Teaching – Page 7 – Steven D. Krause

December 23, 2014

Ungrouping Groups, pros and cons (and other reflections on Fall 2014 teaching)

Normally at this time of year, during the holidaze on some family visit (now at the inlaws and later at my side of the family), I’m finishing the planning for the next semester’s classes and reflecting a bit on the semester that has just been. But since I’ll be sabbaticalling in winter term, now I’m just reflecting, and in particular not assigning a collaborative project in either of my classes.

(This is mostly interesting to me and for “future Steve” to read when he actually has to start thinking about the fall 2015 term. But just in case anyone else is interested, I thought I’d put it all here).

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September 20, 2014September 21, 2014

Enough with the “no laptops in classrooms” already

There has been a rash of “turn off the laptop” articles in various places in the educational media, but I think what has pushed me over the edge and motivated this post is Clay Shirky’s “Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away” on Medium. In the nutshell, Shirky went to the no laptop camp because (he says) students can’t multitask and students are too easily distracted by the technology, particularly with the constant alerts from things like Facebook.

Enough already.

First off, while I am no expert regarding multitasking, it seems to me that there are a lot of different layers to multitasking (or perhaps it would make more sense to say attention on task) and most of us perform some level of multitasking all the time. Consider driving. I think it’s always a bad idea to be texting while actually moving in traffic because, yes, that’s too much multitasking for most people. But how about texting or checking email or social media while at a long light? I do it all the time. Or how about talking on the phone? For me, it’s easy to talk on the phone while driving if I am using headphones or if I’m driving a familiar route in normal conditions. When I’m driving an unfamiliar route in bad weather or in heavy traffic, not so much.

Second, distraction and not paying a lot of attention in class isn’t exactly new. When I was in high school, I sat in the back of the room in that chemistry class I was required to take and I read paperbacks “hidden” under the table. Students used to pass these things called “notes” on paper. Students did and still do whisper at each other in distracting ways. As both a college student and as a college teacher (certainly as a GA way back when), I’ve been with/had students who were distracted by and multitasking with magazines, newspapers, other people, with napping, etc., etc.

I agree with Shirky and some of the articles he cites that what’s interesting and different about contemporary electronic devices generally and social media in particular is that these are designed to distract us, to break our concentration. I routinely experience the sort of instant and satisfying gratification suggested in the abstract of this article. But to suggest that teachers/professors can solve this attention problem by asking students to temporarily turn off their laptops and pay attention to the sage on the stage strikes me as both naive and egotistical.

So here are three tips for Clay and other would-be haters for how to mentally adjust to the inevitability of laptops in their classrooms.

Number one, stop lecturing so much. When professors take the “stand and deliver” approach to “teaching,” the laptops come out. And why shouldn’t they? In an era where anyone can easily record a video and/or audio of a lecture that can be “consumed” by students on their own time, why should they sit and pay attention to you droning on?

I realize this is easy for me to say since I teach small classes with 25 of fewer students, but there are lots of ways to break up the talking head in a large lecture hall class too. Break students into groups to ask them to discuss the reading. Ask students to take a moment to write about a question or a reading and then ask them to respond. Require your students to discuss and respond. Use the time in class to actually do work with the laptops (individually and collaboratively) to do things. Just stop thinking that teaching means standing there and talking at them.

Number two, be more interesting. If as a teacher (or really, just a speaker) you are noticing a large percentage of students not paying attention and turning to laptops or cell phones or magazines or napping, there’s a pretty good chance you’re being boring. I notice this in my own teaching all the time: when my students and I are interested in a conversation or an activity, the laptops stay closed. When I start to drone on or it otherwise starts getting boring, I see the checks on Facebook or Twitter or ESPN Sports or whatever. I use that as a cue to change up the discussion, to get more interesting.

Number three, “Let it Go.” Because here’s the thing: there’s really nothing professors can do (at least in the settings where I teach) to completely eliminate these kinds of distractions and multitasking and generally dumb stuff that students sometimes do. Students are humans and humans are easily distracted. So instead of spending so much time demanding perfect attention, just acknowledge that most of us can get a lot done with a laptop open. If you as the teacher are not the center of the universe, it’ll be okay.

August 22, 2014August 22, 2014

What and why do students and faculty (and anyone else) want to and not want to write?

I read two different education media articles the other day that both spoke to me in oddly similar ways about the reasons for (or for not) writing. First there was from IHE, “What Students Write,” which is a sort of review/essay about Dan Melzer’s book, Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing. The article is good and the book sounds great. The very short version (based on just the article) is that Melzer studied over 2100 different writing assignments across the curriculum at about 100 different institutions. Not surprisingly, most of the writing assignments teachers give are shitty, mostly an exercise for students to prove to the teacher that they can repeat back in a written text (an essay, an exam, etc.) what was in the lecture and/or reading.

