Our First Class: Exit Slip

From the words of Frank McCourt and the discussion with my peers I gained several insights into how to level with my students, and how to not only deal with behavioral challenges but moreover how to turn them into teaching tools and use them in the classroom. One of the challenges that Dr. McCourt recalled from his experience teaching English was that the students often wanted to “vent” about the novels. Dr. McCourt labelled the venting as venting and I think, in a sense, that served a multifold purpose. As someone who struggles with anxiety, I have often used a strategy called thought labelling where we learn not to suppress thoughts but rather just to gently move them into categories such as thoughts or feelings. This helps to create distance from the thought or feeling. I wonder if labelling the venting as venting helped to separate the student from the emotion? Moreover, Dr. McCourt went a step further, he learned to channel the elements of valid criticism from his students and have them turn that into learning. I wonder if creating the distance between the student and the emotion allowed this tool to be accepted by the students. Another way that he met the students where they were was with the example of late slips, he had students use their experience faking late slips as a tool for learning. For me this provokes the question of how this can be transferred into teaching physics. While it might translate directly in English, how can I take relevant experiences in the students’ lives and apply them to a subject such as physics? In discussion with peers at the garden we drafted the examples of sport, amusement park rides, or even architecture as examples of potential, “bridges” between physics and the everyday lives of students. From the class as whole, what struck me was the strategies of bringing myself to the level of students, meeting them where they are at any moment in time and being authentic to who I am. Balancing authenticity with meeting any student where they are, I expect, is likely to be the key to successfully educating students.