AGE OLD QUESTION #10897362Y

How much of teaching is about being a taskmaster (recently one of students in his frustration called me a taskmaster), and how much of teaching is about inspiring students to dream the impossible dream.

The way I posed that question is decidedly tainted and skewed. Oh well.

This is an age-old battle between the right-wingers and the lefties. For instance, when teaching a child to read, the right-wingers say you should teach phonics, while the lefties say you should teach stories/ culture. The middle of the roaders say do a little of both.

Many students just want to hang out and they get annoyed when you expect them to work. Once they start working, they are happy and once they see the final product they are happy or they wish they had worked more.

I teach animation, and often my students don't want to write a storyboard or anything, they just want to randomly doodle. They want to be in their own little bubble. They could do that at home and I would not be a good teacher if I allowed that to go on.

But how do I teach- through calculated inspiration (in educational thinking, the lefties like this approach and they call this "scaffolding"). Or do I just force them to finish the damn exercise, knowing that they'll thank me in the end (obviously a right-wing tactic- Do the fighting words, "bring em on" ring any bells?).

I've found it's better to do the calculated inspiration route. However, sometimes I haven't calculated enough or I am too tired to be fully present, so I fall back on the just do it approach. It really does take a lot of experience to have the time and foresight to be fullly prepared with a ergonomically desgined, form follow function scaffolding. So I do fall back on the 'just do it' approach and it does the trick. But part of the scaffolding is this composed front that keeps the law of the land, which is all a drama of blind justice. I pretend that I'm serious about deadlines and all that, so that they have something to strive for and feel like their work is truly important and needs to get done.

It's all invisible, yet it yields real results. I am always finding out that the most important thing in the classroom is the culture of the class. It's necessary to teach skills and whatnot, but you can really make the class work for you. When they work together and teach each other, it's a lot easier for me, they feel proud to show people what they know, they learn better from their peers and they become friends. When there's laughter in a room and happiness it is such a big difference froma competitive environment. I really try to subvert the competition, not in any idealistic way. I didn't set out to have a noncompetitive classroom before I started teaching. It's when I saw the way people are, especially on computers. Some people are so know-it-all and try to beat everyone to the punch all the time (the guy who called me a taskmaster was the ultimate 'master of the computer class'). It's rough on the self esteem of the other students and then they feel like they'll never get the hang of it.

I am rambling, like a class with no structure. I love structurelessness. But I also love structure. Systems, ya know. Systems seem like a female thing- school marm, matriarchy, safe monetary investments. They seem so ball-busting. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, nerve endings or need to compete. Actually maybe I want to shine a mirror towards the competers until they punch the mirror in competitive fervor and with bleeding fists realize how foolish and how to open their hearts. Not only will you learn 2 kinds of tweening, you will learn how to learn to love in 2 weeks intensive computering around with me as your taskmaster/ scaffolder. What was more amazing - the Sistene Chapel ceiling by ol' what's his name? OR the scaffolding built by Jacomo di Patronelli Santa Barbara Castini IV?