I had a great teaching day today!

What an excellent feeling it is when you feel like the discussion in a classroom was productive, interesting and actually *gasp* educational! I've taught this text four times before this and I have never had such a good preliminary discussion of it. And I have to wonder if it has to do with the conscious choice I made this time to structure the beginning of the class period by talking about something that was in many ways actually peripheral to the text. I started talking about a theme that is only dealt with in about a tenth of the essay, mostly just because I felt like I needed to put some more structure into what are usually more loose discussions in class. But the strategy seemed to work. It gave us a language with which to contrast the important parts of the essay, and I think more importantly, the students felt more comfortable talking about the text after they had sat through a traditional style 'lecture' full of unfamiliar terms and concepts.

It's odd, this psychological dimension to class planning. Many times, I can't always put myself into the head of a freshman undergrad - I would find it boring to get a lecture about Marxism when what I'm supposed to eventually write about is Requiem for a Dream, but they seemed to actually like it. At one point, I just stood back and let them discuss it among themselves - they really engaged with it.

So I guess the lesson I've learned is to lecture at them for a bit, as much as I dislike doing so, and then get a discussion going. Who would've thought a seminar would run best with a lecture component? I always thought of them as two different things. If you've taught before, maybe you know what I mean... or maybe I just have a weird group of freshmen... or maybe it was a fluke. Regardless, I felt like it was worth going to school today to teach, and that makes some of the disappointments of the last week seem less intensely important.