I am a college teacher, part time. I teach various courses in Communications at the local university. By day I am a general contractor. By free time, I teach various college classes and I run a vlog called the Genuine Optimist. Search for me everywhere and you will find me under that description.
Here's the challenge, every year I become more and more inclined to create more freedom for students. The blowback or negative is that students get lost, at least for a short while.
I have found that students are not trained to use freedom. It's too foreign to them. They are too focused on regurgitating what the professor wants. Even worse, it is far too tempting for educators to drone on in lecture and never connect with students. The best connection is never a student idolizing the teacher, it's the teacher shutting up his or her mouth long enough the hear student.
Now, if the student has nothing to say, then the teacher, in the purest respect to Socrates and others who have followed, gets to ask questions. In the sciences its different, or at least there is a foundation of axioms to know first. In the humanities, everyone thinks they have the most solid foundation and so we tend to force feed ideology to students. We then become political lecturers focused on linear thinking. I choose to be a political questioner focused on relational understanding.
So that is my bias, I want more freedom for students. I want them to relate and not regurgitate. I want them to question and not assimilate. I want self-starting, self-nourishing minds, minds that can function powerfully on their own, free and clear from political ghetto thinking.
Some day I might get in a lot of trouble, if I am not careful. The weird price we pay for practicing deliberate freedom...
