I started teaching at the college level, spent the middle of my career both as a full-time high school teacher and part-time college teacher, and am currently winding up my career exclusively in the college classroom once again.
Teachers at both levels always want to know: which do you like most? What’s the difference? It’s similar to your youngest asking which child you like best. The truth is, they’re all good.
When I walk into my classroom at George Mason University, there’s no question whose direction everyone will be following for the next hour. Students are respectful, sometimes a bit too quiet.
My high school classroom was also respectful, but it had the feel of familiarity about it: it was a room where people spent a lot of time together, like a lived-in house or dormitory. In college, students are never in any single classroom more than fifty hours a semester, so the room is a place to visit and not a place where you live.
But with comfort comes noise. Students having a good time while they’re learning chat with those around them. High school is a social place, and sometimes sociability is louder than a teacher’s voice. I don’t miss trying to be heard over several different conversations.
That is never true at GMU. Students might make friends during class, but then they arrange to meet later. The classroom is not where they socialize, so the learning environment and personal networking stay separate.
Though the sociability factor may generate a high comfort level, it also generates self-consciousness bordering on paranoia in young adolescents. They spend so much time together they’re sure everyone is scoping them out and finding fault with their weight, clothing, complexion, and intelligence.
My college students confirm what my high school students were slow to figure out: high school is NOT the best four years of your life. College offers students a learning environment that is not suffocating. Students have the time and freedom to explore their interests; in high school, students are essentially locked in a cement building seven and a half hours a day, with no possibility of escape.
Yet teachers and administrators of younger students are benevolent dictators, locking them in to protect as much as to confine them. Parents like it when our children are home so we can keep an eye on them, too, and we don’t think of that as imprisoning our offspring.
So that’s the analogy that explains the difference best of all: in high school, we are like parents. We know the students pretty well (but not completely) and we feel their successes and pains. We also get frustrated with our charges because we spend so much time with them.
In college, we are colleagues rather than family. People generally are on good behavior and save their shenanigans for after class. But that absence of familial feeling means who we are matters less than the subject matter of the course.
In college, the classroom is neither more nor less than a place to learn. It’s the appropriate evolutionary stop between the nurturing, confining classroom and the more impersonal workplace.
