Sydney.
It’s mostly warm.
Hot even, although this morning, Sunday, dollops of rain smack the windows and turn the air icy.
Friday night. The Rocks. Heat seeping from sandstone walls that contain people, noise, colour. And moments of stillness. And history.
Saturday morning before the clouds burn off: icons.
I try for a different view.
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Earlier this month (October) World Teachers’ Day was celebrated around … well … around the world. Did you hear about any celebrations? Did you take part in any? If you have school age children did you do something nice for their teacher/s? If you’re a teacher, did you celebrate in some way, or were you celebrated/acknowledged by others?
When thinking about success yesterday, I began to think about what it meant to be successful as a teacher. How is success measured? What does a successful teacher look like? What do they know, what skills and understandings have they developed, in what ways can they communicate their ideas, knowledge, understandings, thoughts, feelings, views? What are their values and what do they value? Can you ‘see’ teacher success by looking at their students? Is there a link between a successful teacher and successful students? Is teacher success a sum of individual students’ successes? Is it simply a matter of addition … successful student A + successful student B (and so on) = successful teacher?
We sometimes talk about students as if they are pieces of machinery that can be weighed and tested to see if they fit a certain list of pre-ordained specifications. Even if they are, would the teacher be the only one responsible for ensuring they meet those specifications, or are others involved too?
The structure of the school, for instance, has a part to play in student success – the kinds of programs the school offers, the number of lessons scheduled each day (and therefore the amount of time students have to work on things that matter), the relative worth of particular subjects (what’s more important and therefore how much time is spent learning Physics, English, Drama, Maths, the capital cities of the countries of the world, the canon of English literature, History, driver ed, pet care, sustainability …?). And when there is only so much time in the day, what’s given priority? What’s missed out? And ability to ‘do’ which of those subjects would constitute success? If you can do quadratic equations but not name the poet who wrote The rime of the Ancient Mariner and discuss what it’s about in a coherent way, should you be considered successful? If you cannot name the rivers down the eastern seaboard of Australia, but be able to parse a sentence correctly, are you a success? And for how long do you need to know this information? If you could parse a sentence when you were at school, but couldn’t now to save your life … were you really successful/was the teacher?
Different people will have different views on these questions and I doubt there will ever be any agreement. You might think that there is no question, that surely everyone would agree with your perspective, but ask around. What do others think? Do they agree with you? On what points do your views diverge?
So the ways schools work has some impact on student success and our understanding of success has some influence on whether we deem students successful or not. The culture of the school – which is often established by the principal and leadership team – also has an impact. If the principal says, at the end of lunch, ‘Okay troops, back to the trenches’ then she is putting a particular way of being into place. The teachers are soldiers and the students are … the enemy? Language is important, and it is to our detriment that we ignore the power of the metaphors we use and the influence they have on our own and others’ actions.
Of course, parents also have an influence on how successful their children are at school. Parents’ attitude to education and to teachers will be communicated to their children even if they don’t say anything to them directly. Some parents will be in a position to take their children overseas and provide cultural experiences that other parents will not have an opportunity to provide; some parents will nag their children to do their homework, while other parents will have the view that schoolwork should happen between 9 and 3 and there should be no requirement for children to do school work out of school hours. Some parents will hold that view and still nag their children to do it! Some parents will talk to their children and in that way support the child’s capacity to communicate with adults; some parents will buy books for their children and establish a routine of reading to them at bedtime each night; some parents will limit time on the Nintendo DS and the iPod and how many hours of cartoons/video games/internet porn their children watch and will encourage them to become involved in sporting, cultural, community, and/or social activities. Some parents will speak to their child’s teacher and show an interest in the child’s education and progress.
But not all parents will do those things. Does that mean that some students get a head start? Or are better placed to be successful in schools?
We can’t discount the influence of teachers, of course, but we should remember that not all teachers are the same. They will have different motivations, different ideas about their role in the classroom, different ideas about the purpose of education, different ideas about how best to manage the classroom and its resources, how best to motivate and engage students, how to interact with children to allow them to flourish. Some teachers won’t even think about student flourishing. Some teachers claim that they teach subjects (disciplines) while other teachers claim they teach children. Some teachers are critically reflexive and question everything they do and question why they do it in the way they do it; some teachers don’t. Some teachers go to PD on a regular basis and continually learn; some teachers don’t. Some teachers leave as soon as the bell goes at the end of the day; others stay at school for hours, planning and marking and finding resources. Some teachers take their students on camps or walk the Kokoda Track with them, spending hours preparing themselves and their students for the trek.
Education is not a level playing field – not in terms of the children, their families, the schools they attend, or the teachers who teach them. But neither is it a factory, where a raw product is off-loaded in the loading bay, put on an assembly line, moved through a series of processes that are done to it over a number of years, evaluated at the end of the process to see if it measures up, and sent on its way – that ‘way’ being determined by how it measures up.
