::A Geek in Korea::

The most frustrating thing I’ve discovered about teaching at a University is the lack of positive, helpful feedback for my classes while I can still affect change and improve my lessons. It does no good that students have to fill out mandatory anonymous reviews of all classes at the end of the semester like this University requires for all students to see their grades. If I don’t have the information now, I can’t do anything to improve while I’m still teaching.

The main problem is that criticizing anyone older than you in a respected position to their face is not done. When I ask for questions, or need to get feedback, other professors are my main source of information. The students don’t really feel comfortable speaking their mind most of the time. In one of my classes this week there was a bit of time to talk about the class I had been teaching. Some outspoken students that were older than me were able to speak their mind. I encouraged them to share all the information they could about how I could improve my class.

They told me I have a particularly “strict” teaching style, which I assume I picked up trying to marshal 15 small unruly children into a task for an hours worth of time. If you aren’t strict, children will run all over you. I think they made a fair point that perhaps I had to rethink a few of my methods because they weren’t developed with adults in mind. I treat people like adults, and I don’t waste anyone’s time, but thinking about classes for adults and children forces you to approach a problem completely differently. I can give up a lot of control and still have a positive class. The more power I give to students to determine the topics of study and guide the conversation, the better the adult classes. I left up the lesson to the children we’d never accomplish anything. I need to have a guiding hand in the class to keep us on the right topic, but I need to develop a lighter touch.

The main thing I learned from them was that the grammar was more of a review than I had taken it for compared to classes in the past. This is not the first time these students have seen this material, and I shouldn’t treat it as such. This was eye opening. I never got to assume prior knowledge about ANYTHING with previous classes, and it was exhausted. The students by and large already know all the grammar and only need to be reminded of the rules before moving on.

They aren’t looking for anything more than a correction while they speak. The book is more a repository of speaking ideas to base a week’s lesson around, and not really a very good structure for the class other than for a reference point to the progress we’ve made so far. This was also a habit I picked up from teaching at my last school, where the entire book WAS the syllabus, and you had to teach straight from the book because you needed to be able to replicate the lesson every time dozens of time over the course of a year.

Getting the adults to speak and improve their fluency so that they may increase their test scores is what they want from me. I told them that I have teaching requirements I must cover according to a syllabus provided by the school, and that I was covering that simply because that is what I was told to do, and being the “new guy” I was never told the repercussions for following the guidelines loosely. If I could do a free talking class five nights a week with students that never needed a reminder about grammar and could use all the structures in the book perfectly, I would love to have the opportunity to do so. I was worried that if the students finished my class and didn’t end up being able to complete the assigned syllabus goals I’d have failed. They told me not to worry about it so much. Since the level process is completely foreign to me, I have no idea what actual criteria places people anywhere. I also have no guidance as to the other levels either.

The way I had built and structured the class versus what the students actually wanted was very different. I think I can take some of their criticism to heart and change a could of things, but even with a class of only three students there were contradictions in what students wanted. Some wanted an hour of unstructured chaotic madness. Others argued that free talking can isolate people that can’t talk about a certain topic due to lack of experience and can cause students to clam up. Some wanted to be called on for questions whether they were comfortable answering something or not. Others said that being called on is negative for their confidence and wanted only pair work.

I’ve been in this position before. If you try to pander to one student, you run smack up against what another student dislikes to do. There is always a compromise involved in creating a class, and the teacher has to be the dictator with the velvet glove, handling a crisis with strength and a delicate touch. I know from experience that if you don’t come in with a plan it does everyone a disservice.

Even with all the contradicting class messages and teaching styles being suggested, I learned a tremendous amount from these outspoken students that were willing to actually share feedback with me about my performance without being rude or dismissive of my questioning when I challenged their assertions about what a “perfect class” might be. They talked about classes they liked, classes they hated, and what works for them. All of the suggestions are now wracking at my confidence a little bit, seeing as how I only heard about them now, but I can use the criticism to better myself and my classes from now on.

The cool part was that the entire process was face to face and collaborative. I could talk to the people in my class and explain to them why I made the decisions I did so that I could get immediate feedback from all of them. They all saw the decisions behind my classroom structures and see why I thought I was doing the right thing each step of the way. No one dismissed my ideas, just as I didn’t dismiss any of theirs. I got my point across that I was a new professor trying to figure out my style after coming from a child-focused English education environment and transitioning into an adult-centric environment. I’m learning on the job, just trying to do my best because no one is going to take the time to steer me in the right direction. It’s a very “boot-strappy” sort of environment, no one has the time to do open classes or teaching seminars for people attempting to improve.

I’d love to have this sort of brutal assessment of my teaching with all my classes, but I don’t know if my teaching ego could take it. Going into class today I had a lot of doubts about how well I had thought through everything I had been doing up to that point at the school. Had I been making a fool of myself this entire time and no one was brave enough to tell me?

No one called my class a waste of time, no one said I was boring, or that I didn’t try hard to help them improve. They didn’t fault me for my effort, which is a relief. They just think that I can do things differently and have a greater impact if I structure things differently. I’m going to have to read the comments for my “for credit” classes too. That will be after I give grades and the students are gone for the holiday break. I’m both delighted for the opportunity to improve, and preemptively wincing about what sort of comments might be left for me.