Category: Teaching

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And where are my chili peppers?!

Also in Inside Higher Ed, a report on a study done by James Felton, a professor at Central Michigan University, finds that there is a correlation between “hotness” and “quality” on the dubious web site Ratemyprofessor.com:

As far as students — or whoever is rating professors on the open Rate My Professor site — are concerned, nothing predicts a quality instructor like hotness.

Felton found a positive correlation of 0.64 (0.00 means there is no correlaton whatsoever, and 1.0 describes a perfectly linear relationship) between the “hotness� and “quality� — quality is a composite of “helpfulness� and “clarity� — ratings on the site. “Hotness� is determined by evaluators choosing “hot� or “not hot,� with each click counting as either +1 or -1. “Quality� is on a simple 1-5 scale. (Felton may be an exception on the correlation — while he doesn’t get any hotness points from RateMyProfessors, he does well on quality.)

I wonder if, by teaching online, I can somehow increase my hotness factor….

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Student Loan Follies

Inside Higher Ed has an article about the piece on Sallie Mae last night on 60 Minutes. It’s sort of an odd article because it seems to be defending Sallie Mae in a way; is there some advertising dollars at work here?

I saw this story on 60 Minutes last night, and on the whole, I agreed with it. The student loan business really is a no-lose proposition for Sallie Mae: if students default on a loan, the lender gets money from the “guarantor” (thus the phrase “guaranteed student loans”), meaning the bank can’t possibly lose. Further, unlike most other forms of debt, students can’t negotiate it down or erase it through bankruptcy. So it makes sense as to why Sallie Mae was described as one of the most profitable businesses in the world.

On the other hand, the students they talked to about their debt load seemed a little uneducated about the whole process. These former students expressed shock that when they borrowed $60K, it turned out that they now all of a sudden owed $100K or more. Uh… this is called interest; it’s how banks make their money and why banking is lucrative in the first place.

What was completely missing from the show was any discussion as to why students have to borrow so much money to go to college in the first place. Essentially, the state and the federal governments have steadily decreased its funding for high education over the last twenty years or so. If a young person wants to earn a college degree (and young people are repeatedly told that if they want to “get ahead” in this country, they need a college degree), then they need to find a way to pay for it. Unless Mom and Dad have the cash, they have to work; and generally, jobs delivering pizzas or waiting tables aren’t enough to pay all the bills. Thus the loans.

I would have liked to have seen a bit more in this report something about the relationship between increased student loan debt and decreased government funding for higher education. And I wouldn’t have minded some sort of discussion about priorities for spending in the U.S. For example, the “education president” is pursuing a war in Iraq that has so far cost the government about $280 billion dollars (and rising, of course). Think about the number of full-ride scholarships we could have given to students attending colleges and universities.

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15 Weeks vs. 7.5 Weeks vs. 12 Weeks (Online)

I stumbled across this blog entry by Liz Kleinfeld lamenting the length of the 15 week semester the other day; essentially, she contemplates the potentially benefits of a 10 or so week semester.

Actually, I more or less experienced this with my first tenure-track job at Southern Oregon because they were on the quarter system. If I recall, it was either 9 or 10 weeks, including finals. Now, I had a number of problems with this job, so perhaps my judgement about the quarter system has been tainted. Nonetheless, I thought it was not a good idea for a couple of different reasons. First, while I appreciate the notion that 15 weeks is perhaps too long, 10 weeks is too short. There was just too much work for both students and instructors crammed into those 10 weeks. Second, and this was perhaps a problem unique to Southern Oregon, but a typical course there was four credits, meaning you met either four times a week or twice for about two hours at a time. Combine this with the fact that most people taught three courses like this for three quarters in a row and you’ve got some stressed-out and over-worked folks.

Third, the quarter system meant that the school year lasted WAAAAY too long. We started in mid-September and went all the way through early June, which made schooling a rather unpleasant experience for students and teachers alike in mid-May. Which reminds me: EMU wrapped up winter term classes last week (technically, my classes had finals on Monday).

No, ten weeks wasn’t good. Of course, the way that most of the spring and summer courses are taught here at EMU isn’t necessarily a very good idea, either. Spring term (the term we just had, which most schools call “spring,” is actually called “winter” term here) starts on Monday, May 8 and goes through the end of June, and summer runs from then until the third or so week in August– in other words, 7 and a half weeks.

Now, these 7.5 week courses do meet for about six hours a week, and, given that it’s the spring and/or summer terms, this does work reasonably well. But it isn’t ideal, and, in my experiences, it makes teaching writing and/or a course with a ton of reading a bit of a high-wire act.

