Traffic Cop
I am in charge of teaching a fairly complex course. The course has myriad learning outcomes and lots of moving parts attempting to achieve them. Many of those learning outcomes must be doled out in small chunks, rather than learned all together in a one-week module. So, as I said, there are lots of smaller elements, lots of moving parts. I sometimes describe my course as:
A jalopy held together with chewing gum and string going down the highway at 85 miles per hour.
Fortunately, I have teaching assistants to help me manage this reality of the course we teach together. I tell them that one of our goals is to hide the jalopy-ness of the course from our students as much as possible, so they don’t stress that the whole thing is about to come apart. (Which it never really is, but it might give that impression sometimes).
So some days - well, I feel like more of a traffic cop than a teacher. A lot of my time is spent coordinating short presentations by my TAs in class, preparing my own presentations, speaking with students after class, or later in office hours, preparing a signup sheet for student group conferences next week, contacting two external teachers for one after-hours session they do with each of my students, providing feedback on 125 pages of their output, responding to emails - some light, some quite substantive. And on and on.
Is this normal? Is your teaching life like this too? Is it just that I am getting older, and I notice it more? Am I trying to do too much?
I wonder about these questions on the regular.
Some days, I would like to put a better spin on it. I would like to think that a better analogy is not Traffic Cop, but rather that I am an orchestra conductor. I do that carefully, as one of my favorite music jokes reminds me: What is the difference between a bull and an orchestra conductor?
With a bull, the horns are in front and the ass is in back.
But teaching is like music, isn’t it? It has a rhythm and meter. It goes in cycles, and even occasionally repeats. It starts and takes off with a score (syllabus), and you can’t just stop until the music (semester) is over. It has climaxes - hills and valleys, loud and soft passages. And, at its best, it can lift the spirits, and be transformative.
That’s it! I would rather be an orchestra conductor, with the players my students, following a score I have composed but each of them put their own interpretation on, which - in the end - is uplifting and beautiful, and that comes together in magical moments that are hard to describe or pin down. That everyone is glad to have heard and participated in at the end of the year.
I will let you know if I can make any progress from Traffic Cop to Orchestra Conductor. Where are you on that spectrum?
Letters of Recommendation
A few weeks ago I wrote about what impact on our students might come from their having access to digital photos and video of themselves throughout their growing up years. This week’s issue of The New Yorker magazine has a wonderful article on this question, taken from a different perspective, by Joshua Rothman called Becoming You: Are you the same person you were when you were a child?
Q of the Week
The Q of the Week this week is a Quote from the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov:
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
I don't think of myself as a traffic cop. As we've returned to the classroom post-pandemic, I've been working at retooling my classroom to be as conducive to peer-to-peer learning as possible. Lots of group work, lots of discussion, lots of presenting an idea then sitting back to see how it unfolds. And if a traffic cop did that...well, it's not just cymbals that crash!
But I definitely see where you're coming from. I think one contrast might be that I tend to iterate-out-loud. I often tell my students that there is no one way to learn anything, especially something as maddening as English, so we need to experiment until we find what works best for them. So, I guess I'd think of myself as more mad-scientist-in-chief rather than anything else.
Also, I love the Asimov quote. I used "thinking through my keyboard" as a tagline for my first blogs, years and years ago.
Love the image of “mad-scientist-in-chief!”