Attitude and Engagement at the start of the term
The start of the term means figuring out the archaeology of the class. This requires some digging, brushing and poking around to determine what substrate the students are in. Where did they come from?
The values of the students, their tools, their approach to learning is a collection of practices that developed over time in relation to an environment or environments. We would be remiss as teachers not to investigate that sediment for the things that worked for students in previous classrooms.
The metaphor opens up the idea that when students are acting in ways that frustrate you, or make you launch into a narrative of “how terrible students are today,” you can change that attitude and ask after what previous classroom experiences they had that made them act in these ways. It takes the blame off of your students and puts it on what we know to be an underfunded and misguided system of state requirements for moving between somewhat arbitrary grade levels.
Also shame on you if you blame your students as individuals for their classroom behavior and don’t consider what experiences they had in classrooms that might have led them to this behavior.
Approaching student behavior or questions or engagement with the “nuts and bolts” of the class (as a favorite history professor of mine used to call it) should be done with care. They are showing you valuable information as to what “survival strategies” and “technologies” of learning worked for them in the past. The blame is not with them, unless you want to blame them for making it this far.
The first few days of teaching are always very insightful as you can see the students trying to figure you out using the paradigms they have on file for every previous teacher. You can use this to your advantage to raise some incredible positions, questions, possibilities with the class as to what it means to sit in mostly forward-facing, plastic seats and face a wall for 90 minutes and listen to someone talk.
Today is day 2 of my classes for the most part, except for my terrible hybrid section (I despise hybrid courses but they keep giving them to me) which because of University scheduling will not meet in person till the 12th. I’m interested to see what bubbles up in the conversation today. What fragments of pedagogical engagement will come to the surface?