Am I a nice guy? Is your teacher a nice teacher? What is niceness?
I ask this question, because I sense some confusion about the role of “niceness” in teaching and learning situations. I mean “niceness” as opposed to “toughness.” I hear students referring to teachers by these terms a lot.
As near as I can tell, some students think a nice teacher is one who won’t flunk a student, no matter what. A tough teacher is one who will flunk almost everybody then, I guess.
How do you know if a teacher is nice or tough? Well, I guess a nice teacher smiles a lot, and is gentle –sounding, and encouraging. A tough teacher scowls, and demands that you do better.
Hmmm.
One of things I had to learn when I first started teaching was that I scare some people. I’m a large man, and I have big voice, and if you give me some authority and put me in front of a podium, I scare some people. I think I scared some people into doing better, and I scared some people into dropping the class immediately. This happened kind of haphazardly.
Later, as I started to learn more about teaching, I learned to most important lesson there is: listen to your students. In listening, I finally discovered that some were afraid of me. I am an actor as well as a teacher, so I decided to fix the problem of students fearing me by “acting” the part of a nice teacher. When I did that, I found something else was happening. Some students expected that I would pass them no matter what because they now considered me “nice teacher.” I got a lot of surprised emails and phone calls at the end of the semester from students who hadn’t turned much in all semester but were surprised to find that they had failed the course.
So, how do I send the right message? Some students like teachers who act tough, because if they pass the class, they feel like they accomplished something special. Some students like nice teachers because they need encouragement in order to do well. How do I be all things to all students?
I try to let students know that I like them (I do, I like students, why else would I do this), and that I care about their learning. I also try to help them understand that if I didn’t care about them, I wouldn’t flunk them.
What? I flunk because I care?
Well, yes. Believe me, it would be a lot easier to not give students failing grades. I could just pass them all through. But would that be helping anyone? Students really will need the skills that are taught in my classes. If they don’t have them, they are not going to do well in the rest of their college career, or in life. So just passing students on through would be harmful to students. Easy for me, but harmful for students.
So if I’m “nice” it might send the wrong message, and if I’m “tough” it might send the wrong message. I guess I’ll just have to be me, and do the best I can to help students understand that passing the course isn’t about whether I like them or not, or whether I’m “nice” or “tough.” It’s about what the student learns. My role is to help the student learn as much as possible.
