#classroom teaching

[aplacetoputthingsdown]

Movement in the Classroom

Stepping into a box full of teenagers, with the goal of controlling them, steering them, inducing in them positively toward creative learning conversations... there are many analogies people use. Stepping into a lion's den is a common one. Stepping onto a stage another.

I don't like either.

A metaphor I would not recommend but the one that best describes my experience was that of a wind tunnel. Not a normal wind tunnel, more of a solar wind. Hot and withering, with shards of high-speed plasma peppered throughout the oncoming gale.

To try to oppress it, to bravely feel as though you can face the wind down with enough willpower is an egoistic trap. Standing in face of it, pitting your own perceived importance against it quickly strips the skin from your body.

The trick is understanding that current is complex. Not one, enormous and uniform wind pushing against you, specifically. That feeling is a kind of illusion. In actuality, it is the sum of two dozen smaller currents. And those currents are curved and unique, non-uniform, fluctuating in speed, severity and direction on a moment to moment level.

A loud and busy café can feel 'noisy' but if you search for the 'noise' you won't find it. Every individual table is is having polite conversations, giving and taking orders, using cutlery. Nobody is being 'noisy'.

One of the first things the classroom teacher should learn is how to move through the classroom, to come to a similar revelation.

To move around the room, to notice how the pressures change as you do. How being in different places feels different, and how different moving is to standing still, how different fast movement feels to slow movement, how different standing at the front feels from standing at the back, or facing the windows or with your back to them.

The room is a complex interference pattern of nodes and antinodes, and where you are, how you move changes the nature of the field. Sometimes it's warm. Sometimes its exciting. Sometimes it's jovial. It's a game about feeling out the currents and becoming familiar with them through experience.

Moving changes the activity and experience from one of harrowing endurance to one of a kind of surfing, a flowing with, a moving with, a balancing, a dance, certainly a kind of play. 20250518

[insteading]

I think of myself as being pretty strongly a "persuade me" reader-- like, if I find a premise far-fetched but you persuade me, I am going to be genuinely excited about it. I recognize and admire when people are doing something that has a high degree of difficulty.

But I also think back to classroom teaching and seeing people's belief that all interpretations were equally valid play out in real time.

Sometimes that belief played out in blatant sexism and racism-- and it was my job to counter that in the moment, because it's hurtful to students of color and/or female students to just let that hang in the air.

Sometimes the interpretation wasn't aggressive toward another student but was simply an indicator that the opiner hadn't read the material. "Okay, show us where you're getting that" was usually the best way to assimilate that comment into productive discussion-- whether or not it led to the student doing the reading next time, it at least reinforced the point that this is a class in which the source material is important, and it engaged other people in looking for relevant evidence.

Sometimes the interpretation was just based on a factually incorrect premise. For example, it did not honor the laws of physics, in a situation where that was relevant to the argument the student was trying to advance? Again, pretty easy to counter gently and without ridicule by pointing to, say, GRAVITY, and then moving on to point to the parts of their reasoning that would have actually worked pretty well, were the starting point not kind of fucked for its context. This kind of issue tended to generate animated, non-hostile discussion (and also an occasional good one-on-one later about "have you ever thought about writing speculative fiction?").

And every once in a while there was the kind of uncategorizable interpretation that Wolfgang Pauli would have referred to as not even wrong, because it took a bullshit premise, applied logic that if it had any internal consistency kept it lovingly hidden from readers, and ended up in "My shoes are made of cheese" land. That was past assimilating into a conversation about the text we all shared. And the only thing I could do with it was say "WELP," regroup for 15 seconds, and then change the subject.

When I'm reading for fun, I'm not teaching comp, literary analysis, or creative writing. I'm clear no one's asked me for that-- it's not our dynamic. But I definitely do have some of those same reactions I would have had in the classroom while reading fic. I read from the premise that the source material is important, and that if someone didn't actually like the source material, they'd be much happier writing fiction without its constraints. (Or at least introducing an original character to kiss their blorbo who doesn't share a name with someone who already has well-defined preferences and motivations in the source text.) And that premise has bearing on what I want to read and engage with.

