Biting in
February 20th, 2008 tlarson
Perhaps the lecture is the teaching method we love to hate because it is the one-size-fits-all solution our teachers used throughout most of our education. If it had been used more judiciously, if it had been just one tool among many used by a variety of teachers in a variety of ways, maybe then I wouldn’t hate it so much. As it is, I hate lectures and take no pity on them.
I didn’t always hate lectures, but having experienced something better, I can’t go back. Especially after the many community-based classrooms I have experienced here at Mason, I can’t help but respond to instructors who teach through lectures with the feeling that they are arrogant and self-absorbed [though I realize many instructors who continue to use primarily lectures are not arrogant or self absorbed, just … unenlightened =) ]. My time is much more precious now than in high school or undergraduate, and pure lectures seem like a waste of my time—so very focused on what the instructor wants to say and so very little focused on information I can actually use. It seems to me that lectures bypass the process of learning for everyone except the teacher. Blau points out “the ironic paradox of teaching: the fact that the intellectual work undertaken by teachers in the teaching-learning relationship presented richer opportunities for learning to the teacher than anything the teacher might do in the course of teaching his students” (55). This certainly rings true for my experience as a student.
From time to time, we do fit lectured information into meaningful knowledge webs that stick with us, that we can and do apply to the real world, but as Ginny encountered with her optometrist, more often we fail to see how we can apply what we learn once we are out of the classroom. In a similar incident, I was talking with another writer in the Teaching of Writing and Literature program who was curious about the teaching of literature class. She was surprised when I said literature classes were often my favorite in undergrad, as I said, “because we got to sit around and talk about stuff.” After walking away from the conversation, I realized this feeling came from one solitary class that (though I was unaware of this at the time) was an experimental class on English “contexts and contests.” It was essentially a literature workshop and my first discussion-based class. It focused not only on the contexts in which texts were written, but also the criticism and other texts that came after them and responded to them. All of this was examined in order to explore meaning. The instructor was very hands off. Her silence often forced us to initiate the discussion, to find our own connections, and to draw our own conclusions. We got to see how not only different students/readers, but professional critics disagreed about meaning (and in doing so to study models for finding meaning). Like Blau’s discussion of how the common interpretations of Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” changed over time, as students, we got to see textual evidence of such swings in interpretations. It seems counterintuitive, but it was in this one class where the teacher did the least in-class work that I learned the most important skills: how to think critically and how to examine (and apply) a text in relation to the real world.
“Louise Rosenblatt says that taking someone else’s interpretation as your own is like having someone else eat your dinner for you” (Blau 25). And as Karen pointed out a couple of weeks ago (and as Blau points out in her book), students relish the idea that they can be on equal footing with the teacher, that they can participate as a true academic and work with the teacher to find meaning. While developing and then giving students a formula to swallow may seem like we are doing more for them, spoon feeding them the answers is essentially just setting them up to choke … if they ever do move on to real food, that is. But, as we’ve been discussing over the past weeks, encouraging students to tackle “difficulty,” “questions,” or “confusion” themselves is essentially teaching them how to chew, and to my experience as a student, a literature workshop is a good method for getting students to really bite in and taste what studying literature is all about.
(But I’ve been glutened and have been nursing a migraine most of the night, so forgive me for being both persnickety and rambling.)
Entry Filed under: Week 5
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