I’m thinking about the assessment I just received the other day from my tutor for year 1 of the PGCert HELT (Higher Education Learning and Teaching). Considering my engagement, practice and output over the last year the grade B seems punitive (but perhaps that goes without saying especially considering the fact that I'm clearly seen as an anti-authoritarian upstart), but the written feedback is simply an insult, at one point quite literally so.
Over the past year I’ve kept a private blog available only to myself, my colleague/mentor and my tutor. The blog contains a wide variety of informal, confidential and more academic writing (including posts from this blog) on teaching and learning related matters as well as other reflections on teaching and notes, emails and materials gathered through my studies and practice as a teacher. All of this work has been produced in my own time, through my own motivation and in addition to the required course submission (which as such, is not assessable, basically because the rules for evidence are so pathetically rigid). Out of 237 blog posts, a single entry is on the subject of a test I had for dyslexia last December. I’m not dyslexic, but I am dysgraphic as it turns out. In the post I included the following definition of dysgraphia with a brief comment:
“Students with dysgraphia often have sequencing problems. Studies indicate that what usually appears to be a perceptual problem (reversing letters/numbers, writing words backwards, writing letters out of order, and very sloppy handwriting) usually seems to be directly related to sequential/rational information processing. These students often have difficulty with the sequence of letters and words as they write. As a result, the student either needs to slow down in order to write accurately, or experiences extreme difficulty with the “mechanics” of writing (spelling, punctuation, etc.). They also tend to intermix letters and numbers in formulas. Usually they have difficulty even when they do their work more slowly. And by slowing down or getting “stuck” with the details of writing they often lose the thoughts that they are trying to write about.” -Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Yep, that pretty well sums me up. Now I know why I have such an significant aversion to being the “Scribe” in group tasks or making decent notes during lectures and meetings etc.
Buried among the 30 or so lines of feedback is the following remark which didn’t quite make sense to me, so much so that I had to carry out a text search through my entire site to find the source which turned out to be the above comment on dysgraphia. The feedback reads as follows, and I include it with its original punctuation and formatting:
- an significant aversion should read a significant
"A" is for acquiescence. You've got a lot to learn about teaching.
ReplyDeleteSean, you don't know how reassuring that is. You're absolutely right though... I'm beginning to wonder if there's any point in learning even the slightest bit more about 'their' teaching.
ReplyDeleteI've just got back up off the floor. If you were my student on a PGCert whatever I'd have asked you some months ago to run at least half of all my sessions. Who gives a monkey's about a typo?
ReplyDeleteIn my creativity group on Friday people were talking about their experiences with teachers, and I heard myself say something like, 'well, it seems with some very rare exceptions, where people find a teacher who actually helps them to move outwards into a bigger, more wonderful world, education is generally a deadening and destructive experience...'. After 12 years as an Education lecturer and 30 years teaching adults, I'm only more convinced that the whole business is, with the above noted rare exceptions, usually actually one form or another of (mild to serious) abuse.
I realise that I made rather a strong comment there! I just wanted to add that the debatable issue of the degrees and nature of abuse doesn't mean that education isn't also something that people get good things out of.... Being forced to operate within constraints and experiencing strong forces that push you in a particular direction can have powerful effects on people and change their lives.
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