Looking back over the course of the past week (both conferences and the two classes this week), I’ve noticed a few things. One such thing being that during conferences, students had no idea what to do, despite being told what would go on at their individual conference. I asked them to bring their papers to discuss with me any questions they had about their grades or my comments, as well as, be prepared to go over their progress in the class. Oh, they also were required to bring their midterm (I still don’t have everybody’s complete midterm). Most students showed up empty handed, unprepared, and midterm-less. Fast forwarding to this week, I’ve had students, more than usual, ask me what their Reading Response assignment was the night before it was due. I’ve noticed papers with fudged margins and spacing (usually together! not one or the other), and then one student asked me why they had to use Times New Roman font. The student wanted to know why they couldn’t use larger fonts. It was at this point today, through all of these circumstances, that I came to the conclusion that the students just don’t listen, and I have absolutely no idea how to make them listen short of yelling at them and being the instructor no one likes. Any suggestions in this department would be immensely beneficial because this past week brought my tolerance to the brink of spilling over. I’m not exactly sure how to dangle a shiny thing, so to speak, in front of their assignments and needed knowledge in order for them to pay attention, or at a minimum, listen.

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.