Sometimes I want to completely throw off the shackles and restraints of textbook teaching. I'm so absolutely tired of wadding through the dreary quasi-academic prose of textbook-talk--not too difficult for students yet learned enough to impress the profs; always the same chapters on the same topics; always the bulging move to cover enough of everything to placate everyone while not perfectly pleasing anyone.
Student clones reading textbook clones writing essay clones to turn into instructor clones.
I'm gripped by the desire to declutter my classes, to remove all SUPERtexts--all things extraneous to students engaging ideas and then writing. An intellectually honest proposal to students: We will read and write and talk and then we will help each other to see what we don't yet know and then we will work hard to learn something more. That's it.
But...I know there would be problems. I know there does not exist some idealized learning situation where all SUPERtexts are removed. I, the teacher, the prof, the one who knows and grades, will always and forever be the SUPERtext, the one who must be relied on even if she knows nothing and wants nothing to do with anything SUPER.
Still I dream, dream of time where professors and students can engage language and idea without a METAplan of action, without a proscribed set of outcomes which mean nothing in practice, without glazed stares from students only wanting a pass. Why pander to the middle, to the lower middle, in order to pretend we are all learning something in an organized and outcomy kind of way? Why create structure and detailed, self-important plans at the expense of meaning?
Because we must. Because even in the best case scenario of educational contexts, there would be failures and confusion and frustration. And if we must have failure, confusion, and frustration it must, the SUPERtext tells us, be orderly failure. Because orderly failure can masquerade as success, can be rejiggered and then sent out in the President's email to the college to prove our on-going success as THE PREMIER community college of America. Because orderly failure can be reduced to a system which needs tinkering with, which needs a few more outcome goals, a little more hard work, a bit more commitment from students.
Orderly microchange is the answer! Go forth and teach: mark papers, prepare syllabi, crack textbooks, shift the curriculum, form committees. At least this way we won't lose any students in any untoward upheaval and confusion. Certainly some students will fail and class, at times, may feel dull, but at least we have a big official book and a PLAN.
