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Miscellaneous Rants

Dr. Evil#

A lightweight posting today...mostly because I spent last evening visiting my sister at the hospital and didn't get much reading done.  Of interest and relevance (and I have a friend that tells me everything is always relevant..."everything is everything" she says) was my conversation with my niece.  She's finishing her sophomore year, majoring in French and Math, and last semester got her first B in a college class.  It wasn't a class one would consider hard, particularly for her.  We chatted about the class and here's where I discovered. Dr. Evil (as she calls him) had a different teaching style than she was used to.  He had the students reading primary documents (in old English!) and his class periods were interactive lectures.  My niece admitted this was a style she was not used to and through our conversation I began to sense that she resisted this style (here's the relevance) because it required a transformation on her part, one she wasn't ready to make.  I shared with her the essence of what I wrote yesterday and some of what I've been reading, talking in particular about my epiphany of yesterday that one of my classes wasn't fully ready for transformation at this time, in this place, or in the ways I was trying to facilitate this transformation.  As we talked about some of the reasons Dr. Evil might have approach teaching in the way he does, she realized that near the end of the semester she had begun to adjust to this new way of teaching, that is, to a way of teaching that required her to actively participate in ways she was unaccustomed to.  Her description illuminated for me how one student became ready as a result of the experience, the opportunity.  Now, the question that remains is:  How long do I wait, should I wait, before adjusting my teaching style to fit the situation?  That is, when is reverting back to more traditional information delivery systems giving up and when is it acknowledging the right pedagogy for the situation?

Posted by Karen McComas on 4/4/02; 9:14:44 AM to the Miscellaneous Rants Department
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