16 Comments

I love that you have enjoyimg looking at the students work as a goal! Makes sense to me :)

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Thanks, Kaspa. I think a lot of professors might not agree with me. There seems to be a sense sometimes that learning also involves suffering? Which, why? I think sometimes you have to be uncomfortable to learn, but that’s different from suffering. And why would I create assignments that are designed to be both boring and that don’t allow students to showcase their strengths? I don’t know. It makes sense to me but it’s not the status quo, so I sometimes feel like I’m the crazy one.

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Yes I can see that. My Dad had/has a (unconscious?) belief that work should be difficult and not enjoyable and it took me a while to shake that off... Doesn't serve anyone.

Sure the students appreciate you 😀

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Oct 21Liked by Robyn Ryle

Wish I'd had you as a professor in my college years. Not sure I took sociology, but I'm sure I would have liked your class, or nearly so.

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Thanks, Sandy. Jeff hated his undergraduate sociology course, which makes me sad.

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Oct 21Liked by Robyn Ryle

Wonder if your students read "you think too much". Do they?

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Lol. I don’t think so. I used an essay I wrote about baseball and capitalism in my intro class a couple of semesters, so they at least read that post. I do assign parts of my book about sports in my intro class.

I love my students, but it’s also very hard for me to imagine many of them reading my newsletter or anything else “just for fun.”

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Great assignment. Great teacher. Great post. Thanks.

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Thanks so much, Barb!

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Oct 21Liked by Robyn Ryle

I wish I had taken your class. ❤️

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Me, too!

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Beautiful piece of very active pedagogy. I hope the classroom discussions were interesting and I'll bet they were!

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Thanks, Caroline. It’s always interesting to talk to students about social class and help them realize all the ways in which it does matter, even if the rest of the world is telling them that it doesn’t.

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This is a great assignment and I am sure you described it to them both before and after with as much sympathy and understanding as you show in writing about it for us or they wouldn’t have taken the risk of doing photos that they found meaningful and take the risk of explaining that meaning to others. Insight producing work! And also a clear rebuttal of the right wing propaganda about teachers forcing their beliefs on students. Eye-opening for everyone.

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Thanks so much, Myra. In my twenty-plus years of teaching, I’ve never had much success forcing my beliefs on students. I think the sad fact that many people don’t want to admit is that it’s not me who changes students’ beliefs when they come to college. It’s other students, as well as for students at residential colleges, the freedom that comes with being out of the house.

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Yes, exactly! And those who haven’t been to college imagine it as being like the high school classes they hated - being taught stuff and dinged when they “got it wrong”

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