Learning Empathy From a C Student

I'm starting to catch up on things after a couple months of intense development (where we made some great new modules if I do say so on our team's behalf—see here and here for more info). In reading back through the stack of journals that piled up, I just read a beautiful little essay by an editor at American Biology Teacher called "On Being a C Student" (M. Flannery, American Biology Teacher August 2008: 371-373). In the essay, Flannery describes what it's like to be a student again after many years of being a biology professor and researching science education at a university. Now approaching retirement, she started taking classes on drawing plants at the New York Botanical Garden. Unlike her previous classes in biology and her research, it turned out drawing flowers wasn't a subject she excelled in. But she describes how that in itself taught her a lot about science teaching and students, even after 40 years in the field. What her essay boils down to is a set of realizations that create empathy with her own students—the glow of an average student who finally gets a C+ or a B, even knowing they'll never get an A; what it's like to show your work right after a bunch of star students, and feel like it doesn't measure up; the power of positive reinforcement; that some familiar student refrains really can have a lot of truth ("My grades may not reflect it, but I learned a lot"; transportation problems really can make you late for class at a city university). The whole essay is a nice study in putting yourself in the shoes of people you're dealing with, and realizing things that maybe you already knew but you didn't really appreciate. For me, it reminds me of a "values" process that we are undertaking at SimBiotic to define what we value as a company. One of our core values is emerging as "Respect". This is something professed as a value by many organizations, and we first came to it as an internal value—respecting our work colleagues and the contribution each is making towards our products. We also make an effort to treat our customers with respect in all interactions. But in a brainstorm, one of us realized there is an additional component of respect that we semi-consciously try to embrace, that of respecting the time, energy, and learning process of the students using our labs. What this means is that we try to put ourselves in an average student's place and ask, is this lab just busy-work, or is it really taking me somewhere? Did the authors try to make it fun and engaging? If I mess something up can I recover, or am I just going to get frustrated because the authors assumed I was brilliant? It's easy to get caught up in writing a lab that shows off our own knowledge, or a clever idea we had for teaching something, or indulge some other teaching ego, but from a student's point of view, we are then wasting their time and attention. Flannery's essay reminded me both of how important empathy with the student is if we want students to learn from our work, and also how hard it is to keep that respect in mind, and know how to apply it, when we are at a different level of understanding and comfort than many of the students we are working for.