It’s good for a teacher to be a student once in a while.
I learn this lesson over and over as I pursue my MEd. I have encountered all sorts of challenges I’d forgotten about, like worrying about grades and managing my time in order to get readings done and papers written. I’ve had to examine how my (sometimes less than courteous) behaviour toward my teachers has affected their feelings and feedback. I’ve had to wrestle with approaches that I’ve found less than helpful. All of this is good food for thought for any teacher.
However, sometimes I find myself in a context that gives me a whole new perspective on what my students are going through. The kind of work I’m doing in my MEd comes pretty easily to me. I like reading, writing, doing research, participating in class discussions. I know how to form a sentence, construct an argument, interpret a research paper. When these tasks are challenging, I still have a strong sense of self-efficacy. It is more interesting to observe myself when I am struggling with a task that I don’t do well.
Billie Hara, over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, has written a revealing summary of what it’s like to be an overweight, middle-aged gym neophyte and receive inconsiderate, condescending and careless training. I loved reading this article because it says so much about effective and non-effective teaching. The teacher-as-student can make excellent use of discouraging learning experiences, and Hara has done just that. In her article, she lists some questions that her experience has raised for her regarding her own teaching:
Have you ever:
- Made incorrect and negative assumptions about why a student was in your class and that student’s ability to perform the work, assumptions based on gender, race, class, age, or physical ability?
- Told a student that she wasn’t prepared to do more even if she had the motivation and skills to do so?
- Simplified instructions to a procedure (theory or concept) to such a degree that a five-year old would understand it (and your student was an adult)?
- Assumed that students want to be like you (because, you know, you are so amazingly awesome)?
- Told a student that other calls (other students, other work) were more important than working with him right at that moment?
- Cut a short appointment even shorter because a student was late and you were insulted?
- Used terms and concepts that were above a student’s level of understanding, without asking the student if she understood?
This summer, I have been taking swimming lessons. To give some context: I can swim. Sort of. I love being in the water. I took swimming lessons as a child – I failed my beginner’s class three times, but finally managed to scrape through and do a survival class in which I learned how to tread water, float, etc. I took adult swimming lessons about ten years ago and discovered (or perhaps just reaffirmed) one of my most serious limitations: I am so uncoordinated that I have often suspected that I suffer from mild autism. (This is no joke – there are other indicators.) Just walking around in the world is a constant gamble for me; doing one thing with my arms and another with my legs while suspended in liquid is totally baffling. What is more, I recently lost a great deal of weight, and learned for the first time why most people find swimming to be an excellent workout: most people don’t float like corks the moment they enter the water.
So it wasn’t a total surprise to me to discover that, in my intermediate class of seven, I was at the absolute bottom in terms of ability. I was so much less advanced than the others that during each class, one of the two teachers took me aside to work with me privately. Both teachers were very sweet young people. They were in their late teens/early twenties, and were doing their best to be encouraging and helpful.
One did a pretty good job of it. He worked with me for only one class and focused on one thing at a time. We started with my shoulder rotation, and once he felt I’d gotten the hang of that, he got me to extend the motion to my elbows and hands. However, I found myself unable to grasp one of the instructions he was giving me, and when I tried to explain my difficulty, he seemed bewildered and slightly impatient. I never was able to figure out exactly what he meant for me to do.
I worked more frequently with another teacher whose approach was to get me to swim back and forth and to explain to me, at the end of each length, one thing I needed to work on. This would have been fine, except that my problems were so myriad that the moment I corrected one thing, another problem arose, until her corrections were so overwhelming that I finally lost my cool. “I know it was worse this time,” I explained, “because I’m trying to remember all the things you’ve told me up to now and incorporate this new thing you’re telling me and I’m still having trouble moving my arms and legs at the same time!” Her face went a little blank, and she nodded sheepishly, and I felt slightly ashamed. She was so young, and she was clearly doing her best. But at the end of the next length, she said, “I see what you’re saying – I’m giving you too much to think about at once, and I can see you’re trying hard to use my suggestions. Let’s just work on your breathing for the rest of the class.”
This really impressed me. Do I have that kind of humility? I wondered. If a student gets angry at me because I’m not meeting her needs, do I listen and adjust, instead of dismissing her out of hand or telling her how she should approach her own learning?
This may be the principle I focus on this year: learning can be frustrating, and frustration interferes with learning. If a teacher can acknowledge and adjust for frustration, a student can learn better. In the meantime, I’m going to step away from swimming classes for a while and spend some time alone in the pool trying to assimilate what I’ve learned, about both swimming and teaching. And if anyone can give me pointers about my shoulder rotation, I’m all ears.
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Classroom as Microcosm 
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