I’m co-teaching this semester, a cross-listed honors course. My colleague is tenured faculty in a STEM field, and a nice guy in his 40s. I like him and we have a pleasant, easy-going professional relationship.
But lately, I’ve been bothered by what I can only call his emphasis on a competitive, even bloodthirsty attitude to learning. I fear revealing too much, but we’re using a game-based pedagogy made up of lecture and debate mostly carried out by students themselves. We serve as guides and coaches to all players, and do all the assessment and grading, of course. Each student must weigh in on a larger historical issue (pro or con) but also has individual goals requiring them read critically, write and speak informatively, and employ primary sources to persuade others to adopt their views.
And here’s the deal: the students are fucking petrified. Honor kids or not, they’re being thrust into what seems like a very adult skill set (it’s amazing how real “playing” can feel). We’re concerned with motivating them to do their best work, and Prof. X has repeatedly taken on militant, dare I say macho, language like “ideally, you’ll crush your opponents” and “there’s nothing more fun than humiliating an enemy.”
Yikes.
I understand why he’s doing it; using people’s inherent competitiveness can motivate them to work hard, but I doubt it’s the best or only way to do that. First, because I fear that language is further adding to some students’ anxiety, which isn’t going to help them do their best. And second, because working collaboratively and learning to negotiate and comprise is actually the best way to win the game (by meeting one’s objectives), and one of the most important, hardest things one can learn: how to deal with those who disagree with you, and how to come to some compromise without completely selling out your goals.
I did, after Prof. X’s pronouncements, try to provide a countering voice (“Remember though, you don’t get points for being rude, and beware ad hominem attacks. Use the sources, build your arguments with care. Do the work.”), but:
1) it’s not as sexy (violent rhetoric is more appealing than concern for building rhetorical skill), and
2) I’m a chick advocating chick stuff like collaboration. I know of at least one male student whose eyes gleamed at hearing that “humiliate the enemy” stuff. It’s not what I want my students to practice, either in or out of the classroom.
Because we are a man and woman in front of the class, and are advocating positions that are conventionally gendered (compete/collaborate), I worry that our male students, in particular, are going to embrace the masculine model and go for the throat, rather than focus on doing the work and learning the material.
But maybe I’m being the essentializing one here by assuming that competition is inherently macho and problematic as educational model. I’m not terribly competitive–except against myself–and although I like to win things, the idea of winning something so that someone else will lose/fail/be humiliated is really just repellent to me as an individual and as a feminist.
So, readers, those of you are competitive, and who do respond to a dog-eat-dog ethos: can you explain to me how this squares with your feminist leanings?
I tend to look at it as more proving things to myself, as opposed to beating other people (although I am not perfect and sometimes, I really enjoy beating other people.) That being said, I fall apart under pressure, dislike public competitions and being in the spotlight, so I guess I like to compete in things where everyone else doesn’t know they’re competing. And now you know how much of an awful person I am.
Aside from that, from what you say I think you are doing a good job of balancing the prof’s aggression – I remember really appreciating pacifist TAs and they certainly take the edge off an abrasive prof. (Or in some cases, an unhinged prof.) You can’t protect the anxious ones forever, but you can offset the anxiety with your behaviour, and that’s pretty much all you can do.
I’m competitive, but only up to a point, the point being trying to stay within the bounds of good sportsmanship. I think this transcends gender and so many girls these days are involved in team sports and gaming that I think they get this concept. The statement “There’s nothing more fun than humiliating an enemy,” is clearly out of those bounds and if I were in the class, I would be so happy to have an authority figure providing the counterbalance you are.
Competition is great, and I agree with you that it can be an important motivator for valuable learning. I coached high school policy debate for several years (after, of course, competing in it myself), and one of the things I love about it as an educational tool is that it combines competition and cooperation (in that each round consists of two people working together against two other people). Also, it is hard – really, really hard – so it forces people to actually figure out how to work with their partners.
However, none of the advantages of competition are helped by cruel rhetoric, shame, or humiliation. Telling people that it feels good to humiliate the enemy is a horrible lesson in empathy. Trying to *win* is fun and educational – even for those who ultimately don’t win. Trying to cause psychological harm should not be fun, nor does it teach anything worth learning.
In short, setting up competitions where one person or group tries to outperform another can be a powerful motivator, but “outperform” does not mean “act like an asshole.”
I don’t think competition is inherently masculine. I agree that it has some masculine associations in our culture: those associations are bad. Is the notion of “fair competition” gendered separately from competition itself? I’m not sure about that.
I am unhealthily competitive. I have worked very hard to reduce my competitive streak because it’s really at odds with my values.
That said, I’m still pretty competitive.
I do not think that humiliating your enemies is the same thing as being competitive–even the fierce, vaguely unhealthy competitions I love. Having a humiliated enemy means that you fought against someone who was not an equal. If two people compete and are evenly matched, there will be no humiliation because there will not be a large difference in ability. If your competitor is humiliated because they’ve lost spectacularly to you, it just means you shouldn’t have been competing with them in the first place.
