Teaching

Pilates class. Photo from flickr user heraldpost.

1) The Cult of the Personality is a Dangerous, but Effective Tool

My favorite Pilates teacher at the RSF is very popular. She’s so popular that if for some reason she does not appear at class and a substitute is sent in, more than 50% of the class shamelessly gets up, rolls up their mats, and leaves the room in disdain.

She starts off the class with a warning that the style of Pilates we are about to be guided through is a perfected blend of classical moves and scientifically updated exercises. She warns that any other class might cause unalterable damage to our delicate bodies. Throughout the hour she makes snide remarks about yoga, aerobics, and abs & back, letting any doubters know that if they don’t like her way of doing things they are welcome to leave and head to the inferior options.

The problem is that, over the three years I’ve been a disciple of this teacher, she has slowly but surely cut her hours at the RSF. She used to teach three mornings and two afternoons, then cut back to mornings only. This semester she hung us out to dry on Friday mornings, so that we only have two precious hours per week with her. Her indoctrination has been so effective that rather than go to other classes on those days I would rather do nothing, which is definitely counterproductive for my transversus abdominis.

Lesson: Romancing your students a bit with your special expertise can get them hooked on your subject matter—but also on you. Use your powers wisely.

2) No Business like Show Business

The same teacher I mention above is not only an extremely knowledgeable and gifted instructor, but also a magnificent showman. She trills her “R’s”, alternatingly sings and barks instructions, and uses her mesmerizing voice to talk us through all 55 minutes of exercise without missing a beat or checking notes. And the memorization of her routines doesn’t imply boring repetition—she switches things up every class, changing orders of exercises or introducing new moves or equipment to keep us on our toes. She can make a crowd of huffing and puffing exercisers giggle mid-abdominal crunch. And her predictions of bone and muscle decay as the aging process takes its toll is enough to make an 18-year-old work even harder to do her future self a favor.

Lesson: No, we’re not there to entertain our students. But since we have a captive audience, we might as well present our subject with panache.

3) Energy Begets Energy

I’ve tried Group Cycling classes at the RSF at all hours of the day. I have dragged myself to 6:15AM sessions, snuck in pre-dinner evening classes, and skipped lunch to make a noon meeting. The instructor’s energy level, and their soundtrack selection, is always the deciding factor in whether the sacrifice was worth it. If the instructor seems more exhausted or hung-over than the students at the beginning fo the class, there is a good chance they will end the class by complaining about how lazy and slow the spinners were. If, however, the class starts off speeding to blaring Scissor Sisters tunes and the friendly-yet-sadistic instructor smiles as he screams “Get uncomfortable,” chances are the sweat and compliments will fly, and everyone will leave happy.

Lesson: Your students take cues from you. So grab that extra espresso on your way to class and slap a smile on your face. If all else fails, try playing “Filthy/Gorgeous” before an especially drudging grammar lesson. Your class will thank you.

Berkeley classroom. Image by amiz.

My classroom has two large, east-facing windows that magnify the mid-morning sun, and only open about six inches to provide breezy respite from the intensified warmth. This low crack is wide enough to attract curious squirrels, which understandably distract students whose desks butt up to the windowsill where the nosy creatures belly up. It is not, however, wide enough to cool off the room during any of the Bay Area’s rare but intense heat waves. The pale yellow of the walls just adds to the feeling of being trapped inside a rising soufflé, and students and GSI alike fall under melted-butter hypnosis, and focusing on the past perfect subjunctive rises from challenging to impossible on the difficulty scale.

After a few classes of sultry sighs and lackaday during the last hot spell, I walked into an exam review session to a full house. The chatter that had filled the muggy room vaporized as soon as I entered the room, and the students looked at me with wide eyes and held breaths. I looked at my immediately sticky sweater vest and regretted my wardrobe choice. Since I had no new material to teach that day and could probably get away with skipping the chalkboard, I suggested we take the class outside. Read the rest of this entry »

Exams to grade. Image by olga.

I will never forget the fear I felt the day my most beloved undergrad professor raged about an exam my Latin American Poetry class had taken. Among the errors that provoked his outburst were someone who had repeatedly used the masculine article with the word for woman: “¡El mujer! ¿¡El mujer!?” My cheeks burned, and though I was fairly sure I was not the offender, I still prayed and crossed my fingers that I hadn’t, in some test-induced delirium, forgotten one of the most basic aspects of the language I’d been studying for three years.

He moved on to the word for image, imagen, which made frequent appearances in the literary analysis class. From this berating I did not, unfortunately, escape unscathed. The word is feminine. I had modified it with feminine adjectives in the essay I wrote for the exam; in fact, I got one of the few A’s in the class on the exam. But the trauma of the tongue-lashing has left its mark. I am now in the midst of a PhD program studying Latin American literature, and I avoid using the word imagen in spoken language at all costs. What if I get it wrong? I look it up in the dictionary every time I write it down to reassure myself of its feminine nature. I even checked wordreference.com before typing this paragraph.

I know my professor meant well, and the amount of liberating and inspiring learning my classmates and I did in his classes overwhelms this limiting slip. But the incident exemplifies an important part of the instructor’s work. Balancing constructive criticism, encouragement, praise, and downright disappointment is hard work.

This semester I graded one of the worst exam sets I had ever seen. I went back through looking for ways I might have miscounted, places I might give back points lost, and just couldn’t justify it. In fact, el mujer made several appearances. The grades were low. I tried lecturing my students when I gave back their exams, and gave them a lot of writing homework, hoping the practice would help them improve before the next exam. The class average did improve, but the range was wide, and the low grades were very low.

Further on in the semester I began to worry that I was traumatizing my students when their first compositions came in. Some of them were marvelous, even moving. Others were just unacceptable. After some tears shed in office hours, and mid-semester evaluations complaining that I “grade really hard,” I began to question whether I was holding my students to an impossible standard. However, there are as many As as Ds on the compositions and exams I grade, so I know it’s not impossible. And thankfully, as the semester has progressed, more and more of those straggling students have dragged themselves into my office hours, written several more drafts before turning in final essays, and generally improved not only their grades, but their Spanish and writing skills as well.

What it boils down to is that the same fear instilled in me as a student that day worrying about gender agreement remains with me as an instructor. What if it’s somehow my fault that they didn’t learn the material, didn’t understand the instructions, didn’t realize they needed to study? Do I teach poorly? Do I grade too strictly? The student has become the teacher, but I’m still frightened by the specter of imagen.