class seems to get it, and they might have to admit publicly that they don’t get it and feel stupid.

It’s great to be reminded of how students feel sometimes — and not just to be reminded, but to experience it, to feel the intimidation and panic myself.

So you know how I wrote last week about my teaching workshop and the 10 minute mini-lesson I’d have to do? I had to do the lesson yesterday, and I ended up doing the lesson I mentioned in my last post, the one on a cycling pace line. And I thought it went pretty well. I was the only one, out of five participants, who finished within the 10 minutes; everybody else got cut off short (the workshop leaders had no mercy and wouldn’t let anybody seize a few extra minutes to finish up). This seems typical of me: I’m generally an extraordinarily good direction-follower (not always a good thing, let me say) and someone who doesn’t tend to take up a whole lot of anybody’s time. We had a short feedback session after each lesson, and one of the participants said that she thought I might have taken less than the allotted ten minutes if people hadn’t asked questions. That’s true; if I’m at all nervous (which I was, a little bit), I’ll rush, and forget half of what I wanted to say. And I was trying so hard to keep from going over 10 minutes — not a long stretch of time at all — that I was in danger of overdoing it.

But the session did go well. I made them act out a pace line, so they got to walk around the room, rotating from front to back up to the front again as they went, and then we talked about the benefits of a pace line (drafting) and the dangers (bumping into other riders) and the need to keep a steady pace and not stay in the lead too long.

The “class” responded very well to my enthusiasm; I started off talking about how some of my happiest moments have been spent on a bike and particularly riding in a pace line, and people talked about that afterwards as a highlight of the lesson. I’m reminded that a little bit of enthusiasm in the classroom will go a long way. And they liked the active nature of the lesson. I’m sure I don’t take enough opportunities in my regular classes to make students move around and do things and be active in some way.

I also learned that spending seven hours in one room with the same people — actually it was more like 6 1/2 since we got out early — is exhausting. I’m a pretty extreme introvert in the technical sense: even though I like being around people a lot, it drains me of energy, and I need a lot of time to recover. By the end of the day I was ready to crawl into a corner and refuse to talk to anybody.

So, two more Fridays in this workshop, and two more mini-lessons. Even though I think I could easily do two more lessons in cycling, I’ll probably try to teach something about writing or about literature. But I have no idea what.

So I signed up for a workshop at my job that teaches instructional skills; it’s called, logically enough, an Instructional Skills Workshop, or ISW. The workshop involves four Fridays this October. We met yesterday for four hours, and we’ll meet the next three Fridays for seven hours and learn about things like creating effective lesson plans, formulating learning outcomes, assessing student learning, and encouraging student participation in class.

On the one hand, all that sounds kind of boring and bureaucratic. Say the words “outcomes” and “assessment” to average academics and they will roll their eyes. On the other hand, though, today’s workshop was fun, and I think I’ll learn a lot. It’s very practical, so what I’m learning will be directly usable in class. I’m guessing it’s kind of like coursework you might do for a degree in elementary or secondary education — where they actually teach you how to teach — shortened into four days. And that sounds like a very good idea to me, since many, many college instructors don’t get formal training in pedagogy. I got some training in how to teach writing, but very little in how to manage a classroom. My problem is that while I know some things about good teaching, my knowledge is kind of vague and nebulous, and this sort of workshop will help me be more consistent and systematic about doing the things good teachers do.

This kind of workshop works for me, since I’m more of a planner than a spontaneous teacher, and this way I’ll learn better ways to plan. The things we’re learning don’t preclude some spontaneity anyway. This is one way the Hobgoblin and I are quite different; he’s got a post on more spontaneous forms of teaching, which sound great but just aren’t my style. I think I’m learning ways to play to my strengths as a teacher rather than trying to be a kind of teacher I’m not (the kind who can wing it successfully).

The main part of the workshop is a series of mini-lessons all the participants have to do: one a week for the next three weeks. I’m supposed to do a 10-minute lesson on whatever I want next Friday, so I’m wracking my brains for what I can teach. The workshop leaders recommend teaching something out of one’s discipline — a hobby or non-academic skill one has, for example. So I might teach something related to cycling. I’d thought about doing a lesson on how to watch a bike race; i.e. how to make sense of what’s happening. But the lesson is supposed to be interactive in some way, and I’m not sure how to teach that lesson interactively. Then I thought of teaching the concept of the pace line — what it is and why cyclists use them. I can be interactive with this lesson easily — I can make everyone form a line and pretend we’re riding and act out the paceline’s movements.

Anything about cycling anybody out there has always wanted to know? I don’t think anyone else in the group knows much about it, so I can get away with teaching the basics.

We’ll get videotaped as we teach, but, thank God, we’re not forced to watch ourselves. We’ll get feedback on our teaching, which will be fine, but I can’t handle the thought of watching myself on tape. And I don’t even own a VCR, so I have no easy way to watch the tape anyway. What a relief.