I have been struggling with my teaching this semester and have started to lose my patience, which I fear is the death knell for any instructor who is trying a non-standard approach to instruction. With impatience there is a temptation to scold the students. The scolding may work for me to expunge the demons from my own system, but I know that it won't work for the students. Nobody likes to be scolded. I certainly don't. There is a tendency to shut down when you're being scolded. What I need is for the students to open their eyes and see things as I'm seeing them.
There seem to be two factors that are distinct but work in conjunction to produce the source of my struggles. One is student competence (or lack thereof) on prior knowledge, which to me includes the ability to fill in gaps in their knowledge on demand as the need arises. Part of this is to understand the meaning of terms in a way they can be applied correctly. I'm actually seeing a lot of mistaken interpretations that might have been reached in haste but then weren't checked to see if they were correct. Doing it slower to get to the right meaning of the terms is a habit of mind. That habit seems to be absent in a lot of students.
The other is student responsibility, which includes feeling an obligation to come to class even when attendance is not required, doing a thorough job on the homework rather than rushing through only a partially completed assignment, this includes a thorough checking of one's own work before submitting it, and then getting the work done in a timely manner. In my class last Tuesday, which was the start of the fourth week of the semester, attendance was around 50%. This is in an upper level course in the major, one where students should have intrinsic interest in the subject matter. The question I will pose in class today is who bears the responsibility to catch up the students who missed that session? Does that rest on me, them, or the entire class? In the process of asking this question I will inquire among those who attend regularly whether they've been asked by any of their classmates to catch them up. I'm expecting unanimity, or near unanimity, that they haven't received any such requests.
Yesterday, I wrote a post on the class site that I hope didn't scold, at least not too much, about what the issues are from my point of view. We will discuss that post in class today. I will repeatedly say that I want students to be making connections between the various ideas they are being exposed to and with that also make connections to their own experiences that illustrate those ideas. I believe many students aren't used to do doing that. They don't understand this is time consuming. They also won't see the gain to themselves from going through this sort of effort. Maybe I can convince the students to try out my way for a while, to see if they can get the hang of things. That's for the blogging I require.
But then there is the math modeling part of the class. Some of the students seem to be extremely uncomfortable with high school algebra and basic analytic geometry. They have no intuition at all here and lack the skills to do some basic manipulations. How can I teach economics at this level, where we do some math modeling, when the students don't have high school algebra in their set of tools?
On an ethical level, I feel compelled to help those students who struggle through these limitations, but I don't feel responsible for other students, who themselves don't display a sense of responsibility. I don't believe I can teach them that. I can make them aware of behavior I perceive to be unprofessional. But from there on out, the choice in how to react to the information is theirs to make.
This is not the first time teaching the class where these issues have manifest. But this time my class has more students. I have tried to preserve an approach that I first used in fall 2012, then to good effect. But the last few times these issues have been there. Maybe it's time for me to hang up the spikes and go onto something else.
But if I do that, who else is going to get these students to turn around?
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