Learning Journal

Oh, shan’t you bear witness to my pain?
Yesterday’s teaching was challenging, as always, but more than usual. In essence I am saying that usually teaching is challenging, but this time it was more than usually challenging – i.e. that it was more challenging than usual.
If you want me to spell it out for you anymore there will be trouble.
The AS lesson in the morning was quite fantastic. The A2 lesson in the afternoon was not so.

My question: what be this difference?

The AS lesson was good as I had learned everything beforehand and was most authoritative on the issue at hand. I had planned all sorts of activities for the students to get on with (not that all of them did, so I have started to use the comments box on their EMA sheets to note down any major failures of attention or character as a ruse to keep them on their toes, striking in them the worry that their perhaps ill-deserved £30 won’t arrive if they just sit their through the lesson thinking of sweet, sweet cash). The students became receptive to the taught matter by being chased, weakened, and exhausted by the amount of things – and even repetitions – they had to undergo, ending up being able to answer the questions perfectly.
My A2 lesson was different. Instead of covering one bite-sized topic that could give me leeway for my own interpretations within the lesson, and time for doubling back as in a small ‘spiral curriculum’ to check learning and the linking of it to new problems, I had to punt the rackety old class boat through the stinking hedges of a learning swamp – a swamp in which sense and nonsense both decay together in unholy matrimony. Everywhere were dry facts to be chewed on, like a mass of dried tobacco leaves, and swallowed into an uneasy, sickly stomach. There was less for them to do, and more for them to consume. And, let me tell you, the human appendix don’t work any more for a reason. We’re not supposed to be ruminating animals.
Link this difficulty also to the strange dissection of the college day into three-hour mornings and two-hour afternoons. How am I supposed to do the same with an afternoon lesson when it contains so much less time!
The students did not take kindly to the work on long-term deprivation that they had to do, I imagine precisely because they were asked to work things out and answer questions quite a lot. And also because some of them hadn’t bothered to come in the previous two weeks and didn’t understand what was going on. And just wanted to take a booklet about all of this, go home, and leave it in a drawer and not look at it. I do sympathise with that feeling.
Evidently, I must militate against any future lessons that become too much hard work for the students, and find some way to make the masses of research, that are mandatory, interesting as well. Perhaps a brain drug that gives photographic memory is being developed. Or perhaps we could trade with the students – teach them things they can comprehend the importance of if we are going to make it important to remember facts upon facts, especially if these facts are wildly contradictory research findings about whether divorce or discord are better (the answer? Both, none, or either). Heaven forbid that we teachers are asked to teach syllabi that include facts both interesting and relevant.