Week 3 Reading

One of the things that I find most different in the US graduate education, and education in general, is the idea of reflection. I can not imagine a professor in my alma mater, i.e. Ukrainian University, assigning us to write a reflection on our attitude to grammar or pronunciation, or teaching. I also never saw most of them reflecting on their own classroom practices. We had a course called Home Reading, which was basically a lit-based class, where we would read a couple chapters from a fiction book at home and then do all kinds of activities in class. We had three professors teach that course in different years. They all had books they were teaching for 5+ years, where they knew every line by heart and made it boring as hell. I remember wondering, how they endure saying the exact same things over and over, year to year. I could never do that, I remember thinking. Last year I taught three different groups of three levels, and I loved it, because no class was the same. This year the idea of reflective teaching was one of the central ones in the TA-workshops, and we had assignments and discussions that promoted it. We were composing teaching narratives, observing other people's classes etc, and I think it's wonderful. Teaching is an ongoing process, the moment you think you have it and you're ready to rest on your pedagogical laurels, you are done as a teacher, especially if we are talking about a practical course (I can sort of see the argument for basic lecture-based courses, although not quite).

I also liked the MCM chapter on classroom research, since that is something I am doing at the moment. A quick digression. Last semester, when we were doing the multi-genre paper in this class I was totally puzzled for the first ten weeks at least. I had never done anything like that before and it made sense to me only while I was listening to the explanations, five minutes after it was a blur. So, I started reading books on the multi-genre, and ended up taking this approach with my comp class (there were two of us doing that, out of 25). Finally, multi-genre papers became my thesis topic and I am now collecting the data. So, it was interesting to read about something I can really relate to.