[EAS] Boredom in Class
Peter J. Kindlmann
pjk at design.eng.yale.edu
Fri Apr 6 17:29:34 EDT 2007
You've heard me mention the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list before.
This item, about how to avoid boring students in class, with the
charming confessions by a Stanford professor, opens up a worthwhile
set of awarenesses.
Teaching techniques, as per the below, tend to be a much more evolved
topic in non-technical fields, where verbal skill is at the core of
professional advancement because everything is arguable. Engineering
discourse, framed by the certitudes of Maxwell's equations, can be
the duller for it, though I see no reason why Engineering couldn't
have its Vincent Scully's, given adjustments in the value system of
teaching. Our Yale undergraduates continue to have sterling
opportunities to "comparison-shop." --PJK
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Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 08:56:12 -0700
From: Rick Reis <reis at stanford.edu>
Subject: TP Msg. #785 Why Good Teachers Have Bad Classes: And What You
Can Do About It
To: tomorrows-professor at lists.stanford.edu
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"In this issue of Speaking of Teaching, we address the issue of why
even the best, most knowledgeable teachers occasionally find
themselves teaching a course that is just not working. In this
introduction we propose several effective approaches to the problem,
and then in the following pages listen to the reflections of one
Stanford professor who found himself in a class that was not working.
Finally we offer a list of excellent books that can help you
avoid--or at least respond constructively to--a bad class."
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Folks:
The posting below offers some excellent advice and resources on how
to improve classes that for one reason of another just don't seem to
go right. It is from the newsletter, Speaking of Teaching, produced
by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), Stanford University -,
http://ctl.stanford.edu/Newsletter/ Winter 2003, Vol. 12, No.3.
Speaking of Teaching is compiled and edited by CTL Associate Director
Valerie Ross. Please feel free to contact Dr. Ross at
[varlet at stanford.edu]. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis at stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Teaching Naked
Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning
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Why Good Teachers Have Bad Classes: And What You Can Do About It
In this issue of Speaking of Teaching, we address the issue of why
even the best, most knowledgeable teachers occasionally find
themselves teaching a course that is just not working. In this
introduction we propose several effective approaches to the problem,
and then in the following pages listen to the reflections of one
Stanford professor who found himself in a class that was not working.
Finally we offer a list of excellent books that can help you avoid-or
at least respond constructively to-a bad class.
Bad classes happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is the way
the course has been organized-is it coverage-centered or
learning-centered? Other times it seems that the traditional
teaching methods-lecture and Socratic discussions-just don't engage
students the way they used to. Sometimes students just don't do the
reading...why is that? Much of the literature on effective teaching
suggests that there are several important ways to approach the
problem of a bad class: creating a sense of community and
collaborative learning in the class, getting feedback about the
course from your students early and throughout the term, varying your
teaching methods, and bringing significant "active learning" moments
into each class meeting.
More broadly speaking, however, the bad class can be approached from
two intimately related directions. In her exceptionally useful book,
Tools for Teaching, Barbara Davis suggests a student-centered
approach of increasing motivation by getting students actively
involved in generating the content of each class. Options range
anywhere from designating students to be responsible for bringing in
discussion questions to assigning short in-class writing assignments,
to using debates, case studies, small group projects, and letting
students have some say in choosing the course material. She writes,
"Students learn by doing, making, writing, designing, creating,
solving. Passivity dampens students' motivation and curiosity" (p.
194). This is true for undergraduate as well as graduate students.
Even for large classes, Davis suggests in a chapter called
"Supplements and Alternatives to Lecturing" that there are always
ways to bring community and active learning into the classroom.
On the other side of the issue, a more teaching-centered approach is
suggested by Wilbert McKeachie in his book, McKeachie's Teaching
Tips. McKeachie encourages teachers to be continually open to
learning about teaching, and to make extensive use of evaluative
feedback from peers, students, faculty development specialists, and
even from themselves. Whether by reading about teaching, attending
workshops, talking to colleagues, or observing other teachers in
action, McKeachie maintains that in order to know how to handle-and
avoid-bad classes, our best resource is our own willingness to learn.
He writes, in the chapter titled "Vitality and Growth throughout Your
Teaching Career,"
Talking about teaching with colleagues can be an invaluable
source of ideas as
well as emotional support when a class hasn't gone well. The
colleagues need
not be in one's own discipline. You will often get
interesting feedback from teachers
in other disciplines. (p. 322)
McKeachie also strongly suggests that students should be offered the
opportunity to provide course evaluation feed- back early in the term
so that changes can be made before the course is over. This one
strategy-agreed on by virtually all pedagogical specialists-can go a
long way toward helping a class that is not working.
