INSIDE DOUGLAS COLLEGE / JANUARY 16, 1990
VOLUME XI, NUMBER 25

 

= INNOVATION ABSTRACTS

PUBLISHED BY THE NA evn INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL syste ie Ms UNIVERSITY Y OF: TEXAS ais Mie

WITH SUPPORT FROM THE W. K. KELLOGG FOUNDATION AND THE SID W. RICHARDSON FOUNDATION

 

There’s No Such Thing as Too Many Cooks in the Classroom

After months of listening to my vague complaints of
not being completely satisfied with teaching writing,
despite my love of both teaching and writing, a close
friend of mine and former composition teacher herself
summed up all my stewing in one apt analogy. “Of
course you’re unhappy with what you’re doing,” she let
fly one day. “It’s just like putting on one big meal after
another: All you do is prepare, prepare, prepare, and
then clean up, clean up, clean up. You’re left with
almost no time or energy to enjoy the meal in between.”

Sound familiar? It sure did to me! I prepared classes
into minutiae, evaluated papers into eternity, and in
between I met with classes full of students who didn’t
seem nearly grateful enough for all my hard work and

er. It was like a perpetual Thanksgiving dinner:

—

just looked effortless to my students because | slaved
long and hard under a hot desk lamp to make it look
that way.

This realization, though heartening because of the
clarity it produced on one level, was confusing on
another level. Maybe I was guilty of overkill in my
attempts to be the best teacher possible, but I couldn’t
believe the alternative was to surrender to what I
looked upon as the fast-food purveyors of teaching: the
burned-out, the lazy, the cynical, and the less-than-
capable who somehow manage to survive in every
discipline. Yet learning to give less to my teaching
sounded like the only possible response to overkill,
which in turn sounded suspiciously like learning to
serve up junk food. The fact that the friend who flashed
this realization before my eyes had given up teaching
completely was not lost on me either; but she was
working at least as long and hard in her present career,
so conclusions weren't easily drawn.

Searching through scraps of memory and experience
from my years as student as well as teacher brought me
back to the same point again and again: Very good
teaching is inseparable from very hard work. Try as I
might, I couldn’t find the line between hard work and
overkill, so I was about to acquiesce to the idea of

aving away alone in a hot educational kitchen the rest
of my life and being vaguely dissatisfied in the name of
duty and honor when I remembered a vital point about

my friend who made the analogy in the first place.
Although she’s a great cook, she never does the cleanup
after the meals she prepares. And that may be the key
to her continuing love affair with cooking through all
these years.

In other words, I was finally struck by what may
have been obvious to the non-Thanksgiving-dinner-
producing people of the world all along: Not all hard
work is alike. There is a difference between miserable
hard work (e.g., overkill) and positive hard work (what
I now, at times, become exuberant enough about to
think of as joyful hard work). The implications of this
difference can have an effect on both our approaches to
and satisfaction with teaching.

Miserable hard work is doing it all ourselves but
receiving very little acknowledgement for our efforts
because these efforts are, paradoxically, both hidden
and selfish: We are the ones who shop for the ideas,
buy those that we believe are appropriate, prepare the
ideas in the way we find most interesting, feed them to
our students, and then evaluate their digestion of the
ideas presented. So we prepare, prepare, prepare, and
then we clean up, clean up, clean up—over and over
again. This approach does get the turkey on the table,
but it rarely leaves students or teacher satisfied. What
is there to be satisfied about? We as teachers have
claimed full responsibility for the success of the class
and so become like anxious hosts, hoping above all else
to avoid any embarrassing social blunders. The stu-
dents are denied any part of the creation of the class or
even their own ideas, so naturally they have no strong
feelings either way about the class, as long as they can
figure out what is expected of them and play along for a
passing grade. Satisfaction, in the end, is choked out of
the class for all of us.

How, then, does positive hard work differ from
miserable hard work? I’m sure the true answer is in
ways we'll never stop discovering—since variations on
the theme “take risks together and learn together” are
limitless. One element basic to all positive hard work in
teaching seems to be this willingness not only to
encourage students to take risks in learning but to take
risks ourselves. From this basis, some of the steps I’m

 

  

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