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January 23, 2005
tj 308: "tom-management"
b & i have a student, tom, (yes, that's his real name, but not much of it), who's setting himself up as a person either in need of management or in search of the kind of attention that leads one to consider whether or not he needs managing. we don't know yet. she's a little more concerned about it than i am, but probably with reason--she's more experienced that i am and has probably seen students like tom become the kind of problem you wish you'd done something about early on. i'm mostly in the ignoring school--if what he's doing disrupts the class for a minute or two each time, and he only does it once a class, even if it's every class, 15-30 minutes of tom-time out of approximately 45 class-hours of the semester isn't much to me, especially if acting out a little makes him feel strong but doesn't hurt anybody else.
here's what happened on day 1, when i was there: we had the class in the computer cluster and were walking through the various features of Bb together. we opened a chat-room and asked them all to join it and say something, so they could see how it worked. tom joined (perhaps not realizing that his name would be displayed alongside the comment?) and wrote "fuck yourself" as his contribution. someone else said something encouragingly dismissive (i don't know how else to describe it) that managed, without being directly insulting, to tell him that was dumb, & he dropped it; in our discussion forum later in the period someone else said something else along the same vein. becky, at the time, smoothly pointed out that yes, names were attached, so there were no such things as annonymous chat contributions, and suggested (& i demoed for the group) that he use private messages for such commentary in the future.
it was maybe 2 minutes worth of disruption, he laughed it off, we laughed it off, and it created a window for a side-lesson about the program's functionality: all good.
on day 2 (i wasn't there for this) when everyone was supposed to bring in 2 examples of something exhibiting "good style," one written and one not, his non-written example was some sort of graphic including a man flipping the camera the bird. when she told me about it, i asked her, "does that strike you as continued insolence or self-aware irony?" she answered: "i told him he must have tourette's." later, our continued aim conversation on the topic looked like this:
[becky]: you'll notice that Tom's group set an objective just for him ;) [the groups were defining learning objectives for their own style; the first item on that list was: "refinement (tom)"]
[becky]: that was after I accused him of having Tourette's
[becky]: as for what he's up to: not sure. he may just want attention; he may want to express his independence or disaffection; or he may have a combative attitude toward women in authority.
[becky]: If it's that last one, he'll continue to push until he forces us to a confrontation.
[becky]: I propose just taking a wait-and-see attitude about that, but lso not letting him go further than he should
[me]: i like assuming he's just immature & giving him enough to work on/worry about that he doesn't have time for this silliness.
[becky]: I'm kind of thinking that he has a third strike coming, and then I/we can quietly take him aside at the end of class and ask him WTF dude
[me]: if he wants to work the word "fuck" into everything he writes all semester, & he does it w/finesse & is actually learning about style in the process, i couldn't care less. :)
[becky]: same here
so it's not an immediate concern, but something to keep an eye on. at the very least, he's earned himself a term. "tom-management" is on our list of potential discussion-topics for next week's planning-meeting!
Posted by ttobryan at January 23, 2005 02:03 PM