I have a hard time thinking of children as products, as things that need to have processes “done to them”.
And so I have a hard time determining what constitutes success when it comes to teaching. What does a successful teacher look like? What is the outcome of their success? Is it a group of children who all know the same things because they’ve been through a standardised/standardising ‘process’? Or is it more than that – how much more? What does that ‘more’ include?
And how do we know when a teacher has been successful? A teacher’s success may take years to be realised – there are countless instances of students who get in touch with their teachers many years after leaving school and recount a story of the impact the teacher had on that child as an adult. Success may not be immediate. Does that mean the teacher is any less successful?
I’m really interested in your thoughts on this. What does it mean for a teacher to be successful? Can success be measured and if so how? Against which criteria and whose judgements? Do we all have the same understanding of success and are we confident that we’re measuring apples against apples – if we agree that there is some way to measure teacher success?
Let me know what you think. I’m sure there’s a body of literature out there – people who have conducted studies on this very issue, but I’m interested in what you think.
And if you do think, then perhaps you should thank your teachers!
I’ve been reading a lot this week about the ways young people define success; I’ve also been reading about the aspirations of adolescent girls.
I’ve therefore been thinking quite a bit about aspirations and success.
What is success? Well, according to the year 7 students in Wendy’s study it’s a lot to do with having a goal and achieving it (it’s also, according to them, about fame and wealth). Wendy is another success story, but I’ll leave that for another day.
And aspirations? For the year 10 girls in Cherie’s study, there was a sense of uncertainty, a lack of clarity around their aspirations for the future. They had ideas/fantasies, but no concrete goals they were actively planning to achieve. There were so many options for them, that they found it difficult to project themselves one year or 10 years into the future and choose which of those options felt right for them. The girls had difficulty visualising life as anything but what it is now.
I empathise with that view. Do you? Can you imagine yourself 10 years older: what you’ll look like, what you’ll be doing, where you’ll be living, what kind of relationship you might be in (particularly if you aren’t in one now), where you might have travelled to? Could you have done that when you were 15 or 16?
I certainly couldn’t. I never imagined I’d be a university lecturer, for instance. I can’t believe I’ve been one for so long that I’m eligible for long service leave! It wasn’t something I had as a goal. Being a lecturer wasn’t something I strived for, or planned for, or worked towards attaining. It wasn’t on my to-do list. My life just led there. It’s just what happened.
For those of you who are planners, that might seem unnatural, not the proper way of doing things, it might even seem wrong. For those of you who have known me for the longest time (and I’m talking almost 40 years here. Yes, Michelle, it’s been that long) you might think I made decisions that inevitably led me to that destination – but if I did it was never with that destination consciously in mind. I didn’t at any point say “I have aspirations to be a lecturer”. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to me to aspire to that kind of role.
I don’t generally set goals. I hate the question “where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” No, not hate. Loathe. I loathe that question. I don’t know where I’ll be in ten years’ time, but ten years ago I didn’t know I’d:
* be married (to the most fabulous man I know)
* be living in Burnie (and loving living here)
* have (almost) six more grandchildren than I did at the time
* have my doctorate
* be employed full-time as a lecturer
* have had the opportunity to be a Course Coordinator (and in so doing help change some lives)
* have had the privilege of being the Director of Student Engagement (and help to change a few more)
* have travelled to Paris (twice), been to Germany to visit Elke (twice), spent a week in Venice with Sarah and Ben, caught the train around France and Italy by myself, or been proposed to on the London Eye
* have seen Macbeth at the Globe Theatre in London, Les Mis on the West End, or Loch Ness
* be a student again, this time studying Media Communication.
And more … much more. I wouldn’t have thought of some of those things ten years ago, let alone planned to achieve them if they’d been goals – and look how much I would have missed out on. So for me, that’s a clear justification for not living your life according to five or ten year plans. I know others will see it differently, and I’m not saying they’re wrong, I’m just saying that I don’t live my life that way.
So … and I’m getting to the point now … imagine how surprised I was in November last year when I set myself a goal. Just one mind you, but it was a big one. It was one I wasn’t convinced at the time I could achieve, but I set it nonetheless. I couldn’t “see” myself into the future to see how I would look or feel if I achieved this goal, but that didn’t stop me from setting it.
And it didn’t stop me from working towards it.
You see, I’d become increasingly unhappy with my … physical self/weight/appearance/being treated by strangers as stupid just because I was fat. I wrote the following earlier this year as part of an assignment for university:
Lizzie* was fat. Morbidly obese, according to the chart in her doctor’s office. She’d
been that way for years, apart from the time, five years ago, when she lost 12 kilos.
Since then she’d managed to put on 20. Or more.