Melzer calls this largest category of writing assignments “student to examiner;” I would more cheekily call it “parroting,” or “Polly wants a cracker” writing. Oh, and students better repeat what the teacher said correctly. Here’s a quote:

Short-answer and essay exams made up about one-fifth of assignments in the study. Melzer said in an interview that the testing scenario makes sense, given the constraints on professors’ time. Offering multiple opportunities for feedback in a non-test scenario takes a lot more work, he said. But such opportunities are critical to writing development and lead to better student outcomes.

“There’s a lot more testing with the teacher-as-examiner going on than we probably think, and that’s a real negative to me because it’s such a limited kind of writing,” Melzer said. “It should make people think about how we can improve upon the situation and have student do richer kinds of writing.”

Professors are also “obsessed” with grammatical correctness, even when they claim to value critical thinking, the study says.

In the other corner comes this from CHE, “Anatomy of a Serial-Plagiarism Charge” about Mustapha Marrouchi, who is a postcolonial lit professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. There’s more about the case in an article behind CHE’s firewall, but the gist is that Marrouchi has apparently been plagiarising to different degrees for decades, this despite the fact that he was enough of a “big shot” in the field to get hired away from a previously high-paid spot at Louisiana State to an even sweeter gig at UNLV. What the non-firewalled piece I’m linking to here does do is highlight a number of incidents that do look kind of fishy.

So, what do these two articles/incidents say about what it is that students and teachers write and read, what they want to write and read? A few thoughts:

I like to write and always have. Writing is one of the few things I am actually good at and I can recall being rewarded for my talent as far back as grade school. I like to read too, though like a lot of my students (especially the creative writing types), I like to write more.

I write and read every day, but I still have a hard time with “assigned” writing, meaning for me not assignments from a teacher (I’m not taking any classes) but writing I am supposed to be doing for some other reason. There are at least three projects I’m procrastinating on right now to write this post instead. The same goes with reading. There are a stack of academic books and novels I am supposed to be reading right now so I can be a better person and a good intellectual, not to mention to be prepared to teach in a couple of weeks. But I am more likely to be reading the links to things on Twitter or the listicles on Facebook about which Hollywood stars began their careers as strippers.

So I guess there are some ways in which these reports of lazy writing assignments and serial plagiarism are not that surprising to me. Like everyone else in my field, I try to develop writing assignments with a clear purpose and audience beyond just writing to me as the teacher and beyond just having students prove to me they did the reading and/or were otherwise paying attention. I do think it makes a difference. I think students learn more from such assignments, I find this writing a lot more pleasant to read and grade, and I think it helps students to not plagiarize. It’s a bit of a cliché, but I also think it’s true that there’s a difference between assigning writing and teaching writing. So when professors give the sort of stupid assignments that Melzer is writing about in his book and with no actual teaching involved, it’s no wonder that those professors are disappointed and even angry about their students’ writing. Garbage in, garbage out.

But good assignments aren’t a cure-all. Not everyone likes to write just to write, and students frequently don’t like to write and thus resist new assignments. I gave a talk back at the CCCCs in Louisville in 2010 (a talk I should probably assign myself to revisit and rewrite into a longer essay) about using the movie RiP! A Remix Manifesto as a topic and a guiding principle for teaching first year writing. Among many other things, I said that while it is certainly more pedagogically effective and ethical to give writing assignments that are not parroting, many of my students ultimately reverted to writing five paragraph essays. When students do this, I think it is because it is the path of least resistance (it’s always easier doing something you’ve done rather than doing something you haven’t done before), but also because students don’t trust me. Perhaps for good reason. They’ve had years of previous school writing assignments where teachers obsessed over their repeating what the book/the teacher said and where they were dinged on the grade for grammar stuff. And the whole situation is by definition not “authentic” since it is writing assigned and tied to a grade. Students are “made” to do this– at least in the sense that it’s tied to requirements for a class and a grade. Even assignments that ask students to “self-reflect” on something on their own are still assigned.

Then there’s my cynical connection of assigned writing (bad assignments in particular) to Mustapha Marrouchi. I don’t know anything about him or his scholarly work beyond what I read in The Chronicle. But based on that reading, here’s a guy who has had quite the successful academic career by publishing convoluted literary and cultural theory liberally sprinkled with plagiarised and otherwise paraphrased quotes. He’s been doing this for years, and while he has apparently sort of/kind of been called on this before, he’s only just getting into serious trouble for this now. How did this happen and how did he get away with it that long? Is it possible that so few readers– academic or otherwise– read Marrouchi’s work that no one really noticed it as a serious problem for more than 20 years? Did no one care?

And why did Marrouchi do this anyway? As the examples in that CHE piece make clear, it wouldn’t have taken a whole lot for Marrouchi to cite his sources, to write “as Terry Eagleton put it” or whatever. Was he as a writer just too lazy to cite his sources? Was much of Marrouchi’s scholarship the equivalent of the five paragraph drudgery assigned to him by academia so that he could get another line on his CV? What’s going on here?

