Monthly Archives: February 2016

This ‘tude is self-inflicted

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Is there such a thing as self-inflicted peer pressure?

All my students are on the cusp of adolescence, so it is safe to assume that there will be some changes in attitude and their behaviour in school. This is often not a gradual change, but bursts of sporadic hormones and, more or less, temper tantrums. Unfortunately, there are some behaviours that are just puzzling, that have me taking a step back with my head cocked to the side, startled by the unexpectedness of the situation. It had been a subtle change, forgotten homework and slouched posture that graduated to a whole new level of attitudes and hoodied defiance. Now, as I mentioned before, these are all pre-teens – attitude can be expected sometimes (though never tolerated). But there are some students you would never expect it from, so it comes as a shock when it’s suddenly there.

If I had to guess, I feel it stems from trying to fit in with the “right crowd”. In striving for that, many people are driven to behave in ways that they wouldn’t normally. Most of the time, this change in behaviour and actions stems from the desired friend group pressuring the person in to it. Sometimes, though, the change seems to be self-inflicted.

Is it created by the fear that people aren’t going to like you if you’re just being yourself? It’s ingrained in us to want to be liked – we see the consequences of not being liked, and it’s never very pleasant. Is it attention they’re looking for? If they behave a certain way, get the type of response from the teacher that pulls a reaction from the class, will that group accept them as one of their own? Is the motivation something else entirely?

Learners are not people that never fail; They’re people that never quit.

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I have had many opportunities to take part in self-assessment since venturing into my undergrad. It’s not a new tool – in fact, the concept comes from the Greek in their Paideia approach (Orr, 2004). As David Orr says in chapter 1 of Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect, “[t]he goal of education is not mastery of subject matter but mastery of one’s person” (Orr, p.13). Now, that’s not to say that learning the subject matter isn’t important. In fact, Orr continues on with his “rethinking education” to make four other statements that very much speak to the subjects that students need to learn in school and how they can relate them to their lives. It’s the focus on self that seems to be forgotten most often, though it’s gaining ground in education.

I remember my school days where assessment was based mostly on the tests and projects that were handed in, at least as far as the students knew. It didn’t matter how well I thought I did, how proud I was of my work, the amount of effort that was made behind the scenes – it was all about the end product. I won’t go as far as to say that, had self-assessment been integrated in my grades, I would have done better. It could have had an impact though.

Self-reflection and self-assessment go hand in hand. One must be honest with one’s self to be able to assess properly. In my many self-assessments, I have been honest and admitted when I could have done more, or done the work better. Not everyone will reflect in the same way. Some will give themselves top marks despite minimal effort. The most, as I have come to realize, will be harder on themselves than I would have thought.

The most recent lesson that I gave had a self-assessment attached to it. It’s one they are familiar with, they’ve used it before and it’s very simple:

  1. Not yet meeting expectations
  2. Meeting expectations
  3. Exceeding expectations

The objective was for them to use their creativity and create a monster with the materials that were given to them. I would say that 90% of the students gave themselves a 2, stating that they failed at creating the yarn creature I was asking them to create. Not one of them gave up, some even created their own style of creature, and all of them were engaged, imaginative and had fun. So how is this not exceeding expectations? My comments to most of them went along the lines of “you didn’t let ‘failure’ stop you from trying again” or “there was no right way to make a creature”. They all got 3s in my books.

So what is it about assessing yourself that makes you tougher to please? I had a discussion with one of my professors recently, after I expressed my feelings of failure and fear of putting myself out there with some of my (not so) hidden talents, and he said something to me that, while simple, has stuck and very much speaks to this topic:

“Why are you expecting perfection from yourself, when you don’t expect it from anyone else?”

I don’t have an answer. But I see it in my own self-assessments and in those of my students. So what do we do to combat this? How do we work our way into treating ourselves as fairly as we treat everyone else?

Bibliography

Orr, D.W. (2004). Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect, Island Press, Washington.

As long as I know how to teach, I know I’ll stay alive

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We all know the old adage “pull the rug out from under” – Its when someone takes away the much needed support from a person, and it’s sudden. It’s not a pleasant feeling. It’s often followed by panic and floundering, sometimes even a complete breakdown if the person is in dire straits. It’s not always done maliciously, sometimes it’s caused by laziness, or the desire to test boundaries. And sometimes there’s even warning signs; gut feelings or past experiences warranting a weary reaction.

I had the rug pulled out from under me. I was left with minimal support. I walked in, and was faced with having to pull on past experiences to figure out how I would handle the day. Now, I had warning. I knew that there was going to be a change in the day. It was discussed that I would take over science, as well as my routine duties. Instead, I was handed all the work and told to go forth. To teach. By myself. All day.

“You know the students better…”
True…

“They will respond better to you.”
I mean, I guess.

I survived. In fact, I shed a lot of anxiety after that day. I no longer feel as if I’m not ready. I am. I am so ready to have a class of my own, to teach the whole day. I mean, I’m still unsure about a lot of things, and need to practice so much (Remember the meme, Vicki. Remember the meme.), but if I were faced with the same situation again… I’d be fine. I don’t know if it was because the students do know me, or because I was upset about the situation that I had maximum teacher voice going on, but there was no blood shed, and everyone left relatively happy.

Okay, so I had to have them all stay after class for misbehaving at the end of the day, but they left all in one piece and that’s a win in my books.

Just a Small Reflection…

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An ongoing trend in my observations of the students and my personal experience in school has been change, both gradual and instant.

When you work with a group long enough, you find yourself falling into a familiar pattern. People get used to having others around in one capacity or another, and everything becomes a little predictable. Until someone throws a stick in the spokes and things become a lot different.

Two separate events, both positive, have caused my class to shrink by 3. With the ongoing flu that seems to plague the education community at least once a year, the class numbers fluctuate day to day. The changing attendance causes the overall feeling of the class to alter in ways that are both subtle and drastic depending on the missing piece. It’s not to say that certain students have influence over the mood of others, at least not intentionally, but there is a level of normalcy that comes with a group that you see for a better part of the year and that you grow with. When you’re lacking a part, small or large, you don’t run the same.

I guess it comes down to the community that you start building on that first day of school when you, as the teacher, stand in front of this small group of students who may or may not have been in each other’s classes since Kindergarten. If you’re in my classroom, rules are set from day one that are created as a group, not dictated by the teacher, pushing all of us in the direction of forming a bond that will hopefully foster a healthy learning environment. In this environment, you become comfortable. It’s not always the most peaceful, as we are still slave to human nature and sometimes conflicts happen, but it’s what we’ve made it. It’s our own. So when it changes, we feel it. When things are off, when people aren’t present in conversations, are withdrawn or are just completely missing from the classroom in general, the whole dynamic can get thrown.