 |
| The original "Early Thirsty" blurry graphic. |
No complaints about my students so far. It's a pretty theoretical course that spends as much time just learning the "concept" as applying it. Rather introductory, as the name might suggest.
Last class, I was explaining the concepts behind Certainty/Uncertainty. One student was simply not understanding the concept. I tried working my way around and explaining it a different way. I tried googling it and reading that. Nothing worked. In the lull as I was trying to think of/find a way to explain it to her, another student said "Look, it's like this." He put his hand under the desk and said "My hand is definitely somewhere under this desk. If you're asked whether or not my hand is under this desk, you are 100% confident that it is, right? But if someone asks how confident you are that it's under the *left* half of the desk, you're only 50% confident."
And she immediately understood it. As happy as I am that I explained the concept well enough for one of my students to elaborate upon it for his peer (and as impressed I was with an excellent illustration of it), I couldn't help feeling a bit jealous that his explanation had worked and mine had not. Honestly, part of me is tempted to use his analogy if I teach future classes because I think it's more effective than graphs (though I'll obviously still have to use those).
Q: Has a situation like this ever happened to you? Where either a tutor / another professor / student gets one of your pupils to understand something after you failed? Are these feelings natural / will they go away?
Sure, this happens. Use the analogy next time - in fact, tell the class that a student just like them came up with it. That illustrates to your future class that students can learn the concept well enough to help each other. This is all good.
ReplyDeleteSure, be jealous. But then, like Ben says, let yourself give credit where credit is due.
ReplyDeleteWho knows? That other student might have learned it that way from a previous teacher, or be someone who will turn out to be a teacher.
Heck, the first, slow to get it student, might be the next one to be the teacher.
In any case...successful learning!
Sounds like my pedagogy is showing.
I'm sure my students explain things to each other better than I do all the time (I'm sure they also misinform each other on a regular basis, but that's another story). It's part of the process, and strikes me as one of the advantages of working with the population you're teaching: some of them are going to have some pretty well-developed intellectual and social skills, even though they don't have a degree.
ReplyDeleteThere would only be a problem if you reacted negatively to learning just because you didn't produce it entirely on your own (but of course it's fine to be privately, momentarily jealous). As I see it, the student who was having trouble now understands the concept, *and* the student who explained it understands it even better for having come up with the explanation, and you provided an environment (the initial explanation, the atmosphere that welcomed the re-explanation) that made all that possible. Win-win-win.
One thing that I realized only after years of teaching, and still struggle with a bit, is the idea that it isn't about me. It's about them, learning. I try to build in some opportunities for students to teach each other, and this semester I actually heard a student tell another, "hey, look, you talk about this all over your paper. Maybe that should be your thesis, and not this." I was pleased, not jealous.
ReplyDeleteThat's fantastic! Kudos to the student for coming up with a great analogy and to you for creating the kind of classroom where students feel comfortable teaching and learning from each other. As others said, either you taught it to student 2 really well or they learned it somewhere else, but either way, you created the environment for that exchange to occur.
ReplyDeleteI tell my students that I will happily steal their better-than-mine ideas and use them later. And, I do - but with attribution (a student came up with THIS idea) so that current students understand that I really value their insights. Plus, I get to look a little human for a while.
ReplyDeleteAmen.
DeleteWhy would you feel like a failure? One student understood your explanation so well that s/he could explain it to another. It's all about the students, no?
ReplyDeleteWhy would you feel like a failure? One student understood your explanation so well that s/he could explain it to another. It's all about the students, no?
ReplyDeleteBecause whenever you've striven but can't reach a student, your first thought is that you've failed. It takes a bit more time and stepping back to see that as long as the learning occurred anyway, you succeeded.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOf course it happens! A good teacher is a good thief.
ReplyDeleteIn my research, I'm a gerbil specialist, but I teach a lot of Intro/Remedial Hamsters because there's a much bigger market in hamsterology than in the rather obscure and specialized field of gerbilology. I only took hamsterology as a student because it was required for all rodent majors, and since I had little natural ability or interest in hamsterology, I sweat bullets in every one of my hamsterology classes.
ReplyDeleteNow, however, I am a very effective teacher of hamsterology (I'm not going to feign modesty about my teaching ability- I'll save my imposter syndrome for my research), particularly intro and remedial classes, because when my students make mistakes or don't grasp some concept, I often know exactly what they don't understand, because chances are I had also made that mistake or struggled with that concept. Moreover, I genuinely enjoy teaching the intro and remedial students, which most of the real hamsterologists don't; I enjoy the pedagogical challenge and I eventually came to love hamsters after all (although that's still not where my research interests lie), and it's great when I succeed in passing along some of my hard-won appreciation to a few of my students.
I'm guessing that you were reasonably competent at mathematics from the start or you wouldn't have chosen to study applied mathematics. And now you're teaching remedial or at least very out of practice students and you don't understand how they arrived at their mistakes or what part of some fairly simple concept they don't understand. When one of them shows you what's not quite connecting in their heads or a concrete example that clarifies an abstract concept, treasure that; these are methods for acquiring insight into what they don't get without personally having struggled with that subject in your own schooling.
Itinerant Adjunct For Hire: Have Laptop, Will Travel
P.S. Like most forms of social embarrassment, the sting of a class that doesn't go as planned lessens as one ages and gains experience in that type of interaction. Being rejected by my first middle school crush was mortifying; now a badly matched date is a funny story even before it's over.
Hey, I can use all the help I can get. I teach physics: this shit is hard enough without egos getting in the way. Not only does it requires fluency in mathematics, which is more than rare enough, but it also needs to connect to reality. When I tap something with a hammer, I need to understand why it fell over in the way it did.
ReplyDeleteAND THEN you have to explain it to someone else, in a way they can easily understand. This is hard enough when talking about tapping things with hammers: it's much worse with quantum mechanics. So, I long ago learned to accept gratefully any and all help I can get. I suppose that it's quite rare makes this easier.
DeleteAnnie, this is a wonderful story. Students learn best from each other and good on you for providing an atmosphere where that can happen. Try to make it happen again! Start a log of "best tips from fellow students" and acknowledge students who contribute something that really helped someone in the class.
ReplyDeleteThis is teaching at its best, Annie!
I believe that this situation demonstrated multiple aspects of a pedagogy known as "constructivism." A definite win!
ReplyDeleteRemember the adage about med school pedagogy:
ReplyDeleteSee one, do one, teach one.
As we have all undoubtedly heard (and occasionally personally experienced) one of the best was to LEARN something is being able to TEACH it to somebody else.
I concur with my learned colleagues - win, win, win.