As occasionally happens, the students in my Intro to Lit course didn’t do their reading for yesterday’s class.
I was initially flummoxed. Half the class still didn’t have the book. The half who had it didn’t read.
I know I had an electronic copy of the book that I had planned to make available. Had I forgotten?
No, it was up on our learning management system, posted last week.
I know it listed it on the syllabus and that the syllabus is the first thing a student sees when they go to our course Canvas page. The students said they found the syllabus listning confusing (“Who wrote that story again?”), but I knew nobody had emailed me for clarification.
I knew I had posted practice quiz questions on Monday night too.With each additional “I know I did this” I knew I was sounding more and more like I was maintaining plausible deniability instead of offering an honest to goodness teaching moment.
In his book The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman writes that one way we can discover our own language is by examining the way we try to show others love. Often the love we extend to someone else tells us more about what we ourselves would want than it does the person receiving our affection.
I was reminded of this after my teaching session yesterday. Maybe an electronic version of the text and practice quiz questions were exactly what I would have wanted, but perhaps my students were trying to telling me those tools didn’t necessarily work for them.
It’s humbling to have to try and be quiet and listen, especially when I had to fill the rest of the class without the luxury of being able to talk through the story we were all supposed to have read (save for when we went through the quiz answers, which was filled with IDKs).
What I hate most about the way I responded is that I doubled down too easily on the utilitarian motivation of “You’ll need this for your essay.” If that was what motivated them, they would have done the reading already!
That leaves me without an easy answer to my dilemma, and so I’ll have to do what every teacher and disciple does: keep listening.