Hey All,
I hope my comment about trying to avoid the word "lazy" didn't come across as sanctimonious.
Students MUST be expected to take responsibility and act like grown ups. In fact, there are some students whose names and faces I will never forget because of the disrespect they showed for what I was trying to accomplish in the classroom, their sense of entitlement, all that. These students make me absolutely nuts.
But I always try to figure out what about them makes them unique, so I can set them aside from the rest of my students in my head and keep trying to do what I can for these students are still salvageable.
In most of our students, we are dealing with human beings who, after years of:
* having teachers for most of whom teaching was a last and loathed priority,
* sitting in anonymous lecture halls of increasingly expanding size,
* dealing with TAs who have had no training and little sleep,
* being fed through increasingly large and expensive university
bureaucracies,
* experiencing assessment as punitive instead of instructional,
* being lectured to by people who don't care to learn their names or notice
when they are absent
. . . after years of all this, many students think they have figured out that education is a game to be played and caring will more likely lead to frustration than reward.
Clearly, I don't think anyone on the TBL list (or, honestly, anyone who uses TBL) falls into the categories of teacher I described above. We all discovered TBL because of our own discomfort with all of that.
We are, unfortunately dealing with the damage done to our students by teachers who didn't know any better, or just gave up.
I have found that trying to remind myself of the stories these students are living often makes it easier for me to see the expert learners in some students that their training has not yet unleashed.
Note, though, I say "often" and not "always." There will always be some who exceed my ability to deal with compassionately.
-M
Michael Sweet, Instructional Consultant
Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment (DIIA)
University of Texas Austin
MAI 2206 * (512) 232-1775
"Teaching is the profession that makes all other professions possible." - Todd Witaker
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