Teachers and Students: Just Who Are The Lab-rats?

Offensive isn’t it? Whether applied to those doing the instruction or those receiving it, there is this underlying assumption that being labeled as a guinea pig subject to experimentation is incredibly degrading. I’m here to ask one basic question:

Why?

As someone who’s been on both ends of the spectrum and experienced firsthand the feeling of testing someone - and being equally tested on - I can understand the flagrant tension and emerging stress this causes. For a supposed leader in a position of power, this situation means that he/she is constantly subject to unimaginable scrutiny as students try to discover how much of his/her authority they can question, and - whether implicitly or explicitly - transgress. In all fairness though, the tug of war goes both ways as well, as teachers also use their own gimmicks to try and trick students into working for them the way they best see fit. Often teachers impose certain rules on one batch of students just to see how receptive their reactions on a certain type of activity are. The idea here is that if it passes it passes, and if it fails, they’ll simply test-drive a new strategy on a new batch of students. And so the cycle continues. Certainly there is a margin of error present in this messy journey to devising a one-size-fits all syllabus, but that’s just it. There isn’t one.

I’m here to debunk the myth that our role as educators is to put together the perfect manual that all students of different levels could keep up with, in just the same way that I’m also here to object to the idea that students always deal with any new teacher/course with the same mentality of wanting to achieve the highest grade possible for the least amount of work done.

Every student is different. Every teacher is different. Experimentation is both necessary and inevitable when it comes to both parties involved. In fact, I have observed that it is more of a game of chess than both teams would like to admit. The very basic bottom line is this: If we play with our students, our students will want to play with us too.

In fact, I only just observed this recently in one of the courses I was teaching in Fall 2013. I had announced how this entire semester was going to be an adventure whereby I was going to be putting my students through a lot via different activities and assignments just to see what worked best with them. I mention this as I find it funny how in this entire experiment of mine, I had viewed myself as the power-hungry mad scientist in control of everything, and yet was taken aback when once the semester ended one of my star A students approached me saying “I really enjoyed being your lab-rat this semester miss. I felt I learned a lot about your rationale behind every task you assigned”.

And just like that I realized: It’s never a one-way street. So how is my relationship with my students? Sure on most days they are perfectly aware that they are my victims, but I have humbly learned, that on many other days, I’m their lab-rat too. And it’s wonderful.