I guess this gets me back to the question about what and why does anyone write anything. But I don’t really know the answer to my questions, not even for myself as a writer. All I can say is do the best that you can with writing assignments, hoping for the best but understanding the inherent limitations of the rhetorical situation that is Education generally. Make all writing as engaging and as new and as thoughtful as possible. Don’t make students do dumb assignments just so they can do dumb assignments that get some grade. Don’t write dumb and/or plagiarized scholarship just so you can write scholarship.

August 2, 2014August 2, 2014

What I Learned from My Crappy Student Evaluations

My teaching evaluations for this past winter (what everyone else calls spring) semester came in, and man, they were pretty bad, some of the worst (maybe the worst?) of my career. At least the worst I can remember. Jeez.

It’s probably a bad idea for me to reflect too much on them this shortly after getting them, but it does prompt me to write a couple of things about these evaluations in particular and evaluations in general. Maybe for next time I get these kinds of evaluations, maybe for others out there who are looking through some student evaluations themselves.

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July 17, 2014

When is it okay to make fun of grammar?

Remember Weird Al? Yeah, me neither. Well, no– that’s not true. Of course I “remember” Weird Al from lots of different parodies over the years, all the way back to “My Bologna” to “Like a Surgeon” to his latest releases that have come out this past week. It’s just that I don’t find myself thinking about Weird Al one way or the other– except when he pops up in the media once in a while, like now.

WA has a new album out and one his parody songs is called “Word Crimes:”

Sung to the tune of “Blurred Lines,” it’s a series common “grammar nerd” criticisms that are ridiculously picky (it is a parody, of course) and that rhyme in funny ways. As someone who appreciates word humor, I thought it was funny and I didn’t think much more about it. Ha ha.

And then the hating/backlash began.

There was Forrest Wickman’s Slate article,”Weird Al Is Tired of Your “Word Crimes” in New Video,” which goes into equally silly detail in out pet-peeving WA’s pet peeves. A more pointed critique came from Mignon “Grammar Girl” Fogarty here, “Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” Video.” She is not amused:

Perhaps the most troubling thing for me is seeing teachers who say they are going to use this in class because kids will find it funny and it will make them care about grammar. The entire ending of the video is putting down people who have trouble writing. The video says it’s OK to call people who can’t spell morons, droolers, spastics, and mouth breathers. Really, you’re going to use an educational tool that tells your struggling kids that they’re stupid? It just blows my mind that any teacher would think that’s OK.

It’s also hard for me to separate my feelings about this video from my feelings about his 2010 grammar videos that reinforce simplistic ideas, such as one in which he goes off about signs that read drive slow being wrong. The problem is that slow can be used as something called a flat adverb. The sign isn’t wrong, but drive slow is one of those things that people who don’t bother looking things up love to rant about. Those videos were extremely popular, so I imagine at least a few people told him that he got it wrong, but his comments from the NPR video suggest to me that he didn’t take the time to listen to those people and figure it out—that he still thinks he was making those signs better. If, as he says, “correcting people’s grammar is kind of a big deal” for him, then with the kind of power he has, I expect him to get things right.

The bottom line is that I don’t believe in word crimes, and I don’t believe in encouraging people to think about language that way.

In my Facebook world of comp/rhet folks, there seems to be a fair number of people in the Grammar Girl camp, finding WA’s song offensive– it’s not funny to make fun of people who can’t spell, it’s not funny to make fun of people who can’t write, we don’t need to be calling bad writers dumb, etc., etc., etc.

First off, I’m not going to “mansplain” anyone about the definition of parody. That’s a recipe for disaster. Though one fun fact: here’s the second link I found on Google searching for parody. That WA is everywhere right now.

But in a tradition that includes a “modest proposal” to eat the children of the poor and more recently a runaway hit Broadway musical that skewers Mormonism with lots of filthy and hilarious songs, it seems kind of strange to me for people to get bent out of shape over “Word Crimes.” Even for a Weird Al video, this is pretty tame stuff. Where were these people with arguably more offensive WA parodies like the racially charged “White and Nerdy” (fun fact– this video has Key and Peele in it!), or the food/fat-hating “Eat It” and “Fat?”

So, is it ever okay to parody and/or make fun of bad writing, grammar, and students? Are these even more off-limits than fatness, religion, and eating babies?

Don’t get me wrong– I don’t think it would be fair to make fun of/mock particular students in public, which is where sites like Shit My Students Write more or less crosses a line. There is at least the illusion that these are “real” quotes from “real” students– though I think that the realness here is debatable. Though some of the stuff on that site is pretty funny.

Of course I don’t think a prescriptive/pet peeve approach to grammar is write for teaching at any level and I’ve never done that. Of course it’s not useful to call students dumb or accuse them of committing “word crimes” or whatever. Of course.