Which brings me to this year’s 12 week experiment. This spring/summer, I’ve managed to carve out a deal where I will be teaching an online class, English 328, for 12 weeks. I thought that teaching an online class in just seven and a half weeks was just crazy, and I also thought that 12 weeks sounded just about right. We’ll see how it turns out; I hope it goes well because I like the idea of teaching online in the summer (if I’m going to teach then at all…).

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Writing Cops?

Laurence Musgrove has an interesting piece in Inside Higher Ed called “The Real Reason Students Can’t Write.” I think it’s interesting because I agree with just about half of it.

Musgrove, who is an English professor-type who teaches first year writing and who has been involved in some writing programs at different schools, suggests the following causes of “bad student writing:”

I believe most faculty think that when they find an error in grammar or logic or format, it is because their students don’t know “how� to write. When I find significant errors in student writing, I chalk it up to one of three reasons: they don’t care, they don’t know, or they didn’t see it. And I believe that the first and last are the most frequent causes of error. In other words, when push comes to shove, I’ve found that most students really do know how to write — that is, if we can help them learn to value and care about what they are writing and then help them manage the time they need to compose effectively.

I think that this is all very very true. Musgrove also suggests that a lot of “bad” student writing continues to happen across the curriculum for two reasons. First, it’s a lot easier for most professors to complain about their student writing than to actually do anything about it– like, you know, teach (as opposed to merely assign) writing. Second, students rarely face serious consequences for bad writing; bad writing might receive a less than excellent grade, but rarely do students fail as a result of their bad writing.

But then Musgrove kind of loses me when he proposes this:

All faculty members are hereby authorized to challenge their students’ writing proficiency. Students who fail to demonstrate the generally accepted minimum standards of proficiency in writing may be issued a “writing ticket� by their instructors. Writing tickets become part of students’ institutional “writing records.� Students may have tickets removed from their writing records by completing requirements identified by their instructors. These requirements may include substantially revising the paper, attending a writing workshop, taking a writing proficiency examination, or registering for a developmental writing course. Students who fail to have tickets removed from their records will receive additional penalties, such as a failing grade for the course, academic probation, or the inability to register for classes.

Wha????

Look, average people/students already think that English and writing professors are members of some sort of grammar Nazi patrol; this guy wants to give us the power to write actual tickets? No thanks.

I have been thinking lately though how it’s a problem that comp/rhet folks have reduced the role grammar, correctness, and proofreading in contemporary pedagogy too much. To me, I think this is especially a problem in writing classes beyond first year writing. But that’s another post for another time.

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The future of my own textbook…

Jeff Rice has a post where he discusses his participation in a discussion about the future of textbooks sponsored by the future of the book organization. Interesting enough, but… well… I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but I think there are three basic problems with the basic premise of open source textbooks (though what they’re talking about here is not necessarily open source, I don’t think):

  • The main reason why someone writes a textbook and also why publishers publish textbooks is to make money. (This perhaps goes without saying, but in my most recent past experiences, this is not a good reason to write a textbook, mainly because making “real” money from a textbook is essentially like winning the lottery.) In that sense, textbooks are very different animals from academic books, novels, poetry collections, etc.: sure, people want to make money with those kinds of books too, but there are other reasons for both writers and publishers for coming out with those kinds of books, reasons like scholarship to be counted on a CV, pleasure, and/or (dare I say it?) love.

    Some institutions will “count” a textbook for the purposes of tenure and promotion, but I don’t think anyone– writers, publishers, or readers students who have to buy the textbook– is in it for the pleasure or love of books.

  • The main reason why an instructor assigns a textbook in the first place is because a) she has to as some sort of program-wide requirement (this is of course common in first year composition circles, which is one of the reasons why publishers make a lot of money from these books), and/or b) the instructor has no interest in writing his own materials for a particular class. In my opinion, the best (and worst, simultaneously) textbooks out there are like cookbooks full of fool-proof recipes: add instructor and stir.
  • The history of software developed by small groups for a very particular thing– TK3 for example, or potentially this software being developed by these future of the book people– is not very good. It’s not that this stuff is bad software; it’s just that it seems to do only one or two things, and it doesn’t seem to do those one or two things (at face value, at least) a whole lot better than the accepted format. TK3 wasn’t a hit because it didn’t have that much more functionality for most users beyond Adobe Acrobat.

Of course, I wasn’t there; maybe the conversation/thinking that happened there addressed and solved all of these problems.

