CandidProf: an effort to motivate
by Miki SaxonCandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday— anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts.
Knowing your audience is important for any public speaker. That is particularly true for someone who is teaching. You need to know where your students are coming from.
A few days ago, one of the local high schools brought several bus loads of students to campus for a college day. They wanted us to give presentations to the students on why they should go to college and what sort of things that they could study when they got here. These were summer school students. The students who take summer classes at college are often the better students, the ones who are trying to get ahead.
The summer school students in high school are normally different. A few are working ahead, but most are in summer school because they failed classes and are having to go to summer school in order to advance a grade. These are students who don’t want to be there, and often don’t want to go to school at all. These are what they call “at risk” students.
They are the ones that are unlikely to go to college in the first place, but the school is trying to do the right thing. These are high school freshmen. They still have a chance if they buckle down and study hard for the next few years, but if they continue to not take high school seriously they won’t be ready for college when they finish. Even if they go to college, they are unlikely to finish.
These students are bussed to the college and they are led around to different departments where somebody gives some presentation about their areas. We are given a specified time period. They have me following someone talking about the health sciences. The kids arrive late. The previous presentations have all run over. The person in charge tells us that we’ve got about 1/3 of the time that we were allotted, since they are running late and need to catch the buses.
The person before me gives a standard sort of thing, like probably everyone else had one all day. She has a Powerpoint presentation. She talks about what is offered, what programs of study are available, and what jobs in those fields entail. It is pretty standard; each slide has too much information (lists and such). I know that these can be interesting fields, but the presentation is boring even to me. The kids are falling asleep. She races through her presentation, but it still takes as long as mine was planned to take. There’s no way she could have finished in the allotted time if she’d gone at normal speed.
Then it is my time. (Cont’d Thursday, July 10th)
Is this a good approach to motivating high school students?
Your comments—priceless
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Image credit: TWINMOM
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:26 pm
I *just* got sucked in and BAM – wait till next Thursday. I so don’t like you anymore.
I’m kidding, of course.
Can’t wait to see what you do with the kids. I really think if high school had classes that made sense to high risk students it could be so much more beneficial. Why are my kids the only ones that are going to learn how to budget and save from an early age? I think economics, etc. would be far more interesting if the younger grades did things that made it interesting to learn about things on a global (or stellar, in your case) scale..
But that’s just me. I am not a teacher to anyone but my young’uns and that’s because I barely have the patience for them.
Thanks, and I’m looking forward to next week’s post!
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I agree that knowing and understanding the kids as parents and teachers is the best to teach the kids. To do this need love and a lot of efforts.
http://www.parents-kidz.com
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 pm
To many, teaching is just a job. Here is where the problem lies, because teaching is not just a job. It is a vocation, in the same way that the priesthood is a vocation, a calling. If it is treated just as a job, then you go through the motions of preparing a syllabus, a lesson plan, lectures, quizzes, then grades –which sort of tell you how much information has been assimilated & regurgitated, but not how much educating you have actually done. If you’ve been teaching for a while, you get into a rut, go through the same motions year after year, and churn out students for the next level, as in an impersonal assembly line in a factory which turns out products according to narrow purely physical standards. This probably works in an industrialized / standardized society, but I am not sure if it makes for a better world of aware, concerned, responsible people.
Educating comes from the Latin word, educere, which literally means to lead out of. You lead out of the person the capabilities he will need to go through life, be the best he can be, contribute to the community, etc, etc. If you want to do this effectively, then you have to know where your students are coming from –as CandidProf says.
July 4th, 2008 at 7:02 am
Jennifer,
You’re exactly right. In an effort to not leave any of the slower students behind, they’ve slowed down the whole class. For years, the brighter students have been bored in school. Now, almost all are bored. When the students are bored, they are not learning.
July 4th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Ren,
Good point. Teaching is not just a job. I am a college professor, and that is part of what defines me. I am doing what I do all the time, whether it is in the classroom or at home. And, yes, in higher education, we also get the push from the administrators to just churn out the students. Some give in, but some of us are resisting.
July 4th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Cana,
Teaching isn’t easy because people all learn differently. What gets me is all the folk out there saying that “this” way to teach is better than “that” way. Yes, there are some things that are better than others, but everyone is different, so everyone learns differently. Some of the latest trends only work for some people. You need to learn where your students are in order to reach them.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:30 am
[…] because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts. Read the first half of this post here and all of his posts […]
September 20th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
I think to give some real stories to kids will be more efficient than just presenting slides of those information.
http://www.parents-and-kids.com