A Semester of Pleasant Surprises!

I can’t even begin to tell you how nervous I was when I walked into a University of Rhode Island classroom this past September, not as a student but for the first time as an instructor.

I had completed an excellent training program where I learned about pedagogy and classroom-management and that I would need to be firm about attendance policies, and punctuality, and civility (i.e. no cell phones or text-messaging in class).

Although I love the subject of Communications, I worried that many of my students, the majority of whom are freshmen, may not be overly interested in the class, a required general education course.

And I worried that students might be disrespectful and that they would see right through me and know just how nervous and “over my head” I was feeling.

That’s not to say I don’t know about working in the field of communications, something I have been doing in one form or another since graduating from URI just over a decade ago.

 Or that I don’t know about teaching, something I have also done in many various forms over the years.

But teaching communications at the college level and utilizing technologies far beyond anything that existed when I was in college – that was all new to me.

But I’m so happy to report that my fears were unwarranted.

My students, while not all enthusiastic about the subject, and not always attentive to the details of the assignments, are really nice, kind, truly lovely people.

And getting to know them over the course of the semester through our class discussions and through various writing assignments gives me such hope for the future.

The 22 students I worked with are interesting young adults with big dreams for their lives that encompass much more than just “getting a good job” when they graduate.

They are people who care deeply about their families and friends and our world.

As we made our way through our textbook and learned about the theories of interpersonal communication and conflict resolution, several of my students had to suspend their schoolwork for the “on the job training” known as life.

In one semester students in our small class faced the challenges of parental disharmony, romantic relationships ending, the hospitalization of a family member and even the unexpected and devastating loss of a sibling.

And for teenagers who are just on the cusp of adulthood, they handled these painful, uncharted waters very well.

And when they didn’t handle things well (like actually reading the assignment before completing it or notifying me in a timely manner when they needed to miss class), they accepted the grade penalties (and my reminders about the often harsh “working world’ consequences of similar actions) relatively gracefully.

Of course you know our happy little classroom bubble had to burst eventually (or at least that’s what everyone kept telling me!).

Somewhere around mid-semester it happened – the civility policy was violated by a (loudly!) ringing cell phone.

Boy was my face red as I scrambled through my bag, shaking my head and stammering about how I was sure I had turned the darn thing off before class.