But bad writing is funny and fair game for parody, and you know what? there are “word crimes” of various sorts. We see them every day in bad apostrophes or stupid exclamation points or “unnecessary” quotation “marks” or even passive aggressive notes. My experience has been that these kinds of “word crimes” are ones that students at all levels recognize and they’re often actually an entry into a less picky discussion into what constitutes correctness and the rhetorical/persuasive impact of effective or ineffective grammar.

So lighten up, people. But don’t get me started on that bastard’s mocking of the Amish.

April 3, 2014April 3, 2014

Thoughts on “Con Job: Stories of Adjunct & Contingent Labor”

I’ve watched “Con Job: Stories of Adjunct & Contingent Labor” twice now today, even though I don’t have anywhere close to enough time to be doing that– and I don’t have time to write this post, either. But I kind of can’t help myself, I suppose….

Anyway on the positive side:

It’s probably the most heart-felt and honest discussion about the problems of adjunct/contingent/non-tenure-track faculty teaching writing in college I’ve ever seen. The movie features both adjuncts and tenure-track faculty from all over the country who are interested in these labor issues. Though it’s only about teaching first year writing– I’ll come back to that in the “not so positive side” of things– the things these folks are talking about here are raw and real. Not a lot of punches held back.
I talk to a lot of MA students (or would-be MA students) who tell me that they’re interested in our program in Written Communication because they are hoping to teach first year writing at a community college and they figure they’ll get started with part-time work and take it from there. I try to explain why that isn’t the best of plans, but I think they often think I’m just being a pessimist. This video ought to be required viewing for these people.
There are a lot of good ideas toward the end of the movie to help with the “adjunct problem,” most of which has to do with (basically) reimagining how it is we hire people to teach courses like first year writing. What we try to do at EMU with lecturer positions is sort of an example, but it’s worth getting to the end to hear some of those smart ideas.
This is the clearest argument I’ve seen in a long long time in support of the “abolitionist” school of thought regarding first year writing alá Sharon Crowley and others. In brief, that position is higher education should eliminate the “universal” requirement for first year writing because the labor conditions necessary to teach so many sections of fycomp are blatantly unethical. (Often included in the abolitionist argument is the claim that first year writing is of limited pedagogical value, but I’m not going to go there for now.) So instead of making every first year student take fycomp, simply staff as many as you can with GAs, tenure-track faculty, and teaching but non-tenure-track faculty (albeit inevitably “second tier” faculty, which is its own problem) who have adequate training, who are treated more fairly, etc., etc. If that means at a place like EMU we’re only able to offer 25 sections of first year writing instead of 100, so be it.

The downside of this is you have to be careful what you wish for. If students didn’t have to take first year writing at a place like EMU, fewer students would obviously take the class, and that would have an impact on department credit hour production, which in turn would have implications beyond the adjunct problem in fycomp. That credit hour production from the required sections of first year writing helps to offset the lower enrollment in other upper-level courses and it also helps us justify tenure-track hires. Further, a lot of the adjuncts complaining now about the injustices of their current employment would simply be out of the classroom entirely.

And this brings me to some of the not so positive sides of this movie:

This isn’t about the problem of adjunct/contingent labor in “Higher Education” generally; this is specifically and exclusively about the problem of adjunct/contingent labor in first year writing. I can understand why this is the case– the folks who made this movie were adjunct first year writing teachers– but to me it’s a striking weakness of this project. Why didn’t they talk to adjuncts in other fields? How hard would it have been to have done that? It suggests that the long-standing argument about the adjunctification of higher education generally might indeed be mostly limited to first year writing, and if that’s the case, then the solution of abolishing the requirement is all the more appealing.
It’s difficult for me as a tenured professor to know how I’m supposed to situate myself as an audience to this piece. This is the case with a lot of this genre. A lot of the commentary from adjuncts in the movie is angry and even hostile to tenure-track faculty– or it at least puts me on the defensive– with repeated claims that contingent faculty are “just as good” as tenure-track faculty, that the jobs are no different, that the conditions are arbitrary, and so forth. Besides the fact that that isn’t true– that is, the jobs are different in a myriad of ways and tenure-track faculty tend to have more degrees, experience teaching, etc– it’s difficult for me to grab on to how I’m supposed to react to this. “We don’t like your privilege, but what many/most of us want is a tenure-track job.” “We don’t like how you are abusing us, but we want you to help us.” It’s a strange space to be in. If I’m sympathetic to the cause, I’m not doing enough to help; if I’m not sympathetic to the cause, I’m not doing enough to help.
I thought that a lot of the folks interviewed for this were oddly naive and otherwise unaware of how “the system” works regarding adjunct labor. What I mean is while I think their critiques of what’s wrong with the adjunctification of higher education are spot-on (and again, that’s what’s good about this movie), I find it surprising that they didn’t seem to know this when they started down the adjunct path. For example, a couple of folks seemed disappointed that their part-time teaching job has turned out to not be a way to wiggle into a tenure-track position. And along these lines a lot of these folks (maybe most of them?) seemed to be trying to make the adjunct life work by stringing together gigs at two or three different places, something that is a recipe for bad teaching and grumpy teachers. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’ve been blogging about this for a long time, maybe it’s because I’ve always told adjuncts that this is not a way to get a tenure-track job and this is not a way to make a full-time income, and maybe it’s because of my comfy job security in a tough market. It just seems a lot of these people should have known better. Which leads me to my next point:
There is no doubt that “the system” exploits adjuncts. They do it because (as someone says in the movie) administrators are “addicted” to cheap labor, and administrators are playing off of the “do it for the love” of the job (and not the pay or the security or whatever) that just about everyone who teaches has. The folks in this video clearly feel exploited, and one of the things that also comes up somewhat indirectly is the extent to which exploited adjuncts are women. That said, I think these folks are allowing themselves to be exploited. Miya Tokumitsu has an absolutely brilliant essay about this here, “In the Name of Love” that was originally published in Jacobin, so I’ll just point there for the time being.
Because here’s the thing: I can understand the frustration and sadness that comes from being stuck in this exploited position especially after you have a dream or a calling for this work and you’re not successful at it. I was in an MFA program; I am familiar with the “failed dreams” of would-be novelists. But these folks all have advanced degrees and undoubtably could remake themselves into gainfully employed people outside of academia. They aren’t “trapped” the same way that exploited workers are in other lines of work– migrant workers, the fast food worker without a high school diploma, and so forth. Universities are exploiting folks by offering them jobs at shitty wages, no doubt about that. But folks are allowing themselves to be exploited by agreeing to take those jobs. Universities aren’t going to stop exploiting adjuncts until would-be adjuncts stop agreeing to being exploited.

