Ruth Mirtz’ article irks me not because I necessarily disagree with her assessment, but because group discussions are a tricky business. Our class is the only one in which I feel group discussion works as it should, especially in the smaller groups of two or three. First, we’re grad students. Our concerns with what classmates will think of our opinions shouldn’t be our primary concern. Second, the assessment of our group discussions is not limited to our classroom evaluation at the end of this semester. In fact, I’d say we don’t care much about how Pam interprets our conversations or conclusions, let alone how her evaluations of our work will affect our final grade. For us, there is a greater pressure on the horizon.
We’re working towards a frightening few semesters, dipping our toes into instructional waters that could be icy or boiling. We have goals beyond the classroom, life goals, and occupational goals: getting a job, keeping it, spreading what we perceive as our wealth of knowledge to students, others, whomever, becoming good teachers, good human beings. Undergraduates, in this case college freshmen, are insecure, intellectually shy individuals who have yet to find a place in their world or within themselves. What Mirtz diagrams, the sociological aspects of groups’ idle chatter, is a form of coping, of finding out what the rest of the group is about, and filling a role they feel comfortable with and feel others will feel comfortable with, too.
I don’t know if you can diagram or control group discussions at that stage of education and you certainly cannot avoid idle chatter. I prefer classroom discussions instead of small groups unless, as Brian suggested last week, we know students as well as they know each other. That’s a great goal to have in class, to get everyone conversing in a friendly manner whether about classroom topics or ‘how much beer they drank that weekend’. Mirtz glosses over an important factor, teacher presentation and interaction, to focus on students. Yes, the classroom is a fifty-fifty divide between teachers and students, but I consider the classroom like a family. When children do wrong, their parents are questioned. Similarly, when students do nothing, if they are uninvolved, staring at one another like bumps on a log, I would first question the instructor.
I’ll share a personal story. Last fall in one of my classes we had to do group presentations on certain short stories. The class so far had lacked any structure, with constant changes in due dates, assignments, syllabi, and professor opinions. This wouldn’t have been a problem if the professor was the root, the stable foundation of the classroom. The first day of class the professor was fifteen minutes late, left for a cigarette break, cursed, hadn’t made a syllabus, and farted, rumbling the table under her while giving a little laugh (I kid you not). This was an almost every day occurrence (well, everything but the flatulence). For writing conferences, the professor made appointments with students, like me, and never showed up or asked if we could wait an extra hour for her to get back. The professor took our contact information and would occasionally call some of us to talk about our work, but the conversations would stray off topic after a few minutes, as if a professor calling your cell phone to chat wasn’t uncomfortable enough. There were no real grades in the course. The expectations were whatever ‘you felt’ or ‘it doesn’t matter to me’. The worst part were our assigned readings, not because they were arduous, but because the professor filled class time with stories about her sex life, dangerous children, serial killing, high school talent shows, and questions about African American hair, not discussion of our text.
So, when our group presentations came up, we just sat and talked or sometimes did other homework. The professor never checked to see what we were doing, instead running errands around campus during class or chatting it up with students in the hallway. This went on for about a week. I did nothing in my group, learned nothing, wishing I hadn’t driven in the snow to get to a class where the professor didn’t take attendance anyway. The professor, who liked to belch aloud and comment upon the sound of it, didn’t know our presentation schedule, didn’t know who was covering what stories, didn’t have set groups, and didn’t really have any sort of grading method in mind. My group didn’t even present. We sat and watched a few others. I got an A in the course.
If the professor had a semblance of a pedagogical, methodological, hell, logical clue or care, our group discussions would’ve been productive as we read great stories and were all English majors. But since our professor ran our class so poorly, beyond the accepted definition of ‘free-spirited’, and we knew what the expectations were (none), grading scale (made up), we didn’t do a thing and didn’t feel bad doing it. If a student is not feeling like he/she is getting her money/time/effort worth from the professor, what’s to stop them from blowing off the class? I tell you, when I showed up for my conference about final grades with that professor and was told, after waiting for a half hour, that she had went home to pick up her kids and run some errands and oh, could I wait for her to get back, she doesn’t know when, I felt betrayed. When a professor betrays that sense of commitment and trust, everything, group discussions, classroom atmosphere, student participation, will be lost.
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