Good teaching involves tact and practical wisdom. It is often challenging to discern when a student–or a group of students–needs to be pushed harder, and when they need more support.
Recently, I’ve struggled to balance an understanding of, and appreciation for, how much students have been through these past few years against a worry that students need some tough love if they are going to get the most from the semester. Push too hard, or push in the wrong way, and some students recoil. Don’t push enough, and a student’s talent won’t be cultivated.
At heart, and to be more specific, I’ve been thinking about the ways that students–and not just students!–are waiting for some external change to happen that will make everything better. Students–and not just students!–start the day wanting to be excited and engaged, and yet they don’t always see the role they can play in generating this excitement and engagement.
To be clear, I am not blaming students for how hard everything was and continues to be. But I did feel that I needed to speak up and remind students that the quality of our academic community hinges on the quality of engagement and the quality of care that we bring to each course meeting.
I was worried that the message might be too harsh, or that it might be received the wrong way. Thankfully, a student I’ve known since her first year on campus raised her hand and floored me with an insight.
She told me that students want to engage and be excited, but they are clinging to their devices–their phones and their laptops–as they would to a blankie.
All the strategies we used to survive the worst of the pandemic are still with us, even though we may not need them. Even though they may be holding us back.
And this struck me as a challenge we teachers need to find ways of addressing. We need to be kind to the strategies we–and our students–used to survive the pandemic, but we also need to have difficult conversations about leaving some of those strategies behind so that we might learn how to re-find purpose and flourishing in this moment and into the future.
Building meaningful and purposeful human connection is a practice, and we are out of the practice. Our students need us to model what this looks like, and even as we hold our students accountable for getting the most from the college experience, we also need to consider the work we need to do to get back into the habit of building human connection in our classrooms and our community.