Polarize people

Polarize the classroom.

Why do we believe that we have to make every student comfortable every moment possible? Why are those who demand thought, who toss students off balance, often find themselves on the irate end of a phone call or sitting in the principal's office like a recalcitrant child?

I was blessed with the opportunity to work at Seton Hill and teach a western civ class duo, WCT I and II, last spring. My students were superb, the learning environment even better -- the school's culture encouraged thought. Lovely concept!

I mentioned it briefly in my other blog, Simply Sentenced, that I was able to ask my students one of my favorite questions: "what if we're wrong?"

If that can't polarize, nothing will.

Imagine the implications. What if we're wrong about the higher power? What if we're wrong about all men being equal? What if we're misreading archaeological finds? What if we're wrong about peace? What if everything we stake our soul in is incorrect?

Perhaps worse, "what if we're right?"

Ponder that. What if the "mistakes" we made as humans weren't mistakes at all?

There is nothing more amazing to me then a room full of adults who are thinking. That's all I want: for my students to think and to question, for if they do that they can do anything. They can find wrongs and right them, they can change their lives, they can risk success.

To teach certain topics, you have to elicit emotion. Time and time again, conventional wisdom dictates something of that ilk. It's called experiential learning by the experts:

Take a room full of students, create a safe haven, and make them pretend to be people from various historical eras or pieces of literature. Line them up as parts of a sentence, let some be the words and others be the commas.

No.

Not for adults. Not for cognizant, street-smart adults. Not for people that we're supposed to treat as professionals. Not for the post-secondary crew. N-O, no. Frankly, maybe not even for the senior high. You be the judge when it comes to teenagers because, as all of you know, they tend to come with parents in tow. Particularly Gen-Y. Their parents even come with their own nickname, you know: Helicopter Parents.

(Trust me, you don't want to deal with Mr. Smith or Ms. Jones when it comes time for little Suzie to take a test or Skippy to turn in a project. )

For those readers who a sighing in relief because they are in the business world and not education, bad news: helicopters don't land upon college graduation. Be prepared for mom to call and re-negotiate Suzie's salary. Dad probably won't have qualms about dropping you an e-mail or twenty about Skippy's poor performance review.

So my previous post wrote about making meaning. Now I'm ranting about polarization. I want to polarize to make meaning for them. I want people to read this blog and think I'm either out of my gourd or the female answer to Peter Drucker. (I'll settle for somewhere in the middle, to be honest.)

If I can make you, the reader, think then I did my job. Great literature, the sort I used to teach in AP English 12, survives because it evokes emotion. Great literature is not great because it makes you happy, read any Shakespearean tragedy and you'll see what I mean. Great literature speaks to something within us. It hits a nerve and makes us emote whether we want to or not.

Some of my best classroom discussions were about why students hated a certain book. They hated what they were made to feel, all thanks to the words of Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, or Ralph Ellison.

So I ask: if literature can polarize, can my introduction to management class do the same? Can I make my 8 a.m. economics class wake up if we talk about fair prices for coffee in South America? Can I send my 9 a.m. into orbit with the half-wit statement that "sweatshops are good for a nation's economy"?

I can, and I have.

You see, when you polarize, you force thought. You demand that your students take a stance and jump off of the fence. When they do that, they have to come up with a defense. It's a slippery slope for them once they come down from that safe little fence, all of a sudden it's impossible to say "I can't judge because I didn't live it."

It forces them to make meaning for themselves.
And that's when they learn.