On September 27th I attended an event called Teacher-Scholar: a Conversation with New Faculty in the English Department.” This event took place in Corey Union’s Fireplace Longue and allowed me to talk and connect in an informal manner with members of SUNY Cortland’s english department. The panel consisted of four members of the school’s faculty that are new to campus this year. Laura D, Danica Savonick, Jeffrey Jackson, and Katie Ahern provided me, as well as the rest of the group, with extensive information on what it means to truly be a teacher let alone a professor. Each spoke of how they incorporate their own interests into the classroom and implement them into certain aspects of their class. For example, Jeffrey Jackson talked of his passion for technology and how some semesters he aims to be paperless. Specifically he used technology in an experiment in the posting of his assignments on blackboard. Jeffrey made it so that in order to do one assignment, you must do all because the next assignment would only appear and unlock after the previous one was completed. This showed his implication of his interests into how he runs his classroom. This aso represented building towards a goal. By locking the assignments Jeffrey said it was “as if one must get over one hurdle before they take on the next one.” I thought this was a brilliant idea in that it allowed him to incorporate his own personal interests into the classroom in a way that teaches students a bigger life lesson.
Jeffrey Jackson specifically stuck me as extremely interesting in providing his insight about teaching as a whole. He stressed two particular ideas that I believe are extremely essential in being an educator. The first was the idea of failure. Jeffrey stated that failure is a learning experience and teachers “must recognize failure and provide students with room to fail, learn, and come back stronger on the other side of it.” Although failure is an extremely frightening idea in a public classroom setting, without it students would not personally experience the idea of continuing on in hopes of preserving next time. In addition to failure Jeffrey also stressed the importance of an instructor multitasking. He said that “teachers are seen as just providing information to students, but it is so much more that that. One must gather information about their students and their trend/vibe as their teaching in order to find methods that work best for these individuals. This leads to experiments in lesson plans with the notion that this technique may very well fail completely.
I thought that all these speakers gave us as students amazing insight as to how much work they do behind the scenes of the classroom. I also was fascinated in how they discussed confidence in the sense that they know that there is realistically a possible chance that their lesson plans could fail completely, or their interactive activities may fall apart. The message that I truly got from this seminar was that educating others is all about trial and error, and working with students in ways that is best for their learning. All in all I thought the discussion was extremely enlightening and I am grateful that these are the types of people SUNY Cortland is bringing into their faculty year after year.
This is a great event review, Maddie! I’m glad Professor Jackson’s remarks were useful to you. The point you make about failure is so important. It is through failure that we learn just about everything – testing ideas, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and revising our ideas accordingly. This seems true about both teaching and writing. And I know from watching you as a student how willing you are to test out and get feedback on your ideas! I hope you will take this willingness to fail into all of your classes and even your life beyond SUNY Cortland. If you do, I promise you will never get bored and you will always be learning new things about the world.