If you’ve ever explored my website, you probably came across my teaching philosophy statement. What that statement doesn’t detail is my in-classroom persona. It’s a part of my teaching that has been complimented by every person to evaluate me but one (so that’s about a 30 to 1 ratio). It’s an interesting mix of:
- Softspoken but not weak (I’m a huge person and have a deep voice– I don’t NEED to be in-anyone’s-face to command authority, and when I’m loud, it actually goes worse for me)
- Super-nerdy, like Comic Book Guy with less snark nerdy
- Paced like a comedian. Not that I’m always funny (I do try to work in clever dry zingers, but I mean that I pace the part of my teaching when I’m speaking like an observational comic, with speed variations and storyteller tricks)
- I try to go where the students are
- I am a big, big proponent of teaching responsibility through freedom
The one out of the thirty to evaluate me that didn’t think my persona worked well was a faculty advisor who told me I’d outgrow being able to be the “buddy” teacher. I sort of resent the idea of “buddy” teacher; I don’t try to be the student’s friend, as such. I try to be concerned, and I try to be friendly and make class fun, but I’m not as such trying to be friends with my students. I do end up being friends with many of the students who do extra-curricular work because I am, by far, the “friend” mentor vs. the authoritarian mentor. I am open about my own work and my own struggles, I don’t do things like trying to time emails so it doesn’t look like I was up at 3 am doing work. I admit that I’m not answering a text because WWE Raw is on and I’m into the main event. I try to be real with people.
I disagree that I’ll get too old for that role because I was already too old to be “cool” to my students when I built that role. When I was a young teacher (and I taught my first class as a junior undergrad, so I had class with some of the students in my classroom) I was much more formal to make sure that the separation between Phill the teacher and Phill the person was clear. In my 30s I loosened up. I’m 40 now. I don’t think it’s me chasing my youth or trying to be cool when I talk to a student about the fact that I, too, play Hearthstone or that I’ve been carrying my Switch around so I can play Breath of the Wild. I think anyone who thinks I’m trying to be cool completely misunderstands the fact that I was an outcast my entire life, I have no idea what cool is, but I am also not obsessed with the trappings of being a professor, whatever mythology there might be to that. I am who I am, bright sneakers and shorts with my button-down shirt, video game systems and movie plot rants. I don’t pretend not to be.
There’s a weird thing that happens, though, and I thought at the middle of this semester I might reflect on it. I teach humanities based material most of the time. I am now in a fairly STEM-tastic program, but I’m the guy who does writing and culture with his design work, so while I can teach soft-coding (HTML, CSS, Java, etc.) I’m not a “coder.” My courses are mostly about things like how to construct a narrative, how to perfect game design principles, etc. It’s not easy stuff. But…
My classes are often considered “easier” than those taught by my code-teaching peers. This is compounded by a secondary factor. Students who are majors in our program tend to end up in courses with me and with a specific peer at the same time. That peer teaches something that is incredibly software and code specific, that requires enacting very precise and measured skills in a way where while there isn’t a straight-up right and wrong, there are very limited ways to do it “correctly.” These courses are difficult, and the workload is heavy. That professor’s persona is one of a taskmaster, one who has no sympathy for other courses or for students having other needs.
My classes have the same level of content, and honestly, they have the same (or more) rigor and difficulty. The difference is that unlike a new software suite, I have students who work with words and puzzles and stories and game mechanics and rules– things they already know and have been working with their whole lives. So my classes aren’t so prescriptive. I can’t make them watch a game plot tutorial and all follow the tutorial to learn to make a game story. That sort of result can’t come from this subject matter, though I know the value of that mode of teaching from my intro web design and visual rhetoric classes. I often wish there was a similar practice for game writing or game theory.
But that lack of the easy-to-make-transparent structure is a secondary thing. My teaching philosophy leads to me NOT being a taskmaster. I have the same level of assignment rigor. The projects for my class take work and are complex. But I don’t ride my students about their work. I don’t demand that they show me evidence of their work (I ask for check-ins, but I don’t punish them for being behind at a check-in). There’s a reason for this, a reason that emerges from having taught for now 17 years: students need to learn to be grown up.
I don’t have a lack of respect for college professors who structure their classes to work like a high school course with higher expectations. I get it. It’s a method that works. But I consider my students to be adults, and I know that none of them aspire to a job that will treat them that way. So every course I teach is built with a time-tested, user-tested, design. All the information is there. All the assignments are easily followed. All a student has to do to succeed in my class is listen and do the work. Nothing is mysterious. Nothing is bizarre. Anything that has been thought of as confusing or misleading has been reworked with student feedback.
But if you take my class and you don’t listen, or you don’t read, or you don’t pay attention, I essentially drop the rope in even lengths so you can string yourself up.
I just did my midterm grades, and my classes are the opposite of a bell curve. They’re a tale of two islands. The major projects all come at the end (in terms of their due-dates). I know that’s not the best pedagogy, but that’s just how the current crop of classes I’m teaching work out. Two of my three classes are hybrid, and the other is once-a-week, so I see all of my students one time every week.
The students who listen to me, who read the material for the hybrid meetings, and who engage with the material are doing amazingly well. The ones who don’t do the most work but pay attention are also doing well, even though they might have a false sense of confidence given that they will have to do more for their major projects than they have weekly.
Then there are students who are failing because they haven’t been paying attention and have simply neglected work. I’ve reminded each of them a few times, but after the third reminder, I stop.
Here’s why. It’s not that I don’t care. I care… more than most people do, I’d imagine. If I have a student who wants to learn something or who struggles to understand I will literally skip sleeping to give the help I can give to get that student where he or she wants to be. But I don’t chase students because I think part of being in college is learning about life and consequences and freedom. This is something that those who worked to get where they are already know, but sometimes students who haven’t had to struggle haven’t learned this yet.
In life you will often meet people who will help you, but at some point you hit the threshold where people help you when you help yourself. I give my students the freedom to choose to not come to class. They can choose to not do their work.
But there are consequences.
I worry that my hybrid students just don’t understand those consequences this semester. My first instinct was to blame myself, but I’ve taught this same course hybrid AND entirely online before and students didn’t have this level of apathy. It’s not anything I’ve done.
So I’m stepping back. But at midterm, there are people failing a class that has, to this point, been only about doing the work. And I think that’s a sad reflection on a small (but still substantial) group of students.
I also know that at the end of the semester if this persists, it will be logged in the student course evals as my fault. And while that irks me on a professional level, I’m okay with that. Because if I cater to what the students who don’t want to do the work want a class to be, I’m not longer teaching. I’d be running a college drive thru window. And as I told the chancellor at my very first job, if we want to make it easy to get a degree we should just wrap it around a greasy cheeseburger and charge a flat fee.
I want my students to learn, but if they don’t want to learn, I will teach them by allowing them to fail. It’s the ultimate gamification move: fail in my class and lose one of your academic lives. You can try again, until all the little Marios are gone from the corner of the screen.
Then you have to start over.
But losing that life will teach you something about the game.
And that’s how we grow.