December 14, 2013December 15, 2013

The end of the semester and a response to “The End of the College Essay”

A lot of faculty go a little crazy at the end of the semester. Sure, everyone understands the pressures students are under, but non-academic-types might be surprised by the extent to which faculty are swamped and otherwise stressed out this time of year. Everything is due and then there’s all that grading. I was at a department XMas function last night, and there was many a weary colleague taking a break from the final climb up Grading-Grading and More Grady-Grading Mountain.

Actually, it surprises me how much grading and work so many of my colleagues seem to leave until the bitter end of the term.

The writing classes I teach don’t have finals and I learned a long time ago to assign essays so that students get my feedback (and have a sense of their grade) long before the very end and to save finals week for revisions. That’s pretty much what happened in my Writing for the World Wide Web class this term: I finished all the grading for that last night and they have until Tuesday to revise things if they want.

Tangent/reflection on the semester #1: Overall, the class turned out pretty good and in some interesting ways. This is the first time I’ve taught WWWW in person and not online in several years, and I have to say it’s as strange of a shift for me to go from online back to a face to face class as it was when I made the shift in this class to the online space a few years ago. That was one struggle. The other was the last couple times I’ve taught the class it was in the 7.5 week summer format. The short semester can make the whole experience feel overwhelming for students and for me, but when I took the 7.5 week class and expanded it to the regular 15 week semester, it felt positively airy and even underwhelming.

I was also a lot less of a “hard ass” in this class for some reason, and I can’t really say why. Part of it was because it was a small and chummy group, a lot of it had to do with the fact that the class was face to face. I routinely get the worse student evaluations for online teaching and I think that’s pretty common for everyone who teaches both f2f and online.

A good class, but there are a few “back to basics” moves I think I’m going to make the next time I teach it, probably this summer (or “summer 1” or really spring). Codecademy is great, but it’s not enough HTML/CSS, so I will probably be going back to one of the various big “how to make web sites” books like the Head First series so students really have to puzzle through the code a bit more; I’ll probably have a unit where we’re working specifically with a WYSIWYG app (though not Dreamweaver– too expensive and too much) to make some sites, and some more about modifying/using a CMS like WordPress (which is really the only one I sorta/kinda know). Along the way, I’ll probably keep the “Semester of Social Media” assignment because I think that’s been pretty effective, though I’ll probably retire Shirky and some of the other reading. /tangent

In grad classes that involve a lot of reading, I usually have a final to keep everyone honest. I typically make some kind of essay/writing assignment due at the last class meeting, I distribute a take-home final at that last meeting, and while I’m waiting to collect their finals, I read/comment on/grade whatever they handed in. I collect the finals and power through them in one reading session, and I’m usually done with grading by the middle of the day after they are due.

Tangent/reflection on the semester #2: That’s what I’m doing/procrastinating about with this blog post right now, reading essays from my graduate students in the Rhetoric of Science and Technology class. An interesting group. The class started pretty much full with about 13 students in it (the cap on our graduate courses is 15) but it quickly dropped down to 8, with 7 finishing solid. I’m not entirely sure why that was the case.

