This morning, I posted this on Twitter:
And yet, here I am, 2 hours later writing a blog post…
Full disclosure. I’ve also checked my Twitter feed & notifications 3 times.
And I’ve also cried. Seriously sobbed.
Over the past few days, I have done EVERYTHING to avoid working on my assignment for a Research Methods course I am taking as part of my MEd.
On Wednesday, I hosted my first Coffee EDU. Though I was really worried that it would just be me and a book, it turned out to be an amazing gathering of educators and the conversation was so rich. When I got home, I was exhilarated and exhausted and couldn’t possibly work on my assignment.
Yesterday, instead on working on it, I signed up for the EduMatch Passion Pitch moderated by Sarah Thomas as part of Shelly Sanchez-Terrell’s 30Goals e-conference (which you should really check out if you are NOT working on an assignment). I had never done anything that spur-of the moment before. I thought I would throw up I was so nervous, but I got to meet Shelly and Sarah, whom I’ve admired on Twitter and several other really great educators who shared their passions.
Then last night, instead of working on my assignment, I revised a blog post and added it as a guest post to Edu_match (again something that I would recommend if you have some spare time). It was awesome and I was temporarily ecstatic, until I sat back down to my course work, realizing that I really should have used those precious hours to get caught up.
I told myself that I was doing these things to “put myself out there”, to “try something new”. I did things that disrupted my routine, in the hope that the adrenaline rush that comes with trying something new might somehow help.
And of course, it’s summer, so I need to spend some time with my family by the pool, planning our summer road trip, and watching our favourite Netflix shows.
But the reality is. I am avoiding my assignment(s). Because I feel completely and utterly out of my element here. I am re-reading research articles over and over again and I quite literally still don’t understand the “research methodology” or the “conceptual framework” at work or why the “standard deviation” really matters. I may as well be reading a foreign language and I have never felt quite so stupid in my life.
Does any of this make sense to you, because it sure makes no sense to me!
(From: Children’s utilization of emotion expectancies in moral decision-making Steven G. Hertz* and Tobias Krettenauer Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2014)
I know that I SHOULD contact my professor and that she will be more than willing to help me, but I don’t think I will. I will go to Youtube, ask a friend, and keep struggling through it. I have even decided that I will be satisfied with a lower grade, even though I really won’t. I know when I get through this, I will be better for it, but the feeling of failure is a palpable right now: an anchor weighing me down and I’m drowning.
I wonder if this is what my own students felt when we read Shakespeare together. Me, with a passion for the nuances of the language, my students completely and utterly befuddled. Is that why some of them didn’t hand anything in or were completely off-task in class? Or why my students didn’t come for extra help when they needed it? Or resorted to plagiarizing?
Of course it is.
Self regulation and resiliency are not easy skills to teach, develop, or support. I think recognizing that might be a good place to start.
I will start by moving this post from Draft to Published and go and work on my assignment.
N.B. This post reflects a moment in time. You will note from the comments that I did seek help from my professor (who was incredibly supportive) and that many of my peers were struggling as much as I was. Nonetheless, this moment of reflection been an important one, for me. How do we deal with the reality of teaching students who may be feeling the struggle? How do we stay in tune with that and how do we support them along the way?
I’m so glad that I saw this post in Doug’s weekly Edublogs Blog Post! It’s clear here that you’re speaking from the heart and struggling with issues that many of our students do too. If a student of yours were to write about similar struggles, what would you recommend to him/her? Why are you reluctant to ask your professor for help? As adult learners, I often wonder why we don’t want to tell our professors that we’re struggling, when we would often encourage our students to tell us (and ask for help). Maybe it’s okay to say more often, “This is hard. I’m not giving up. I will persevere. But I need help.” Knowing when to work through problems alone is great, but maybe we also need to know when the struggle is just too much. What do you think?
Aviva
Hi Aviva,
You raise some really good questions that I’ve been asking myself as well. I know that for me personally, I haven’t been a student in a LONG time and so I have felt insecure from the beginning. I feel that I excel in a variety of arenas, and I guess you get used to feeling that you can accomplish anything, so that when you do encounter difficulty, it feels insurmountable.
I would hope that my students would have the courage to raise their own struggles, but in a high school context, I know that isn’t always the case. Like me, a student wouldn’t necessarily want to admit such vulnerability, unless he/she had forged a relationship and therefore felt somewhat “safe” in doing so. At the time of writing this post, I hadn’t developed a comfort level yet with my peers or the professor. And I guess that’s what I’m thinking: asking for help and persevering through academic struggles are in large part dependent on teacher-student relationships. Would you agree?
In class, later that week, I did actually risk looking stupid and asked for clarification and realized that everyone struggled with that same passage as well. And that is a realization that I needed and I suspect might make a difference for students as well. I wonder if as teachers, we need to model the struggle a little bit? By that I mean, using something like a think aloud to show that working through an academic challenge is normal? And when a student does take a risk to ask for clarification, respond in a very positive way?
I also think back to your post on learning skills and wonder if spending lots of time on those might help create a culture within a classroom whereby a student would feel confident enough to ask for help when needed? In particular, I’m thinking about initiative which includes taking risks: how can we co-construct with students what “risk taking” looks like in various educational contexts? how can we model that? and have students regularly self-assess?
I’m glad you saw my blog in @DougPete’s What’s New in Ontario Edublogs as well and I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my post and for challenging me a little bit.