Anyway, having made those grand and sweeping pronouncements, I am also pleased to report that there is at least a chance that my own textbook project has some kind of, er, “future.” I hope I’m not jinxing this, but a deal is in the works with McGraw-Hill that would essentially allow me to take it to another publisher and/or put it up on the web.

I’ll have to see what this deal looks like and what it allows me, but my plan right now is to actually put it up on the web. That might not be the smartest move as far as publishing and money and such goes– once it is available electronically, I don’t know what my chances are of getting another publisher to pick it up. But publishing it as a web site would represent something that is at least different in textbook publishing so far, which might get the manuscript some attention it might not have otherwise gotten. And it is a move that might bring me a sense of closure. At this stage, closure would be good.

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The danger of everything

See quotes about how things like rock -n- roll, the telephone, novels, movies, and the waltze were all once dangerous in “The Culture War.” I saw this article in WIRED (I actually bought it last month), and I was reminded of it again this morning at boing-boing.

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YackPack– something else I'll have to talk about in this podcasting article, I suppose…

See Yackpack, which (as far as I can tell after monkeying around with it for about three minutes) is a website/software that facilitates group podcasts. It looks quite easy and kind of fun. And it looks relevant to what I’m trying to write about, which is an expansion/revision of my CCCCs presentation on podcasting.

Of course, the tricky things about trying to incorporate this stuff into my online class this coming spring is I don’t have a lot of time to get it up and running. Classes this term end May 1 and classes in the spring term start May 8, which, given the rest of my life, is not a lot of time to do a lot of major revisions to the way I teach online. But it still might be worth a try.

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They come in waves/the end is near…

I can’t remember the last time I have felt this swamped with grading/commenting on student work. I’m teaching an overload this term, and while it is a modest overload (one class that I’ve taught many times before and which I kind of feel like I need to teach in order to further a research project), it has really slowed me down the last couple of weeks.

This week is the final wave for everything in my classes. The last day of classes are this coming Monday, and as a result, I’ve got (between my three classes) five sets of projects/essays to comment on. Then, after I finish that reading/commenting, there’s another big wave. Final grades need to be calculated in two of my classes by Monday of next week (students in those classes use finals week to revise things if they want to). And then in my graduate class, another wave will begin as they hand in their seminar projects.

And I’ve been distracted by getting writing.emich.edu to work.

And the weather is really starting to turn nice.

And then the spring term starts in two and a half weeks, though I’m kind of looking forward to that. Since most “school business” more or less shuts down during the spring and summer terms (May to August, basically), I will be mostly just teaching, and the course I’ll be teaching will be online. I’ll certainly have to meet with some MA students for advising and such, but the service burden drops off quite a bit after the regular term.

Anyway, the end is near, and I think.

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A comic to remember for later… and potentially why…

First things first: the comic for later is PoCom-UP-001, which was a group/collaborative comic of enormous propotions. It’s a pretty slick flash interface, too. Scott McCloud used this in his talk recently as an example of his concept of the “infinite canvas” possible for comics on the web.

Second, some of you, especially those of you who have witnessed my pooh-poohing of the role of “visual rhetoric” in teaching, may be wondering why I’m interested at all in this comic stuff. Two basic reasons. First, while I’m still not convinced that overt attention to “the visual” has that much of a role in introductory writing classes (at least the introductory classes we have here at EMU because of factors that involve both the students and the poor access to computer lab facilities), I am very convinced it’s important in the advanced undergraduate writing class I teach all the time.

And comics play a role there because for the last couple of semesters, I’ve been teaching a simple comic writing/analysis exercise. This has partly been the result of Linda AK’s influence (a HUGE comic fan), and also because of Scott McCloud’s campus visit. Anyway, I came up with a comic assignment– here’s a version of it— and I think it has been reasonably successful. I’m set to teach this course online again this spring/summer (alas, not next school year though), and I’m planning on switching things up a bit. And I want to include some other “wacky” examples of comics.

Which is why I’m linking now.

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HigherEd BlogCon: check it out….

I’ve been too busy with end of the (school) year business to really pay much attention to the blog-o-sphere lately, but check out the HigherEd BlogCon going on right now. I’m not completely sure who the sponsors of this thing are (I recognize a publisher’s name on the list), and I’m not sure these folks are necessarily in my “branch” of higher education. But it looks like there are just a gazillion different resources here. And I like the concept of the web-based conference/blog-based “carnival” of texts.

I’ll have to go back to this when I get finished shoveling through some more immediate paperwork and grading and such.