In any event, it’s an online class, something that is not completely without controversy. I don’t want to spend too much time defending the merits of an online graduate course now, but I will note that the class web site has over 1500 comments on it. If I very conservatively average those comments as being 50 words apiece, that’s about 75,000 words, or the equivalent of a decent-sized book manuscript. That’s a lot of writing about rhetoric from a small group of students to accomplish in less than 15 weeks, and if one of the marks of success of any writing class– from freshman comp to PhD seminars– is that students write a lot, then it seems to me a format that requires students to write for all interactions can be successful.

The next time I teach this, it will probably be face to face (we try to alternate that with some of these courses) and I will probably try to include for the second part of the term a book-length work. This term, I was thinking about assigning Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric, but I chickened out because a) I haven’t finished reading it myself, and b) what I have read (I’m through the lengthy intro and first chapter) is quite good but potentially too much for my MA students. I did assign the introduction though and that went over fairly well. So maybe it’d be worth spending more time with the whole book? Or another very current book on rhetoric and (even indirectly) “science/technology?” /tangent2

Anyway, this all brings me indirectly to Rebecca “pan kisses kafka” Schuman’s Slate piece “The End of the College Essay.” It’s an intentionally and intensely angry/attention seeking (and in that sense, quite successful) piece about student papers. Schuman’s (unsubstantiated) assumption is that students hate writing them and that she hates reading them (certainly a more substantiated claim). Here’s a typical paragraph:

Nobody hates writing papers as much as college instructors hate grading papers (and no, having a robot do it is not the answer). Students of the world: You think it wastes 45 minutes of your sexting time to pluck out three quotes from The Sun Also Rises, summarize the same four plot points 50 times until you hit Page 5, and then crap out a two-sentence conclusion? It wastes 15 hours of my time to mark up my students’ flaccid theses and non sequitur textual “evidence,” not to mention abuse of the comma that should be punishable by some sort of law—all so that you can take a cursory glance at the grade and then chuck the paper forever.

and this:

When I was growing up, my mother—who, like me, was a “contingent” professor—would sequester herself for days to grade, emerging Medusa-haired and demanding of sympathy. But the older I got, the more that sympathy dissipated: “If you hate grading papers so much,” I’d say, “there’s an easy solution for that.” My mother, not to be trifled with when righteously indignant (that favored state of the professoriate), would snap: “It’s an English class. I can’t not assign papers.”

Mom, friends, educators, students: We don’t have to assign papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma: abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training, an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important “piece of paper.” Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers. It’s time to declare unconditional defeat.

Read the rest of it if you want more of this kind of thing, a lot of hate on students, a lot of hate on the work, etc., etc.

First off, this is what I mean about how a lot of faculty go a little crazy at the end of the semester. Having read some of pan kisses kafka, I think this is generally Schuman’s writing voice/shtick, and I hope it is an affectation and she isn’t really this “on the edge.” But when the end is here/near and people like Schuman (especially part-timers teaching too many classes at too many different places) are staring at a big stack of papers that represent all they have and haven’t accomplished as a teacher this semester and that stack is all that is between them and their meager holiday vacation, well, sometimes people lose their shit and throw open the window and shout at the world “fuck all of this!!!” And by the way, if you don’t want to read Schuman’s essay, “fuck all of this!!!” is a pretty accurate summary of it, in my opinion.

So in that sense, I feel her pain but it is just part of the job. I can only offer these previous thoughts and advice on grading. I’d especially recommend the timer because if you’re spending 15 hours reading final projects, you’re spending too much time, unless you have 120 students, in which case you have too many students.

Second, congratulations to Schuman for “discovering” what I think has been the conventional wisdom among composition and rhetoric scholars for decades: writing is a process and assigning “research papers” with no discussion of audience or purpose, no discussion or support for process, and no opportunity for feedback from readers is a waste of time. It’s lazy teaching that invites lazy student responses.

And personally, I hate the word “paper.” Besides the fact that I haven’t collected the physical, pulp-based substance called paper from students in at least a decade, to me the word “paper” in this context has the connotation of bureaucracy (as in “doing paperwork”) or policing (as in “show me your papers”). I much prefer the term “essay” because of its connotations of “try,” or the term “project” because there is hopefully not just one single document but rather a series of assignments and steps along the way that lead to some final presentation or essay.

Anyway, her blog post “My Un-Essay Essay Pedagogy” (which should be “My Un-Paper Pedagogy” but she, like most, clumsily assume that “paper” and “essay” mean the same thing) crudely sums up the conventional wisdom that I have learned and practiced as a teacher and a comp/rhet specialist for the past 25 years: assignments with clear audiences and purposes, focused class peer review workshops, one-on-one conferences to talk about drafts in process, etc., etc. Better late than never, I guess.

And third, Schuman really seems to hate her students. That’s bad for them, but it’s also really bad for her. She ought to stop that.

Okay, on to finish my semester and that pesky MOOC book….

