Ser-se Professor hoje

Se nos States a situação começa a ser bastante preocupante, então em Portugal e com as últimas sumidades que superintenderam a pasta dos assuntos educacionais, o estado de estabilidade emocional dos professores que tem vindo a degradar-se, tende a apresentar uma situação ainda pior.

Segundo Derek Bok:

We’ve all been there: you walk into class with an utterly splendid lesson plan. What discussion activities you have planned! What exciting, insightful, yet accessible questions you have prepped! What engrossing and provocative issues you have to discuss! You can hardly wait to begin. Let’s go!

And then it all just fizzles out. Your activities engender piecemeal effort. Your questions are met with monosyllabic answers. Your issues attract tepid attention, never mind interest. Emerging from the class feeling a lot more like a dentist than an educator, you ask yourself, What happened? Why did that all go wrong?

Quite often, our first instinct is to blame ourselves. And hey, sure, maybe. It’s possible that your lesson was ill-planned, or ill-suited for that particular group of students. Happens to the best of us sometimes. But it also might not be your “fault” (I’d use that word cautiously, because it’s really not about heaping reproach on someone/thing, but discerning the causes to demonstrable effects).

You probably woke up hours before your class, reviewed your lesson plan and enjoyed a delightful cup of coffee beforehand (at least this is a Bok Center recommendation!). But your indifferent students might have been groggy instead; they could have just rolled out of bed and come to class running on minimal to no sleep. And it might have been the best of academic intentions that put them there, half-conscious and unresponsive in your class – maybe they had pulled an all-nighter!