I missed the memo the first week that there were themes each week we could write about. When I saw this weeks theme, it started me thinking about how I have included students in my classroom and what inclusivity really means. Here are some of these thoughts (maybe a little scatterbrained 😉 )

In previous semesters I have had students with certain accommodations for their vision or hearing and it has sometimes been challenging to make sure that I actually accommodate them. I tend to talk fast when I teach, especially when it is a favorite topic. These students that have a hard time hearing were having trouble keeping up with me. I really had to slow down so that they could hear and understand what I was saying. For those students who had a hard time seeing, I had to make sure that I wrote legibly and chose colors that were easily able to see. I guess the point I am trying to make is that I had to stop and think about how I was teaching and how I could become better during my lessons.

Sometimes I think we take for granted what comes easily to us, at least I know I do. Whether we have difficulty seeing, hearing (or doing math), we all have our own story that can make learning or enjoying something difficult. I try to remind myself this and adapt my teaching to the needs of my students each semester. I believe this has made me a better teacher, but know there is always room for improvement 😉

During their college years, students must – like it or not – become writers. They must begin to see like a writer, listen like a writer, feel like a writer, even smell like a writer. Uh… yeah…

And the first step to becoming a good (albeit temporary) writer…

Learn to observe.

I have my students complete weekly observing activities to get them accustomed to actively gather ideas for their writing. Every week, they must go out and make observations on a range of areas: the GCC campus, human behavior, food, animals, money, clothing, their major, and art, to name just a few.

I also share my own weekly examples; here are some observations I’ve made recently:

Smaller birds will attack hawks to keep them out of their area.

Just a few years ago, poke was virtually nonexistent in the Phoenix area – now poke restaurants are becoming ubiquitous.

Some panhandlers have come up with creative signs; I saw one that said, “I’m down to my last million – help me please!”

My students have discovered some “gems in the rough” of their own. For example:

Parents are more lenient than before.

When people have to present a project, they usually have something that they do. Like some people twirl their hair and others tug on their shirt.

Children usually act more hyper than adults but also are more honest than adults.

Some gems are rougher than others, but at least they’ve begun to hone their observing skills. And as students progress through college, they’ll continue to develop what Robert Ingersoll called the “Holy Trinity of Science”:  Reason, Observation, and Experience.

Then, the sky’s the limit. Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane…!

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This is my last full-time semester at GCC. In the fall, I’ll be teaching part-time for GCC and strictly online while pursuing a PhD program in Australia. The Australian government has granted me a scholarship with a stipend, and I won’t have to teach as part of my graduate work.

Needless to say, this semester has been different for me from prior semesters. This coming fall will be the first time since the fall of 1999 that I won’t be teaching English classes full-time face-to-face at the college level. For whatever reason, this knowledge of an ending coming has made me more cognizant of a few changes in myself as a teacher as this final full-time gallops away.

1) I am grading faster. I don’t know why. I’m a slow reader and have always been a slow grader. Perhaps knowing that the end is (sort of) nigh in the grading realm, I am motivated more than ever to reach it.

2) I am more patient with students. In the past, when a class hasn’t performed well overall on a given assignment, I’ve pretty much taken it personally and secretly brooded for days. This semester, I finally said, “Okay, that didn’t work.” And then we covered more material and techniques and I found and offered more examples, and then students revised and resubmitted their work.

3) I am less patient with students. I’m having a harder time than usual hearing the hard stories — the ones that cause our students illness and angst and oftentimes prevent their successes. I had one student who was sick with the flu for ten days and every class he missed resulted in an email from him with the blow-by-blow of his bodily suffering. Really, I would have been convinced had he just told me he wasn’t well. In this way, I feel helpless to help my students this semester in a way I haven’t before.  I think this might be because I can no longer imagine the big picture and how we all fit into it. 

4) I am more patient with myself. I have made some big decisions here in the past few months. What if I’m wrong? What if it’s not at all a good idea to leave my tenured position in order to pursue a PhD mid-life in a country I’ve never even visited before? What if? I have to trust myself. If I don’t, what good have the mistakes and successes of the first half of my life been for? Hard as it is, I’m learning to trust myself and to ignore all of the other worrying voices that suggest to me somehow that I can’t. I shouldn’t. I’m crazy if I do. 

5) And now 1-3 make sense to me. Because I have changed my relationship to myself, all other relationships shift, including the working relationships I have with my students. Though if I had known that moving to Australia would help me grade faster, I might have tried doing it sooner. 🙂 

6) I am noticing everything — the birds on campus, the later sunsets, the shift in temperature by ten degrees walking the dog at 6:30 in the morning. It used to be that when it was time to move on, I simply closed my eyes and jumped. But I don’t want to leave Arizona without having really seen it. I don’t want to leave Arizona without having really lived here. I want to move along as mindfully as I can and that means taking my time while I’m still here. 