[bobelhosary]

Hello my dears

I am Bahaa, a Palestinian-Ghazawi photographer

My life consisted of my beautiful, wonderful work with international companies and agencies. In addition, I was working on developing myself and my photography equipment.

Suddenly it was gone and all my dreams, ambitions and equipment in the family’s 5-storey house were destroyed

I was trying to create a project of a lifetime after hard years of continuous work, but before starting it, it was destroyed as well

Now I will tell you about my brother. He is a visual artist and a calligraphy artist, and everything he owned was destroyed

Now I will talk about my mother, the beautiful, generous woman. We owned a kindergarten and she ran it despite her illnesses with diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis. They also burned and destroyed the kindergarten to the point that they did not leave us anything to earn a living from, and now, after the difficulty of the road out of Gaza, we do not know how to travel to treat my mother.

I am asking you to please save the life of an entire family and I hope that you will help me so that we can all travel 🙏🏽

I don't want anything else but to survive the war, death and annihilation that haunt us every second

[alaryheart]

Free themmmmm

[hanafubukki]

Sometimes I wonder how trein feels having these fae students that go “I’ll teach you the real history” and “is that what they teach nowadays?”

He’s just a professor trying to teach some unruly kids, cut him some slack. 😆

Imagine teaching for all these years, and not only learning that what you learned and taught are lies/hidden truths (kind of), but you have these ‘students’ who lived through it and apparently know better.

I mean the education field/studies are always changing and new discoveries are made (that’s history for you) but I think it’s funny and frustrating for Professor Trein when his students act like that 😂😅

How do you even grade them?? At that point?? Lolol

[faeriefully]

what do you MEAN American public schools don’t teach what a verb’s aspect is??? what do you MEAN they expect all students to take foreign language classes without teaching them the foundations of their own language?!?!? what do you MEAN you want to address literacy without providing a deep education of descriptive grammar usage they already subconsciously use!?!?!?!? WHAT DO YOU MEAN!???

[psychhound]

ttrpgs in the classroom (part 8)

oh boy have i not made one of these posts in ,,, like a year. grad school is crazy yall. lmao. but. i wanted to share what we do for our analysis unit now that we've hit it this semester!!

other games used in the unit:

we are but worms & graves for funerals

the assignment:

write an essay of approximately 1000 words doing a literary analysis of some aspect of a game, first forming an inquiry question, then looking in the text for evidence, then coming up with an argument about a deeper meaning of the text. the second draft of the assignment can either be an expanded essay, or a multimodal piece of the student's choosing. (the other option for this essay is to do a rhetorical analysis of an argumentative text about gaming)

the games:

[ID: a powerpoint slide titled choose your fighter game (the word fighter is crossed out, so it reads choose your game). it shows five ttrpg titles, with a short description of each, and an icon to represent them. the background is a light orange sky and green grass in a video game like art style. there is a fake game menu bar on the bottom. the games in the slide are functionally described below. end ID]

when we made war upon the slumbering woods by richard kelly @sprintingowl

a collaborate journey into the magical woods ... to destroy it

the treasure at the end of this dungeon is an escape from this dungeon and we will never escape from this dungeon by riverhouse games @riverhousegames

a lyric game about a never-ending dungeon and those stuck there

kenzie's project by sasha winter @stargazersasha

a Weird Academia horror game for three players

i love you, alive girl by anna anthropy

a 1-page game about writing love letters under surveillance

drifters by gila rpgs

a Weird West game of gunslingers and their guns

past semesters game options:

a dragon game by chris bissette cozy town by rae nedjadi @temporalhiccup

the process:

in the powerpoint introducing the games, i have a more thorough description of each one, and then three examples of inquiry questions that they could use as jumping off points to do their analysis on. the inquiry questions ask things like, what moral stance might this game align itself with, what other stories is this game in dialogue with and to what effect, what does this game have to say about the current state of our society? the students can use these inquiry questions or not, theyre only meant to be examples

the results:

this is definitely the most challenging project for my students, but i think that challenge is good for them! i've had really mixed results, with the most common issue i run into just being surface level analysis. they are, however, 18 and have never done anything like this before (for the vast majority of my students) so a lot of my feedback is just pushing them further and trying to get them to say something interesting. i really love a dragon game and cozy town, but i found they didnt have enough context of ttrpgs and dnd/pf to really Get why a dragon game was interesting, so i replaced it with escape from this dungeon since thats got some more meat for them like voicey rules and characters. and im a big fan of nedjadi's games and wanted to give my students something more cute and fun, but they struggled to find much to read into or say about it that wasnt very surface level. escape from this dungeon and ilu, alive girl are new games this semester so we will see how those go over!!

[itspileofgoodthings]

Imagine teaching Pride and Prejudice to teenage boys (while girls are in the room). Imagine teaching it to teenage boys going through puberty and, generally speaking, a hard time. Imagine refusing to let the boys ruin it for the girls with their bad attitude, which they often try to do. Imagine refusing to simply shut them down in a way that makes them shut down but instead finding the right path for them to still be able to respond to it but only appropriately. Imagine working really hard to give them space to have their own opinions but once again not allowing them to express those opinions in a way that sucks the air out of the room for all the other students. Imagine dealing every day with the waves of struggling teen boy entrenched-in-the-culture misogyny that the work brings out of them and that they direct at you. Imagine having to make it a top priority to not allow their attitude to make you hate them but treat them with respect and appropriate friendliness, even though the attitudes they display ARE profoundly unlikable and they push you to the edge of hating them every day. Now imagine doing all of this while both your principal and the revered founder of your school who occasionally pops up into your life (both men) speak dismissively on Jane Austen. Imagine.

[gojoest]

SATORU

[veriana-rose]

Okay, so I’m a bit late to notice this, but I looooove this Day in the Life.

I just love the characterization that Byleth is teaching the child alts too. It makes me very happy.

[write-to-tell-your-story]

Sometimes the point of a story is to be very realistic in its portrayals of people and/or the world it is set in.

Other times, the point of a story is to be a power fantasy, or a nice black & white escapist fantasy, or a horny fantasy, or all sorts of other fantasies that provide people with a fun and cathartic break from reality and all its gray areas and unfortunate truths and overwhelming systemic power structures that leave us feeling helpless against faceless enemies we don't always know how to fight.

Sometimes, "this story is unrealistic," is the point.

Seek realism when it serves the story. Throw "realism" out the window when something else will serve your story better.

[jstor]

As autumn sets in and the world slows down, there's something timeless about gathering to share knowledge—whether in the warmth of home or the quiet of a classroom. 🍂 📖 This 19th-century scene of a family learning together feels like a reflection of what education has always been about: connection, curiosity, and the joy of discovery.

At JSTOR, we believe in the power of learning to shape lives and inspire change. Whether you're an educator looking to ignite that spark in your students or a lifelong learner diving into a new subject, our resources are here to support you. From digital archives to classroom tools, JSTOR helps bring the world of knowledge to your fingertips.

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Image: Abraham van Strij, Parents Teaching Their Daughter a Song, early 19th century. Watercolor, pen and ink. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[bobelhosary]

Please do not skip

Watch watermelon's daily life..🍉🎞️

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[backfliips]

At work my bosses keep bringing up a position I really really want but im not qualified for it and their bosses definitely won't greenlight me for the position so whenever they bring up me being a media specialist I just look at them like this

[cocainesuperstarblog]

emmrich, as a teacher, would not survive what is today's education system