Teachers who love to talk

I don't know if you've ever been in a room full of teachers, but can be a painful experience.

For the Summer II session of grad school, I decided to enroll in an education course, mainly because it met during the morning—I was really tired of night classes. Plus, the course was called Diverse Learners and is all about multicultural education, so I thought it sounded interesting and would help me be a better teacher. I'm not sure I realized just what was ahead of me.

I've been to trainings and professional development courses where it's become quite apparent to me that some teachers just really love to hear themselves talk. And they are—for the most part—very opinionated and often don't fancy looking at things through other people's perspectives. I found this rather ironic in a class in which we are supposed to be trying to understand other points of views.

For each class, we had to prepare "Critical Questions" on the previous night's reading assignment and e-mail them to our professor. He would choose some of them and request they be asked during class to spark discussion. It was very rare that one of these questions was actually answered. Instead, my classmates thought of this as an opportunity for an open forum where they could tell random personal anecdotes—and sometimes these situations had absolutely nothing to do with things that went on in the classroom. I can tell you useful information on a few of these ladies' husbands, because they mentioned it five or six times in each story.

I felt really bad for my professor, who had to suffer through the month of July in a classroom full of 30 women. Yes, the entire class was devoid of any testosterone (except for our fearless leader, who was too nice to say "SHUT UP!" to the gabbers—I could tell there were times he wanted to, though). One woman (who isn't actually a teacher) ended up crying during one of her stories about how she felt discrimination in a certain situation. I had to hold back from raising my hand and pointing out that she was a middle-class white woman. I'm still not sure what discrimination she faced, because I don't think she ever actually got to her point. There are kids who feel such discrimination and inequality at school, but we never actually got around to that in this particular discussion.

The sad thing is that this could have been a much better class if people had stuck to the original questions and points and related things back to the classrooms. Our jobs are about the students; this class was supposed to be about multicultural education for our students, not how you were upset because you speak Spanish and had a miscommunication issue with a waiter at a restaurant. While that is unfortunate, it really doesn't relate much to the intention of this class. I thought of suggesting to my professor that he hold a self-help session before each class so they could get it all out, but I wasn't sure how he would respond.

My professor—thankfully—always managed to wrap up the class with actual useful information and even told classroom stories about students of various cultural backgrounds. It was good to hear those, and the reading material was actually very beneficial, as well. Am I glad I took the class? Yes. Am I now BFFs with my classmates. Negative. (Although I did make some new friends in here—they aren't all ridiculous.)

The good news is that today is the last day of class. HOLLA!

I would like to give a special shout out to my good friends/running peeps who have decided to read my blog. Once this thing goes global, I think they will appreciate it.