A reflection on a week's classes

            This has been an interesting week of classes; and interesting doesn't mean good! Freire said in last week's reading that the oppressor is also harmed through the act of oppression, and I think this week provided an apt example of how this can happen in the classroom. Since I've started teaching Dankook, I've tried to steer clear from stamping down my authority in class, not out of a desire to be loved, but because I believe that it generally affects motivation negatively. This week presented me with a situation where it seemed I had no other way though.

             My Tuesday afternoon class is a 50/50 mix of business and dance students -the first half being motivated and fairly high-level, the second quite the opposite. Up till this week I had attempted through enthusiasm to get the dance students to become more involved, but on Tuesday it seemed as if the business students were actually joining the dance students in being disinterested and even disruptive, continuing to talk to each other even as I was trying to explain something. After a few failed attempts to get things going, I eventually had to resort to "violence" -I took down the names of 3 students for speaking Korean, and the next time somebody didn't answer a question, I did the same thing. I wrote down 5 or 6 names in the next 5 minutes, explaining to them that this would affect their participation scores. The mood in class changed drastically and people started participating, out of fear rather than real interest. At that point I told them that we could do the class like that for the rest of the semester, but that I personally would rather teach than be a policeman. Students nodded, I morphed back into cheerful entertaining mode and the class went fine from there. During group discussions  I went round and made sure that everyone was okay. Mission accomplished, you could say; I'm pretty sure that class is going to shape up very well from here and make some real progress in spite of their level. But this is Machiavelli, not Freire.

           Freire became true the next morning, when for a much smaller reason I gave another class a similar speech to the one above, and motivation immediately dropped. In between classes, speaking to my co-"oppressors", I found that they had been experiencing similar problems, which reinforced my belief that I needed to be stricter in class. The next day, I asked a girl to leave the class if she wasn't interested in participating, the first time I had ever done that in almost 6 years of teaching.

         I believe that  the first instance of "violence" changed me, especially since it had been effective. It influenced my behavior and the "violence" carried over to other classes. After the class where I had asked the girl to leave, I thought about it and realized that I had let myself be caught up in a downward cycle of motivation, and in my classes today I consciously pulled away from exercising authority, with much more positive results.

         I still believe my actions in the original class were appropriate; the only other option at that point would've been to throw my hands up in the air and give up on the class, which I was not prepared to do. The true danger of any "violence", however, lies in its powers of seduction once you have used it.