Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, August 26, 2002

Back to the Books
School has begun again in earnest. The students are back and the work has begun. As is usual for this time of the semester most of my students are a little freaked out by the format of my courses. For the most part, the relaxation of a lot of the structure they are used to is to blame for the stress. I tend to run classes that are a bit more open and non-traditional than many instructors. My students are most often simultaneously excited and agitated by the change. They like the opportunity they have in a less structured class but they don't like not having that safety net. Mostly what it comes down to is that they are afraid that they won't measure up to my strandards. What they don't quite get yet is that my standards aren't about getting some artificial number but about understanding a process. No one really cares in the "real world" (or anywhere else for that matter) about your ability to match an already known number. That's actually not that hard to teach someone. High school juniors can generally be taught to match numbers of the incentive offered is sufficiently lucrative. The harder thing to do is to allow someone to discover their own creativity. My students aren't used to being allowed to be creative while still meeting a standard of excellence. Usually, being creative has meant a lack of standards while standards have meant that things are approached in a "cookbook" kind of way. What I try to get them to understand is that their work has to be rigorous and illuminating but that there isn't a specific way to do that. The hope is that they will discover what works best for them and with any luck they will. Actually, there is a lot more structure built into the course than they think and they will find it but for right now the course structure seems pretty shaky. Thinking back on nearly every job I've ever started I recall wondering the same things my students are. Probably, the best part of the experience in my class is working through that uncertainty and finding that you have things to offer that have value in their originality and creativity.

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