Lizzie knew that she was fat; she could feel it. When she laughed, her whole body
wobbled; Lizzie didn’t like that, so she stopped laughing. Her knees creaked under
her weight: with each stair she climbed or descended Lizzie was accompanied by a
painful musical chorus. Lizzie’s eyes grew squinty and her best friend commented,
rather rudely Lizzie thought, that she must be turning Japanese. Lizzie’s mummy-apron
grew bigger by the day. Her arms, her thighs, her wrists, her elbows … fat.
Fatness oozed from her shoes with every step.
In her fatness Lizzie was lumpy, unlovely, lost. Far beyond chubby or plump, Lizzie
was fleshy, hefty, corpulent.
And, unhappy.
*The name was changed to protect … well, me.
So, yes I set myself a weight loss goal. By October 12, 2013 I wanted to weigh a lot (lot) less.
Daniel, son number 2, was getting married to Cathy in Byron Bay. I knew there were whales that went past Byron and I didn’t want to be one of them.
It was a goal I was determined to make.
******
I didn’t make it.
But I was close. Really, really close.
I came home from Byron even more determined to reach the goal I had set myself in November last year.
On Monday last week I was 800g away from it.
By the Wednesday I was 400g away.
On Monday this week, I was 600g away. Ouch! That really hurt.
On Wednesday I was 100g away. It was so close … but not quite there. I wanted to see the actual number I’d been striving for on the scales, not settle with ‘close enough’.
You can imagine my trepidation on Friday (yesterday) when I stood next to the scales with my health coach standing beside – prodding me to get on them.
What if I’d put on weight? What if … ah, this was no time for what ifs. I just got on.
Result? I’d blitzed it! I hadn’t just gone down by the 100g I needed to make my goal; I’d dropped 900g and was well on the way to achieving the next (much, much smaller) weight loss goal I’d already decided on.
So, here I am. Forty-nine weeks after having set my goal. Still full of determination and resolve but 35.5kgs lighter.
Yes, dear reader, you read that correctly: 35.5kgs.
In one way I’m horribly embarrassed that there was that much of me to lose, but that really doesn’t stop me feeling proud of myself for losing it.
It was an aspiration. To weigh less, to not look like a whale at Daniel’s wedding, to not embarrass him in front of Cathy’s family (which I hadn’t met).
I had a goal: a particular weight I wanted to be at a certain time (which meant losing 34.7kgs in just less than a year).
I had a plan: an eating and exercise one.
I was determined. Through this process I’ve been re-introduced to my determination. It’s pretty strong!
I worked hard and didn’t let anything deter me.
I didn’t stop when I didn’t make it, or when it got hard, or when the weight wouldn’t move, when my body wouldn’t move, when my knee groaned harder than it had ever groaned before, when others around me ate cake or musk sticks or spearmint leaves or Turkish Delight (thanks Rochelle and Emma), or even toast and vegemite (thanks Mum, but no thanks).
I was determined. I was initially determined to do it for Daniel, but then it got to the point where I was doing it for myself. And my determination didn’t waver.
And I made it. Two weeks late, but hey, I’m not going to quibble.
I set a goal. I worked hard to achieve it. I made it.
If this is what success feels like … I like it!! I might not have fame or wealth, but this feeling of satisfaction more than makes up for that.
******
If I was brave enough I’d put up before and after shots.
You’ll notice from their absence that I’m not yet that brave!
******
I have to acknowledge Tim, my wonderful husband, for his unfailing, constant support, encouragement, and belief in me. You’re the best and I love you to bits!
Thanks Helen and Robyn and Carolyn. You are the best encouragers! You always noticed and let me know that you noticed and that meant a lot to me.
Thanks to Warren and Ben for your quiet support and pride in me. You’re both like Dad/Grandad … you don’t say much in words, but your actions speak loudly.
Thanks to Rochelle for being my exercise buddy for a short time. It helped push me just that bit harder. I don’t do ‘love pats’ at boxing anymore thanks to you!
Finally, thanks to Carolyn and Delicia and Eve. Your support has been amazing. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Do you ever think “I’ve been here before”? I don’t mean that you lived in a different era in a different form (that you’ve re-incarnated from a cockroach into a human) but that you’ve lived an experience that now, at some slight remove, you’re living again. Re-living.
Maybe at the start of a new semester, when you read the unit outline at the end of Week 1 and realise that you’ve missed the deadline by two days for one part of your first assessment task. Or vacuuming the floor when it felt like only yesterday that you tried to get that same spot out of the carpet? Or reading the start of a book you didn’t think you’d read only to find that it’s so familiar that you know, at some point in the past, you’ve sat in the same spot, legs curled up under you, puppy pushed in beside you, the winter sun streaming through the windows … that you’ve been there before?
Life can be like that.
Years ago, you packed a bag, walked out the door, changed your life.
And then, twenty years later it happens again. Bags are packed, doors close, lives change.