Whether student-centered or teaching-centered, there are a wealth of
resources and effective approaches available to the good teacher who
wants to save a bad class; it could happen to anyone! ?
Confessions of a Bore
One honest Stanford professor, who asked to remain anonymous,
submitted the following essay to CTL for this issue of Speaking of
Teaching. We hope that his "confessions" will inspire our readers to
explore the options we have outlined in this issue.
During some telephone conversations, there comes a moment when you
realize that the connection has been cut off. Perhaps it is a silence
from the other end that is just a little too long to be meaningful,
or perhaps it is a lack of conviction in your own voice that causes
you suddenly to note that the conversation is over (and has been for
some time). Imagine that moment stretched into two-hour increments
and repeating itself over ten weeks, and you have a recent episode in
my life as a teacher.
With so many years of education behind me, I am naturally no stranger
to boredom. One late afternoon in graduate school-I can recall the
exact moment: it was deep in a seminar where the poor old professor
had already spent hours charging down blind alleys alone and was just
launching into another tunnel of soliloquy-I told myself that boring
people was unpardonable, easily avoided (wouldn't it be enough just
to stop the monologue, open a window and invite someone else to
talk?), and swore to myself that when I got to be in the professor's
position I would take it as my moral responsibility never to be a
bore.
Fortunately there were no witnesses.
A moral responsibility? Committing dullness is a serious act, I
thought then and still think, because you cause the listener to wish
part of his or her life away, to be drawn toward an attenuated,
granular form of suicide. Bores are torturers. The bore-or to specify
further: the deadly bore-does something so dreadful to time that it
would have been more merciful simply to kill it. The more vividly one
holds in mind the preciousness and finitude of lived time, the less
one can condone boring anyone for any reason. These reasonings imply
that the bore knows he is being a bore. That may not always be the
case. I could not be sure about the professor in that long-ago
seminar, but if he didn't know, he was the more to be pitied. I
supposed that a bore without self-aware- ness was forgivable, but
only because not entirely responsible; and someone as watchful as I
would not have that excuse.
I do watch my audiences like a hawk. I know that what I have to tell
them is not always what they got out of bed for. They may have to be
amused and cajoled into listening. I set traps for attention, many
kinds of traps for different kinds of attention. Jokes, metaphors,
gestures, apostrophes, snatches of song, mimic voices, even the
sluttish temptations of audio-visual and slide presentations-all are
fair means. Eventually, or so I hope, the glow of polemic or the
tight structure of a well-fashioned argument will by itself command
attention. Facing an audience of a hundred, I keep a half-conscious
running tally of the number of glazed eyes and averted faces, and
should these rise much beyond ten or fifteen percent, I pull out the
emergency measures: a dramatic change of topic, a knockdown argument
in favor of the opposing side, even a little shouting and hand-waving
to reawaken our memories of childhood punishments. Anything short of
a fire alarm will do. We teachers are performers; our audiences tell
us what we need to know about ourselves.
Or, sometimes, what we would rather not know. Given what I have said,
you know that I have no excuse for being a bore: I don't approve of
boredom, even on conditional grounds (the value of information
imparted does not justify dullness in imparting it, though the
perception of value may do away with the feeling of dullness), I know
it when I see it, and I devote a lot of energy to watching for it and
chasing it away. You should expect me to do anything in my power to
avoid the failing I have just painted in such deeply moral colors
(the torturing of time, the incitement to suicide by degrees). When
you are being bored, the bore seems to be a perpetrator of some kind,
the active force behind an offense; when you are the bore, it feels
more like helplessness, like being marooned-on Easter Island, for
example. "Easter Island" is the name a friend of mine gives to the
staring rows of stony, uncomprehending faces you sometimes see from
the front of an amphitheater.
I noticed early on in the course I'm making my confession about (a
seminar with seven graduate students) that the students had little to
say. Were they just timid? If so, they must have been petrified, for
the only reaction I could read from most of their faces was a fixed
expression that could easily be interpreted as polite hostility; one
or two of them regularly met my eyes and nodded, a little too
mechanically to convince me that it betokened any strong form of
assent. Were we all speaking the same language? Had anyone come to
the class for a good reason, beyond the fact that the class was a
degree requirement? Maybe I'll stop the didactic monologue and ask
some questions, I thought. Help me, Socrates! But a question thrown
out into the air and not picked up eventually becomes a rhetorical
question to which the questioner is expected to provide a response.
