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kyrasantae
[first posted at BGG's off-topic forums.]
So I just started my B.Ed, and I'm in a third-year sociology of education class (which operates under the Department of Educational Policy Studies) this semester. I find that I'm actually learning the most in this class... about how not to teach.
It's my first class in the morning (8AM), twice a week, and so much about the pedagogy in this class annoys me that I can feel my blood boiling by the time the 80-minute period is over, which rather ruins the rest of my day. Now, sociology was my minor in my previous degree, and it's not like I'm forced to take this course, but it really is the teaching that's ruining the material for me.
Week 1
Day 1
The instructor is a graduate student from China. This is slightly irritating because I'm the only Asian student in a class of ~30, and she speaks with a very strong accent (and I find Chinese accents rather annoying - probably from growing up around too many people with such accents, whereas I'm born and raised in Canada and have native fluency in English).
She passes out the course syllabus, then proceeds to read it to us, spending about a minute each summarizing the theme of each of the article readings (and there's three pages of these - approx. 30-50 pages of reading for each lesson).
We play introductions games and make name tags for ourselves, and she comes around the room with a camera taking mugshots of each student and his/her nametag.
Week 2
Day 2
Our instructor delves into her lecture and goes very quickly through it, reading the Powerpoint slides, mispronouncing a lot of long words (and some shorter ones besides). I'm trying to think of an example but none comes to mind right now.
She breaks up the class into four groups, asking each group to 'debate' a different fundamental consideration of sociology: 1. individual vs. society; 2. agency vs. determination; 3. stability vs. conflict; 4. positivism vs. interpretive analysis. We're given six minutes to do this and report to the rest of the class about what the group decided on.
If you know anything about sociology, each of these considerations is a lot like the 'nature vs. nurture' debate. It's not best to take either extreme but a middle ground. In any case, this activity takes a whole lot more than six minutes, and my instructor goes back to blazing through Powerpoint slides.
I lament the habit of students copying down notes from slides, even though I was just barely keeping up with writing notes in my own words. One student (hereafter "Notes-person") asks if the slides will be posted on the Blackboard module online. Instructor says "no, because if I do, you won't listen in class." Students ask, then, if she could at least slow down a bit so people can write stuff down, and we have to keep reminding her of that every once in a while.
Five minutes before the end of the period, she hasn't finished her lecture yet, so she calls it off and wants us to sign up for our oral presentation times. These presentations are based on the reading material for the day, and since there were two readings on Asian-Americans, and as the token Asian student in the class, I felt like I had to get one of them. Regardless, she takes out her signup sheet and says that she's going to pass it around the room (in five minutes?! Yeah right.), to which I put up my hand and object that, if choice of date dictates choice of topic, then the students at the back of the room should not be disadvantaged (I was sitting at the back of the room).
Therefore she begins to call out each of the topics/readings by title, again providing a brief summary of each. She doesn't make it through the first page of the reading list before it's the end of the period. Students are getting really antsy. Some of us need to get all the way across campus and we need the full 10-minute class-change time to get there. I state something to this effect and she says "okay we'll continue this next class."
Day 3
First thing this period is to finish up the presentation signups. She puts the current list up on the overhead and to my horror, someone had signed up for the topic that I had been eyeing! I question when this had taken place, and got the answer that this student had signed up after class last time. I said that it's okay, I've got a second choice, but it really isn't fair that you continue to take signups after class when people may not have the time to stay.
One effective way of handling presentation signups without using class time is to post the signup sheet on one's office door and have students come by on their own time, first come first served. This also allows students some time outside of class to figure out group members and stuff without needing to pick a group on the spot. It doesn't alleviate the timing issue, since some people may have full days of class and can't get to the signup until later, but at least it's not wasting class time. It worked really well for my German classes in the past.
She talks a little about "How to do your oral presentation" and just reads out, again, the section on the course syllabus about the presentation, adding nothing new, except to stress that the presentation content should focus on part of the reading rather than the whole thing.
She seems to have decided on some form of compromise and has posted a one-page outline of Day 2's lecture on Blackboard. Someone asks if future lecture outlines will be posted prior to lecture so that they can be downloaded and typed in during class. The answer to that is also "no."
She then goes on to "How to learn effectively in this class" (my notes here say "...be taught effectively in this class"). She stresses coming to class for the discussion (what discussion!? The questions have been hardly really thought-provoking) and that it's not so important to take notes from the slides because they're just from the readings anyway.
In fact, they're verbatim from the readings. Her idea of a lecture is to pull out these quotations, read them to us, and then try to explain what they mean but ending up just going over and over the words in the quote because she doesn't know how to otherwise explain them!
She fails to finish the rest of this lecture also, and therefore we run out of time to watch the video she wanted to show. I'm pondering dropping the class, but since elective courses in the faculty of education are few, and I like the way my timetable looks, there's not a lot of places to go.