Only this time it’s not your bag or your door or your life. But close enough to get a sense that you’ve been here before.
It comes as no surprise to find that life doesn’t happen in a straight line. There are turns, and deviations, and unexpected detours that lead you down paths that are overgrown with lack of wear and just a tiny bit spooky, but interesting if you have a spirit of adventure and just a touch (or more) of courage – which you don’t realise you have until you’ve travelled that path and have the benefit of reflection and hindsight.
And there are seeming circles … you tread a path, and then without any encouragement or persuasion, your daughter treads a similar path.
The lines you once heard, she’s hearing (she’ll come to her senses – just give her time and she’ll be back). The fingers that wagged at you, now wag at her. The system that seemed stacked against you, now seems stacked against her. The sense of dislocation you felt, she’s now feeling. The questions you asked yourself, she’s also asking.
There’s living, and then there’s re-living.
Circles.
Different actors. Different lives. But so, so familiar.
Age gives me an advantage. I can see from a distance – having made it to the end of that dark and gloomy path she’s now treading. I know that it’ll get lighter the further along she goes. That there are more options than she first thought, more warmth from others than she initially envisaged when everyone (or so it seems) was turned against her, more resilience and strength than she ever imagined was there, lurking within.
Living
and re-living.
Life.
While I have had a Twitter account for just over a year now, I have not, until recently, given it much attention. Nor have I given much attention to my LinkedIn account. Over the past two weeks, for a reason I have yet to understand, I have taken to checking my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts on a very regular basis. I read through the tweets and articles that arrive during the night while eating rhubarb and ricotta for breakfast, and then I check again at lunch time and regularly throughout the evening. My daughters would call “nerd alert” if they could see who I follow (ABC News 24; The Guardian; BBC World News; Oxford University Press, etc) but that’s okay. Nerds are usually quite harmless and I don’t mind being counted amongst their number.
But that’s not the reason for this post. The point isn’t to tell you that I’ve become somewhat addicted to Twitter and LinkedIn, and to the information, ideas, perspectives, thinking, opinions, moments of humour and sometimes outrage to which I am now exposed.
The point is to try to make sense, for myself as much as anyone, of some of the things I’ve read in recent times.
One of the tweets that came through on Friday was news of a message to members of the Australian Army by Lt. General David Morrison, AO who was responding to reports of unacceptable behaviour.
I also read tweets about the questions put to the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, by (former) Perth radio presenter, Howard Sattler.
The two things became linked in my mind, and also called to mind the list of things others have said about and to Prime Minister Gillard over the last two and a half years.
One of the things that Lt. General Morrison said in his message to members of the Australian Army (and let’s face it, to the rest of us given that it’s on YouTube for all to see) is that “every one of us is responsible for the culture and reputation of our Army”. What if we were to replace Army with “school” or “workplace, houses of Parliament, radio station or home”? Would what he said still apply? Are we responsible for the culture and reputation of where we work and live?
As an aside, he also said: “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept”. One thing I find interesting is that this hasn’t already been said loudly and clearly by an editor of a newspaper, a news director in a radio station, a senior executive of a TV station, a leader in the community …
But I digress.
I stumbled across Angry is a Habit while reading articles on LinkedIn. It is a short blog post about habits. We have habits of behaviour, but Godin (the author of the post) suggests that our emotions can become habitual too.
I thought about this in relation to the words used by some in the media and wondered if the emotions behind their words are habitual ways of being. Why the need to pour hate and loathing and anger into the world? Is it just a habit? Do we, the consumers of these words, buy the emotion as well? Is it a package deal? When we read/hear/watch the angry, hate-filled words that we wouldn’t say to our boss, principal, Dean of the Faculty, chair of the Parents and Friends committee, head of the local arts organisation, do we buy the emotion too so that we get just as angry and hate-filled at whichever politician is being scorned, ridiculed, put down? Do the words cause us to feel particular things? Does hate and anger therefore spread through our communities in the same way that videos go viral on the internet?
From LinkedIn I also read Three words that will transform your career. In this article author Bruce Kasanoff claims that to improve our quality of life we just need to think “help this person” every time we encounter another person: “When you walk into Starbucks for coffee, think help this person about the barista who serves you. Instead of being frustrated that he isn’t moving fast enough, see if you can make him smile. Better yet, tell him to keep the change.” Kasanoff claims that this will “change your demeanour, your thought process, and the entire interaction.”
It is a similar sentiment to one put forward by David Foster Wallace in his now-famous speech to a group of university graduates in the US in 2005. While Bret Easton Ellis (author of American Psycho amongst other works) considers Foster Wallace “the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation“, others have been taken with Wallace’s notion of choice … we can choose to behave in certain ways, we can choose to see the world in particular ways, we can choose to look beyond the surface and (although he didn’t use these words) we can choose empathy. We can choose to live beyond our “default setting” (of being annoyed and frustrated by, for instance, the slowness of airplane passengers when putting their bags in the overhead lockers; of being annoyed and frustrated that even when someone is eighth in the queue for the ATM they still don’t have their purse out of their handbag when they “suddenly” find themselves first in the queue, which has now grown to 23 tongue-clicking, foot-tapping withdrawers of money). We can choose to think/live/behave/feel differently.
