This post is week 4 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators. The prompt for this week is “What are optimal conditions in which to learn, for you, and for students?”

This prompt got me thinking about some of my past experiences as a student.

When I was in college, I had this really tough professor for British Literature Before 1700. He told us on day 1 that he only gave one A per test to the best student response, and everyone else fell somewhere below that. We had a lot of reading to cover, including reading all of Beowulf in two weeks. And we didn’t really discuss the literature. He talked for most of the class period, occasionally pausing to push back his long hair that was constantly falling out of its ponytail. 

I loved that class.

I am highly competitive, especially when it comes to academics, so his policy that only one student could earn an A on each test was like fuel on a fire for me. If I got an A, I would know that I did better than anyone else. (I realize now that this was not a healthy mindset, and that grades do not define a person, but at 19, grades were everything for me.)

I did all of the reading, and took copious notes while I read. As a sidebar, my ideal learning environment involves a lot of background noise, so most of that reading was either done in the library, the student center, or with Gilmore Girls on TV. 

I loved his lectures. He seemed like one of the smartest, most insightful people I have ever met, and I wrote down every word he said about the meaning of The Faerie Queene and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I thought that he was everything that a college literature professor should be. 

Until I had another, very different professor a couple of years later.

It was a small, upper level undergrad class on modern, postmodern, and contemporary literature. It involved even more reading than my British Literature class. But instead of lecturing about the literature, the professor lectured about different strands of literary criticism during the first week. Then, he split us into reading groups, and for each of the texts, our groups were given a different literary criticism lens to apply. We read the text and took notes, wrote a short response from that perspective, and then met with our small groups to discuss. He would move through the groups, adding some more questions and insights to the discussions, and then we would discuss the text as a whole class after group meetings were finished.

I think that I personally learned almost as much from both of those classroom environments. I can learn well from reading, from lectures, and from discussions. I can teach myself if I need to. I’ve always said that, if I were independently wealthy and could afford to, I would just learn all of the time. I would get degrees in everything because I love learning. My “optimal learning conditions” are any conditions at all, really.

I think that most of my students would learn best in that second class, though. Most of them learn by doing, and the way that my professor taught us the theory first and then let us apply it ourselves is what I consider to be doing literary analysis. I try to set my classes up more like that. I model the skills or strategies that I want students to use either in analyzing literature or in their writing, and then I have them try it out themselves, either on their own, with partners, or in small groups, depending on how much experience they have with that particular skill or strategy.

One other key difference between many of my students and me is that, if you tell me to read three or five or ten chapters of a book by tomorrow, I will absolutely do that on my own time, whether I like the book or not. (Except for Grapes of Wrath. I couldn’t finish that book. If you read this, Ms. Gerlach, I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t). That is simply not the case for many of them, for a variety of reasons (past experiences with reading, a multitude of other demands on their time, reading comprehension issues, etc.). With that in mind, I try to give students the time and space to do as much of the assigned reading in class as possible.