#bows teaching manifesto bc apparently he can't shut his mouth

[overelegantstranger]

ruggesnome said:

that sounds ...nice of you. I am mostly too tired to word rn but might return in the morning if I can make anything of thoughts involving how a lot of what I deal with (as a student, but bc of the field) has a more uh rigidly defined right or wrong ness.

No, absolutely, and I realise our fields are different and have different expectations. However, one thing I’ve been realising (and hope I keep on this opinion after tomorrow’s marking meeting with my supervisor!) is that...even if there are rightnesses, and wrongnesses - which there are! - one of the things I’m trying hard to do is frame these in the most positive and encouraging way I can.

For example, there is a right and wrong way to cite your sources, to write an introduction, to set out your points, to quote. Everything I’m marking on and indeed everything I’ve commented on, either has a right or wrong or is on a scale of rightness and wrongness.

However, my big thing is, as a student I put SO much weight on those wrongnesses and felt SO bad and SO stupid over them. But you know what, these are skills. They are things that take practice, and they are hard. And maybe I won’t have room for this in the actual marking, and maybe after 16 bloody scripts I’ll be too exhausted to do this as well as I want to, but I want to acknowledge that these are people, many of them teenagers, who haven’t done this before! And they’re trying really hard! (I am not naieve. I went to this very university with several people who didn’t try hard - but imo we should always assume people are trying their best, rather than assuming the opposite.

So these are people trying so hard, and they deserve the things they did well to be acknowledged and celebrated, and the things they got wrong to be, if need be, explained, and to be encouraged by the fact that these are skills to learn, not reflections of them as people.

I want to go in to marking as if I were marking myself, and I want to show these students the love and encouragement and pride that I wish I had been shown more consistently, and that my favourite teachers did show me. I want to go into it with the primary energy of “what did you do right“, not “what did you do wrong.”

And maybe that’s not a thing every discipline can do on every test or assignment. But I never want to be the lecturer who made me feel so awful that I wanted to die every time I came home from her class, and I always want to be the lecturer who made me love my work. 

I still remember one of my classmates saying that her marker had said on her essay misspelling Edgar Allan Poe’s name is unacceptable at this level, and I remember her clear (if she was trying to disguise it) flinch at the whole thing. And I think it’s low to dig at people’s spelling mistakes when often they’re innocent, or accidentally missed, or autocorrected wrong. I’d far rather just go through and just correct them and then say at the end “there’s some spelling issues here so just go through another pass next time”.

The thing is, the point of telling people what they did wrong is so that they know what to improve on, and they won’t be motivated to improve if you’re sharp and snappy with them. And I think that’s a rule of thumb that holds true across the board, even if not every assessment gets to work that way