The Heart of the Matter: Talking to Students

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

"How did you become a teacher?
I got older than the students"
                    Korean folk song from Cholla-do

In How Teachers Taught, 1890-1980, Larry Cuban writes of the "psychic rewards" of teaching, that human interplay between teacher and student that fulfills us and perhaps sets a course for a student towards a future influenced in some way by a teacher with whom he or she had a close relationship. I teach from 50 to 100 students per semester at Santa Barbara City College in Santa Barbara, California. My students are native Californians, immigrants, children of immigrants, and international students, along with a smattering of students from other states in the United States. My first and principal task is getting my reading and writing classes to form learning communities. Sometimes I am successful and the semester and the class go along quite well, like an engine that doesn’t need the catalyst of the teacher/facilitator.

Most of the time, however, my classes are not whole learning communities, but rather become composed of little groups of students who have bonded with each other or who came into the class together, and then a handful of students who through shyness or preference are on their own. I mix students together to work. I do this in many different ways: by ability demonstrated on an assignment, by gregariousness, by lack of facility in English, by common interests, and, I use homogenous and heterogeneous groupings: like with like, and unlike with unlike. For example, I might group three students together who each come from small towns in northern California or I might group four students who come from very distant places, say Tokyo, Chicago, Kazhakstan, and Los Angeles. I take time to talk to students before class, during class, after class, when I see them on campus, during office hours, and during our hour and a half of work in the campus writing lab. I worry when students work too many hours because then they usually run out of class to their jobs without a chance for me to talk to them. In the past, I have talked with involuntarily pregnant students, homeless students, battered students, alcoholic students, and depressed students. Some of my students use alcohol and drugs. I often find out quickly about the former and sometimes don’t find out about the latter. As the years pass, I find that more and more, my work is to talk to students, sit with them, and find out about their lives. I believe this is relevant because my desire is to serve them in the best way I can. That means finding out what is on their minds. For example a couple years ago, one young man missed a few classes and was two assignments behind. I had thought to myself that when he returned, I would give him a little pep talk about responsibility and not falling behind. A day or so before he returned to class, I received some handwritten drafts from him with a cover note which asked me to excuse him because he had been homeless since the beginning of the semester, and he was struggling to stay in school. Then I ask myself why I didn’t have the wit to think of alternative reasons for his poor performance in school. They might be similar to reasons that many of my students did poorly in high school. The courses I teach are for college students whose reading and writing skills are not at college level; thus, all of my students, save the second language international students, had experienced failure in American high schools.

This past semester I had a few surprises. I had three particular challenges that were a little different for me. In one class I had a group of four young Mexican-American men who were a unit. They came to class or not as a group. They sat as a group. They did their work or not as a group. They kept up a constant stream of chatter in my class, which though not terribly disruptive, was often annoying enough for me to talk to them as a group and as individuals to see how I could get them to stop. I offered to help them in writing lab, but they sat together and infrequently asked for help. Towards the end of the semester, they started missing class more than attending. Finally, they came to class one day and one young man asked to speak to me outside the classroom. He said that his roommate had been mugged and he had taken him to the hospital. He said that he would make up the work. Even though he was the only one of the group to offer an explanation, the whole group was absent during the time of this incident. Time moved forward and final portfolios were due. Students knew from the first day of class that they had to produce five essays for the course, and choose to revise three of them for a portfolio. In this group of young men, not one had written five essays. When the portfolio day came, two of the young men did not come to class although we had spoken and they had promised to do the work, and the two of them who were in class were incredulous that I actually would stick to my requirement of five essays. Rather than discussing it with me, one young man simply picked up his books and walked out of class. A second did the same. Despite dozens of reminders and time spent talking, this group of young men simply did not believe that I wouldn’t accept three or four essays instead of five, and that I would require of them the same I did of all the other students. So, the end result was that each of them received no credit for the work they did through fifteen weeks of class, accepting failure in the sixteenth week. I subsequently talked to one of the young men. I told him that though he might love his buddies, he still had to do the work by himself and be responsible for it. I hope I got the message across.

A second strange relationship was one I had with a young woman who habitually came late to class. Sheila (not her name) proved to be a decent writer and a conscientious student in all other ways despite her lateness. However, about two thirds of the way through the class, she began to miss a lot of classes. I approached her outside of class when she returned. She told me she had had a breakdown and been hospitalized. She also said that she was being treated for alcoholism. I asked her if she had been drinking that day and she said no, that she was in a treatment program. She came to class maybe twice after that and I never saw her again. Sheila would have passed the course easily. I don’t know what happened to her. I hope she and I get another chance. I guess I didn’t talk to her enough for her to be honest with me. I think the alcohol won.

The third relationship was between a young black man from Oakland and myself. James (not his name) was struggling with adapting to Santa Barbara which is a small rich white expensive tourist city, very unlike Oakland, which is urban, largely poor and has a substantial black American community. James also was trying to pay his way for himself, putting in long hours at a local supermarket and getting financial aid. However, he began to fall behind in his work. What I found out was that he couldn’t buy books and materials because his financial aid had somehow gotten delayed and he was struggling just to get by. James was a sincere and enthusiastic student, with a tremendous desire to learn, but with a lot of work to do to get to college level writing. I kept getting promises from James that he would catch up. At the eleventh hour, he came through and gave me all his work. We talked and he thanked me for sticking with him. I was thinking it was I who should thank him, with so much against him, he had succeeded, and thus demonstrated for me what a hunger to learn and a strong will can accomplish.

When I ask my students for feedback, one of the positives I get is the time I spend with them one to one in writing lab. This confirms for me my belief that the only way to help a writer progress is to work with him or her on a one to one basis as often as possible. That means talking to him or her, learning who the student is, what he or she wants, what stands in his or her way, and what I can do to make the path to learning smoother. For it is true, that the teacher is an illusion. We teach ourselves with the help of those who wish to guide us because it is good to do so. In order to be good guides, we need to learn how the path to learning appears to those with whom we work. Does it appear daunting? Does it appear without apparent reward? The only way to find this out is to talk to students.

Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Skills of Teacher Training course at Pilgrims website.