🙂 Jen
Jennifer
Thanks for sharing your struggle. I have been in exactly the same place myself and every time I am, I learn something new from it that informs my classroom practice. The really interesting point though is that most of the time graduate courses don’t include the opportunity for students to share this type of reflection (feedback) with the professor/instructor/course designer. If that reflection doesn’t get back to me from my students, there is no way I can make changes to improve the learning opportunities for all of my students.
Here are some comments from a grade 11 student extracted from her Showcase Portfolio:
“This course has been a huge obstacle for me. I have had such a hard time, but I continued to finish work and hand in without feel accomplished. I feel this course is all about analyzing a text using a literary lens, breaking a text down and see what’s in between the lines. Since I was small I have always been writing stories. I enter contests time to time and to encounter a writing technique I can’t do is frustrating. That sounds like fun for me, but I can’t seem to find no inner meanings in any texts. I continue to try to find these hidden meanings in every assignment and other courses and I feel I might be almost there. I was given a independant novel to read, analyze and write an essay on. I really enjoyed the novel but I just seem to be summarizing the novel and going nowhere.”
I knew that the student was having difficulty moving from a surface reading of a text to deep reading of it. We conferenced about her work and I modelled my process of reading and thinking. We reviewed the process I had put in place to support this work. And yet, at the end of the semester she still feels unaccomplished. I need to hear this from her. I need to know that her lack of accomplishment (not just the feeling, but productivity) wasn’t due to out of school factors that I might presume. I need to know so that I can continue to learn how I can support her next semester.
Metacognition and reflection are two of the biggest factors in our success as learners. Like yourself, the student I quote above, may be struggling with a particular skill but ultimately the ability to talk about the challenge in learning will ensure success.
Thanks again for sharing your story. It has given me this moment of reflection.
Hi Julie,
I appreciate hearing that you’ve been there and that the growth that will inevitably come afterward will be a positive learning opportunity for me–it already has in some ways.
I agree that metacognitive reflection is essential! That’s what this blog post was for me: a record of my learning journey at that moment in time. In my (very limited) experience as a grad student, I have been asked for feedback, but not until the end of the course, so I don’t know if that feedback was acted upon.
I think about your student who felt “unaccomplished”, but who was given the opportunity to not just reflect on her struggle, but confer with you, and in turn, have you respond. How wonderful that she knew you were there to help her as she moved through the rest of the school year. That is the iterative process that perhaps needs to occur and that is what’s missing if we only ask students to reflect at the end of units or at the end of the semester.
The more opportunities we can give kids to share their thinking in an ongoing way, the more varied the opportunities and mediums we can use for kids to share their struggles, the more insight we will have into those struggles and the more we can help them to feel a sense of accomplishment.
Thanks for sharing your students’ and your own thoughts here to push my own thinking about metacognition.
Jen
Jennifer, I just want to reach out and give you a big hug. It sounds like you need it! Aviva and Julie made great comments on the academic ramifications of your post; I want to focus on the emotional, if that’s okay. First, some empathy: the hardest, HARDEST course I took as part of my M.Ed. was my Educational Research course, which sounds similar to yours (and it was during the summer, and partly during a trip I took, and online). It ended up being one of my most memorable, but that was because of the a) understanding professor and b) fellow struggling students who were just as confused and befuddled as I was. Misery loves company? I don’t know. It’s the feelings associated with all of it that makes it so darn challenging: the new things you tried that met with success = ecstatic, exhilarated, (positively) exhausted, (initially) nervous vs the #@&%$#* statistics task you tried that did not yet meet with success = out of your element, stupid, etc. That does stuff to our brain. It’s not a failure in self-regulation for you to choose “new and doable although scary” instead of “old and seemingly-impossible and un-fun”. Maybe it’s like giving birth (or writing your M.Ed paper, which I only survived with drinking, swearing, crying and praying, not necessarily in that order): it’s pretty horrible but after all the pain and suffering is over, you have something nice to show for it. Hang in there, and let us know how you get through the yucky parts.
Hi Diana,
Thanks for the hug!! Funny thing about capturing a moment in time like that on a blog post…writing it down is cathartic, but sharing it is not necessarily a desirable outcome. I actually pressed “Publish” and didn’t share the post URL as I usually do, thinking that no one would read it and that my very personal moment would quietly disappear. But, I didn’t write my thoughts and fears in a physical journal, I wrote it on my blog which is a public space. So when George Couros shared it and then Doug Peterson included it in This Week in Ontario Edublogs, I was simultaneously flattered (that they would read and share my writing) and horrified (that the world would catch a glimpse of my vulnerability)!
I have since wondered if I should have just written it and saved it as a Draft, but then I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to chat with you and Julie and Aviva and a few others about this experience. You are so right when you say that these moments do stuff to your brain!
Since then, I have learned that 98% of us are struggling with some of this content and that our professor actually assigned it to help us through the research we will encounter as we go along. I didn’t know that when I was struggling through it all on my own at the kitchen table while my family enjoyed the sunshine and I distracted myself with other things. This is the not-so-positive-thing about taking an online course, isn’t it?
I think there will be lots more yucky parts, but for now, I am feeling a whole lot better about where I am and genuinely appreciate the support!
🙂 Jen
PS Thanks for the heads up that drinking, swearing, crying, and praying will help me get through my thesis!