Insights from the Community College Front

Every semester, I make it a rule to learn something myself.

Lessons from Fall 2010:

1) Although adding a website is great resource for a face-to-face class, online learning is not a viable alternative to classroom learning for any but the technically savvy and academically experienced student; in my classes, such students are about one out of twenty. At this point, I have tried as hard as I could for a year, done everything I can think of--I've taken courses in how to do it, I've spent hours with my "hybrid" class in a computer lab showing them how to do it, I have spent more hours setting up a website than I have ever devoted to course prep in my life, I have roamed Google and U-Tube, searching out ways to make the website entertaining, at least as far is is possible for a 60-something teacher to entertain a class of mostly 20-somethings. At the end of the day, most of the students are not entertained, don't do the work, are confused about what to do and don't send me emails to tell me they are confused. A third of them don't pass the course, a figure I have never confronted before. The powers that be who want us to do these hybrid courses are always pulling out studies that show students learn as well or better online. Well, the subjects of these studies either aren't the same students I'm teaching, or aren't learning the same kind of things my students need to learn. Or the teachers who are doing it know something I don't, which I really wish they could explain to me.

2) Another class, the one where I teach them how to write a college research paper, was very successful this semester, apparently as the result of a change in textbook from one I really liked to one that kind of bored me. Instead of exploring the American cultural landscape through luminous writing from the likes of Langston Hughes, Anzia Yezierska and Amy Tan, we plowed through pages on pages of textbook passages from various disciplines, interspersed with sample research papers. When they came to write their own final research papers, it turned out that the class had benefited a good deal from all this "scaffolding," to use a current education buzz word. I also found out that many of them are more interested in ecomomics than I am, and actually understand it rather better. Counter-intuitive moral: what bores the teacher can be right for the students.