Silence and laughter
This morning my class wouldn’t answer my questions.
Any of them.
They just sat there. I waited.
After a short time I got up and took the chalk.
“If you dont’ want to talk”, I said, “neither do I.”
I wrote notes on the board for an hour and a half without even looking at them. Then I wrote up a classroom exercise: “Arrange these PC components into the order in which you think they should be tested, blah blah…”; put the chalk down conspicusously and sat in the corner in silence.
One lady came and wrote her answer up on the board and I clapped. The other ladies all joined in too. Then I wrote on top of her solution “Is this correct?” and sat down again. After some more waiting I wrote the following on the board:
“Does the class work when teacher does not speak?”
and
“Does the class work when the class does not speak?”
They said “no” to bothl so then I wrote “Whats missing?” and they answered “communication”. Then I asked them all to stand up and answer aloud my question “will you help me make the class work bu communicating?”.
Then, at last, we had a bit of a discussion. But even then it was difficult. This particular class are very hard to work with. They don’t laugh as much as some of the others. Laughter, I have decided, is good.
Bring it on.
The next class was better. a group who laugh the most (in my experience). They were in the lab and working on C programs when the power went off, as it so often does here. I gathered them round the whiteboard and we worked on some examples in the tiny model computer I have invented for them as part of my preparation for this class. They worked hard and, at the end, one of them **asked me** to give them an example to do by themselves for homework.
So I was cheered up by this second group though I still felt slightly guilty for treating the first one so harshly, and completely exhausted.
Jan Says:
:confused:Is the hard group like that because they dont want to work ? or are they older ? or same as others I mean diferant years .. or new ? or are they just trying to be hard on you ? or do they have a leader who instigates this ?? and I would have done the same .. it sounded as if you did get somwhere ?? dont feel bad … xx Jan humor is a wonderfull gift isnt it ..
May 22nd, 2004 at 3:17 amMark Says:
Hi Sis,
They are also in an odd position where the results of their exams from last term have not come back from the university yet (I’ve mentioned before that they have problems of their own at the university and we are at the bottom of the food chain, certainly the bottom of the exam chain). So they are under some stress.
I spoke to the other staff, after the class, about the difference between the two groups. Stage IV apparently used to have a couple of more confident personalities who encouraged the whole group. For one reason or another they have all gone and it seems to have rather pulled all the stuffing out of the teddy-bear. I have seen that happen before with a cohort of IT students at Leicester Poly, or was it De Montfort?
Part of it might have been my own bad mood. Maybe I should have had more sugar in my (Ugi) porridge for breakfast.
May 22nd, 2004 at 6:34 pm