Have you considered sharing some version of this essay with your students?
This question makes me squirm a bit, which makes me think it might be important.
I do discuss the rationale behind my course design choices with students, in some limited domains. I should have mentioned in this report that I’ve tweaked my intro-to-SRS presentation I gave at the start of last year; I now bill it as a kind of superpower, and we have some cards in our deck about the principles of it—cards that still get some play even this late in the year. I hope this may create more of those “sleeper agents” I speculated about, who may bloom into power-learners down the road.
I also make sure my students understand how valuable I think pleasure reading is, with a different presentation that spruces up the more interesting findings from that report I linked to. And I put my money where my mouth is by making sure they understand how very unlikely I am to give them a hard time for reading during my class, even if it’s not exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.
I even try to let them know why each unit is in our curriculum, whether it’s “because the boss/district/state says so, but we’ll try to make it fun” or “because I want to help you get into college and I know this will help”.
But a lot of my thinking I don’t share. I understand some of my reticence: there are things I do that wouldn’t work as well if they knew I was doing them, and there are other things that would be exploitable if I laid out the strategies behind them. I’m struggling to articulate the rest of my hesitation, though.
Like the stuff about apathy and caring. I had some experimental lessons dealing with this sort of thing about 7 years ago when I taught a course with a broader curriculum mandate. I don’t feel like these lessons got a lot of traction, though, in the same way that other “life skills” lessons tend to fall flat with typical teens. This age group is so slippery… so reluctant to accept advice where others would see it, so wary of anything that smells of paternalism.
My instincts now tell me to approach these things obliquely, as though I’m accidentally letting out the secrets I know they’re too immature to make use of. I’m not telling them what they should do. I’m talking about how the rash actions of young characters in our stories make sense because said characters don’t understand how adolescent brains are wired for overconfidence and short tempers. I’m making a seemingly off-hand comment about the rare superpower of “taking advice”. I’m giving an off-script response to a question about my past with an answer about that time I totally kicked butt by putting in extra hours of effort, as though this were a cheat giving me a secret edge.
I remember being a teen and thinking much more deeply about the things adults seemed to let slip than about their prepared remarks. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that some of those slips might have been carefully scripted.
This question makes me squirm a bit, which makes me think it might be important.
I do discuss the rationale behind my course design choices with students, in some limited domains. I should have mentioned in this report that I’ve tweaked my intro-to-SRS presentation I gave at the start of last year; I now bill it as a kind of superpower, and we have some cards in our deck about the principles of it—cards that still get some play even this late in the year. I hope this may create more of those “sleeper agents” I speculated about, who may bloom into power-learners down the road.
I also make sure my students understand how valuable I think pleasure reading is, with a different presentation that spruces up the more interesting findings from that report I linked to. And I put my money where my mouth is by making sure they understand how very unlikely I am to give them a hard time for reading during my class, even if it’s not exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.
I even try to let them know why each unit is in our curriculum, whether it’s “because the boss/district/state says so, but we’ll try to make it fun” or “because I want to help you get into college and I know this will help”.
But a lot of my thinking I don’t share. I understand some of my reticence: there are things I do that wouldn’t work as well if they knew I was doing them, and there are other things that would be exploitable if I laid out the strategies behind them. I’m struggling to articulate the rest of my hesitation, though.
Like the stuff about apathy and caring. I had some experimental lessons dealing with this sort of thing about 7 years ago when I taught a course with a broader curriculum mandate. I don’t feel like these lessons got a lot of traction, though, in the same way that other “life skills” lessons tend to fall flat with typical teens. This age group is so slippery… so reluctant to accept advice where others would see it, so wary of anything that smells of paternalism.
My instincts now tell me to approach these things obliquely, as though I’m accidentally letting out the secrets I know they’re too immature to make use of. I’m not telling them what they should do. I’m talking about how the rash actions of young characters in our stories make sense because said characters don’t understand how adolescent brains are wired for overconfidence and short tempers. I’m making a seemingly off-hand comment about the rare superpower of “taking advice”. I’m giving an off-script response to a question about my past with an answer about that time I totally kicked butt by putting in extra hours of effort, as though this were a cheat giving me a secret edge.
I remember being a teen and thinking much more deeply about the things adults seemed to let slip than about their prepared remarks. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that some of those slips might have been carefully scripted.
How old are your students?
14-16, usually. These are 9th and 10th graders, with a few repeating upperclassmen.