Week 3
Day 4
We had the first two student presentations today. The first group was actually pretty clever and made printed copies of their slides for everyone, and showed a clip from the movie "Lean On Me." The second presenter didn't have a fun movie clip like that but she focused on one part of the reading and did a lot of extra research into it, which was really really good.
After the presentations we watched the video intended for the previous lesson. I've kind of forgotten what the video was precisely about, but it was one famous sociologist spending 10 minutes talking about why it was important for teachers to study sociology of education or something like that.
There was then a lecture on structural FUNG-shin-oll-IS-um (functionalism) and some other stuff and all I really remember from it is that she asked us for participation in answering some questions which had already been clearly spelled out in the student presentation. And asking us if we knew what a self-fulfilling prophecy is.
There are no further lecture outlines posted on Blackboard - only Days 2 and 3.
Day 5
Coming into class, our instructor set up her computer but for some reason was really struggling to get it connected to the wireless network. It just wasn't working! There's an auxiliary Intranet network, I guess, which lets you access the installer that sets up your computer for automatic connection and login to the university connection to the Internets, and she kept clicking to connect to that Intranet instead of the whole Internets. After several minutes I approached and directed her to attempt to connect to the correct network, but it still didn't work, so eventually another student offered her own laptop, which was connected, for use during the class.
There was another presentation today. The presenters asked if it would be okay for them to email their Powerpoint file to the teacher and have her put them up on Blackboard.
Since the reading dated from the 1970s but was a very influential paper, after the presentation, the instructor tried to steer a discussion in the direction of whether the ideas in it still applied today. Since it was about the status culture/value of education, she pulled up some examples of Canadian lobby group TV spots campaigning for recognition of foreign professional credentials and stuff.
Then we ran out of time.
After class, she posts both the students' and her own Powerpoints on Blackboard, and writes us an email saying that we should read the rest of her slides and ask any questions at the next lecture, as she wasn't going to spend time to finish the remainder of the lecture.
Week 4
Day 6 (yesterday)
I found the TV in the classroom again when I came in early for class. Today's presenter was already there, setting up the same borrowed computer from last class.
Our instructor comes in on time and tells us that her plan for today was to do the presentation, then talk about 8 discussion questions, and then watch a video. I suggested that maybe it'd be more efficient if we did the video after the presentation and before the discussion, so that we could actually get to the video. She says okay and asks if there were any questions regarding her slides from last class.
Silence.
Notes-person asks if the student slides had been posted. Yes, the instructor responds. In fact, she says, you really should check Blackboard every day for new stuff. "I check it every day for my other classes," Notes-person says. "But I don't check this class because you don't put your notes up." [Zing!]
Although today's presenter just read off her slides, the topic was on the history of educational organization in Canada and she managed to summarize the reading well.
After the presentation, the instructor went to start up the video. But she couldn't get the VCR to work, so in the interest of 'saving time', she goes to hook up her computer, boot it up, and pull up her lecture/discussion slides. Takes 5 minutes to explain the principle of historiography (but without using that word; it's basically the study of bias in history), including waving around the textbook used by the other section of the course.
She already lessens the number of discussion questions and only gives us five. But she reads out each of the questions and then rephrases all of them in different words just for good measure. This takes ten minutes, I think. Finally we get to discussing the questions among ourselves and she gets someone to bring in another VCR, which works. She gets that set up.
Is it really so difficult - especially when it's the first period in the morning and so no one uses the room before you - to show up a few minutes early and get everything prepared for the lesson so that it runs smoothly?
We regroup and share some of our responses. I think she realizes that we're running short on time and she zips - even faster than on Day 2 - through a few slides on some material that we immediately notice isn't from our textbook or readings and so many of us uncap our pens or close Facebook and start frantically writing or frantically typing on our computers. Without explanation, just reading slides.
It's on Max Weber's analysis of bureaucracy and legitimacy or something like that, and hey, it's new to me so I'm writing some stuff down to maybe research later, but I couldn't keep up at all. She notices the sudden panic and says "don't write this down, you won't be tested on it. It's just to give you some background for the video."
GREAT way to encourage learning beyond the classroom...
Well, after breaknecking through the slides, guess what...
...we're out of time.
We'll watch the video next class.
Coming soon (tomorrow is Day 7!):
* Is the Weber material relevant to the video?
* Will anyone do a presentation that does not involve reading aloud from Powerpoint slides?
* Will anyone do a presentation without using Powerpoint at all?
* When do we find out more about the reflection paper due in October, and will there be more information other than that which is already on the course syllabus?
* Will we ever actually finish a lecture?
* How long will it be before kyrasantae gets a heart attack from this class?
