All Gibbons students take Gibbons Freshman Seminar during their freshman year, and some of them are lucky enough to get Mr. Zachary Taylor as their teacher. A part of Mr. Taylor’s class is the “sophomore talk back” he has at the beginning of the year.
“The sophomore talks backs allow sophomores to come into a freshman class, my GFS class, and talk to them and answer whatever questions they might have, depending on academics, spiritual life, social, whatever elements that freshman might have a question for I have sophomores come in to answer them,” Mr. Taylor said. He added that it “serves as a modeling aspect to show ‘Hey this is what a socratic seminar should look and feel like for sophomores who have done it already.’”
The talk backs are a good experience for sophomores to tell the freshmen what to expect for the rest of their year.
The sophomore talks backs weren’t always a thing though.
“I didn’t do it my very first year, I knew only a few sophomores, but by my second year it kind of came to me at the end of the year, and I was thinking ‘You know what, I think the best thing to do for freshmen, especially after experiencing the first few days of classes, to actually sit down with somebody who was where they are 365 days ago,’” Mr. Taylor said.
Now you might think “Why do it a couple weeks into school, why not do it the first few days?”
“I do it because I do think that by this point in the school year they have better questions to ask than over the summer when they’re kind of forced one on one, or the first day of classes when they’ve never experienced the class,” Mr. Taylor said. “It is a challenge. It’s kind of like a juggling game, I have to balance their schedules with my schedules, so I’m coordinating with their flex schedules and if that doesn’t work then I try to coordinate maybe with their elective if that works, and then if that doesn’t work out with their elective then I can’t pull them out of a core class into my GFS class. So it is a bit of a juggling game.”
The sophomore talk backs seem like they help everyone who’s a part of them. Hopefully they happen for more years to come!
