Classroom Discussion is Like Tetris

Hello everyone,

Someone said something to me the other day that made me think that effective classroom discussion is sometimes like playing Tetris.

You know the game Tetris don't you? Little shapes made up of variously colored boxes float from the top of a video screen, and the player tries to flip the shapes around so that they will fill in empty space, or so that their colors will match other colored shapes. The object is to have the shapes fill the screen with no empty places. I am often hypnotized watching my daughter play.

Effective classroom discussions can be like Tetris in the following ways:

1. Student comments and questions are unpredictable. They seem to drop out of nowhere sometimes

I confess that, if you have only one prep, by the end of the day you might have an idea of some of the questions or ideas that might be brought up. Further, after teaching for more than 20 years, I knew that someone was bound to ask certain questions at certain times. (It is impossible to teach Shakespeare's complete sonnets without the question, "Was Shakespeare gay?" coming up.) I also confess that a certain amount of manipulation can take place. (If I announce in my film classes that I don't watch "R" rated movies, I can predict with fair accuracy that someone will ask me why.) But if you allow free inquiry, which I think is important in class-wide discussions, then you must know that some students will ask questions or bring up subjects that are not obviously connected with the discussion in hand. Personally, I think ALL questions must be answered, and none should be ignored or disrespected, but that leaves the discussion open to enormous digressions, which leads to similarities 2 and 3.

2. You need to fill in the gaps while under time constraints. Class only lasts as long as it lasts. You can't fail to make connections.

3. You need to flip the shapes around to make them fit. In Tetris, different colors and shapes are dropping all around you. In class, wide varieties of subjects are flying around. I want to talk about sonnets, my students want to talk about gay sex. This sort of digression is not for the faint of heart, though it's very invigorating. I can use the non-issue of Shakespeare's sexuality to turn the students back to sonnets so fast that they hardly know they've ventured away from fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. (The fact that the question of Shakespeare's sex life in the sonnets is unanswerable, but the sonnets provide all sorts of interesting commentary on a wide variety of human interactions--both sexual and non-sexual makes for very interesting sessions with these 400-year-old poems.) In the meantime, students are close reading more than they've done in their lives in an effort to keep up their side in the discussion.

I will have approached the sonnets, by the way, with very specific objectives in mind. As soon as I open up a class-wide discussion or inquiry into the sonnets, however, I find that the class is led in ways that don't necessarily fill my objectives. I need to find ways to make the connections. The suggestions in the previous paragraph may help fulfill some of my objectives including close reading of difficult texts or decoding of compound/complex sentences. Still, I may also have objectives involving the structure of poetry, scansion (it was an AP class), and autobiography; or I may have an integrated vocabulary lesson built in (including lessons in connotation). I need to use the discussion to fill those objectives. It requires me to keep the objectives firmly in mind while following the potentially wide-ranging discussion.

My reward for allowing digressions then making connections, is that the connections become very powerful because students make them based on previous knowledge or associations that I would have been unaware of until I began the discussion.

It really is like a game, and, when it works, it's exhilarating.

Jeff Combe