Engage

Who needs activities? What you need is passion.

Action is nice, activities are nice. Use them in the classroom whenever you can -- but if you're doing them without passion, fellow teachers, those activities boarder on useless. At worst, they are motions used to get a good review and make our bosses happy. At best, without passion, they are a quick fix. A placebo to replace your disinterest. Students are not stupid; they know when we don't care.

There are enough talking heads out there telling you what to do with the students. Everyone has a workshop designed to show you how to motivate the masses before you. I'm more interested in talking about the things that happen before you walk into the classroom. That's what Ferocious Tigers is interested in, um, chewing on.

At a workshop last week, a speaker told us to get motivated or get a new career. We have no room to be malcontents. We are here to instruct, to guide, and to facilitate. That's all well and good -- and I agree. But, let's face it, how many of us would leave one post-secondary school for another?

All the gold stars in the world won't spark our disinterest when we're mentally exhausted, beaten down by you-name-it in the world of academia.

Teaching now has to engage and involve, to pull the student in and give meaning to everything. We have to meet the immediate-gratification mentality of the world today. We teachers are probably all well-versed in ways to engage the customers. More and more we are told to be entertainers. Edu-tainers, if you will.

Our concept of reality in the classroom colors our attitudes and thus our personality, our public self. What if, rather then walk in armed to teach topic, we walked in with the mentality that our classrooms were businesses and the students were potential employees?

This can work. Trust me. Just think about the best teachers that you ever encountered. They had passion, didn't they? They convinced you to enjoy something you may have otherwise abhorred. The sold you on something you didn't otherwise care much about or saw much meaning in.

You're a salesperson, like it or not. So, let's talk about selling, beginning with perspective. Your perspective. I'm taking a page from Guy Kawasaki on this one:

Make Meaning.

To do that, he says, you have to do one of three things: prevent the end of something good, right a wrong, and improve the quality of life. I've taken these ideals and took the teacher approach:

1. Prevent the end of something good.
What is good is your energy, your passion. The reason you got into this career was not, as the joke goes, the money. You got into this career because you believed in it. So prevent the end of something good: prevent the death of your optimism. Do what you need to do to keep that energy off paycheck-infused life-support. Focus on the wild strawberry moments, savor them. The wild tigers and steep cliffs (metaphors for numbers-driven administrations and rabid students) can wait for two minutes. The world won't end if they don't have an immediate answer.

2. Right a wrong.
Find ways to right what you believe is wrong. This blog is one attempt to right the world. I think that workshops where they tell us to solve classroom problems with activities are wrong. To that end, I'm plotting my own version of teaching workshops and adding them to my growing collection of semi-canned lectures on ethics and management.

Walking into the classroom with the intent to right what needs righted can certainly energize us. For example, one of the greatest "wrongs" I perceive is that our urban students come in with virtually no problem-solving skills. If we wait for those above us to offer solutions, we are adding in the death of our own optimism. Find your wrongs, fix them.

I'm in the midst of fixing that wrong, by the way. That's a future blog.

3. Improve the quality of life.
Yours, not theirs. I love my desk. I've a few plants, a few pics, and a few good books on my desk. They overwhelm the work-related items, which is my intention. Desk toys, like those you find at Office Playground, are not made because people are bored. They're made because desk jockeys need a mental break now and again. So, who said post-secondary teachers can't do the same? Check out the website of Rainbow Hector, the "mascot" of a prof at my beloved alma mater, Seton Hill. Dennis has five -- six? seven? -- Hectors in his office alone.

Make meaning for yourself. Not for them.