Yet Another post on Teaching

My student, Sam, told me today that I was "the tighest teacher in the college." "Tight? Erm...well, Sam, what do you mean?" I asked perplexed. "Is being tight a good thing or a bad thing?" I turned around and asked the class. They smiled indulgently and told me that it was a really good thing. Whew! Of late I have been finding it really difficult to understand what these teenagers are saying. I mean, it is supposedly English [or "American" as they put it] but the "lingo" seems to be a world apart from the language I speak [and supposedly teach].

Upon reflection, the parlance is not the only thing that sets me apart from my students who are about 13 years junior to me. When I went to college, the classrooms were strictly "traditional," in the sense that we learned by reading from actual textbooks. Our teachers always asked us to write about the texts we had studied in class. That is not the case in classrooms today. With the advent of computers and satellite TV, many teachers simply allow students to learn “literature” by watching tapes or movies based on the original text. That is my conundrum -- I know my students are really into technology. So how can I incorporate technology in my classroom yet ensure that my students do not turn into robotic techno geeks who have no capability to think independently?

In a literature class, for example, can the reading and actual enactment of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” which is an active exercise, be replaced equivalently with a simple “watching the movie,” activity, which is very passive by nature? What is it that the students stand to lose by sacrificing the active for the passive?

Many of my colleagues are perplexed with students who can effortlessly perform complex activities during a video game, or develop a website with apparent ease, but who cannot read fluently from a piece of text. At the community colleges, we are now seeing the advent of Gen Yers, (students born after 1981 and before 1995). They exhibit some typical personality traits. Last fall, I was involved in setting up, and conducting, a workshop for the teachers at my community college. The workshop focused on teaching instructors some skills so they could effectively deal with these “problem” students.

I have realized, by trial and error, that it is impossible today to ignore the influence on technology. We cannot get away from the use of computers and other multimedia in our classrooms. Often, I find that letting the students watch a tape, or a movie, is an excellent way to introduce the subject to them and get them interested enough so we can then read the actual text with enthusiasm. Most students tend to think of literary figures like Shakespeare or Faulkner as old fogeys who didn’t know what they were writing about. They’re also a bit intimidated by the language used in these literary texts. However, watching the movie often simplifies things for them, and they understand that there is indeed a story behind the text, that contains some universal truth about human nature and human follies. This is what eggs them on to actually read the text for the class.

Each teacher has to experiment with various teaching methods and tools to figure out what works best for their subject and class. There is no right or wrong way to approach teaching literacy to Gen Yers, our students in the digital age. It does help to remember, that a good teacher always incorporates several pedagogical tools to get his/her point across.