In my experience, competition is the worst way to learn. It’s the best way to play Taboo, but the worst way to learn. Because it makes the learning experience all about winning instead of learning, and it becomes overly strategic and/or the excitement of victory eclipses the new knowledge. Every kind of class I’ve ever taken that has had a competition that emphasized winning and losing over the kind of rhetorical sparring that a good discussion has, has been a total bust. But a good argument or intellectual sparring–that shit is golden. Argument for argument’s sake (in an academic setting) and for pursuing understanding is excellent, but argument to WIN is self-defeating (in my opinion).
That may be partly the other prof’s discipline playing into it. The STEM fields are sort of notorious for this very martial outlook on learning (e.g. my biology profs taught me how to solve problems, the chem profs teach how to attack them). He might be feeling a little out of his depth in a course based more on subjective skills than cut-and-dry solutions and is (over)compensating.
That being said, some students learn very well from competitions, though for me the joy is in competing against the material, not classmates. I have fond memories of my ninth grade geometry teacher inviting us, as a class, to conquer the material as if it were a rampaging dragon. Still, the classes where I can remember this working have been almost exclusively STEM (geometry, chemistry, endocrinology at a stretch) and I’ve never seen it used effectively in a humanities course.
I tend to be very competitive in my day to day life and I don’t see it as inherently macho (I get it from my mother;), though it’s certainly coded that way by society. I think that all students should get at least minor exposure to the competition model, if only because it gives girls permission to put themselves out there. There’s no reason for it to be wrapped in such over-the-top death-and-destruction rhetoric.
I would talk to your co-teacher privately about toning down his language. This is a class in a SCHOOL where fellow classmates should not be either “the enemy” or “humiliated”. What’s next, “dominate them?”
A class like that in college would have prompted me to drop, even if I would have learned a lot. I can’t deal with public cutthroat competitiveness ESPECIALLY when there is a male authority figure doing the cheerleading to be cutthroat.
I would actually be concerned enough about the language he is using to take it to a higher-up if it cannot be resolved between the two of you.
I think I’m competitive but I’m also shy. In a classroom setting, even if I knew everything there was about my position, I would hesitate before saying anything if one of the professors was encouraging “humiliation” or crushing someone. I would be much too worried that I’d slip up and I’d be the one humiliated, so I wouldn’t risk talking. This makes me think about previous articles regarding seperating women and men/boys and girls because of this sort of mentality. I’m not meaning to say that in an all-female environment there would be no attacks and humiliation, but it may reduce the fear. This is no help to you, PhDork, as the classroom can’t (and shouldn’t) be changed, but I thought it was interesting to note. I think it would be best to mention the issue to your coworker and let him know your concerns. Surely he sees how they are nervous to start and maybe he will relate his viciousness in tone to their timidity.
My girlfriend jokes that I’m “aggressively noncompetitive.” I basically don’t believe that having winners and losers is ever helpful in terms of constructive collaboration, learning, or even society at large. I break out in hives when people use violent rhetoric… I believe in the power of nonviolent activism and don’t believe that violence is ever a good solution. Even if we are sometimes stupid enough to drive ourselves passed the point of no return due to failure of imagination.
For what it’s worth, I feel like regardless of gender you owe it to your students to demonstrate that there are other models for learning and creating than competitive ones. I realize you’re in a delicate position as the female half of a female/male teaching team. But perhaps there’s a way to talk about these issues that doesn’t turn it into “collaborative women” vs. “competitive men”? Many well-known advocates of nonviolence were men, for example. Men can be collaborative and pacifist. Women can be competitive and violence. It’s not an innately gendered thing, although we are socialized to behave as if it is.
I get competitive at yoga for chrisesakes.
If you could grade or critique the students’ performance so that rudeness and ad hominem attacks result in points deducted, that might be helpful. Couldn’t they compete at making the best arguments from lots of angles?
But, that’s not your question. I have never thought to square my competitiveness with feminism.
I have female traits expressed by my genitalia, and I have other traits expressed in my personality. That includes one some people want to say is masculine, and so therefore it’s good somehow. Plus, I’m in STEM. And, I dress androgynously most days.
Does that mean that on some subconscious level I have bought into a lot of crap from society: be more like a man, it’s better? Could be: I won’t so no. The problem with squaring this is that I have no real way to know.
I can’t live in a society-less vacuum, so it’s enough for me to say I’m competitive and feminist.
I can get outrageously competitive too, and I just try to remind myself that in order for someone to win, there have to be losers; if nothing else, we need to be grateful to those who have been gracious enough to let us win and feel good about it.
I can be competitive, and boy was I when I was younger, but now it’s used in specific cases and always used so that I can improve myself (like setting goals). Competing against others (unless its in the sporting arena) seldom works or supports good learning outcomes, IMHO.
As for the learning environment, my 2 cents worth – in that sort of environment, it sounds like those students who are better at debating and sophistry, do well under pressure especially with the constructing of arguments, and have the loudest voices will do better in that environment.
In some ways it also sounds like the class could devolve into a critical thinking exercise, where students can instead point out the flaws in others’ arguments without having to make an argument themselves.
Good Luck Dorky – I still return to the harpyness thread about feminist learning practices in the classroom for some advice about structuring tutorials, maybe there’s something there that can be used?
I’m a female professor in a STEM field and I have a lot of male colleagues with the same attitude PhDork is describing. One thing about my field that I’ve noticed is that the folks at the very top tend to be assholes. Therefore, assholery tends to be rewarded.