So what have I learnt from all this reading? What sense am I making from these seemingly unrelated tweets, articles, speeches, thoughts? It has something to do with manners and respectful behaviour … but it also goes beyond that.
For me, one thing is clear: We can change our habitual ways of thinking and acting. To do this, we first need to become aware of how our thoughts impact our behaviour, speech, interactions, emotions. We need to consider our habits of thought and emotion and then to do something about them if we find ourselves thinking/feeling/acting negatively/rudely/in an ill-mannered way on a regular basis.
Through a change in thinking we can transform others’ lives and in the process transform our own as well.
We can stop walking past what we know (deep down) we don’t accept. We can speak up for respect, care, kindness, professionalism and manners. We don’t have to accept the hate and anger of radio shock-jocks and political commentators (of whatever persuasion). We don’t have to accept their hate-filled, angry, vitriolic rantings, and their disrespectful questioning, and their words which claim that we are all somehow implicated in their tawdry games (we continue to listen, to watch, to read, to buy, to comment and thus give them credibility or at the very least our time).
We can choose to think for ourselves, read critically, and ask questions of the texts produced and served to us on a regular basis. We can live by habit, or we can choose to live consciously, being explicitly aware of the world around us and how we are being shaped by the views/words/actions of others (yes, even of me in this blog post), and the ways our views/words/actions shape others.
If we are teachers, then we need to be even more aware of that influence.
None of this is new of course. Educator Wayne Sawyer, in an editorial he wrote in English in Australia in 2005, noted that “our current students face a relentless barrage of shockjocks, media barons, advertising and corporate greed masquerading as common sense” (p. 4). Sawyer called on teachers to ensure that critical literacy was an integral component of their teaching. But in order to do that, teachers too must be aware of how their views are being shaped by the same shock-jocks and media barons that shape our students’ thoughts. And more than that, we need to know how to deconstruct the messages they (and we) consume and know how to teach students to unpack them.
We can choose … that’s what I’ve learnt. We can choose.
Tim seemed to think that I might be at a bit of a loss on my day off, particularly as I have no study to do, so he asked me to take a photo of one of the two roses in bloom in the back garden.
He was right. I was at a bit of a loss, so into the cold I headed and went in search of roses. It was a bit windy, and that always makes taking macro shots of flowers challenging, but the biggest challenge was trying to keep my hands still.
It was freezing and I was shivering so much that I couldn’t hold the camera still.
I hadn’t used my 90mm Tamron (macro) lens in absolutely ages, and for a while couldn’t remember how to switch it to auto focus. Eventually I worked it out, but then discovered that I’m so used to manual focus that I couldn’t use it in auto. I switched it back to manual and tried to time to shaking to the movement from the wind. I suppose I could have used the tripod … hindsight’s a wonderful thing!
Anyway, here are two shots from my winter garden.
This year I took on a new identity … not, I hasten to add, in a witness protection kind of way. Nothing that dramatic! … but a new identity nonetheless.
I could say that I took on a new role … but with new roles comes new identities. We can choose to define ourselves by our new roles/identities, and thus think about ourselves differently. Being an academic means particular things. Being an under-graduate student means almost the polar opposite. We may choose to act in ways that are consistent with our new role and that might lead to inconsistencies in how we portray ourselves to the world. Will I be student today, or teacher? What does it mean to be a student in an online environment where I don’t get to spend time with my teacher or my peers; when I don’t get to hear their voices or even see what they look like? It’s a disconcerting experience. On the other hand, what does it mean to be a teacher in an online environment where I don’t get to spend time with my students, when I don’t get to hear their voices or see what they look like? Experiencing that as an online student heightens my awareness of that ‘disconcerting experience’ as a teacher of online students.
In addition to thinking about myself in a different way and considering if I will act differently to signify this new role/identity, others see me in that new role and make different kinds of connections with me, or think about me in particular ways and so have their own view of who I am (which might not bear any relation to who I am when inhabiting a different identity/role).
My university tutors do not see me as a colleague; as someone who, like them, teaches in an online environment. They see me as a student – a distant one, it has to be said: one who doesn’t appear to be very engaged, who forgets to read her unit outline, who leaves assignments till the last minute, who doesn’t follow the requirements of the task as closely as she should, who doesn’t engage in conversations online, who hasn’t made connections with other students in the online environment.
