Question 3: Energy Levels

It's been a long week. After having three snow days last week, it kind of felt like we were back on break. But now professors are getting back on track and there's projects and speeches and papers to be done, on top of the regular readings, and usually topped with a bit more because we fell behind so much.

And everyone is drained. Even the teachers lack the enthusiasm of the pervious weeks. In an 11am class on a Friday, the teacher stopped and just looked at us. Two people were asleep. More than usual had laptops out and were on other sites (myself included, as I opened this very page). Despite 13 people (little less than half the class) commenting on the discussion board before class, very few people were speaking up. The professor stopped, addressed the fact that we're acting kinda dead, and changed his approach a bit. Dropped his strict guidance through the discussion and let us have more control. Which got more people speaking. And suddenly 75% of the class was contributing and more hands were raised and responses were generated without prompting.

I'm stunned. As a future English teacher, I'm quite impressed. I thought he was going to just switch to full-on lecture mode and just let us be bored. Or maybe try too hard to get us to talk about what he wanted us to talk about. He seemed really focused on this one thing he wanted us to talk about. But he just dropped what his main concern was and let us talk about what we took from the text. He tied it in when he could, but for the most part we completely changed directions.

And this is what dictates what will be on the test. What we talk about, what we're interested in, will guide the entire class. It's a completely different approach than I'm used to. It requires a lot of faith in your students. I need to learn how to do that. I want to be able to sense the energy in the room and know how to let students guide the conversation without them getting out of control. I think if I tried this right now, we'd end up talking about pop culture, not about early American literature. Which is all good and fine for 5 minutes in a 3000 level college course on a Friday afternoon, but I'm not sure it'd quite be appropriate for a high school course. In fact, I'm fairly certain it's not.

So how do I find that happy balance between running a classroom and simply gently pushing them in the right direction? I need control but I need energy and excitement and those two seem to be conflicting points, at least in my head. I think this is one of my biggest concerns as a future educator. The general classroom management concept...it's something we haven't discussed much in my education classes and, even though I don't get into the classroom for a while, I really really need to learn it. Any preliminary suggestions for me?