Brian Sweeney

Frustration.  It’s something you feel a lot in learning with tom.  I experienced it both in taking his classes and co-teaching with him.  I quickly learned the value in frustration; how hitting a wall can inspire you to re-examine what you think you know, and force you to see things differently.  I am going to share two stories of my frustration with you, one from taking a class and one from co-teaching with tom.

One class I took with tom was Global Econ.  The format of this class was centered around extensive, lengthy debates.  For each debate, we were split up into new groups.  We went into the debates not knowing what side of the debate we would be on or if we would even participate at all.  Therefore, we had to prepare every side for every debate, which was no easy task.  No, that’s underplaying it.  It was a pain in the ass.  This required extensive, lengthy meetings with our groupmates, where we spent hours upon hours researching our topics, writing up our positions, and practicing presenting them.  We had to learn every side to an issue, and be able to talk about each extensively, even if we personally disagreed with a position.  There was one infamous night where every group in our class happened to be meeting in Slavin all at the same time.  Naturally, we sent an angry picture to tom. tom regularly became a target of our stress and anger when we were prepping for debates, which was a mantle he held with great esteem.

When the debates finally arrived, we would be waiting with bated breath to find out if we would be presenting.  Even if we were stressed out and anxious about being chosen to debate, we often felt a little disappointed when we weren’t picked.  That said, as we watched our colleagues debate, we were able to critique from a place of knowing, and we often heard arguments we hadn’t previously considered.

Teaching with tom also provided many moments of positive frustration.  tom and I spent a lot of time crafting the syllabus for our class.  Our class was to use film as a vehicle to discuss global issues.  Each week, the class would watch a different film, and then we’d discuss it.  We were creating this class from scratch, and therefore we needed to do the same with the syllabus.  Not only did we have to determine each film we’d watch, we also needed to find readings and videos to accompany them.

This was often a slow and arduous process with a lot of back and forth.  We took our time thinking through exactly what we hoped students would take away from the class.  This required a lot of pushing back against each other, and often disagreements.  While it could occasionally be difficult in the process, I think it led to an end result that we were both incredibly happy with.  It quickly became apparent that our best ideas often came in moments where we disagreed on something, or when we were struggling to determine the right way to present material.

Both of these experiences were often frustrating, but that frustration led to a better outcome than I could have anticipated.