Learning Journal

My first weeks of teaching. And what can I say? Successions of late nights to learn what I am going to be teaching, devising handouts, and then rushing in to college to photocopy them before lesson takes a mighty load of work. Yet I'm not sure for what. I wonder if it is best to teach people in institutions, or whether real learning is actually taking place. I feel as if I am forcing my students' heads full of EdExcel's bland and ever-reformulated porridge of knowledge, just so they can be summatively assessed and gain a grade to help them get into the heavingly unhappy HE sector. I don't feel that I am allowed my students to expand or adapt, or to learn anything they can fit into their lives, or anything they will really remember after a few years. The purpose isn't for them to learn, or for me to teach, but for them to pass an exam. Everything they learn is a tiny unit-within-a-unit, a piece of knowledge reduced to a Lego brick. They have to comprehend, say, Levels of Processing, so it is described to them, a few studies that support or deny it covered, and then there is an evaluation of the theory. Where is the time for them to appreciate what it is, to fit it into how they think? To think at all? It is a constant round of description followed by questions followed by description. The student's job is always to fit themselves around what they have been given - whether I teach them by whiteboard, OHT, handout, or ask them to read the textbooks - rather than fit it to them. It is hard to know how to teach best within the framework I have been given, or how to address individual needs. The needs that are most paramount are those of EdExcel, who set the curriculum and define the content, aims, and objectives. Everything beneath them must conform to their unquestionable standards, and the exact fault in these standards is never found because they change every year.
Accordingly, these past weeks have helped me to discover the truth of Bertrand Russell’s statement, at the frontispiece of Kelly’s The Curriculum: Theory and Practice, that “the teacher, like the artist, the philosopher and the man of letters, can only perform his work adequately if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.” Only this sort of teacher, the 'man' of letters, can impart a freedom of thought to 'his' students. (Wasn't sexism rife back then? Gosh.)
Many people, so I have heard, have at some point received advice from their mentors to not come and teach in the FE sector. It does seem to be a profession that receives much criticism from all quarters, without much in the way of spirited defence. Certainly the job of the college teacher / lecturer is difficult and involves a lot of planning. Without a doubt, there is much to consider about teaching adults - their differing motivations, their different backgrounds, how to address their needs. Teaching children may be in many ways similar, but to accommodate the needs of mature students seems to me to be even more diverse. Yet there are more than just these practical impracticalities.
Rather than the problem being the mass of time-consuming botherations, the whole FE sector has been steadily gripped, vice-like, in the dominating clasp of a point-scoring politic. Problems need to be solved - often problems created only a short while ago by other ‘solutions’ - and before you know it those at the end of the compulsory sector and the beginning of the FE sector have a lot more to worry about. Between the glamorous bits, we fight two actions at once - one to fulfill the needs of the school leaver, the other to fulfill the needs of the university goer. How can this be done at the same time as laying down the curriculum?
My colleagues have readily-expressed notions that it used to be better. When they started out, there was a reason to choose to teach in college. There was self-direction, there was optimism, and there was the feeling of a chance to ‘make a difference’. Where has all this gone?
I am not faced with self-direction, optimism, all the feeling that I can make a difference. I am faced with untidy groups of people who have to learn a mass of material to pass modular tests, scared more than anything else that they will miss out on the grades they need to get onto the courses they want, already sick in worry over debt, and unwilling to contemplate the possibilities of a life of work like that of their parents’. My aim is not so much to teach as to race through drills, supplemented by regular and cheerless handouts, training them in the repetition of phrases and ideas.
I’m not sure that learning is best done in institutions. Knowledge is not institutionisable. To take it apart to make it small enough to fit through the school doors is to take away its soul. To make the student small enough to fit through is to take away the entire of their lives - to ask them to be nothing more than learning machines, divulged of opinions or beings. Some guy studied American colleges for fifteen years and discovered that good learning involves a progression through an epistemological hierarchy. First one believes that knowledge is a duality - what is right, and what is wrong. Slowly, one’s view becomes more complex, until the scary post-modern fragmentation of perspectives can be comprehended by the student - the liberal arts view of pluralism, with all the equal opportunities and so on that this requires.
This progression is not at all present in college. One word - the teacher’s - is listened to, and the student that is not listening is deficient. It seems like a regression into a didactic past.