I need to be careful...

This semester I am teaching an undergraduate class I have taught every year (and occasionally twice a year) for at least 12 years. It is a class I enjoy teaching a lot because it is a creative and intellectually engaging class, where the people in class make cool stuff and learn a rhetorical approach to visual arrangement to boot. As I teach it now, the class is hugely different from when I started, and every year I make some modifications, and every 3 years roughly I am careful to rethink it and make large changes in order to avoid me becoming robot-teacher.

I have to admit, though, that I have taught the course enough that some aspects of it -- getting people to move around the room a lot, having them do lots of small group critique, doing whole group critiques of all the work, getting them all engaged and happily diving hard into the work, helping them see the cultural ramifications of what seem can seem like very simply and unremarkable design decisions -- are like floating on my back out in the lake. And the class this semester -- after 3 meetings -- is clicking along well enough, with a relaxed atmosphere, the work progressing as it should, and everyone talking, including the one woman who in her syllabus response particularly remarked that she didn't like speaking in class: today she said something very smart, and she said it very confidently.

But I have to watch myself. The class dynamics this semester are very different from last year, where there were a few people who set a very cheerful, focused, and hard-working tone from early on. (These were also the people who would say out loud in class how much they liked the class, and how well they thought the class was organized, and so on. It was spontaneous, and would have me sailing out smiling at the end of class -- which is worth bringing up, maybe, in terms of how an audience can very much affect what a teacher or speaker does... but that's a digression.)

People in class last year were very friendly to each other, and there was a high level of trust and risk-taking with assignments. This time around there is some combination of personalities and my this-semester demeanor that isn't yet clicking. Today, when we put all their work out on the floor to critique it and moved some pieces to the end that was designated as "very boring," one or two people were quietly but visibly upset. I thought I had prepared them all well for such things to happen, by doing what had worked very well in the past: I had talked several times about how hard it is to get feedback that your work isn't cutting it, but that getting such feedback is what helps you figure out how to make your work better. I checked in with the visibly upset people afterwards, and reassured them that this wasn't a sign of 'bad' work but rather of the beginning of the process for figuring out how to make the work better.

Maybe this is all just impatience on my part: it was only day 3 today, and I am remembering last year's class as a whole. But this tells me that I do have to be more careful with this group to set them up to be able to hear and respond to feedback that (sometimes) is not about how wonderful their work is but is rather about how their work could be very much stronger. I'm going to have to work harder with this group to get the trust built more firmly -- between me and them, amongst them -- and to help them understand how sometimes it is the NOT "all is wonderful" feedback that is the most useful.

But I am also going to have to be careful, it is clear, to hear and see this class as this class, as this particular mix of people.