"All Downhill From Here"

As I pulled into a parking space in front of UH on Monday, a New Found Glory song was playing. My nerves distracted me, however, and I paid no attention to it.

Why on EARTH did I assign a Royster essay for my students to read? Because it was revolutionary when I read it for the first time and I hoped that maybe even ONE student would have the same reaction to it as I had. Yes, but now you have to teach it to them.

It's ok, I gave them fair warning and posted the article well in advance so that they all had PLENTY of time to read it. Plus, I told them to read for the conversation and not to let the jargon trip them up.

I lesson planned in my office, as I normally do, while Elisa was in class. I came up with a really great quick write, but then realized that they needed me to define some of the terms that Royster uses to better understand the conversations she addresses. I will begin class by offering them the option to quick write first or for me to define terms and THEN they quick write.

I got to class and things went smoothly and just as I had planned: We talked about important happenings from this past weekend, then they chose the option of me defining terms and then a quick write after. I took out my marker and asked them to tell me which terms I needed to define. I stood in front of the whiteboard, ready for the bombardment of words/terms/concepts to arrive. Instead of a shower of words, I got silence.

"I will wait for someone to tell me a term."

At least 5 minutes went by as I paced with my marker in hand.

"Subject positioning," someone shouted from the corner.

I wrote it on the board and then decided to give them a few more since the first one took so long to come up with. I finished defining some terms and I told them to talk about the text before I had them quick write. "Talking with your peers will help you tease out meaning from this dense reading," I explained.

After 30 seconds, I one student from the back corner of the room asked, "What if our surrounding neighbors didn't read?"

Ruh roh. I responded, "Well, then you should migrate to the other side of the classroom and talk with them." As I gestured toward the other side of the classroom, I noticed that they seemed to have the same dumbfounded looks on their faces. Double ruh roh. No one read.

With that horrible thought, I decided to blatantly ask the students if they read. "If you read, raise your hand."

2 hands reluctantly raise. 1 other girl halfheartedly raises her hand. Yes, a grand total of THREE people out of TWENTY-SIX did the reading.

And here I had been stressing out about teaching Royster and so proud of myself when I came up with a lesson plan. Time to scrap that plan (for now) and come up with an improvised plan B. My improvised plan B looked something like this:

--find out why they didn't read
--narrow their excuses down to the ones that were not preventable--which were "the reading was too dense" and "it was boring."
--collaboratively come up with strategies for reading texts that are boring and long (because this will not be the only time you will have to read something you don't want to. That is what college is all about."
--point out that we are all responsible for our own actions and non-actions. Relying on peers to pick up our slack can bite us in the ass, at it has today.
--if you don't put for the effort to read, I will not put forth the effort of telling you what you didn't read; that robs you of your own, personal interpretation of the text and allows for only MY interpretation of it.

By the end of the class, not one single student would look me in the eye. They had the same look that my dog has after he does something wrong and I swat him on the muzzle. Needless to say, I left class feeling unsure, afraid, and frustrated.

Unlike most Mondays, I decided to stay on campus surrounded by my peers instead of driving home during my long 6-hour break. Elisa, Logan, Rachael, Darcy, Brenda, and Bridgette were my sounding boards. At the end of the day, I did not feel unsure of how I handled my first truly bad day in class. As Logan pointed out, the day wasn't bad because I still taught them something even if it wasn't the same something that I had planned on teaching them.