« tj 308: week 3 | Main | balancing acts? »
February 09, 2005
the house of network?
today class was good. this is not an informative sentence, really, although we construct it & sentences like it in the halls all the time; it doesn't convey anything other than that it was the opposite of "bad," an almost equally neutral term. "good" classes are classes in which nothing "bad" happened. & yet we--the teachers i pass in the halls and i, in these halls, in the halls where i used to work, in the halls before and before and before that--keep asking.
perhaps the value of the exchange is an overall climate-indicator; when most people are saying "class was good," then the program's okay, the curriculum's okay, the students are okay. or at least not "bad." when we hear "not so good" once in a while, it's a conversation-piece or a problem to solve & a learning opportunity, but when we hear it often, we have to start looking for thematic distress. & if we hear it often from the same person, we have to look there, because either that particular group of students, or the text they're working with, or the unique outline of the assignment, or the teacher him/herself isn't okay, and because the rest of us presumably are, we can pitch in. offer ideas. observe a class. listen to an anecdote and relay one of our own.
what started this:
- listening to myself complain about 670, again
- mike's post to 711 addressing the "what's network literacy" question
- re-reading stephen m. north for 611 & being re-reminded of the "house of lore" metaphor i already carry everywhere
- noticing that i haven't swapped a single class-story with j in almost a week
- elisa closing the door to our office meaning to me that nobody's going to wander by for a while
here's what mike said:
[C]onsider the way news was read and disseminated in the 19th century. Men (and some women) would stand around a news print. One would read, the others would discuss, all would break up and go on to share that information with others. A network literacy?
i understand that institutions need structure, & so that's why we have structured 670 as a set of scheduled meetings to make sure that inexperienced teachers--whether inexperienced at teaching in general or just teaching in this climate with this curriculum--have a chance to hear from and share with more experienced teachers. but there's too much structure, or at least too much on our agendas. and too many people listening when one person's talking, when we could each be doing one or the other, when we could be getting enough grading done that we'd have time to stand still when a hard question arose in the hall that warranted a decently thought-out answer.
i learn so much more from hallway lore--from those temperature-gaguing questions, from the anecdotes, from the euphoric & exhausted & anxious & puzzled looks on my colleagues' faces on their way back from class-meetings. & it seems so much more germane there in the moment of joy or confusion, there in the place where so much of it happens, the halls between offices & classrooms, between conferences & copiers, the desks at which we grade & respond to student e-mails, rant & overhear others' rants, crow & commiserate.
i'm uninterested in war metaphors. these halls are not trenches, & although we use the word "dungeon" when kidding about the poor lighting, lack of ventilation, unreliable cell-reception of our over-heated window-less basement, its here that we do our networking. it's here, not in the most well-intentioned of organized meetings, that we learn first- & second-hand what goes wrong, what goes right, what ingredients & influences contribute to those wrong & rights. what we huddle over isn't the newspaper, but the stories we share are more relevant to what we're doing daily than they would be if it were.
Posted by ttobryan at February 9, 2005 11:38 AM