Assignment+1

The subject of my first blog postingwas the transition from student to teacher.

I'd first experienced being a teacher in my capacity as an employee of the Purchase College office of Campus Technology Services; I'd been hired to help some instructors in the New Media department teach classes in which the virtual worlds of Second Life and World of Warcraft would be used to examine online socialization and the use of social science methodology in the study of online game culture. What this translated to, for the most part, was acting as a teaching assistant and providing tutorials to the students (and occasionally faculty) in the use of these programs. I came into my first tutorial session confident that I was prepared to leave behind the role of the student and provide instruction. After all, I'd often helped others working with unfamiliar technology, and had no small amount of experience in public speaking before a sizable audience from both in-class presentation, and extracurricular activities with clubs and organizations. I knew exactly what to teach the students, and I'd been assured by their teacher that they'd been instructed on proper behavior for this tutorial session, since it took the place of a regular class session on a day when the instructor was unavailable, and counted towards their class time.

It was as if I'd tried to learn to swim by jumping into the deep end of an aquarium tank filled with a diverse and sometimes hostile variety of sea life. The tutorial session was populated by the full class-- thirty or more students, since this was one of two concurrent sections of a highly in-demand introductory level course --and many of them were second semester freshmen or sophomores, four or five years removed from my own experience at that point. I couldn't relate to them easily, and I wasn't in a position to have their respect as an instructor. Several were short with me, pointedly ignored instructions, or generally failed to treat the tutorial as a class session. I very nearly suffered a minor breakdown and had to excuse myself after a student took issue with me telling them to keep their language clean in the virtual world we were exploring, and had to excuse myself; I'm fairly positive that I snapped at another misbehaving student while being observed by one of my superiors. I was convinced that my position at the school was doomed, and swore to myself I would never teach again.

I would later learn that the students didn't recognize that I was a staff member rather than a fellow student working as a teaching assistant for credit. That was the key, I found-- I had come in thinking that I wasn't a student, and the students had come in assuming that I was. They might have perceived me as an upperclassman or even a graduate student, but in their eyes, I wasn't that far removed from their own role. This observation led to others: there was not a clear division between the treatment of fellow students and instructors, but more of a gradation. The closer the students perceived someone at the front of a room was to them, the more likely it was that they would treat them as an equal, with all the positives and negatives one would expect from that. The more an instructor's behavior was distanced from what a student expected from the teacher-student relationship, the less respect they tended to show for them, and what a student expected from this relationship was never consistent from one student to another. I observed several who insisted that they found a classroom environment that encouraged discussion and active exploration of subjects to be detrimental to the learning process, and wanted to be lectured at; such an idea was practically abhorrent to me. I realized that I had to adjust: I could not simply teach as if I was teaching to myself or those with whom I had previously had success, I had to adapt and learn from the students. In short, I had to become a student of students, in order to teach them. I might have been there to teach, but I was far from finished learning.