With that cliche for a title, I violate one of the first rules of blog-writing that my writing fellows advised my students against. And with that preposition, I end my first sentence (while beginning this second one with a conjunction). Thus begins the terrifying journey of completing my own assignment in front of my own students - and anyone else who cares to take joy from observing this self-inflicted pain. May as well start by keeping the expectations low.
You see, by keeping this blog, my students are going to realize a lot of things we professors usually try to hide. Like, for starters, the fact that we continually rely upon the same cliches and intentionally keep the same grammatical gaffes we criticize them for. Or that we don't always recognize how challenging, stress-inducing, and time-consuming our assignments can be (or that when we come up with them, we don't actually imagine having to do them ourselves). One thing we professors particularly like to hide is that we don't actually have all the answers (and by all, I mean most, or perhaps any) - another fact that is going to become apparent to you all pretty soon. I don't think we're really fooling anyone but ourselves, yet by even attempting to hide any of these things, we're not entering into the same vulnerability we're asking of our students. Without that vulnerability, can they trust us that we trust them to learn? [Do we actually trust them to learn?] Especially if that learning requires taking risks, being different, digging deeper and taking responsibility for their own learning? Especially when it means admitting when you don't know something?
This brings us to the class at hand, which is itself one big experiment. I mean, with a humble title like "Sustainable Development Solutions," where could we go wrong? [I told them the third day of class the title should actually have a question mark at the end.] As if all this weren't self-serving and esoteric enough, I then placed them into interdisciplinary teams, assigned each team to an international project, and basically told them to "take the year and figure it all out." Oh yeah, and blog about it along the way.
Well, once I hit "Publish," there's no turning back (and at this point I'm still 70% sure I'll hit "Publish"). I'm committing to put it it all out there for everyone to see. I'm requiring my students do the same, and even more cruelly, I'm grading them on it - grading them critically, no less. There will be no editing, revising, or re-posting. No hiding of our motivations, our goals, our shortcomings and constraints. Just a genuine effort to humbly reveal who we are, where we are, what we're doing and what we're learning along the way. Lesson #1: students should definitely try challenging more of their professors to complete some of the very assignments they require of them.
You see, by keeping this blog, my students are going to realize a lot of things we professors usually try to hide. Like, for starters, the fact that we continually rely upon the same cliches and intentionally keep the same grammatical gaffes we criticize them for. Or that we don't always recognize how challenging, stress-inducing, and time-consuming our assignments can be (or that when we come up with them, we don't actually imagine having to do them ourselves). One thing we professors particularly like to hide is that we don't actually have all the answers (and by all, I mean most, or perhaps any) - another fact that is going to become apparent to you all pretty soon. I don't think we're really fooling anyone but ourselves, yet by even attempting to hide any of these things, we're not entering into the same vulnerability we're asking of our students. Without that vulnerability, can they trust us that we trust them to learn? [Do we actually trust them to learn?] Especially if that learning requires taking risks, being different, digging deeper and taking responsibility for their own learning? Especially when it means admitting when you don't know something?
This brings us to the class at hand, which is itself one big experiment. I mean, with a humble title like "Sustainable Development Solutions," where could we go wrong? [I told them the third day of class the title should actually have a question mark at the end.] As if all this weren't self-serving and esoteric enough, I then placed them into interdisciplinary teams, assigned each team to an international project, and basically told them to "take the year and figure it all out." Oh yeah, and blog about it along the way.
Well, once I hit "Publish," there's no turning back (and at this point I'm still 70% sure I'll hit "Publish"). I'm committing to put it it all out there for everyone to see. I'm requiring my students do the same, and even more cruelly, I'm grading them on it - grading them critically, no less. There will be no editing, revising, or re-posting. No hiding of our motivations, our goals, our shortcomings and constraints. Just a genuine effort to humbly reveal who we are, where we are, what we're doing and what we're learning along the way. Lesson #1: students should definitely try challenging more of their professors to complete some of the very assignments they require of them.
