"The Midterm"

Shortly after midterms, Dr. Peckham and I agreed that I would write something that "tied in" the objectives of this course and what we were assigned to read on Thompkin, Freire, and Strickland.

Of course, being Raven, every time I sat down to write it all out, I blanked. I thought up perfect sentences in my car and while standing in the line at the grocery story, and yet every time I tried to write I froze. The things I managed to write, I saved as drafts and they sat in my blog, waiting.

I did literally every project of my semester before I started this. It just felt too important. I couldn't bring myself to half-ass it. If I was going to do this, I needed to do it right. So here I go.

THOMPKINS, FREIRE, STRICKLAND  (AND ME.)

I didn't go into this class expecting to find relationships between fear and education so often. However, after completing this class, I'm wondering how anyone ever has a conversation about our education system without mentioning fear. Fortunately for me, fear became my English 3301 class' intellectual center of gravity. Our class ripped fear apart and then examined its insides. It was an eye opening experience.

My relationship with fear and education is most clear in my fear as a teacher. I fear that one day a boogie man is going to step out, rip off my "teacher disguise" and reveal me as an ignorant fool, unworthy of respect and someone that has no business teaching how to know my ass from a hole in ground, let alone teaching English and writing. Thompkins touches on this, writing about fearing "being shown up for who I really am." Is this a fear all teachers experience, or just the insecure ones? I'm willing to bet its much more common than we hear. As teachers, this fear certainly follows us into the classroom, where our fear influences the way we interact with our students. As writers, this affects the language we use, and we carefully construct our words, doing our best to tell our stories in such a way that people not only "get it" but are impressed. So what do we do to combat these fears?

Tons of things, though what I have done is to try to learn as much as I possibly can before I open my mouth, and then to also over think everything so much that when I attempt to communicate it to another human being, it comes out "i hav much smart u shud listen 2 dis."

But seriously, fear can be a major influence in the way teachers interact with students in a classroom. Ignoring my "teacher mindset" for a moment and focusing on my experiences as a student, students have much more to fear from teachers than teachers have to fear from students. The most fear students face is grades. It makes sense, as grades are only a subjective judgement of WHO THEY ARE. I mean, come on! Of course students fear grades, and how can that not affect the way they approach school? One thing my Engl 33301 class discussed was how this fear of grades can in turn oppress a student's natural abilities and interests while in school. Students fear stepping too far outside the box to point where it affects their grades, which in turn limits creativity and innovation. If we turn to Stickland for solutions, we find the idea of a constantly confrontational classroom in which everyone (including the teacher) challenges the pedagogical authority. I love the idea of basing education around intellectually questioning the knowledge presented, but I wonder at how this approach affects student/teacher relationships, and how intimidation and confrontation can affect writing. (Here, I am reminded of our writing inventories, in which many students in class wrote about extremely negative experiences with writing due to "bad" teachers.)

When writing for an academic purpose, the words never just "flow." Why is this? Personally, I think it is because of the extreme expectations and restrictions we have placed upon writing assignments in the classroom. They are no longer "fun," but rather a purely instructive exercise, used really just get you to the next unit or lesson.

and students hate it.
It turns students away from writing, away from using their literacy as a tool of empowerment.

The heavy focus on academic writing not only takes away the student's voice, but it creates a wall between the teacher and his/her students. Because most of us have only ever had authoritarian teachers while in school, it becomes difficult to imagine a classroom in which there is no real "power struggle."  With the current state of education system, I simply refuse to believe that there is no legitimate alternative to how students/teachers must behave in academic institutions, particularity that of a classroom dedicated to teaching writing.

One of my favorite "alternative" classrooms that we read about this semester is Thompkin's classroom in which she creates a syllabus, and then literally allows her students to teach the class. Each student is assigned a topic, and then she allows them to create a lesson and teach the class. According to her, this technique drove student engagement, discussion, and though it was chaotic at times, she swears that this is an effective way to teach. This is certainly a change from the traditional classroom.The level of trust that goes into giving your students that much power! Yet Thompkins knows that allowing her students' choices, feelings, and thoughts guide her classroom will create exactly the type of environment for learning.

Still, there seems to be an exorbitant amount of trust involved in this. With that thought, I feel like we have no choice but to turn to Freire:

"Trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change."

What a sentence, huh?  Yet I think it might be one of the most important things I've ever heard, even if I'm still not 100% why just yet. To apply that to education:  if we can place our trust in students, and place our trust in their experiences and knowledge, what could happen? Would the world explode? Would we create a classroom environment that breeds learning and innovation?  By allowing the students to use their experiences and knowledge in a classroom, we can battle the fear we associate with authoritarian relationships (like that of a teacher and student.)

I think that many teachers in our society are so "caught up in the system," that they forget they are teaching other humans. Individuals. The ridiculous amount of test scores and grades are blinding us. We are unable to see whether or not students are actually learning and actually growing because we have dehumanized  students.

It is my belief that we need to check our preconceived notions about what a classroom needs to look like at the door. We need to contemplate genuinely trusting students and allowing them to insert their own experiences in writing and in the classroom. By releasing the "control" we have as teachers, we create an open and honest learning environment full of students that might just respect us for treating them like human beings instead of little knowledge machines.