Hailey's Reading Notes #8

As a young instructor entering the classroom for the first time, my biggest fear was respect in the classroom. I would have nightmares of students talking back to me, ignoring me, or situations arising where I could not gain control of the classroom. During the past 2½ months of teaching thus far, I can say that my fears were a little exaggerated. While students don’t harass me on a regular basis, I can say that a few occurrences have occurred where I felt challenged by the student. This is something I would love to discuss in class this week: handling disruptive students.

While both Davis and Lang give suggestions for handling disruptions, including designing a well-taught class to engage students, Lang also mentions rather humorously, “Nonetheless, students, like the rest of the population, can sometimes just be rude idiots (pg. 252).”

I guess this is true whether you are in the classroom or in the workforce; some people are just mean bullies or immature jerks. While I appreciate suggestions that Lang and Davis give, anticipate problems in the back of the room (Davis, 49), deal with problems sooner rather than later (Davis, 49), offer student incentives (Lang, 252), etc., some things just don’t work. No matter how prepared you may be, I still think it is difficult when you get in that situation. How do you keep your cool?

Another thing that was mentioned in Davis particularly was teaching in times of crisis and tragedy. While I do not need a big discussion about this in class, it did remind me of the Virginia Tech tragedy. Since my university was just down the road from Virginia Tech and many students had friends that attended, there was an exceptionally high level of panic on campus that day. Davis mentions following online coverage in your class, or designing assignments relative to the tragedy (pg. 53), and I think this is a great idea. The one question I have is more about university policy. Would it be more beneficial to just let students have the day off to calm down? Forcing them to attend class could be somewhat of a waste of time in my opinion.

The final thing I would like to discuss this week came from the excerpt from Learner Centered Teaching. We discussed briefly last week in class about the “cafeteria” method of letting students choose assignments. This idea was discussed in more detail in the excerpt. While I understand the purpose of engaging students more, I still feel a little conflicted. Is it really the instructor’s job to tailor material to those students who flat out don’t care? While maybe I’m a little harsh, I personally think that if they don’t want to be there and don’t want to do the work, then fine. There grades will reflect that.