Sustaining a Quality Education ~ with Brian Goedde ~
Up For The Challenge
This year I’d like to focus my blog posts around a particular aspect of education—or should I say challenge of education—that I’ve been facing over the last year: teaching online.
I started teaching online because, as it has been said, it’s not the “future” of education but the “now” of education, and I felt I should at least learn how to do it. Still, I strongly resisted. The Internet is amazing for many things, I used to say, but education is not one of them. If teaching and learning is a concern of the community we share, being in a room together to foster a sense of community is essential. If I consider the best education to be both informative and inspirational, it needs to be a live, in-person exchange of ideas, questions, challenges, discoveries—everything that only a face-to-face dialogue can provide. If the student brings as much to his or her education as the teacher does, it needs to be embodied by both of them. What can come of disembodied education? I asked.
Then I found out.
At the end of my first semester teaching an online section of Composition II, I got one of the nicest emails I’ve ever gotten from a student. She wrote that she ended the class better informed and greatly inspired, that she never thought she could like writing but now she loves it, that the class has really changed her perspective on her world. She was extraordinarily thankful, which is flattering, but reading the email, my face reddened not with pride but shame. I focused my eyes on her name... and could scarcely recall the essays she had written.
What can come of online education? As I suspected it would be, it’s hard to get to know your students—but this is only a reflection on my teaching experience. The learning experience, on the other hand, is not necessarily hindered or limited as a result. This student’s education was, apparently, the best I could ever hope to provide, even if I can’t say I ever knew her.
Brian Goedde
English and Writing Department
Washtenaw Community College