I was never in a talent show as a child. I’d heard about them, and even attended a handful, but overall I had a rather negative impression of talent shows. What I believed was that either the performances weren’t very good (if you were in the audience), or the experience was anxiety-provoking (if you were one of the performers). Why would anyone want to do that?
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—Psychologist R.D. Liang, Knots
At the educational conference I attended this past weekend, we received lots of feedback. We gave feedback. There were handouts about how to do so in our binders. There was written daily feedback, oral feedback sessions, feedback on the feedback, and an online survey I still have to complete.
Well, here’s my feedback: I’ve got feedback fatigue.
Although my formal student days are in the past, I know I was a good student, and reasonably compliant in class. I have an Ivy League degree and a PhD. But I also know that underneath the placid exterior, I was not the happy little learning sponge that seems to be how good students are conceptualized these days. And I know I was never asked for this much feedback back then.
I think a renewed appreciation for feedback is mostly a good thing. As an educator, I don’t want to go along, blithely repeating errors or poor practices class after class, harming student learning without even realizing it. I think this happened too frequently in the past. For example, my science teacher in 7th grade spent most of his time sitting at his desk, while we students struggled alone through an incomprehensible student-directed learning workbook. Where was the feedback then? I think we all could have used some.
But these days it goes too far the other way. I can’t even get an oil change without being asked whether the cleanliness of the dealership where I took my car “exceeded my expectations.”
And, for me, there’s the rub: the expectation that I will have expectations.
The last day of the conference involved the attendees dividing into groups and each group facilitating a shortened practice lesson for 30 minutes. I felt more nervous than everyone else looked, or acted, except for one other person (out of about 25 total), who was the only one who admitted out loud to being nervous. And the fact that we had to not only give each other feedback on our facilitations but also be self-reflective, aloud, about our own performance in the exercise, just increased that nervousness.
When we were not presenting, we sat in the audience, pretending to be the adolescents who will be our students when we go back home to teach the course on our own. Like my real adolescent self, I didn’t do anything very inspired to test the other facilitators’ classroom management skills. I just took out my phone once or twice and played a game on it until the facilitator asked me to put it away. But it was remarkable how quickly I slipped back into my old student mindset anyway. Back then I was a little anxious, usually, about how classes were going to go. I could almost always follow the teacher, and the main lesson, but the student social behavior tended to move too fast for me. Other students would be giggling or laughing or interacting behind the teacher’s back and I wouldn’t understand what was going on. This happened again, even in the present. I started to disengage a bit, as the words started to wash by and around me, too fast, and I had to bring myself back. To my delight, in this time and this place, I could.
As a student, I was much like Liang’s narrator, insisting that someone “tell me everything.” But at this point in my life, much of my learning process involves trying to untie one or another of Liang’s knots. Rather than expectations, what I usually have are questions. What am I supposed to know here? Do I know it? Can I know it? If not, can I cope anyway?
The hard truth is that I will never know everything I don’t know. And you won’t either. I’m glad I did this workshop, because it helped me embrace this discomfort.
I’ve been teaching middle school science for about 2 years now, in non-traditional settings. I sort of fell into teaching the age group after applying for a high school AP Biology tutoring position and finding out that they needed someone to teach the middle school ages instead (roughly ages 11-14). Since then, I’ve not looked back.
But it is a remarkable, and unexpected, place to find myself at this point in my life. Even when I made a conscious career change out of research administration and into K-12 teaching, I was expecting to teach high school. I wasn’t sure of the subject–biology or chemistry, or both–but it would high school, preferably Advanced Placement.
And when I was middle school age, I was not particularly enamored of school. (Actually, that’s an understatement.) Based on my experiences, I had written off middle school science as a waste not worth further exploration. It was my wonderful high school teacher, Mr. Webb, who had turned me on to biology. I was ahead in school, and two years younger than my peer group. They were going through puberty and I wasn’t. At least that’s a short, easy, believable explanation of what the problem was. But as I talk to adults now, I have yet to find one who really liked middle school and felt comfortable there. Even in my misery, which seemed so unique and poignant at the time, I wasn’t unusual. Reading about the subject of middle school education can be a little harrowing: this interesting article about middle schools quotes one teacher calling middle school “The Bermuda Triangle of Education.”
While I have to admit, I have had students both break-dancing in the corner and climbing under tables (not at the same time), I haven’t been as daunted as I feared, or as given to hyperbole, even in private moments. I think maybe the fact that I remember that time so well in my own life gives me a little window into what’s going on in that of my students.
It’s in that spirit that I’m approaching OWL training this weekend. In this case, OWL stands for “Our Whole Lives,” it is a sexuality and decision-making program created and run by the Unitarian-Universalist Association. I will be training to be a teacher of these classes at my UU church.
It’s a long way from science education in some ways, but not in others. My daughter went through it at our church a couple of years ago. I don’t if “enjoyed” is quite the right word for her experience, but I have seen her grow in maturity and thoughtfulness around all those issues. Parents aren’t allowed to teach their own children OWL, which is a good policy. I’m looking forward to being able to help the growth and maturation of other kids in the congregation.
Recently my husband and I went on a geocaching trip to Washington, D.C. While I was there, I found my one-thousandth geocache. This got lost in the shuffle a bit, because the main event was my husband finding his ten-thousandth cache, and completing the Cache Across America series. That was the whole purpose of the trip, the reason we went. My husband ranks among the top ten geocachers in the state of Massachusetts.
The occasion made me think back to when we both started geocaching, back in late 2008. Back then it was just kind of a fun thing to do with the family, a way to get outside and see some local flora and fauna, and to hike with a purpose. We shared an account. And we helped our daughter’s Girl Scout Troop, Troop 71915, find and hide a cache of their own.
At the time he and I were more equal in our interest. I even sometimes found caches that he didn’t. I particularly remember one at an airport in Germany, where the rest of the family, following their geosense, were going to give up. But I followed the GPS, and, most importantly, looked at where we’d all been, unsuccessfully. And went a different way. I found it myself on the road less travelled.
In the intervening years, though, he’s gotten more serious about the hobby, and I’ve gotten less so. He started keeping statistics and lists, and completing challenges and goals. He didn’t let wasp stings, aliens, or his GPS ending up at the bottom of a river, deter him from these goals. But I did. For me, what had started out as fun became an unpleasant chore and a source of stress and even strife. I would occasionally tag along, grumbling, but then neglect to log my finds, deeming that a waste of time.
What I decided, on this trip, on the occasion of my thousandth geocaching find, was to try to change all that. I’d already given up anxiety for Lent, and decided I was going to shed this stress as well. Instead, I would embrace geocaching my way, without heavy-duty lists, challenges, goals, or stress. But what would be different this time? What would make the next thousand geocache finds better than the first?
I got the idea to blog from the last time I picked up a long-term project again after burning out. I re-started playing the violin several years ago as an adult, after not having played for a long time. It was hard to come back to it as an adult student, especially in an instrument learning culture that values an early start and has an obsession with prodigies. No cute little “Twinkler” on a fractional-sized instrument, I. But somehow, in writing about it, I was able to keep going, and enjoy the journey. Everywhere I looked, I found something new that helped me become a better violinist.
So that is my overarching goal for this blog: Geocaching as a metaphor for life. There are many ways to find what you seek. Just keep looking.
A Thousand Finds 