Sometimes I get the feeling that our students have come from a background in which teachers have been so eager to make classroom content relevant, interactional, and fun that they've forgotten to give their students any medicine with their spoonfuls of sugar. And so I've got these students sitting in my classroom, staring at me, expecting sugar. They want games. They want entertainment. They want candy coated writing lessons. Everything should be fun and entertaining.
All hyped up on sugar, they have no attention span. Once they recognize that any portion of the lesson is going to be sugar-free medicine, they're gone. Their eyes start to glaze over or close. Doodling ensues. Is it so much to ask that out of a 50 minute class period they willingly listen, take notes, and respond for 10-15 minutes of it? Are they so used to manipulatives and small group activities that they can't see they can't sit and listen for a few minutes?
I'm all for trying to incorporate creativity in the classroom. I'm all for collaboration and student input. I might even be able to see the value of using manipulatives now and again. But I do not think that our students are incapable of sitting and listening to a lecture and making an actual effort to pay attention. I know that "lectures" do not fit as well into a writing classroom as in, say, a literature classroom, but there are times when we need to take them through some basics of MLA or give them some content to work with before splitting them into groups or starting an activity.
Many of our students seem to be suffering from a media-induced, education-induced, sugar-induced unwillingness or inability to process information that doesn't involve fun and games. And I think our fear of lecturing and fear of boring our students and our constant need to keep them entertained feeds into their appetites. I don't think it harms our students any to have to set aside their sugar addictions for a few minutes and swallow a little medicine.
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Comp students are like hummingbirds, sometimes, aren't they? Well, less lovely than hummingbirds, to be sure, and probably incapable of simultaneously feeding and pissing while hovering like helicopters, but they sure do like the sugar solution to which they've become so accustomed. It's an imperfect analogy, I know, but I'm rolling with it, anyway. Okay.
I finally determined to address my concerns about boring my students by making an impromptu mini-lecture on the issue. Basically, I told my students that it can't be fun and games all, or even most, of the time. I reminded them that, bored or not, each of them had made a decision to attend university for one reason or another, and they might want to examine their individual reasons/motivations for doing so if they can't be bothered to suffer the so-called "boring stuff." This isn't, after all, high school, and most of them are here at considerable costs of time and money, in the very least, even if they're on the mom-and-dad tuition plan.
More important to their success as students, I explained, be it in this or any other course, is understanding that it is their individual burdens to find ways in which to engage themselves in a given course, regardless of whether or not they fancy the instructor and/or material as fun or exciting or what have you.
Then I launched into a minor diatribe about what a liberal arts education means, and suggested that a vocational education is a viable alternative for those who generally perceive gen/ed requirements as insufferable, pointless drudgery that must be endured or "survived," in a manner of speaking. I was quite mindful of and careful, of course, about this not being misconstrued by them as an attempt on my part to convince them to drop out of college.
And I suspect that this little discussion had a positive impact on at least a few of them; since then I've had several students become markedly more pro-active about taking ownership of their progress in the class rather than remaining silent and aloof, waiting for me to learn 'em, so to speak.
Okay, enough.
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