Answering my own question returned me to the stream of my detestable
patter. It went on and on. At the very least, I was going to complete
the job the university pays me for, and fill out the whole two hours
with verbal behavior from which someone might, other conditions being
favorable, extract some knowledge.
To construe my verbal behavior as a performance would impel the
conclusion that it was not a very successful performance. The
audience response was lacking, or at any rate was not registering on
the meters at my disposal. So it could not have been a performance.
Rather, what I was doing was extruding the required amount of verbal
matter (two hours' worth), and shaping it as best I could: a little
antithesis here, a little personification allegory there, now and
again a chiasmus or a hysteron-proteron. In short, I was talking to
myself-unwillingly-and trying to disguise my own boredom with an
engagement in the rhetorical materiality of the verbal flow, like a
child adding up the numbers of license plates on a long drive.
The self-aware bore is a desperate creature. He is conscious of the
offense he causes his hearers, conscious of his responsibility for
it, and in the worst of cases unable to do anything about it. (I am a
few years too young to simulate a heart attack and thus get out of
the room.) While my mind raced about, seeking expedients, escapes and
alternatives, my voice, reliable after years of practice in less
trying situations, continued to emit a certain volume of verbiage
under a certain pressure for a certain time (in obedience to a flow
ratio established by centuries of academic precedent): and this
volume, sculpt and twist it though I might, was, I knew, the very
substance of boredom. Boredom fills the room, makes movement
impossible, asphyxiates any alternative to itself. It is a painful
thing to realize that one is the source of boredom, that dullness has
taken one over, like a disturbing odor or an involuntary tic.
Possession by devils would have been more exciting. One can only wish
for it to be past, and if the audience will not help (my audience was
too reserved, too passive or too hostile to try), the only horizon
for its being over is the end of the quarter. That means taking the
granular death-wish in large handfuls, and having enough left over at
the end of class to carry it home.
If our species can feel boredom, there must be a purpose to it.
Presumably the reaction is triggered by fruitless activity: those of
our predecessors who persisted in looking for fishes in the treetops,
and did not feel boredom, starved before passing on their genes.
Boredom is the vast penumbra surrounding focus, attention and will;
it defines itself relative to these three. But even given this
proximity of dullness to more valuable mental powers, there is surely
no need to teach people how to be bored: there is enough noise,
enough pointlessness, enough waste already, and the very formlessness
of these opposites of attention makes it doubtful whether they have a
lesson in them that could not be taught equally well by a
proportionate amount of time spent waiting in line or searching
haystacks for needles.
An experienced and optimistic colleague of mine urged me to put the
experience behind me. "It's not your fault. You are a good teacher.
Everyone can have a bad class. They were not ready for or receptive
to what you had to say. You will go on to have better classes."
Perhaps. But having been an incorrigible, helpless bore for several
weeks at a stretch makes it harder for me to hear identity-statements
such as "you are a good teacher" as anything but well- meant
mantra-chanting. The horror I felt on observing the spectacle of the
helpless bore led me to draw a line be- tween myself and the bores, a
line which it was not in my power to maintain. Perhaps the
stubbornness that made me continue with a class that was not
working-that is, my determination not to be a bore, not to admit that
I could be a bore-was the real villain of the piece. ?
-----
Speaking of Teaching is compiled and edited by CTL Associate Director
Valerie Ross. Please feel free to contact Dr. Ross at
varlet at stanford.edu with any questions, suggestions, or comments;
thank you!
Useful Books for Improving Your Teaching
Angelo, Thomas A., and Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment
Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. 2nd edition. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994.
Banner, James, and Harold C. Cannon. The Elements of Teaching. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Boice, Robert. Advice For New Faculty Members. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
Brookfield, Stephen D. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
Christensen, C. Roland, David A. Garvin, and Ann Sweet, Eds.
Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership.
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991.
Davis, Barbara Gross. Tools for Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993.
Erickson, Bette LaSere, and Diane Weltner Strommer. Teaching College
Freshmen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991.
Feldman, Kenneth A., and Michael B. Paulsen, Eds. Teaching and
Learning in the College Classroom. 2nd ed. Boston: Pearson Custom
Publishing,1998.
Grunert, Judith. The Course Syllabus: A Learning Centered Approach.
Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing, 1997.
Light, Richard. Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their
Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Lowman, Joseph. Mastering the Techniques of Teaching. 2nd edition.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
Mazur, Eric. Peer Instruction: A User's Manual. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.
McKeachie, Wilbert J. Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory
for College and University Teachers. 11th edition. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2002.
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