God, I remember when I started sixth form (last two years of high school in the UK, seen as a more university style learning environment) and the teachers kept complaining about how quiet we were during lessons.
We wouldn’t talk. They’d tell us to do something and we’d just sit there quietly and do it, until eventually they just said “hey, guys, it’s okay to chat while you work!” and then everybody would start talking.
One teacher described it as creepy.
And I just remember thinking, what the fuck did they expect to happen? We’d all been taught from the age of four or five onwards that talking in class was bad. That if we did it, we’d be told off, or punished, or in some instances maybe the entire class would be punished along with us, just to make sure we really got the idea. It was a whole thing.
But now, because we were sixth-formers and therefore ‘grown ups’, we were suddenly expected to flip a switch and be able to talk as much as we liked? The whole reason we were in sixth-form was because we had worked hard, done well at school, and generally followed the rules— but still the teachers couldn’t understand why we didn’t just talk to each other.
Now I’m at uni, and seminar tutors are having a similar problem. People will talk in seminars, but a lot of them will insist on raising their hands and waiting to be called upon first. “Don’t put your hands up, just shout at me!” the guy keeps saying. But they keep doing it anyway.
Like, I really don’t know how to tell these people that you can’t train somebody to act in one way for over half their lives, and then suddenly expect them to start acting differently just because the expectations have changed.
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