The Moon Standard: Building a Quality Student-Teacher Channel of Communication by Ritika

The Moon Standard: Building a Quality Student-Teacher Channel of Communication by Ritika - January 2015 Scholarship Essay

The temperature had dipped into the teens that afternoon. Much to my dismay I discovered I had been walking in circles, having passed Toy Joy for what seemed like the third, maybe fourth, time. I pressed my phone harder against my ear to see if I could make out what the muffled voice was saying, but by then my fingers, numbed by the cold, had lost their grip on the phone. All I could catch before it fell and fatally cracked on the pavement was a: “yup, I’m here . . . still waiting.” On the other end of the line, sat a cross interviewer who had already been waiting for an hour. He repeated, “walk eastward on Dean Keeton. Take a left on Speedway. Continue on Speedway until you reach a five-way stop sign. Make a sharp right turn on 30th street, and you should see it to your left.” To him, this seemed straightforward. To me, undecipherable. Though the information was decidedly clear on one end, it had all but disintegrated en route to the receiving end. In essence, the fault lied in the nature of our communication, as the signal was tenuous at best. Comparably, teaching and learning—both situated at opposite poles of a channel of communication—are also plagued with this problem.

Having been a student for most of my life, I have found that effective teaching and learning not only require meaningful content, but also an established student-teacher channel of communication—the latter being no less important than the former. Accordingly, one piece of advice I would give a teacher would be for him or her to understand that a well-charted syllabus and top-notch material are not enough for high-standard learning to take place; rather, on top of that, a teacher must keenly ensure to the best of his or her ability that knowledge has been properly received, unpacked and processed by the student. Learning logically requires that one be taught; by contrast, teaching does not require learning. It can easily continue sans learning taking place. Consider the college students, sitting in the back row, who habitually spend class perusing their Twitter feeds, while the droning professor fades into the background. The lecture’s content is effectively rendered useless and deflected by a fortress of back-row laptops manned by these listless students. Regrettably, the learning never occurs for them, since they sever the channel of communication between them and the professor. It seems, then, that a sizeable challenge for a teacher lies in building and securing a strong student-teacher channel of communication, so that a student is able to receive and meaningfully process knowledge that has been conveyed. After all, there isn’t much utility in speaking into a disconnected phone, or likewise, in listening to unintelligible voices coming from the speaker for too long. In either case, who wouldn’t eventually hang up?

To construct a quality student-teacher channel of communication, I would advise a teacher to go by what I dub, The Moon Standard. Here, both ends of the phone line, so to speak, remain intact while dynamic discussions—class lectures, contemplative questions and answers—flow with ease. Professor Moon was my contracts professor in law school; he was a charismatic, genuine and hilarious fellow. He challenged us to view dense contract theory in a positive light—that is, not as a source of boredom and misery, rather, as an exciting puzzle begging to be unscrambled. He transformed notoriously lackluster topics (i.e., the terrifying labyrinth that is Section 2-207 of the Uniform Commercial Code) into those that I quickly began to relish and work hard to master. Bewildered readers may reason that surely he managed this by performing nothing less than wizardry. He did not. Moon simply did so by establishing a strong rapport with his students and communicating in a way that inspired me to learn. He put forth twice as much effort in bolstering a strong student-teacher channel of communication than I would have normally expected from a professor. Those hallmark efforts culminated to what I have now christened in my mind as The Moon Standard: He was easily accessible to students, and would often email us sample exam problems and detailed hour-long videos of him breaking down the solutions, provide us with Moon-original diagrams that proved extremely helpful come exam time, and impart serious career-related advice—all while cracking rib-tickling jokes. This to me was the source of his wizardry, as it were, of how he was able to establish a strong student-teacher channel of communication that enabled high-standard learning to take place. In short, he went above and beyond of what was expected.

Essentially, by utilizing the standard as a blueprint of sorts for constructing a quality and illuminating channel of communication, a teacher would not only bridge the gap between teaching and learning, but also foster positive feelings and motivation among students towards their learning. Moon’s sincere persona as well as his keen efforts put forth towards ensuring that students understood the subject matter, in my mind, struck an important balance worth noting: holding students to high standards of excellence while maintaining a level of lightheartedness, motivation and optimism in the classroom. Simply put, current and future teachers would do well to adopt the general prescriptions embodied by The Moon Standard, in which no call is dropped.