Good Morning, class

Ugh!  Yet again, a wasted hour lecturing.  It’s frustrating, angering even, to lecture when they don’t care, and they’re visible about it too.  But then I put myself in their shoes.  How many hours today have they already been listening to someone lecture them?  How many pages have they filled with nonsense about which they care nothing today?  More transcribing nonsense has got to be the last thing they want to do.  And perhaps they’ve been B.S.ing their way through discussion sessions about books they haven’t read.  They’ve been sitting frozen when asked what they thought about a particular passage, searching for something that will get around that dreaded phrase, “I didn’t read it.”  I remember so many of those moments.

Somehow a lecture that requires constant writing is satisfying.  After it you’ve got something accomplished.  You can imagine you’ve learned something.  And yet it’s out of your head the minute you leave the class.  Well, for most of us it is anyway.

What business have I got expecting them to transcribe my worthless nonsense?  They want to DO something – they want to be asked to do something hard, to be challeneged, and copying notes isn’t challenging, nor is listening to someone drone on about something you’re not interested in challenging.

It’s a pretty darned deep question you have to ask yourself, if you really think hard about it; why should my students bother to learn what I’m trying to teach them?  Not too different from “why should anyone want to buy the product I’m selling”, or “why should anyone want to pay for my services?”  It’s a brutal system we have, a market-oriented education system, where teachers are selling education and students are buying.  It’s a humbling experience if you really ask yourself those questions.