June 24, 2013June 24, 2013

Commonplaces for “The End of the Humanities”

By commonplace, I am thinking in terms it as one of the progymnasmata, which (as Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee discuss it in various editions of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students) were the structured exercises in classical rhetoric pedagogy. To quote Crowley (this is from the first edition) quoting Erasmus, here are some commonplaces that students would “amplify” or “elaborate” on as rhetorical exercise:

It matters what company you keep.
The safest course is to believe no one.
War is pleasant to those who have not experienced it.
The best provision for old age is learning.

This is a fuzzy definition for me; I’m not sure I see the difference between a commonplace, a cliché, and a genre marker, other than the connotations– that is, commonplaces and genre markers are more noble than clichés. In any event, I’m using the term commonplace because on Facebook the other day, Daniel Smith pointed to the NYTimes op-ed “The Decline and Fall of the English Major” by Verlyn Klinkenborg with the comment “At what point does a commonplace become a genre?” And then, later that same day, via (I think?) John Walter, I came across Michael Bérubé on Facebook taking on a remarkably similar NYTimes op-ed “The Humanist Vocation” by David Brooks. So I thought it might be an interesting writing exercise to try to begin to tease out some of the key commonplaces/genre markers/clichés of the “End of the Humanities” piece. I see it as a public service; it will make it easier for future writers to keep up with the demand for such pieces in the mainstream media.

So, what does it take to amplify and elaborate on the commonplace “The humanities are in decline”? Here’s a list/comparison to get started:

Continue reading “Commonplaces for “The End of the Humanities””

May 4, 2013May 4, 2013

Week 6/7-ish of Composition I

I actually don’t have too much to report about the Duke Composition I class because, well, not much has been going on in it lately– other than me not getting some things done that I should have gotten done. Nothing is really different; there is just more of it. More on this below, but just to get repetitive: it still feels very anonymous and locked in lost time to me. When a class like this is taking place face to face and in a small group, the interaction becomes critical to the whole point of the class. When that’s not there, well, what’s the point?

But first, many MANY MOOC article links and the like, so many I’ll just mostly link here:

I was going to post this list of links and my latest response to the Duke MOOC earlier this week, but I got distracted and busy with other things. I’m glad I waited now because just the other day from CHE comes “Why Professors at San Jose State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC” by Steve Kolowich. Go read the whole thing– well worth it– but to summarize: faculty in Philosophy at SJSU (which MOOC followers will recall is one of the first universities in the U.S. to very publicly incorporate MOOCs into engineering courses) have refused to teach a philosophy course with an edX MOOC developed by Harvard’s Michael Sandel because the SJSU faculty see MOOCs as a tool to replace them, and they go further to suggest that Sandel and “professors who develop MOOCs are complicit in how public universities might use them.” Sandel wrote this response where he claims to know “very little” about what edX was going to do with his course and where he says he “The last think I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions.” Three observations/tangents here:
- Alert readers will recognize that Michael Sandel is the guy that Thomas Friedman has a middle-school crush on in this column from March where he once again spouts off crazy stuff about MOOCs and transforming education.
- I’ve been raising the concern about MOOCs from elite institutions having the effect of further marginalizing the likes of SJSU (and EMU) for quite some time.
- You know, I’m not going to say that Sandel is lying in his response where he says he had no idea how edX might try to use his online course materials. But either Sandel is not being entirely truthful or he is not quite as brilliant and broad of a thinker as Friedman and the folks at edX might think.
“I’m Failing My MOOC” by John Warner, from Inside Higher Ed and also about the same Duke Composition I course. I mostly agree with Warner’s main review: the content of the MOOC is okay to pretty good, but “content by itself is a very limited part of what matters in terms of teaching and learning.”
“Students Avoid ‘Difficult’ Online Courses, Study Finds” in CHE by Ann Schnobelen. I don’t know if this is really about MOOCs and I don’t know if this is really about the kinds of online courses I teach, but basically, the study (with only 46 students) suggests that students pick classes to take online that they find easy to “teach themselves.” I can see the point and see how it connects with the potential role of MOOCs, but in my experience, most of my students who choose to take classes online because of how it fits into their schedules and lives. The most typical student in my undergrad online courses are women (single or not) with babies or very young children at home.
“MOOCs and the Quality Question” by Ronald Legon, an Inside Higher Ed piece about the evolving nature of MOOCs. The term “MOOC 2.0” comes up, which strikes me as a tad premature.
“Of Machine Guns and MOOCs: 21st Century Engineering Disasters” by Pat Lockley at Hybrid Pedagogy. It’s kind of an interesting analogy, but I’m not sure it’s an argument that really holds together for me.
“The War on the Humanities has Three Fronts (Part 1: The Right Wing),” a post on Karen Michalson’s blog. I think Michalson has a lot of good points here about how things like MOOCs are favored by the right wing (which generally is not that crazy about paying for this pesky “public” education in the first place) and she links to a lot of good stuff. The problem though is she avoids the hard to escape reality that MOOCs in higher ed are getting the most traction in Democrat-thick California.
“The World is Not Flat” by Ry Rivard is an interesting (albeit long) InsideHigher Ed piece that makes a pretty compelling argument that the American/English-speaking version of MOOCs might not work in all parts of the world and may represent a sort of “intellectual neo-colonialism (PDF).” That link leads to a book/collection of essays published by the Commonwealth of Learning in 2012 called Open Educational Resources and Change in Higher Education: Reflections from Practice. Definitely something worth looking at later: basically, it’s a collection of essays about international trends in Open Educational Resources (OER) and online instruction in higher ed.
“Before MOOCs, ‘Colleges of the Air'” by Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez and on the CHE blog/site about classes that were offered over the radio back in the 1920s and 30s. Good stuff, and another one of those pieces that suggests to me that there might still be a project in me about technologies of teaching before the computer– especially in “distance ed” and “correspondence” formats. And this quote rings especially true for me: “The problem of what MOOCs add up remains. While some universities have promised to accept them for credit, in the long term, we may find, as proponents of radio did, that the courses play at best a minor role in helping students earn degrees.” Oh, and speaking of which:
“MOOCs, History, and Context” in Inside Higher Ed where Arthur Levine talks about literally hundreds of years of transformations in higher education to MOOCs in, well, context.
“Duke Faculty Say No” also by Ry Rivard and Inside HigherEd. Faculty at Duke forced the university to back out of a deal with nine other universities to “create a pool of for-credit online classes for undergraduates,” apparently with an outfit called Semester Online and a deal that has been in the works since 2012. And as a reminder of something I’ve mentioned here before: while Duke seems perfectly willing to support its faculty developing MOOCs that might someday be offered for credit at other institutions by Coursera, they are not willing to accept those credits at their own institution. By the way, Semester Online seems somewhat reasonable to me: “Unlike massive open online courses, or MOOCs, only a few hundred students were expected to enroll in each course – which would feature a mix of recorded lectures and live discussions – but each course would be divided into sections of no more than 20 students led by an instructor, perhaps a graduate student.”
Finally, there’s this strange “map” of the “Major Players” in the MOOC Universe from CHE:

