My colleagues, oy vey, they're dunderheads. Nobody is as wonderful as me. Yet, one day, while doing an observation, I witnessed an engaged and ready classroom, different from my own. These students were active. I would give anything for action.The students talked. They asked questions. Before the proffie started anything, a student had a theory he wanted to talk about. The class answered him. The proffie, the shiftless bastard, just sat there and smiled like he'd just eaten an entire jar of Nutella.
It stunned me.
I walked out back to my office and reconvened with the observed party, that shiftless and errant bastard!
"How did you do that?" I asked. "I didn't see any wires or smoke. Your students actually led the class."
That miserable son of a bitch smiled again and said, "I trained them. I start the semester MAKING each student in turn start the class. They have to do at least 120 seconds of an opening salvo. They HAVE to. They get docked points. I MAKE 2 other students each day give at least a 60 second response. They HAVE to. I give them tiny points for extra insight, for an example from our readings."
"And they do this all semester?"
And he smiled again, that motherless, despicable asshole! "No, I stop MAKING them do it around midterm."
"And the rest of the time?" I asked, already knowing the answer, already slumping in my chair, already designing some kind of torturous death for this unctuous and abhorrent creature before me.
"The rest of the time they do it themselves."
Q: What's the best teaching tip you ever learned from a colleague?
Socratic seminars led by half the class and observed by the other half. I observed a colleague do this with a class of sixth graders (no kidding) and I couldn't believe how well they did with the material and how seriously they took the process. Obviously one would adjust the sophistication of the material and expectations for older students (or not, I guess, depending on your students!)
ReplyDeleteYou have to have a fairly small class for this. The students running the discussion are being graded by me on how well they explicate the text they're dealing with and how well they run the discussion in general. The observer students (who will be the discussing group in the next class period) are graded on the quality of their observations (they have a rubric to guide their assessments).
In general, my students seem to enjoy the exercise. It's interesting to see who will participate well in the discussion--it's often kids you can't get a peep out of during a regular class. I think partly they feel pressure to impress their peers. But mostly, they know they're being very directly graded on the quality of their participation in a few very quantifiable ways, so they take it seriously.
Wear pants.
ReplyDeleteI always pictured you in a white lab coat and Hawaiian board shorts.
DeleteDo NOT move around the room a lot and speak very quietly--I have them leaning *in* to me and focusing *on* me, and the quality of the experience is good for all. Of course, I need to have something to say...and they have to be convinced that it is worth hearing. I learned this from a colleague who taught maths. He, like me, had an over-the-top personality and I had expected a dog-and-pony show going in to observe him early in my career. Quite the opposite. The kids hung on his every word. And it has been a pleasure to tone myself down and to insist upon their attention.
ReplyDeleteI have a naturally quiet voice. This works well in a small room. It doesn't work at all in a large lecture. ;)
DeleteI've seen administrators fire adjuncts for not "walking around the room". Just goes to show you how dumb administrators can be.
DeleteFirst of all, is this THE Eating Low Salt, from the old days? Good grief man, where have you been? You were/are funny.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I stole tons of my good teaching ideas, but the one I use the most is simply being inflexible about people coming late and leaving early. Absent is marked if you're 30 seconds late. That's a rule. I make it hard and fast and for whatever reason it improves in-class behavior. I sometimes don't even follow through in my gradebook, but they have the impression I'm a hard ass and it's enough.
I stole this gem from a faculty pal who I thought was a great teacher: Give your own midterm student evaluations. You learn what's working and not midway through, and it diffuses any bombs that might occur in the official evals at the end of the term.
ReplyDeleteThat is a great idea and I use it myself. Most decent books on the craft of teaching mention this too.
DeleteEating Low Salt is so FUNNY! I searched his name and found some REALLY old comments. Glad to see you're back. I love the tone of this post, but don't have a good answer off the top of my head. I feel I've learned most things from my students.
ReplyDeleteEating Low Salt is back and using words like "unctuous" and "dunderheads"? This must be a holiday of some sort. If not, then we'll make it so. Break out the bourbon!
ReplyDeleteKick someone out during the first class. Mind you, this was advice for a large, cavernously large, 1st year course. There will ALWAYS be someone who acts like an idiot during first class. Kick 'em out, with extreme prejudice. Everyone goes quiet, and things go smoothly for the rest of semester. If they are a particularly altruistic bunch, they actively self-police themselves ("Shhh! Yer gonna get it! The prof is going to kick you out!").
ReplyDeleteStapling a student's dick to the floor on the first day also works well for this. Particularly if they're still there on the last day of class.
DeleteBest teaching tip I learned from a colleague was to be consistently fair with students. This colleagues wasn't consistently fair, and student resentment built up to a point where they felt my colleague was no longer fit to judge their work because he had 'favorites' that consistently earned A's regardless of their level of work. I was so horrified by the mob waiting outside the chair's office one day that I decided that even if I had favorites, no one would ever know who those were.
ReplyDeleteLots of proffies are not fair and--worse yet--cannot be taught to be fair. Teaching a proffie to have a heart or to have integrity is about as easy as teaching someone to have perfect pitch.
DeleteAnd sometimes snowflakes are full of crap about perceived unfairness.
