Week 8 – Recovering a Sense of Strength

“The Ivory Power”

Cameron says, “It is my experience as a visisting artist that many academics are themselves artistic beings who are deeply frustsrated by their inability to create.”  She goes on to discuss the power of both encouragement and criticism; critism being perhaps the most damaging form of artistic loss.

I have been teaching adults for the past 25 years and have found that encouragement is the most powerful tool for aiding in the susccess of students.  I also often listen to students who are experiencing a critical instructor and how difficult it is for them.  They feel like failures, they always take it personally, and blame themselves rather than the instructor.  Many of our students are nontraditional, older, with families and jobs.  They have taken a huge leap of faith just by enrolling in school again.  They need constant encouragement, a kind ear, and knowing that the instructor cares.  They already are struggling with low self esteem and the burdons of life.  I have seen first hand how a kind and caring word can encourage success, and a noncaring, abrupt comment can cause a student to quit school.  I have always felt that our job is so much more than just relaying information.  I try to get to know my students and let them know they have an advocate.

Another Cameron paragraph:  “Creativity cannot be comfortably quantified in intellectual terms.  By its very nature, creativity eschews such containment.  In a university where the intellectual life is built upon the art of creation itself, the art of creative construction meets with scanty support, understanding, or approval.  To be blunt, most academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.”

My first reaction to this was OUCH!  But after thinking more about it, I think it is basically true.  We assign projects, then we grade them according to our standards.  In most of my classes, creativity is not desired, doing the assignment according to the directions is.  Just yesterday I was grading projects in a class.  All the students were doing PowerPoint presentations on ski areas with links to each area.  One student did his project totally different from the other students.  It was not really according to the instructions, yet it did meet the purpose of the assignment.  Before reading AW week 8, I probably would have marked him off and asked him to complete the assignment like the rest of the students.  But this time, I recognized his creative solution to the project.  I am going to try to be even more encouraging to my students and their unique approaches to the assignments.  Too often, if the work is fine, I make no comment; only pointing out the inaccuracies.  This is subtle discouragement and I need to also point out what they did well.

I also think back to my own schooling.  So much of it was just rote memorization, creativity not encouraged, follow directions, spit the information out on the test and then forget about it.  It remained that way throughout my schooling and college. When I returned to graduate school to work on my Master’s degree, it was a different world.  Now the professors wanted our reactions, opinions, introspections, incites, and fresh research ideas.  It was a very difficult transition.  The first paper I wrote, I received a low grade with the comment, “This is a good essay.  I want your reflection.”  Huh?  I had to learn a whole new way of learning and responding.  Now I had to reflect on what the material meant to me, how it had changed me, how I could or would use it in the future.  It was a definite growth period.  Now critical thinking was encouraged and valued.  Why do “they” (the school systems) spend 20 years beating the creativity and original thought out of us, and then in graduate school try to resurrect it?

Comments

[Lynsey Bourke]

My college girlfriends and I spend many a night pondering the same questions...we pop open a bottle (or three) of wine, and sit around the kitchen table assessing our own worth, our successes and failures. Are we smart enough to get into grad schools? Do we come across as articulate, mature women, or do we sound like ignorant little children? We also find that a professors words can either totally tear up our worlds, or they can incourage beyond what they could even imagine. For some reason, many academics feel that it is thier role to keep academia a little good ole boys club where only one "type" of person can really be accepted, while i understand that academia needs to have high standards, I feel that it scares off brilliant people. My college girlfriends and I are really good students. If we are incredibly insecure about our own intellect as successful students at a four year private university, then what does academic snobbery do to students at community college or huge state schools? I'd imagine they are even more lost in the confusion.