Thoughts on Teaching

Yesterday was the last day of my semester at Laguna College of Art & Design. History of Animation is history. I started the semester with 26 students. That is a very large class for LCAD. (LCAD has a total student body of about 300 so we are talking about 12% of the whole student body in my classroom)

I finished the class with 24 students and all but one passed the class. I lost 2 students. One just stopped coming to all of his classes so he failed, and one dropped the class in the second week.

8 = A
9 = B
6 = C
2 = F



Only 1 of these F students took the final but just did not pass the class. That was because he did not hand in work or handed it in late and he did very poorly on a number of the tests. I tried with him. I really did. But there is only so much you can do. I set up the requirements of the class and then it is up to the student to meet those requirements. A good curriculum, a fair curriculum, has very little wiggle room in the grading.

When I was teaching Animation to high school students I had a girl come up to me after the semester. Mr. Loc, you gave me a D! She was all pissed off. Like I was out to get her. Like I gave you that grade and she had nothing to do with the grade she earned. The fact was she was right in a way. I did give her that grade. She had earned an F but it was early in my teaching career and she was close enough to a D- that I fudged it in an upward direction.

I have learned over the years. My curriculum for most of my classes is so tight now that what I think about a student has nothing to do with the final grade. The fudge factor just isn`t there anymore. And that is the way it should be.

Let`s look at the students who passed my class. In the classic bell curve sense I am a complete failure because too many of my students passed the class. That is okay, I hate grading to a curve. In the classic curve 20% of any class is going to fail no matter what they do because the deck is stacked that way. The bottom 20% are written off, flunked, thrown away no matter how good they are. In a bell curve you can have as little as 15 points between an A and an F and the bottom 20% is still trashed. That is not teaching, that is evaluation/elimination.

I have had teachers who brag that nobody gets an A in my class. This is not a teacher, somebody whose goal is to teacher, to impart knowledge. This is somebody feeding their ego at the expense of the students in their care.

Eight A`s, nine B`s and six C`s. Very flat curve. Kind of heavy on the A`s and B`s. Well, it should be. These are students who have made the cut to get into the school. That means that they are all top performers to start with. Top performers, perform at the top. Their grades should reflect that fact.

The strange thing is that there were no D students in this class. When I teach this same class over at Cal State Fullerton as a lecture only class to 80 plus students the curve falls into a more classic bell curve pattern with the bell skewed toward a B. With large number and no chance for 1 on 1 teaching that makes sense.

My job is not to fail students. They can do that on their own if they really want to. My job is not to make students learn a lot of useless stuff that they are going to forget as soon as the test is over. What is the use of that? What value does that have in the long run?

My job is to get the information to the student in a way that they will have it for a lifetime. And since a lot of my students keep in touch with me over the years and they still show knowledge of my subject, maybe I am going about it kind of the right way? Hope so.