We have a retired VP who wanted to try her hand at teaching so now an adjunct until the end of this academic year. She made a comment the other day about the students in her capstone management class based in our student run restaurant. She said, "the students just don't want to analyze the results of their marketing efforts." Let me say straight away that she is a horrible teacher. And like many VP's has no clue how to run a business at the unit level. I just love it when industry people find out that what they did to plan, direct, organize and control employees in the "real world" does not translate at all in an academic setting. So, naturally it is the students who are to blame for not responding to them when they are the one's who are clueless on what it takes to be a great teacher. Afterall, anyone can teach, right?!
Of course, the comment made by our adjunct is made by others who are experienced teachers, too! They blame their students for just not "getting it." Like the old adage that a "bad golfer blames the clubs" and a "poor workman blames the tools" we have educators who just love to blame students for their shortcomings.
Here is a straight up simple fact. The reason that students do not "get it" is that the teacher has a limited tool kit. Or put another way, the person sucks as a teacher. Amazingly there are teachers out there who attend teaching workshops, talk to colleagues about how they have solved problems, read books on teaching, attended teaching conferences and more to learn how to be better teachers. They then experiment with new techniques to see which ones work and which ones don't and become better teachers. Indeed they expanded their teaching toolkit and low and behold the students started to "get it" because the teacher was a more enlightened educator.
So do me a favor please. The next time a colleague says "these kids just don't want to....." suggest to them that perhaps they suck as a teacher. That will be a great conversation after that indeed!
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