Reading to the T

[swan_tower]

When I was in grad school, I got a small amount of instruction in pedagogy: the art of teaching. Not a lot, because grad school tends to just chuck you into the deep end of being a TA and leave you to figure out swimming on your own, but a little. And one of the pitfalls I remember being warned about is “teaching to the T.”

Imagine your students are seated in rows of desks. Two groups will fall naturally under your gaze: the students in the front row, and those in a column through the middle of the room. That’s your T. By default, you will call on those students more often, give them more of your eye contact and attention, notice more quickly when they’re dozing off or misbehaving, because they’re in the places you will most commonly look. Students on the sides of the room and at the back, by contrast, will be neglected. In order to counteract this bias and be a good teacher, you have to remind yourself to look outside the T, to keep the entire room in your mind and distribute your attention equally.

Why do I bring this up? Because in the brouhaha over the Hugos, I’ve seen a lot of accusations to the effect of “all you PC liberals are the ones Doing It Wrong, because care more about the skin color or gender of the author than you do about the story.” And the other day I thought, no: it’s just that we’re trying not to read to the T.

The publishing industry — really, society at large — is a classroom with assigned seating. And you, the reader, didn’t assign it. Somebody else decided to stack the front row and that center column with mostly straight white guys: to give them more in-house backing, more marketing support, more reviews in major outlets. If you let your gaze rest in the default spot, those guys are the majority of the ones you’ll see. And they may have good things to say! Excellent contributions to the class! . . . but so may the students who have been relegated to the sides and back of the room. The ones you’ll wind up ignoring, if you aren’t conscious of the problem and taking steps to counteract it.

These calls to increase the attention paid to minority writers aren’t about prioritizing the identity of the author above the story. They’re about being aware of our tendency to read to the T, and working to overcome it. They’re about recognizing that being seated in the back corner of the classroom doesn’t mean a person has less in the way of interesting things to say than the writer who got put front and center. You can pretend all you like that publishing is a pure meritocracy, that the authors who get the bulk of the support and attention earned that purely on the basis of their own awesomeness — but doing that requires two things: 1) ignoring a heap of evidence to the contrary, and 2) concluding that yeah, all those women and minorities and so forth really just don’t write very good books compared to the straight white guys.

Don’t read to the T. Look at the whole room. See what’s out there, that you’ve been overlooking all this time.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Angela, who is awesome, was once in a class where the very first day, the professor explained that there was a witch. This witch was responsible for all the terrible or mediocre things that happened. The witch made sure there wasn't any of the good dessert left in the cafeteria. The witch made people fail the test. The witch screws up the curve. Whatever it was, the witch did it.

Then she had everyone go around and introduce themselves. Then she had them vote, secretly, on who they thought was the witch.

With almost no data, class after class picked people in the T.

No assigned seating, very little if any foreknowledge, but an interesting pattern. And we refer to ourselves as the witch sometimes when we mean we're... the star students for a reason unrelated to class, or the student who makes it hard for others in her enthusiasm.


Also, your analogy is perfect.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That is a fascinating social experiment!

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

Ironically enough, I would purposefully sit as far from the T as possible (at the back, against the wall), so I could read during class.

Also! I forgot to tell you earlier, but I was in Shakespeare & Company (and English book shop in Paris) and they had your book on display (http://dhampyresa.livejournal.com/84802.html).

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Got me wondering whether there's any trend in where students in media are portrayed as sitting. The two I can think of off hand (Kyon and Haruhi Suzumiya, Youko in Twelve Kingdoms) sit outside the T -- I suspect a bias toward window seats, so the student protagonist can look moodily out of it, or notice people outside. OTOH Nagato Yuki-chan sits in the T in her series.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

It might be a pattern of "good student = in the T; person who doesn't pay much attention = outside the T"? Then again, I seem to recall there's assigned seating in Haruhi.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Don't remember if they specify in Suzumiya, but assigned seems pretty common in Japanese media. Random draws in _Wandering Son_. Some sort of assignment in Twelve Kingdoms, though with protest ("Teacher! I don't want to sit next to her!") And regular seating, not daily freestyle. But I think that's common in high school, and the original comment was about college.

So my comment was more about where creators choose to place their students -- even if the students didn't have an in character choice, the media creators might follow a theme.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

When I was the witch, a grad student taking undergrad classes in a different department, I tried to stay out of the T. That was for the people the class was for. My job was to stay out of the way of their learning.

They never appreciated it. I'm usually the witch.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

That's rather ungrateful of them.

[aulus-poliutos.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too. The places outside the T were the best.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

Exatly.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Nice metaphor!

I suspect that it'll be like my impression of Scalzi's "easy mode" metaphors: insightful seeming to those of us already convinced, but with marginal persuasive value to the hostile. But every bit helps, hopefully...

[teleidoplex]

One of my most memorable experience teaching for the GROUPS program (first-generation, minority, and low-income freshmen at a midwest state university, for those who aren't Marie) was the first day of class, when ALL the kids would rush into the room and jockey for the T-seats, some of them even muttering under their breaths "sit in the T, sit in the T" because they'd been TOLD about this phenomenon, and they wanted to maximize their chances to do well any way they could.

I swear, teaching for that program saved my soul. Few of my students during the regular year cared or wanted to be there, but almost every single one of my GROUPS students WANTED to be there. Burned with a desire to learn (not just to get good grades). I loved those kids.