Now that the old teaching model of “sage on the stage” has finally given way to the more progressive “guide at the side,” academe is ready for another paradigm shift. In my classes, I have adopted a philosophy that I call “peer at the rear.” Here’s how I break down and then rebuild students’ expectations of a healthy student-instructor relationship.
I start the first day of the semester at the back of the classroom — literally. Students have no idea that I’m the professor. I pull this off by wearing clothes from Old Navy, sporting a backward baseball cap, and texting nonsense on a cellphone. If anyone tries to talk to me, I am prepared with gossip about misbehaving celebrities or new alternative-music bands.
When the real prof (the old me) doesn’t show up after about 15 minutes, I — as the pretend student — go ballistic. I loudly “diss” the administration, the academic system, and myself (the outdated teacher-me) and make a big show of riffling through the textbook and calling it a load of you-know-what before tossing it into the garbage can.
After I cool down a bit, some of the students usually start to leave. That’s when I casually mention that I saw some “cruddy syllabus or something” up at the front of the class. Of course they dutifully grab the paper before heading off to their next old-fashioned lecture. To further undermine the credibility of the phantom, old-school professor in their eyes, I intentionally make this syllabus as obtuse, incomplete, and condescending as possible.
At the start of the next class (while still disguised as a hip, slouching student), I call out something like, “Well, dudes, it looks like Señor Soper’s not gonna show; guess we’ll just have to teach ourselves!” That’s when the students really begin to take charge of their own education. Granted, they mostly just read the newspaper or talk about what they’re going to eat when they get out of class, but I can see in the way they carry themselves a new sense of ownership over their ideas and lunch plans.
In the middle of this second class period, I crank up some techno music on the sound system while doing a popping and locking dance routine. In the middle of it, I write in giant letters on the board — “Psych! I’m your instructor!” — and take off my baseball cap, revealing my receding hairline. I can tell that some of the students are relieved, but I keep them off balance by donning iPod earbuds, resuming my dance, and pretending that I can’t hear what they’re saying.
If students get so frustrated that they start to leave, I tone things down a bit and reveal the details of my peer-at-the-rear philosophy. That includes doing an imitation of what my old teaching persona might have done, had he been there. After getting a taste of that pedagogical nerd, they seem to chill out a bit.
I lay the ground rules: They have to treat me as an equal, not an authority figure or even a knowledgeable mentor. This includes calling me by my first name (or a cool nickname like “Kerr Dawg” or “Super Soper”) and greeting me with some kind of groovester handshake or laid-back fist bump. When that’s settled, I throw up my hands, say, “Dudes, the class is yours!,” and watch as the magic unfolds.
Eventually some of the more alert students will reluctantly organize themselves into study groups. This is a move in the right direction; they’re no longer relying on a self-inflated “professor” to show them the way. But they’re still full of predictably boring ideas, and so I do my best to disrupt their discussions with postmodern Socratic methods: walking around making annoying sounds; loudly interjecting Zen-like non sequiturs into their conversations (“he who dealt it, smelt it”); or standing behind someone while mouthing their words and mimicking their posture.
To get things going on especially slow days, I do have to facilitate a bit, but I like to keep it loose and open-ended. I might show some music-videoclips and maybe a segment from The Colbert Report, and then I’ll just shrug my shoulders and say in a bored voice, “Wassup?” This may irritate students who are still addicted to oppressive educational methods, but that’s my intention. Students need to be goaded to confront the fallacies of the industrial/pseudo-educational complex, such as “grades matter” and “professors know more than we do.”
But educational misconceptions are so deeply embedded that a large number of my young friends get frustrated with my progressive methods; sometimes they even mount a campaign for a new instructor or to get me fired. Right on! At least they’re passionate about an idea or cause — they’re no longer passive robots.
Ultimately, though, my core objective is to become students’ buddy — their “homey,” as it were. I try to achieve that rapport by first turning their animosity toward deserving targets — anal parents, stuffy professors, and faceless administrators. Then I build my own egalitarian friendship with them in a number of relentlessly methodical ways: following them around after class, texting them weird gossip about my colleagues, forwarding them hilarious YouTube clips; and showing up at their apartments to eat snacks and “crank some Halo” on the Xbox.
Many of the students resist those overtures, probably because truly progressive changes always feel a little uncomfortable at first. But by midsemester I usually manage to convert even the most stalwart holdouts when I start undermining the university’s “bogus” grading system. If students insist on handing in essays, I mock traditional evaluative judgments by writing nonsensical Beat poetry in the margins or by marking every third sentence with a shiny kindergarten star. Sometimes I even plagiarize random feedback from Wikipedia or SparkNotes, just to make a point.
If students insist on taking a test, I adopt Dadaistic strategies, like making them solve the kids’ word jumble from the Sunday comics page in a ridiculously short amount of time (“Go! You’ve got 12 seconds!”) or assigning draconian grades based only on penmanship. The latter traumatizes them until I make a big show of ripping up my grade book and feeding it through a portable shredder. In the end, they get to choose their own grade, of course. (Yes, it’s usually an A, but as if they even care at that point.)
Surprisingly, my student evaluations aren’t as stellar as you would expect. I get the occasional “You rock, dude,” but for the most part, my new peers seem too anxious to fully embrace my antipedagogical persona. My colleagues, too, have been lukewarm about my methods, some of them even holding special meetings to gripe about the way I dress and the “chaos” I supposedly spread into their classrooms. And then, of course, there are the ninnies in the administration building who don’t like the “grades” I give, the complaints they get from parents, and the way I rap and beat-box loudly across the campus.
But I’m confident that eventually my new paradigm will take hold and everyone will acknowledge that I was simply ahead of the curve. I do hope I’ll be vindicated before the special-action committee at my university succeeds in firing me. But if I am fired, so be it. I’ll be remembered as the Galileo of my time, the “antiprofessor” bold enough to give power back to the students, where it belongs. When our movement is large enough, no one will be able to take us down (or, rather, make us stand up). So as united peers, let us sit down in the rear and rock this old school!n
Kerry Soper is an associate professor in the department of humanities, classics, and comparative literature at Brigham Young University.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 15, Page B20