For those of you in the know, why didn’t you tell me it would be like this? 🙂 If only you’d told me to read the unit outline carefully and repeatedly, or that I’d need at least 10 hours per week per unit to do full justice to the work I needed to do, or that learning to use new software is time-consuming and requires a great deal of independent learning and commitment and energy, or that coming home from work and having to study till late is exhausting, or that trying to find information when it’s in ten different places in the online environment is one of the most frustrating parts of the whole experience (it really isn’t all that difficult to put all the information required for weekly activities in the one place), or that reading all the other students’ posts can be mind-numbing and take up all the time I’d set aside for study (and seriously, do 18 year olds really like talk in that like annoying way where they like say a lot without like saying anything at all, you know, sort of, I guess, do you get me? Despite my student status I am still a teacher and despair over the abominable use of language on public discussion boards).
Not that it’s all bad of course. In one subject (Writing Professionally – actually I don’t know if that’s the name of the subject because for some reason I haven’t looked at the unit outline properly to even know what the unit is called), the tutor gives general feedback on our ‘writing watches’ (which are assessed) and on two occasions has encouraged other students to read my work for its ‘quality and depth’ (you have no idea how embarrassed I feel writing that). We had to do three ‘writing watches’ across the course of the semester – responding in a systemically functionally linguistic way to something we’d read. I chose to respond to:
1. an article in a photography magazine
2. an essay by Richard Flanagan which appeared in The Monthly (the article was on David Walsh and MONA which I’d just been to, so it seemed fitting)
3. a blog post titled The oddest English spellings, part 20: The letter “y” from the Oxford University Press’s blog. It was interesting. Seriously!
These writing watches were practice for our exam. Yes, you heard that right – exam. I had to sit an exam.
Why didn’t someone tell me how stressful that is?! That you spend days and nights thinking about what the questions might be, what the text choices might be, what you know (or rather, don’t know) about systemic functional linguistics and how you’re going to write “pages” on it in two hours?
But I did it and wrote (typed) five pages of blather about an advertisement for Income Protection titled Confessions of a financial adviser. An interesting way to spend a day, particularly when you’re at home and the phone keeps ringing just as you think you have the modality worked out!
We also had to do weekly ‘word watches’ (which were assessed). We had to find two unfamiliar words each week and write about them: what they mean, where we’d read/heard them, their derivation, and we had to use the words in a sentence.
At first I found this difficult. I don’t want to sound like a pompous git (unlike some people I know), but in the everyday, normal, regular reading I do I don’t come across too many words which I don’t know. So I determined to try harder.
Here are my words (you, clever reader, are quite possibly aware of their meanings and already sprinkle them through your everyday conversations. I, on the other hand, did not).
So there you have it. New words to pepper through my dinner-time conversations. Feel free to use any of them, particularly in ways that are inventive and thus deeply satisfying.
I am a student and I am learning things. That’s what students do isn’t it? Isn’t that the purpose of being a student? It’s why I decided to be a student: to learn something/s. And even though I’ve said ‘the message’ countless times, it’s always different when you’re on the receiving end of it. The message is: learning can be hard. And it isn’t always fun.
But it is satisfying.
Being a student not only challenges my own identity (I have to flip between student and teacher on a regular basis and I am very conscious of not being a teacher in my student role – which is partly why I don’t engage on the discussion boards: I don’t yet have the student language down pat. I’m too caught up using teacher language and saying teacher things and I don’t want to do that as a student).
Being a student also challenges how others see me.
Some people, on first hearing that I am a university student again, thought (and said) “are you mad?” and other equally dis/en/couraging words. My new role was something they wanted to reject – it was ludicrous, or unnecessary (especially at your age), or just plain silly. I have a PhD, why would I want to be an under-grad again? That’s something young people do. I should do some serious study, not a bachelor degree in an area I potentially know a little bit about. Why, for instance, am I doing Professional Writing (that’s its official title – I thought I’d better check) when I have had a number of journal articles, book chapters and conference papers published?
I guess I feel that I can always learn more – and I did. Heaps in fact, and that’ll help my writing when next I write something for publication.
On hearing that I am a student again, other people saw me differently. They made a different kind of connection with me. Some, because of their own identity as ‘student’ (or perhaps, student-in-the-not-too-distant past) applauded my decision – I was now one of them, a member of a community of adults who are (or were) university students. For those whom I’ve taught – who have been my own students – the connection is even closer. Their teacher/lecturer/colleague is now in the same position they recall so clearly and thus our connection is strengthened. There’s a shared understanding … and as I give advice quite freely about being a student, I also imagine there’s a little bit of mirth around my stumbling attempts at student-hood.
But I have finished the semester, completed teaching and learning surveys (and been very honest – in a professional way – as all students should be), and am eagerly awaiting my final results.
I have also determined to be a better student next semester. I have already created folders for my two new subjects (one is Production Planning; the other is Visual Storytelling), downloaded the information from the course and unit handbook, looked up information about textbooks (I don’t have to buy any), and worked out what I do when I procrastinate (I work … yes, on my study days!).
