One of these things is not like the others
By WitchletsMom On July 27th, 2009I’m back in school this week. For those of you who care to split hairs with me I’ll gladly confess that I’ve never really left school (actually) at least not in any sort of lasting way. Sure, I’ll graduate. But I always relapse.
So this week is a summer course. You read that correctly. This week. One week, one course, three semester hours. AND it’s on a topic that is mentioned frequently at work. It seemed like a good way to get some course credit toward my Ph.D. and learn something that might be helpful at work all while not burning too much precious time. So far, so good.
The class has 13 people in it – a nice, comfortable number for dancing in the moonlight. Being a summer course the demographic is just exactly what you would predict. Twelve public school teachers of everything from grade-school math to high school Spanish all working toward a Master’s or Ed.D. in Administration. And me.
Adult learning theory figures into this course and as an adult learner I’ll take responsibility for my own experience. I’ll also take a moment to acknowledge individual differences and say that I’m an introvert. <insert “Duh”> I don’t like to participate in group discussions (15% of our grade) but I will. The trouble is, how?
Other student comments sound like I’ve found my way into a foreign language immersion course. K-12 education administration is not my forte. I’ve talked to the Witchlets’ school Principal. Does that count? Not so much.
Then there’s the self-consciousness factor. There’s a phenomenon that I’ve seen in the last two classes I’ve taken and it’s heavily at play here today. Education is being compared to Medicine. Education delivery is compared to Health care Delivery. It’s all standards, it’s all evidence-based, it’s all professional practice. And I have to wonder: Are these comparisons made when I’m not in the room? Does health care get mentioned this much in classes where the professor doesn’t have one particular student’s name to associate with it? Introverted minds want to know.
Because if this comparison is made in all the classes that I’m not sitting in but these other 12 students are, then why do I feel a pause after my comments? I’m required to participate in the discussions and yet, 12 people can play off of each others stories and I chime in with my favorite story and the discussion stalls. If I give context, I sound like I’m bragging. If I don’t give context, my comments make no sense. Either way, my comments always leave me sitting here feeling like the odd man out.
Now to put this into context for those who would read into this that my head is in some awful space, it isn’t. I’m outside my zone of comfort but it never lasts for long. I wouldn’t have made it this far as a student if I let my introversion shut me down. I’ll chime in, I’ll let the conversation stall and while I sit in my discomfort I’ll reflect on the fact that the other 12 are reflecting on their own discomfort. We all have our own unique experiences, some of us just end up in situations where we’re more unique than others.
Kinda like being a Pagan in Virginia.
“Other student comments sound like I’ve found my way into a foreign language immersion course. K-12 education administration is not my forte.”
So talk about how you teach adults about the ins and outs of medicine. Not necessarily your formal students, either. As I said to you before, “Put it to me as if you were talking to one of your first-year medical students and I’ll ask a question if there’s a concept I’m missing.” Adult learning is a dialectic – adult learners have the responsibility to ask those questions when they’re missing a concept.
I took a 3-day workshop on Adult Learning theory where I work, and heck, you’re almost as introverted as I am. Everyone in the class (see certificate here: http://bit.ly/WrfNv ) had to do a 6-10 minute presentation to teach something. I taught people how to relieve stress headaches by self-massage of the sternocleidomastoid without accidentally cutting off blood flow on the carotid – and if you look at my certificate, anatomy wasn’t exactly a strong point of *my* classmates, either. ;>
Well, I survived it. It took a little time to sort out that we were all working together to learn and that if I was going to have to try to “translate” how Special Education had anything in common with a Medical School then they could translate my comments, too. And it worked.
Now I just wait for the grade and the meeting with my adviser to discuss how many more classes I have left.