 

Yesterday, in a meeting with a textbook publisher, a question was posed to those in attendance: What’s your favorite class? I started to think about how I would respond, and with each response, I started to realize they are ALL my favorites for varied reasons. I was stuck. How would I respond? Fortunately, my keen colleague to my right said, “What about your favorite one this week?” Ah ha! I could answer that properly.
My favorite class this week was my ENH295 Banned Books and Censorship class. It is taught in a hybrid format and is a concurrent honors/non-honors course. While each week offers rich discussion and thought-provoking inquiry, this week, students were discussing the role of YAL novels and their individual reading selections. One of the books a group read was also a selection that another student had read in a prior K-12 educational setting. She relayed to the class that in the previous instance, the book had a word in it that was considered inappropriate and was thus black-Sharpied out of every text. In our class, she told everyone that she never figured out what the word was. Fortunately, a peer had a copy of the text, and we conducted our own investigation to find the word. Did she find it? Yes! Though, of course, it isn’t appropriate to write here. We then discussed how much energy must have gone into censoring one word. My favorite classes to teach are the ones where my students are engaged and invested in the content. This week, one of those times was in ENH295.

An anonymous colleague and I are writing notes back and forth about our courses. I’m posting here. My postings will be in casual letter format:

Dear Friend,

Thanks so much for agreeing to talk with me about our courses . I especially want your ideas as we both try to increase engagement in our online environment. I’m in week 2 of the 8 week late start online class, and I went ahead and changed the submission time to 6:00 p.m. as we discussed. I’ve had good results so far. No one has died from (or complained about!) the change and students are asking for help earlier. Best of all, I’m not getting frantic messages at 11:00 p.m. I’ll keep you posted on the quality of the submissions. We’ve just had the Get Started module and a few small assignments.

I’ll be interested to hear your results from the extra credit opportunity that you’re trying. Have a great weekend!

I have never been lucky. I never win contests, sweepstakes, the lottery, the one-armed bandit in Vegas, or even a BINGO game. In fact, every time I enter a game of chance, I immediately begin belting out En Vogue’s 1992 classic “No, You’re Never Going to Get It”. However, I did “win” a door prize once. In a former life, the equivalent of our CTLE was giving away prizes for anyone brave enough to attend a presentation called “Make Life Easier Using Excel’s Concatenate to Combine Text Strings”. As you can imagine, faculty would rather attend an exciting department meeting than attend that smash hit. I was the only one who showed up. I won the door prize. Although I remember absolutely nothing about the concatenate function, I do still refer to my door prize frequently and keep it by my bedside just as some might keep their daily devotions, Vanity Fair, or a glass of warm milk with a shot of brandy. My prize that day was 147 Practical Tips for Teaching Professors (1990) compiled and edited by Robert Magnan.

If you think this is life changing book that fortifies our call to teach. You would be wrong. This is a brief 61-page glorified pamphlet that provides short, to-the-point tips that make a professors’ life easier and helps differentiate experienced faculty from novices. The tips are brief. The tips are practical. The tips should be common sense. The tips range from the simplicity of erasing white boards to the complexity of drawing up a strategic plan to improve teaching and learning to benefit every class and every student. It would be unthinkable to believe that I could incorporate all 147 tips into my teaching, but my goal is to evaluate each one and determine which are feasible and which will make the classroom a more rewarding experience for the students. The practical tip I am presenting now is one Magnan calls “Meet the Teacher”. Let me begin by stating that I do not like to talk about myself. In an online class, it is easy. I post my bio and, Boom!, I am done. In a face-to-face class, I tell the students how to pronounce my name and that is pretty much the extent of our bonding. And even that does not work because my name continues to be butchered all semester long. Magnan suggests that the semester should start with a teacher introduction and a Q&A session. Yah, I do that. I review the syllabus and ask for questions. As you can imagine, there are hardly ever any questions.

Magnan suggests a slightly different approach. He suggests that all handouts and the syllabus be distributed to the students with ample enough time to read. Then the students should form small groups and decide to collectively which questions to ask regarding the course. Give the students free rein in their questions. They can ask anything that will inform them about the class or the teacher—either professional or personal. This approach will likely result in more questions than traditionally asked. If the questions are about items that should be obvious from the syllabus like grading, expectations, assignments, or attendance, Magnan suggests revising the syllabus if the questions arrive from lack of information or ambiguity in the materials.

The questions about the less obvious are those that may be of greater importance.  Why did you choose to teach? What are your qualifications? What have you done outside of academia? What do you like or dislike about his course? Magnan encourages instructors to be human. Answer the questions. By answering the questions, the instructor gets to interact with the students in a personal way.

This tip/approach is not simply an opinion by the author. Back in the late 80s, Chickering and Gamson (1987) presented seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. These principles have been rigorously researched and have provided enough evidence to indicate that they work. The suggestion by Magnan to interact with students reinforces one of these principles—contact between faculty and students (Chickering & Gamson, 1987).

Magnan also suggests answering any questions posed by students openly and frankly, but not in excess. As an instructor who hesitates to share personally with students, I agree. I want to share enough to let students know I am human, but not so much that I cross a line. My modification to Magnan’s tip is to provide several questions that are fair game and then allow students to choose the questions they wanted answered. This modification will still allow faculty/student interaction without crossing a line that may invalidate the respect and authority needed to manage the classroom.