Yesterday I started making Google Slides presentations for various reading assignments for my courses. I planned to video some lectures with these, but also providing them as documents on the learning management system (we use Canvas in my shop).
As I started making the slides, the amount of work I needed to do kept increasing. For every slide I made, I felt like I needed to make five more because of what making that slide revealed or what it indicated to me needed to be added next to help explain the readings.
I started to get worried. How long was it going to take me to create all of these slides for all of these readings?
What happened was that I lost the thread of the course. My role in the course is not to explain every reading, every argument, every page. My role is to place the reading into the context of the class that I created.
The role of the teacher is not to elucidate the text but to illuminate the text. The function of a good lecture or presentation for students is to provide the light and perspective by which they can read and interpret the text within the context of the course. So I was pretty out of line with what I was trying to do.
The course should be designed as an investigation that requires the students to take what they get from the text and use it to address or add to the questions the course is set out to pose. The course should be structured in a way where the students add their own response and reaction to the reading toward the major aim of the course.
I know all this, and always try to structure my courses around inquiry and keep the spirit of inquiry as the attitude of the course. But yesterday I sort of fell into the social pressure of having to explain the readings, of transmission or transfer of what I think rather than creating the space of exposure and encounter for them to generate their own experience.
Why is teaching so difficult? It always feels like I’m starting over, every semester. It could be that I’m not that great at it, or it could be that it’s just that hard. Or it could be my favorite answer: Good at what? What is there to be good at? Does teaching really exist in terms we can talk about this way?