Being a student: challenging, stressful, but ultimately satisfying.
What’s your experience?
My online students, in the days before we went online, used to talk about waiting for ‘the envelope’. Ours were yellow and students would camp at their letter boxes waiting for the big yellow envelope to arrive. Some would leave it sitting on the kitchen bench till they felt strong enough to open it; others would rip it open, eager to see their result.
My first envelope arrived in the post earlier this week and I have to say it was an odd feeling. Partly, I think because of the ways my students (now graduates) used to talk about the arrival of the envelope, and the importance it held for them. It was a validation of them as students, scholars, learners, and sometimes it was even more. It was a validation of themselves. Were they worth anything? Could they do it? Were they cut out for this thing called university? Did they have what it takes? Was university really for people like them?
Many of those students had not been on to the university campus at that stage, or had not been on to the campus often. Many of them didn’t live in the same state as the university; many hadn’t physically met their lecturers, tutors, peers. University was a disembodied experience. An experience that involved sitting at home, on their computer, by themselves, struggling to work out what the task required, having little access to anyone to seek clarification, advice, ideas. Not knowing if they were on the right track.
They did their best, not knowing if they measured up; their whole being invested in this. What if I’m not on the right track? What if I fail? Will that mean I’m a failure?
It’s high stakes.
A few days before my own envelope arrived, I had returned my own students’ assignments – though not in envelopes – and was aware of the emotions involved in receiving feedback and a grade. But I was aware of the emotions as an objective observer: as someone who knew that the students would have an emotional reaction, but not as someone who felt the emotion directly. Some of my students had not met the pass standard, and the emotions varied: some were angry, others were disappointed. Many of them spent the weekend crying. Other students had met the pass standard but had expected the same success as they’d had at college. Their emotions were similar – to them their pass (or credit) felt like a fail.
I had warned students that they might feel this range of emotions and that they might react in particular ways; I had wanted to prepare them and to let them know it is normal to feel a range of emotions … and to be quite honest, to let them know that they weren’t to email me at the height of their emotional response. The “post-assignment-blues” email is not a good one to look back on when the emotion has subsided!
All of this was raging through my head when my own envelope arrived. What if I failed … or just as bad … what if I only passed?
So when my envelope arrived I felt part of a community – a community of those who knew the importance attached to the envelope – and for the first time I was an insider in this experience. I felt the weight of expectation and the weight of former students’ associations. It was exciting and daunting in equal measure. The assignment was to write a non-fiction piece of around 500-800 words on a topic of our choice. We had to state the purpose and the audience of our piece, and we had to submit two drafts of our writing plus the final copy. We also had to write a statement about the editing process. Suggestions for our writing included CD liner notes (I didn’t know they still existed), a review (of a book, an art work, an exhibition), a newspaper feature article.
I didn’t know how to write any of those things so I wrote a blog entry. And while I wrote about a real-life experience I wrote it a bit story-like (I used elements of narrative writing) and so was uncertain whether the tutor would accept it as non-fiction.
She did.
I enjoyed your blog immensely. It’s rare to receive an error-free assignment; you’ve obviously invested time and effort for this submission. Thank you.
A validation …
… of my capacity to correct errors.
That won’t surprise any of my own students!
I won’t be so scared when the next envelope arrives. Except I can’t remember when the next assignment is due. I really will need to read the unit outline soon!!
Last week was a big one for me.
I submitted my first assignment. The task was to develop a series of four promotional postcards for the town/city in which we live. We had to “photograph places or things that you find interesting”, while the postcards “are aimed to appeal to a youth/young 18-24 demographic, so please create postcards that you believe would appeal to this audience”.
Quandary #1: I’m not 18-24 – how do I know what appeals to that audience?
Solution: I asked my students. They all said “the beach”.
Quandary #2: The beach in Burnie is almost always deserted and taking a photo of an empty beach possibly wouldn’t make an appealing image for an 18-24 year old.
Solution: Go to the beach when surf lifesavers are training.
Quandary #3: Surf lifesaving championships had been held in another part of the state the weekend before, and only a small handful of people came to train on the only day I could make it to the beach.
Solution: Take a photo anyway!
Below is what I came up with. The water doesn’t look very inviting (that’s possibly my projection: I think it’s always too cold to swim in Tasmanian waters), and that could be a mark against me, but I’m willing to take that chance.
We had to include text of some sort and I wanted to keep it simple on the front and leave the explaining to the back of the postcard.
As mentioned, we not only had to design the front of the promotional postcard, we also had to design the back. Betty, our tutor, had indicated that the cards were not to be ‘touristy’ and so I decided against having a place for a stamp and a message. I wanted to use the back to contextualise the front. Here’s what I came up with:
Continuing with the beach and ‘come and play’ theme I also photographed the marine creatures that feature on the beach foreshore. These creatures have added extra life to the newly renovated beachfront.
