Random musings on excessively high emotions

I agree with Boice that it's good for teachers to prepare for courses collaboratively and invite others to sit in on their classes. Last spring, I had the privilege of having Cheryl Hall come see my classroom, and when we talked afterward, she said that she had never seen someone talk and teach with so much energy. At first, I thought this was a good thing. And, I don't think Cheryl ever said it was not. But then I got to thinking: why do I teach this way? Did I always teach this way? How did it come to be like this? And, I realized....corporate America had infiltrated my pedagogy.

In another life, I worked for The Princeton Review as a GRE-prep instructor. Part of working for a corporate entity meant that they had the right to "brand" my teaching style. Unfortunately for me, that teaching style is best described as pretend you're an annoying bunny on acid who's doing standup. Yes, everything had to be high-pitched, fast-paced, completely directive (always calling on students and never offering choice to answer), and totally focused on lecture and me as the teacher giving the right answer. I did this for a while, mostly because I had to, but I quit this year when I realized that I just couldn't do that bunny routine any more. Unfortunately, I think that this crazy teaching personality bled over into my other teaching.

Part of me wonders whether this is what went wrong last spring in my English 1000 class (which I've mentioned, I think, didn't go as well as I'd hoped). Boice says that "too much emotion, even positive emotion, interferes with effective teaching and learning....New teachers who rely too much on enthusiasm to maintain student involvement risk becoming superficial entertainers" (70). I wonder if that's what happened. Maybe my emotional excitement wore them out. Maybe they had to just give up because they couldn't keep up. I'd say that half of them did keep up, but I was insensitive to the other half.

So, if I've learned anything about teaching this semester, it's to slow down. Don't do too much. Pick one topic or issue, plan a few activities around that, and then end class. I've pared away much of my content/reading/writing in order to have a slower paced class. And, I think it's going well.