Two Weeks into the Semester

Well, once again, I have two classes with totally different personalities (granted, I teach 110 and 210 so that should be expected). What was/is unexpected about this is that my 110 students are more engaging and interested in what is going on than my 210 students who are sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I realize that the students in 210 all come from different backgrounds since this Writing II class is Academic Writing and not something more specific like fiction or non-fiction, but I assumed (and yes I know, I shouldn't have assumed) that they would understand what it means to have a class discussion. However, the second day of class, when we had our first discussion over the assigned readings, my 110 (mostly freshman) students impressed me with the amount of work the leaders put into their questions and the responses from the other students. Since I teach back to back, I was thoroughly excited to see what my 210 class would do. They surprised me as well, but to the other extreme - it was like pulling teeth to get any kind of response out of them and I didn't know what to do.

In my 110 class I feel extremely confident because I actually know what the assignments are this time and I know better ways to approach teaching them, but in my 210, it is new territory for me and even though I am not as nervous as I was my first semester of teaching, I'm still worried about making sure I know what they need to know to be successful. The most important thing in teaching, to me, is the students and I want them all to succeed. I'm still so new at this whole teaching thing that I don't really know how to come up with different ways to approach non-participation in the classroom. I do know that as a student it took me awhile to get comfortable talking in class (even though I love to talk - I was just always afraid of looking stupid).

I'm still in the early stages of determing what my teaching pedagogy is so I don't really know what to say about that just yet. However, I was in 621 yesterday and something Dr. Weaver said interested me. It was something along the lines that we need to look to ourselves and our own writing processes and apply that to the way we teach in the classroom. We tend to do a lot of brainstorming activities in the classroom, but most of us admitted that wasn't the way we went about coming up with ideas and getting those ideas to paper. Just something to keep thinking about.