While we were to take a thematic approach and ensure the four postcards were a ‘series’ I decided to have two themes. The second them is ‘make it in Burnie’. Burnie has taken on an identity as the ‘City of Makers’, and I wanted to capture this in my postcards.
Burnie is famous for making paper (although if you know Burnie you’ll be amazed at the absence of a pulp and paper mill), but it also makes other things. There’s a big Caterpillar factory (or a number of them) in the city, but also smaller companies making big machines for export to the rest of the world. Haulmax is one of those companies and while it isn’t technically in Burnie, it’s close enough to be captured within the instruction to take photographs of “your environment and/or its surroundings”. I figured that East Wynyard is a surrounding of Burnie!
I couldn’t discount the importance of paper to Burnie’s history and identity, so on the day before the assignment was due (I’d been in Sydney for the week before, which is why I had to leave it to the last minute!) I visited the Makers’ Workshop to see if I could find some paper.
It’s all handmade now, of course, and the papier mâché sculptures that Pam Thorne makes are amazing, but I couldn’t capture any of them in a way I liked, and, wanting to keep the images simple, I simply did this:
I thought I’d get into trouble for moving different piles of paper from their allocated shelves, but if anyone saw me they didn’t take any notice. I put them all back in their right places!
Here’s the back:
So, my first assignment submitted – on the day before it was due no less!
Feeling pretty happy with myself I re-read the task description.
It said “students must upload regular updates of their design/s. These regular updates are very important – they demonstrate the on-going development of your work prior to final submission. Be advised that if you simply upload work the day before it’s due (without posting any earlier entries or consulting with your lecturer) this will affect your final mark.
Whoops!
Oh well. Even if I don’t get a good mark, I still learnt a lot.
It’s the end of the first week of semester for me as a lecturer, and almost the beginning of semester for me as a student.
A range of emotions course through me when I allow myself to think about being a student: excitement (yay, I’m going to be learning about writing), and trepidation (I’m going to be learning about writing, and I’ll have to write, and I don’t like writing … except that I do, just not journal articles and conference papers). I read a little from my textbook on writing and realise that I’m doing it all wrong.
I don’t give myself enough time, I expect it to be perfect as I type it, I am impatient for the right words and want them to be the first words that emerge rather than the fifth or seventeenth. I want the ideas to tumble out of me as soon as I sit down to write, and that they will tumble in a logical order. I want insightful, inventive, wow-that’s-an-interesting/humorous/creative/original-way-of-saying-that, phrases and thoughts to roll directly from my imagination to my fingers without the need for agonising over each word, each idea, each choice I know I need to make.
I want it to be easy.
I expect it to be easy.
And then I realise/remember/am reminded that writing is a skill, a process, something to practice and develop, something to take time over, something to learn. And learning is a process – I told my students that last week during Orientation – it takes time and energy and commitment and can be frustrating and challenging and emotional and downright painful. Whoever said learning is fun needs to be sat down and given a good talking to! It isn’t fun. It’s hard. And it’s work. (But obviously worth doing.)
So, I’m feeling in two minds at the moment: me the teacher/me the learner.
As the teacher, I wrote a unit outline for my students, re-worked the learning outcomes, designed the assessment tasks, wrote introductions to each section of the textbook I put together from other people’s works, articulated my teaching philosophy, made my expectations clear, designed my online unit in a particular way (a way that is clear to understand, clear to work through, clear to follow).
Or so I thought.
As a learner, reading a unit outline that someone else has written puts a different slant on the idea of clear. I know what’s in my head (most of the time) and so my unit outline is clear to me. I read it and know what I mean. But I don’t yet know what is in my lecturers’ heads and so I read the unit outlines for the two units in which I’m enrolled and things are not immediately clear to me.
Questions buzz like wasps: where is; what is meant by; when do I; who will; where do I find; how can I; when should I; who should I; how does; why …?
They’re the questions of anxiety which can quickly morph into frustration if the answers don’t come immediately.
There are other kinds of questions though. Questions of excitement and exploration: I wonder how; I wonder who; I wonder when; I wonder what …?
Maybe I should start asking those questions. That would require me to step back, take a few deep breaths, know that I don’t have to do everything (all the readings, all the assignments, all the learning) in my first week. I can give myself permission to learn rather than to worry; I can take my time knowing that learning will happen if I relax a little, ease the tension, free up some space in my mind from the anxiety and allow the curiosity and excitement I know is there to overtake the fear and trepidation.
There are plenty of things I don’t know in relation to the units I’m studying – but that’s why I’m studying: to find out. To learn. To be in that place of not knowing and know that it’s okay to be there. To know that over time, and with commitment and application, I will know.
Over time …
Note to self: learning is a process.
Let the process begin!
Musings from the cold 