07:05, 7F, air
There’s some repeating theme here of how the experience of teaching from the educator’s perspective is fairly different from the experience of a student. (This is the same problem that surfaces when writers experience a piece a million times while editing it, vs. the one-time impression a piece makes on readers. Writers just can’t remember what it’s like to experience it fresh.)
This manifests in many forms:
Pentagoning & unclear expectations – when I say or intend X, students actually hear or assume some modified version Y that matches with their expectations and models of the world Overchunking – it’s easy to forget that things are hard and how much practice it took to get where I was/how many facts I presuppose & generally, other weird relativity effects – e.g. when I wait for a long time, the silence is uncomfortable and deafening, though it seems short to the students; if I say something once, it feels “covered” to me, but repetition helps students To give the students the impression/experience I want them to get (call this E), I have to act in some different way (E’). As a teacher, I must also consider myself an actor.
I first noticed this when repeating the same schtick 5 times to each class last January. Yes, it was almost a scripted exchange each class between my mentor teacher, an unspoken agreement that we were going to respond to each other in the same ways. I was going to write about this back then, too. But now I’ve begun to understand this as something much larger than simply repeating lines.
There’s some sense of caricature. As the de facto leader of the classroom, I make ripples; my effect is exaggerated tenfold exaggerated. I am the first example & last word. If something feels cheesy to me, and even to my students, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Timescales of learning are weird, and sometimes weird steps are taken to achieve desired results. One SPARC instructor spoke of good teaching as metis, not epistemic (section III) – basically, not a first-principles set of rules, but weird cultural learning. And I’d have to agree more and more. “Classroom culture” is a really hard problem, and an interesting one to work at.