Back to School!

Yes, I know that the official Back-to-school time is not in late March but rather in Early September.  But here, I’m not talking about the post-summer return to the classroom.  Instead, I want to write about a rather interesting experience I had this week on campus.  My college has an annual event called “Partner Day” where students pair up with a member of the college faculty or staff, and the pairs spend the day together walking in each other’s shoes, so to speak.

My partner had a pretty easy day of it because the event happened to fall on a day when I do not have class this semester and generally work from home grading and prepping, so there wasn’t much for her to do.  I, on the other hand, had to go to her classes with her, eat in the dining hall, and see what work-study jobs are all about.

The day began bright and early–we were supposed to meet our partners at breakfast.  My partner and I had agreed to meet at 7:45 so that we could plan our day and not be late for her 8:00 work-study position.  I am not a morning person by the farthest stretch of the imagination, so getting to campus by 7:45 was no small feat.  That morning might have been the first time I’ve made it to campus that early, and it was only the second time I’d been to the dining hall for breakfast.  Apparently, most of the students at my college don’t make it to breakfast very often either because there were lots and lots of empty tables (which is not the case at lunch).  But dining hall breakfast wasn’t half bad–the coffee was good, and though I didn’t indulge, I was happy to see that they still serve my favorite undergrad breakfast food: French Toast Sticks!

After breakfast, we went to the student union, where my partner usually mans the information desk. She had managed to convince someone to cover her shift at the eleventh hour, but she agreed to take me to see where she worked and tell me about her job, which basically consisted of answering the telephone when it rang and transferring calls to various extensions on campus.  I was impressed that she could manage the telephone system because there were easily 100 buttons to push, and most days, I have a hard time with the regular phone, especially at 8:00AM.

From there, we went to my office.  We had a little over an hour to kill before our first class. She asked me several good questions about how classes were assigned, how I chose my textbooks, and what usually happened during office hours.

Then it was time for our first class: The Psychology of Intimacy & Relationships.  I hadn’t taken a psych class since my sophomore year of college, and even then it was just Psych 101–no upper-level coursework.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but was quite fun to be a student again: not only was the subject matter really interesting, but I found it engaging to watch someone else in front of the classroom.  I was reminded that everyone has their own practices and method–for example, I always hand papers and exams back at the end of class, but this professor passed back exams at the beginning of class, and it seemed to work fine for him.  The class was lively and engaged (of course, it probably helped that the topic of the day was sex), and I liked the way that the professor encouraged students to make  anonymous lists and then pass them to a student in the back of the room who would read them out loud.  Participation and privacy!  In my classes, we sometimes get into racy discussions–not regularly, but it isn’t uncommon either–and I think that I might adopt the list protocol next time.  It seemed like a great way to get the more reserved and shy students in the classroom to contribute without putting them on the spot or making them uncomfortable.

The other class of the day was American History.  This class was very different from the morning class, and again it was great to see a different colleague and  different pedagogical approaches in action.  In this class, the first ten minutes were devoted to a reading exercise where students were given ten minutes to answer a particular question about their homework assignment.  They could look at their text or their notes, but they only got ten minutes to answer the question, so if they hadn’t done the reading, completing the task would be nearly impossible.  After that, the professor put the students in groups, and passed out discussion questions that we should try to answer.  I often do groupwork, but I’ve never passed out a list of questions like that.  The list was useful in focusing our group discussion and keeping everyone on track.  Once we had gotten through most of the questions, we came back together as a class and talked about it.  Lastly, there was a PowerPoint presentation, lecture, and discussion.  What I liked most about this class was the way that the professor broke the class session (80 minutes) into discrete activities and moved seamlessly from  one to the next.  Breaking up the session really helped the students to stay interested and energized, even in the post-lunch/early afternoon doldrums.

All in all, I got some great ideas for my own teaching, and I learned something both about the Civil War and the psychology of  sex.  In addition, I also got to know a student whom I had not previously met.  I hadn’t been on the other side of the classroom for quite some time, but this activity was a useful way to appreciate the many different tasks that the students at my college have to balance on a daily basis.  As I listened to her tell me how much homework she gets, how little she sleeps, and how she manages to negotiate studying, work, and having some semblance of a social life, my head began to spin.  Empirically, I knew that what she described was not atypical nor was it any more than the load that I managed when I was an undergraduate, and yet I couldn’t help but feel vicariously overwhelmed and fatigued.  Perhaps some of that fatigue is due to the raging case of Spring Fever, which I’ve managed to catch this week, but nevertheless, the experience was a useful reminder of what our students have to manage in their day-to-day lives.  It can be easy to forget that when we only see them for a few hours a week.

Have you had the chance to go “back to school” or take a look at “how the other half lives”?  Please share observations and comments below!

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flick user House of Sims.]