There are many problems with this, but I’ll just mention two for now. First, Khan Academy is not a MOOC in any way, shape, or form. Not even close. Second, Cathy Davidson is just not that big of a player in the “MOOC-iverse,” and even she says this in this post, which ultimately brings things back to HASTAC.

Okay, after all that (!), a few words about the Duke Composition MOOC:

Continue reading “Week 6/7-ish of Composition I”

April 22, 2013April 22, 2013

Week 5 of English Composition 1

Before news about Composition I, some MOOC reading round-up:

As Nick Carbone pointed out on the WPA-L mailing list, it seems like journalists taking and reporting on MOOCs has become all the rage as of late. Just goes to show you that contemporary journalism gets everything interesting from blogs like this one. From the Larry Gordon of the LA Times comes “Hitting the MOOCs instead of the books” about his experience in a “Principles of Public Health” course from UC Irvine, and in the New York Times A.J. Jacobs’ “Two Cheers for Web U.!” I think I like the NYTimes piece a bit better because of its humor and snark (favorite line: “The professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon.”), but both pieces are ultimately pretty fluffy written by good writers who haven’t thought a whole about education since they were in college.
“MOOC Mania: Debunking the hype around massive open online courses” by Audrey Watters on The Digital Shift blog is a solid essay about MOOC stuff, though I have to say it sounds like something I’ve read already.
“They mean to win Wimbledon!” is a post by Jonathan Rees that circles around an obscure Monty Python sketch to make the point about MOOCs being this invasive species trying to take over higher education. Interesting enough reading, but….
…. the main reason I’m linking to it is because it discusses this essay from Inside HigherEd, “EdX Rejected.” In what is clearly at odds with the race into the MOOC business by so-called elite institutions, Amherst College said thanks but no thanks to edX’s invitation to join their consortium. It’s a good read that speaks highly of both Amherst’s administration and faculty. My favorite responses quoted in the piece are from Adam Sitze, who is a law professor. There’s this:

Sitze, though, compared edX and MOOCs to a litany of failed dotcoms, including other education ventures with similar ambitions. He said MOOCs may very well be today’s MySpace – a decent-looking idea doomed to fail.

“What makes us think, educationally, that MOOCs are the form of online learning that we should be experimenting with? On what basis? On what grounds?,” Sitze said. “2012 was the year of the MOOCs. 2013 will be the year of buyer’s regret.”

and this:

Faculty also worried about edX and its broader effect on higher education, particularly edX’s plans to grade some student writing using only computer programs.

“They came in and they said, ‘Here’s a machine grader that can grade just as perceptively as you, but by the way, even though it can replace your labor, it’s not going to take your job,’ ” Sitze said. “I found that funny and I think other people may have realized at that point that there was not a good fit.”

Amherst is an unusual institution even among elite institutions, teaching all of its courses in seminars and never with multiple-choice exams. Still, I think it’s an interesting development.

Anyway, on to English Composition 1:

Continue reading “Week 5 of English Composition 1”