Re: fear of students

[Beth Boquet <eboquet@FAIR1.FAIRFIELD.EDU>]

Connected to the imposter syndrome, perhaps?  That is, we fear being 
exposed for what we don't know but for what we think we're supposed 
to know or what others know or whatever.

Rarely, but enough to make me think it happens more often, I hear 
faculty express a fear that a student will do well in his/her class 
and then poorly in another prof's class, and then what will that prof 
think of prof 1?  

--Beth


> Date:          Mon, 16 Mar 1998 09:49:26 -0600 (CST)
> From:          PGRAY@FAIR1.FAIRFIELD.EDU
> Subject:       fear of students
> To:            Multiple recipients of list <wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu>
> Reply-to:      wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu

> Hello all.
> 
> The fear of students is, I would agree, an interesting notion.
>  
> On my campus, there is a general fear of international students or students who
> speak english as a second or third langauge.  These students are excessive,
> their needs "more than" what a "regular" classroom can handle.  SOmetimes these
> students opt out of the  offered esl section; in the "regular" classrooms that
> they seek,  they force profs to see their own pedagogy as less than seamless.  
> A threat to the guise of expertise:  "I don't know how to handle an
> international student who cannot write English clearly."  Or take the
> first year basketball scholarship student who hands in a handwritten text, 
> this from my colleague, the student's teacher, and that it is simply 
> unacceptable and the kid shouldn't even be here, it is simply inappropriate 
> and half of it is in Black English anyway so I can hardly understand what 
> he is saying, my god, (no matter that the kid has never used a computer to 
> write his papers before).    
> 
> 
> What do we fear?  For one, I think, excesses that we cannot handle, or that
> challenge us in ways we could not have imagined before we saw them.  
> The overflowing of lived experience that cannot be contained in forms 
> (the classroom for(u)m, the thesis form, the "student" subject/"teacher" 
> subject forms) that we make our living attempting to handle, to make sense of,
> but that we still attempt to use to order, contain, tame
> the knoweldges we handle every day -- both students' and our own.  
> 
> 
> Pete Gray
> pgray@fair1.fairfield.edu
> 
Elizabeth Boquet
Director, The Writing Center
DM 130
Fairfield University
Fairfield, CT  06430
Tel: 203/254-4000, ext. 2529
E-Mail:  eboquet@fair1.fairfield.edu