Class Room Struggles

I am a professor. I know my material and chosen subjects. I have a near photographic and encyclopedic knowledge of the things I have chosen to learn about, history and architecture. I'm not saying that I know everything or even very much about either of them (considering how vast both are), but what I have learned I retain to an interesting degree which is why you want me on your Trivial Pursuit team. You really do.

Math and technical and coding and garble garble garble.....I really struggle to retail the details and to remember them in context. Photography is only a small part composition and artistic eye (which I can do) and the rest is math and equipment settings. Sure I can click over to auto and then just be really frustrated later when the camera did not do what I wanted......or I can actually learn how to use my camera.

It is hard. Harder than learning business calculus, which I spent hours with a tutor and more hours in the college math lab pushing myself to learn it and maybe pass the class. I did. With a B+.

Strange thing is that I feel more energetic with this challenge and I very much feel I am on the right track. Half the issue is learning the lingo, which I can store in the language and history part of my brain (the part that works!). The rest is practise and patience. I make a point to read the assigned chapters twice, once the day after class they are assigned and once in the hour before the class where the topic is discussed. Squished in the middle is a combination of researching the assignment, doing the assignment, and finding related youtube videos (because I am a visual learner too).

Then, I make a list of questions to ask. I "reverse" highlight, something I learned in college: I only highlight the parts of the text that I do NOT understand, write my questions in the margin and then ASK about these in class. That's what the professor is there for too, not just a crowd control manager, not just an assignment grader, no....an expert in the subject you are teaching yourself. The instructor helps you find resources and frames the subject matter with a textbook and lesson plan, but it is really up to the student to figure out the rest and ask questions.

One of the real problems I see in American education is the student's expectation to be hand fed all the information and then gifted the grade for paying the tuition. I will not ever be that kind of student. I do not waste my time or others sitting in a classroom for a subject I do not care to learn. I am paying for it? I will make it worth my time and get the full value product. I will ask questions.

This is the shift that has to happen on the student side and I am not sure how else to encourage it, other than teaching the students who walk into my classrooms that I am a resource and they can ask questions and that they are the ones in control of their education.

Being a student is hard. Discouraging. Humiliating at times. Goodness. I turned in an assignment I thought I had done right only to find out that the flash was actually engaged in 3 of the 6 photos. I was completely freaked out when I discovered the mistake, too late.

It is one class, one assignment, and I learned from it. I may bomb this week's grade, but it is not the entire term. It still feels horrible. I forgot what it was like to be on this side of it. The struggle is real.