A few years ago, my mom was cleaning out old file folders and found something she wrote for me when I was young. I was having difficulty with piano, probably saying I wanted to quit (I made a lot of noise about this for a lot of years, and it’s to my parents’ credit that they ignored me.)
It was a questionnaire, something designed to allow me to share my feelings about playing the piano. Five questions: what I thought of my teacher, practicing and performing, and my likes and dislikes about learning to play. Each had a handful of possible answers and an opportunity to fill in my own. Judging by my penmanship, the 7-digit phone number scrawled on the back and the fact that she wrote it out by hand, I’d put it at about 1988. I was eight years old, playing Bach minuets but struggling to learn to sightread the most basic melodies. It was a difficult time, perhaps the only difficult time in my musical career, and without her brilliant pedagogical logic I might not have made it through. I don’t remember the experience at all, but that’s probably a testament to the resolution we reached.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I guess. Last week I did a very similar exercise with my Journalism students, who were in a pretty bad place after last semester. They claimed they were furious at the administration for killing some of their pieces; I arranged a meeting so they could communicate, at which point they told the administration they were furious at me for assigning too much homework. Clearly, we had misunderstood each other.
So, last week, we started over. I asked them what they liked and disliked about the class, what they would change about it if they could, and what they wanted to do for the rest of the year. It was not nearly as well-thought-out as my mom’s questionnaire; I just asked a question, gave them five minutes to brainstorm, and then asked for volunteers to start the discussion. I tried to be fair and unbiased (although when one girl protested that we should do more sports articles, because “everyone loves to read about sports,” I had to take a couple of deep breaths.)
The result: a lot of great ideas. One suggested a food issue where we review local restaurants, share recipes and interview nutritionists. One wants to write only about sports, but another only about international news. One was adamant about including games, like Sudoku and word searches. All liked the format of the paper and at least some of the articles they’d written thus far. After some profitable discussion about interviews, I increased their deadline from five days to seven, which made all the difference in the world; they agreed it was fair and even seemed excited about starting their new assignment.
It seemed almost too easy to heal the hurts of a semester in a day, but by actively seeking and relying on their opinions, maybe I reassuried them that they count, that I valued them fellow human beings. The surprising thing is that when you ask for input and are serious about accepting it, you will find that students’ standards aren’t much lower than yours. Sometimes they’re even higher (many students had specific suggestions about grading, implying they wanted their classmates to share their ideas about proper quality.) In short, after a bad start to the week, things are looking up.
Just for fun, below is the whole piano questionnaire, with my answers in bold. I made a few changes to the original and I think I may send it out to my piano parents — it could be one of them is dealing with a child every bit as headstrong and difficult as me!
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