We did conferences last week. I feel they went well overall. There were many students who showed up and acted like they didn’t care which was to be expected. I have found that many of my students have little interest in the class and in their performance in the class as a whole. One student in particular, who I have had some behavioral issues with, questioned a grade I gave him during our conference. I told him why he received the grade he did but he ended up walking out on the conference 40 seconds in.
I was thinking back to Freire and banking education. I wrote in a previous blog post that I had never thought of education as an oppressive thing. But now that I have had more time to think about it, I realized that I have had teachers and professors who were oppressors, similar to what Freire talked about in “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education.” I remember my sophomore algebra teacher in high school. She was a ruthless dictator in the classroom. You could tell she thought of her students as just little children who knew nothing and that she held all the valuable knowledge in the world. Her class was a terrible experience.