The online classes resulting from the pandemic made me reflect on my role as a teacher; I thought that if students were already spending all day online, what could I offer them that they wouldn't find on Wikipedia? Conventional wisdom says: “if you can't fight the enemy, join him”. Well, I have spent more than one class helping my students “juice up” Wikipedia by reviewing the edit history, understanding the footnote system to get to primary sources, studying the neutral writing style to detect ideological tensions, etc. However, sometimes I feel like mine is like an admitted defeat. Day in and day out, it seems to me that I tend to become irrelevant, to be replaced by an artificial intelligence. On days when I don't feel that way, I reassure myself that my job is to give context. Give context to what exactly? Well, the text I leave in every class that my students don't read. And then my heart breaks.
The classic problem a teacher faces when faced with such a scenario is well known: we leave a reading and they don't read it. Then everything falls apart. The solution seems simple at first: we assign a grade and at the beginning of the class we apply a quiz with a few questions. The premise is that, if they didn't read, they won't know the answers and the punitive weight of the grade will move them to read. It seems to me that this does not work because, at least in young children, punitive environments tend to generate environments where dishonesty proliferates, in addition to the fact that grades do not always yield useful information. Stress, memory, quiz design, and distraction factors all work against students, regardless of whether or not they read.
How to overcome the urge not to read?
That was the question that presented itself to me at the beginning of the pandemic, while I was also thinking about what structure I could create for the synchronous Zoom sessions to mitigate the effects of the fatigue caused by online classes. The solution came to me under the metaphor of “padlocks”, small tests that the very inertia of non-reading must overcome if it is to reach my students. Perhaps, when I imagined the padlocks I was remembering my youth playing the famous Marathon with my family; when nobody got the question right, we moved the fateful black chip and the voice of my cousins could be heard shouting: “Ignorance is advancing! Am I being too Freudian if I say that I am trying to correct my childhood by making the ”ignorance“ race an obstacle course? The point is that these locks provide certainty about future sessions, prepare students for knowledge, shape the class, ensure that everyone has a minimum of preparation, provide me with timely information about what is and is not understood from the readings, and orient everything to reflection and application. In short, it generates a ”low-risk" scenario in which a learning community that includes students and teachers can flourish.
The first padlock mitigates the stress and punitive nature of the assessment. I ask students to review previous material-which may well be a reading, a YouTube video, a lecture, a podcast, and even songs-and make an audio reading report. The idea is to allow as much freedom in the recall process as possible. Instead of asking specific questions, students recall what seems relevant to them and reflect on it. By doing this, I aim to mitigate what the French call l'esprit de l'escalier, which students know in the form “I remembered the answer as soon as I left the exam”. Creating a friendly atmosphere during the evaluation lowers the stress of the whole process and prevents them from giving up before they start.
The second padlock is almost never respected, but it is clearly stated in the instructions because of its relevance. I ask them to record the report at least one day after they have reviewed the material. If at least one night's sleep passes between the two events, it is more likely that what they remember will be more in “long-term memory” and less in “working memory”. Some students mention in their reports that “now they have” followed the instructions about the time between reading and recall, which leads me to assume that respect for this rule is more of an anomaly; unfortunately, I have not yet found a “padlock for the padlock” that does not introduce additional complications.
The third padlock is social. During class, and after an introduction from me, I divide them into groups - Zoom's famous breakout rooms - to share their impressions of the reading material. All class activities - the homework assignments - have a rubric with a score associated with a short report on that discussion. If someone did not read, they have no choice but to listen to the reading in a condensed version.
The method is not foolproof. During the past semester, and as a result of a disastrous session in which priming failed, I decided to do priming on priming using the same tool I ask students to use: I started recording presentation and closing audios that comment on some key points or ask them to focus only on some element. When in the reports I started hearing thanks for the presence of the audios-including someone who even suggested I do a podcast-I knew it had worked.
Carlos Gerardo Zermeño Vargas