DeleteWell, yes, that's true. I'm not sure we can actually all BE completely fair, but as EMH states, we can at least cultivate the perception of being fair. Whether they think it is fair is always a problem...
DeleteTo be fair, you must show them special preference.
DeleteI'm "bias". Openly biased towards obviously smart students who give a fuck. Luckily they are very, very rare where I teach, so most of the time I can treat everybody the same.
DeleteOkay, this wasn't me but a grad school classmate of mine who was just starting his first tenure-track job at Rectilinear State University. An old salt in the department told him, "I've been here a long time, and you're going to save yourself a lot of time in prep work if you get some of those little white hole-reinforcing thingies and put them on the pages of your lecture notes which you stash in a three-ring binder."
ReplyDeleteOh lord, last year we finally set up our office copier to scan things and send them to us electronically. (I know, welcome to the 20th century). The ability to scan has changed my life. And saved my ass.
DeleteStory I heard somewhere. Fun if silly:
ReplyDeletePalm a piece of rock candy before your first class. Write your name on the board with chalk, then throw the candy in your mouth and loudly crunch the candy as though you had just eaten the chalk. The class will watch your every move every time you pick up the chalk from then on.
What is this "chalk" you speak of?
DeleteEvery day, I get covered in chalk! I wear a lot of black. By the end of the day, I looked like I body slammed the board. I hate it! Even when I'm not using the board, I brush up against it.
DeleteI use a dry erase board and the cuffs of my shirt are stained with marker ink when they brush against the board. This is why I've given up on writing on the board and found other ways to convey information to students.
DeleteInterpretive dance!
Peppermint candy, such as from the bottoms of plain, white candy canes, works great for this.
DeleteBeaker Ben doing interpretive dance just made me snort my yogurt.
DeleteI was told by a silver back to plan a "special" day during the term and call in sick knowing the lecture wouldn't be missed. As she said, "We get sick days, so use them."
ReplyDeleteThat classroom demonstrations in physics are much more interesting and memorable when they present real or apparent danger to the students or to the instructor. Importantly, apparent danger works just as well as real danger.
ReplyDeleteIt's almost cliche now due to all the media attention it garnered awhile back, but Walter Lewin's conservation of energy lecture falls squarely into this classification.
Delete"Chemistry is the science of... transformation" . [Big scary green fire on the instructor's desk.] Man, I miss Walt.
DeleteI've mentioned my best several times at RYS and here, but here it is, anyway, 'cause it works so well for me - no make-up tests. Ever. To prevent incessant whining, the values of any and all tests missed, for any reason from the trivial to the grave, are shifted onto the final, which is comprehensive. That was the single best thing I got from my undergrad astronomy class... sorry Frod! I liked the other stuff, but that... whew! So much hassle avoided!
ReplyDeleteI tried that one semester. I got hammered by our accessibility office, because I wasn't giving their precious snowflake an equitable experience, because it was her extreme anxiety that prevented her from scheduling her exam with them (she had to take it there, because even the testing center was too stressful for her, the poor dear) in a timely manner. And I upset her when I sent the email to her, and copied them, a week before the exam to remind her to schedule it.
DeleteSo I was more or less forced to let her make it up. And because it was a full week after the rest of the class, I had to write a whole new exam for her. I took great pleasure in writing the most difficult exam I could while keeping within the parameters of the study guide I had provided the rest of the class. I took even greater pleasure when she failed it.
Happy to report that I already use the tips mentioned by Hiram and Wylod. Good.
ReplyDeleteFunny, in 20+ years here nobody has given me "teaching tips". (Math people are big on "figuring things out yourself".) Except that, recently, I had an email exchange with my old dept head (the guy who hired me, who I consider a friend; now retired.) He said:
"You need to give higher grades."
I don't know if it's a good tip or not. Or even if it will make a major difference. I do know it will require grading tests like Santa Claus.
Something else that has worked for me is to remind them often that "most of the class is doing OK" (meaning, they're pulling a C) and that "not all is lost; if you work really hard for the next four weeks, you may still get a C". Even if not literally true, or patently unrealistic, it seems to cut the drop rate drastically. The I can do whatever I want as far as letting people pass. Not that anybody told me that, I had to figure it out on my own.
A long time ago I was allowed to teach an honors section. Then later somebody told me, "you know, if they would get an A in the regular section, they should also get an A in the honors section; you can't "penalize" them for taking the honors." I go "????" "Really? What if they are in the wrong section. I mean, isn't "honors" the place where we can take our gloves off and actually teach math?" Apparently not.
DeleteThat was 20 years ago. Haven't been asked (or allowed) to teach an honors section since.
I show the class the grade distribution after exams. It makes it clear that 80% (ok, maybe 70%) of the students are not failing. Since the idiots are friends with each other, they can legitimately say, "everybody I know is failing this class." Yes, that's because everybody you know is stupid. Enlarge your circle of friends, dummy.
DeleteOh yes, I do that, too. I also include a table with pair ranges (grade on homework, grade on test) . Using that, I do a "conditional probabilities" demo in class: contrast
DeletePr (A,B or C on test given A,B or C on homework) with
Pr (A,B or C on test given F on homework).
The first one is more than twice the second. And I point out exactly with HW problems were used on the test. So no, they can't complain (and don't.)