I came back to the classroom today, virtually at least. I wanted to talk the big important things going on in the world out with my students. My class of first-year students, which is a section of Critical Thinking and Reading, is reading newspapers. For the last several years, the disengagement of my students from national and world events has been surprising and often disheartening.
This class is my attempt to work on that.
This section of FRST 1002 is totally different from everything I've done before. I've chucked my longstanding syllabus for this class out the window, and I think I've done so for sound pedagogical reasons. In the spring, students taking FRST programs are often, though not always, students who were not successful in the class in the fall. There's nothing homogenous about the students or why they are in their second semester of CT, as far as I can tell. Since something is holding each of them back, however, I'm trying to give them every opportunity to succeed. That means changing a LOT about my teaching habits.
I've mostly done away with required readings, though reading is still required. I've had them get subscriptions to three good newspapers: the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. I had wanted to do this for a while. I just want students to have had exposure to consistently solid journalism, the type that costs something, that you have to pay for, that isn't given out cheap on the streets, to take a step back from social media and its algorithms. I genuinely don't know what the discussion is going to be about from day to day.
The class is the conversations we have. That's it. They need to generate a journal of what they have read, but that's just so I have something tangible to prove the class existed. And we're having the right kinds of conversations, in my opinion, these are very much the type of conversations that I remember having in college. We shoot the shit and get into deep water sometimes, and these students, some of whom were not successful in the past, are doing it. They're game. They're talking. They're throwing out the right questions, hard questions, and they are trying to tackle it. And it's fun; I think they are having fun. Along the way, I'm trying to help bolster civil literacy, which is totally in line with the mission of public education and my school specifically. For instance, during the talk about Ukraine, someone asked, "What is NATO?" Like, thank god someone asked, man. I'd hate to think that I'd say something about Article 5 and my students not have a vocabulary to make sense of what is going on.
Yeah, it's going well.