My Teaching Train Wreck

As I slowly become more and more experienced as a teacher of adults, I’m trying to come to terms with reality: sometimes, as a teacher, you really just can’t win, no matter how hard you try. Yesterday, after teaching two 50-minute classes back to back, I was ready to throw in the towel and sign up for the circus.

Class number one: it’s a scientific writing class for students who are headed into the health sciences field. We’re working on how to write a summary paragraph, and I’ve given them what I think is an interesting article that talks about a particular scientist’s research on drug addiction. The article discusses how this scientist did a bunch of studies on rats and found that drug addiction is determined by environment and social factors rather than by the drugs themselves—i.e., drugs aren’t the problem; society and crappy social circumstances are. Whether you agree or not, the argument is fascinating, in my opinion, anyway. So I ask the students whether they liked the article. (Note that at this point in the semester, I’m lucky if one-third of the class shows up, which is the case on this particular day.) Most are either apathetic or didn’t like it. “I don’t care about rats,” one student says. But it’s not about rats! The article moves the discussion towards humans, and even brings our attention to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Apparently, they don’t care. Yes, these are people who want to be nurses or paramedics, yet they don’t find a discussion about drug addiction appealing. So I ask what they would prefer instead. “Can’t you bring in an article about a baby with two heads?” A baby with two heads. Basically, they want something from The National Enquirer. Christ.

On to class number two: academic editing. It’s all grammar, all the time. I didn’t design this course, and there’s little I can do to remedy the fact that the subject matter is boring (even though I personally find grammar kind of interesting). To make matters worse, a few weeks ago, we were moved from a lovely classroom with windows to a smaller, windowless room that is always overheated. Everyone is usually sweating during class, and I often have to keep the door closed because there are usually chatty students loitering outside in the hallway. But I do my best to be animated and funny. Surely, my charm will win them over, right?

Normally for this class, about one-third of the students show up, and I make a regular effort to applaud them for their perseverance. Today we are reviewing for next week’s test on pronouns, pronoun-antecedent agreement, misplaced modifiers, and dangling modifiers. They seem most concerned with the modifiers, so we do some exercises that I’ve copied from a grammar book. Uh, except that I didn’t have time to carefully look over the exercises in advance, and as we’re trying to work through them in class, I realize that they are confusing, impossible and making the students (and me) feel demoralized. After fumbling my way through the first three questions, we’re now on the fourth, and I’m trying my best to figure out how they arrived at the model answer at the back of the book. I’m standing at the front of the class, 10 sets of fatigued, bored eyes are staring at me, sweat is dripping down my back because the classroom temperature is set to inferno, and all I want is to somehow magically transport myself away from this train wreck in the making. I decide to toss these exercises out the window (metaphorically, of course, because there are no windows in this classroom), and we work on some other ones instead. But at this point, I think I’ve lost them. Eventually, the 50 minutes elapse, and we are all finally free. I head to my office where I will debate slamming my head against the wall.