I fell off the blogging wagon for a while. Things have been pretty crazy in my life, what with organizing, classes, teaching, family health issues, and a creeping general malaise that strikes from time to time and makes things harder than they ought to be.
I will strive to do better. This is important to me.
To reacquaint myself with the blog, a word or two about teaching.
I received my teaching evaluations from last quarter. Generally, pretty good. A few said I was condescending. One thought I was absolutely awful and needed to learn to teach, and I'm very curious who that was, but I'm not too concerned about the outlier.
The condescending thing, though, worries me. I struggle, teaching college students, to assess when they are to be treated as adults and when as students and when (always) as both. Sometimes they make it awfully hard to treat them as adults.
Today I was reminded of how adult they are, and of how unimportant their classes can seem at times. I wish they didn't have to go through the shit that they sometimes have to go through. I can't imagine handling it myself.
I'm going to be making an effort to treat them as grownups, even the ones whose writing reads, to me, as somewhat juvenile. They deserve it.
In other news, Trader Joe's makes chocolate-covered peanut-butter-filled pretzels. My life may never be the same.
2 comments:
mm. condescending is a toughie. let's talk?
xoxo
&p.s. i'm still looking for that balance, as a teacher, 3 years later.
beware the chocolate peanut butter pretzels. more than one have I succumbed to their savory-sweet goodness. it leads to all sorts of bad things. like your pants not fitting.
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