responses to Tuesday

[Shelley Reid <esreid@HOTMAIL.COM>]

I want to say how grateful I am for the range and concern and generosity and
thoughtfulness of the recent set of postings to this list regarding ways to
approach teaching when business is decidedly *not* usual.

Instead of posting to our TAs and instructors a recommended list of
activities (a task I've felt was *way* beyond me this week), I've been able
to compile and re-post messages from the WPA digests I've received, giving
our instructors a wide range of actual and suggested responses from teachers
who are actually in their classrooms working with live students.  I know it
was incredibly important for _me_ to keep reading responses long enough to
(a) find a few that matched my own intuitions, (b) find some that helped me
think about stretching beyond my own first reactions, and (c) be able to
reassure my colleagues and TAs that the best minds & hearts in the business
were discovering *many* honest, considered, ethical, intelligent, empathetic
and responsible ways of being a (writing) teacher in a time of crisis.

I've heard from several of our TAs that they, too, were both highly
appreciative of and fascinated by the list of classroom activities proposed
and experienced.  Some of our teachers needed to hear that it was just fine
to go with group discussion if their students wanted to talk about the
world, because that's what their students did; some needed to hear that
students might be helped by writing or by smaller group discussions, because
that seemed to work for them or their students; some needed to hear that
connecting the week's events to our ongoing discussions of rhetorical
appeals and analysis might -- or might not -- be a good pedagogical
approach.  Some had already discovered that their morning class really
wanted to talk and their afternoon class didn't; many had discovered that
they and their office mates were taking very different routes, and were
worried about having "failed" their students or the program somehow.  With
help from y'all, I think I had something to offer to most of them, which I
wouldn't have had otherwise.  Anyway, I'm supposed to thank you all on their
behalf, as well as mine.

When I teach our composition pedagogy class, sometimes the TAs grumble (not
always without reason) that all our readings are Too Theoretical, geared to
some imaginary classroom and unreal curriculum.  Nothing that happened this
week was "only" theoretical -- but I am particularly grateful to have been
able to share the ideas/experiences of teachers who were very much in
(sur)real life but still carefully and thoughtfully articulating their
ideas/feelings about what to do and why.

thanks,

shelley


E. Shelley Reid
Assoc. Director of Composition
English Department
Oklahoma State University

esreid@hotmail.com
esreid@okstate.edu

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All times are changing times....Archetypes turn into millstones,
large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and
what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people
used to think.  (Ursula LeGuin)
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