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I’ve been working all day trying to figure out what my classes for the winter term (which starts tomorrow) are going to look like.  I was going to write “working my ass off,” but let’s face it:  working in academia isn’t exactly manual labor, a point I’ll return to in a moment.  It involves a lot of sitting, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading online and on the page.  It’s fun.  Hitting the gym and eating right to reduce the size of previously mentioned ass– now that’s work.

Anyway, earlier today via Facebook and Twitter, I came across this CHE article by Thomas “not his real name” Benton, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.” It’s an article about why getting a PhD in “the humanities” in general is a bad idea, and it comes on the heels of a number of articles about how dreadful the job market is for academics at the MLA and, as this piece in Inside Higher Ed suggests, fields like history and economics as well.  I agree with at least two things in Benton’s article:

• A lot of potential graduate students in his and my generation received bad advice.  “Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.’s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, “There are always jobs for good people.” If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, “Don’t worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available.” The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity.”  I think that’s spot-on, and it makes me glad that my entry into graduate work in the late 198os was in an MFA program– not that that was a great career move, but the stakes were a lot lower than a PhD, and it was useful in lots of other ways.
• Getting a job as a professor– particularly a humanities/literature professor– is not as easy as getting the degree, and getting the degree isn’t that easy either.  “They don’t know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don’t make any fallback plans until it is too late.”  Also very true, and I like the comparison of being a professor to these other less than “sure thing” professions.  You want a “sure thing” at a job where you can make good money, live almost anywhere, work on your schedule (within reason), and help people?  Be a nurse.

But as I skimmed and reskimmed the article during my day, while I was putting together the previously mentioned syllabi for English 328 and English 516, I got to thinking a bit more.

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There’s a bit of an intellectual food fight going on about every academic’s favorite workplace debate, the value (or lack thereof) of tenure.  The short version is that Dean Dad at Confessions of a Community College Dean is against it, while Michael Bérubé at his blog (now called American Airspace, I guess?) is for it.  Also in a very basic sense, Dean Dad and Bérubé are simply playing out the logical roles based on their place and status within the academy:  that is, DD is an administrator and wants to get rid of tenure because of the “economic reality” that tenure is not sustainable, and Bérubé is a professor and wants to protect tenure for all kinds of reasons, both noble and self-serving.  Since I too am a professor (not to mentioned a tenured one) and not a dean, I freely admit that I think  Bérubé is right and DD is wrong.  Basically.

Anyway, a few observations on their dispute and tenure before I get to grading and wrapping stuff up so we can get out of town for Thanksgiving:

• There is a difference between a community college and a bachelor degree granting college or university, not to mention a university that grants graduate degrees.  Not to take anything away from community colleges, but it takes greater skill sets and qualifications in your faculty to teach those advanced courses.  At places like EMU, we graduate the kinds of students who DD turns around and hires to teach at his community college.  So I think this is one of the reasons why DD’s take on this seems to be it’d be no big deal to just hire people on contract– and at a community college, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal.  But you show me a university that grants graduate degrees that does not tenure its faculty and I’ll show you a graduate school that is difficult to take seriously.
• Tenure and its definitions vary widely.  Here at EMU, we hire people with the presumption that we’ll tenure them, and in my dozen years in the department, we’ve never not tenured someone.  At that quaint liberal arts college in Ann Arbor, tenure is quite a bit more contentious and uncertain.  Here at EMU, tenure and promotion is largely a union issue; at many (most?) other universities, it is frequently a mysterious, “behind closed doors” sort of affair.  Also, while the numbers have moved around a bit, my guess is we have about as many faculty now at EMU as we did when the faculty organized, plus or minus 30 or so.
• There’s a big difference between a “part-timer” (someone who is hired to teach on a semester to semester basis) and a “professor” on the tenure track, at least at a university.  Our part-timers (and we have some great ones, btw) do zero service, advising, or any of the other work beyond teaching, and they have little investment in the long-term value of the institution.  And why should they?  We pay them a wage that is probably just north of what they could be making at Starbucks.  In contrast, tenure-track faculty do lots of service and advising beyond teaching, and, because they’re tenured, they inherently have a long-term stake in the institution.
• Which reminds me:  given the amount of stuff faculty do that is beyond teaching and the amount of stuff we do that is described generally as “administrative creep,” it seems to me that DD ought to be careful what he wishes for.  I mean, good luck getting your part-timers to participate in the bureaucracy of  program review and accreditation!
• I think the amount of “dead wood” among the ranks of the tenured is highly exaggerated.  Sure, in my department of 40 or so tenured faculty, I can think of five or six who are kind of in that category.  But most of those folks aren’t so much “dead wood” as they are “looking forward to retirement.”  Most of my colleagues, even the ones who have been tenured for 30 or more years, are still quite active.  They might not do much scholarship anymore, but they still teach a lot and do lots of service.  And it ain’t the “dead wood” faculty who are causing troubles for administrators and everyone else.
• DD keeps suggesting that the solution to the tenure problem is long term (say five years) and renewable contracts.  I think he is either being naive or this is a red herring because, in practice, there is no real difference between a “long term contract” and “tenure.”  I mean, does he have any idea how hard it is to not renew a contract and/or fire someone in any like of work?  Especially from what is essentially a “government job?”We have lecturers at EMU who work on year to year contracts, and as far as I can tell, the only way we can “release” these folks is if they do something horribly wrong or if there is some horrible financial crisis.  In a sense then, these folks might as well be “tenured.”  And along these lines, tenured faculty can (and have been) fired for doing horrible things and as a result of horrible financial crisis within an institution.  So….
• … I don’t think that DD’s objections to the tenure system has anything to do with economics at all.  The “Great Recession” has already forced cost-cutting measures at many universities, including pay cuts and increased teaching loads.  No, at the risk of reading “too much into this,” I think DD is really objecting to:

Unions, specifically the AAUP, and

Particular tenured faculty who are pain in his ass.

I have some sympathy with both of DD’s problems– some, not a lot.  EMU has a faculty union (the AAUP), and while I often feel like the union does some dumb stuff and can be rather shrill, I would much rather be in a union than not.  And it is very true that some tenured faculty can be assholes, and tenure has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing and even rewarding that behavior.  But hey, all you have to do is read Dilbert to realize that dealing with workers who are a pain in the ass are just another part of the world.

Sorta like dealing with pointy-haired bosses/deans.

In the “build it and they will come” (sorta) department:  I received a lovely email today from Sally Stephenson about using my freely available and online textbook, The Process of Research Writing. Stephenson is teaching in China and wrote to thank me for making TPRW available free and online:

I am currently on sabbatical from Frostburg State University in Maryland, now teaching Ph.D. students in China at Hunan Normal University, and so much of what we take for granted academically in the States is totally alien here. I am grateful for your permission to use your material and will make good use of it, and credit you accordingly. I especially appreciate all the trouble you took to put the APA and MLA examples up in Chapter 12. I’ve been drilling them on paraphrasing and quoting–something foreign to Chinese culture, which is based on the “one-for-all and all-for-one” philosophy–and am about to tackle the monster of citations and references.

In my search for your well-hidden email address, I also enjoyed browing your blog. Most blogs are blocked here in China, so you might be interested to know yours made it through the “Great Firewall” as it is not-so-fondly called.

So, not only do I have a fan in Asia; I’m escaping Chinese censorship.  Go figure!

This is kind of quick and scattered, because as a result of the stuff I helped out on doing for the National Day on Writing here at EMU on Tuesday, I am woefully behind on dealing with the writings of my students– blogs, online postings, wiki entries, “essays,” etc.  But in brief, it was quite the event.

Linda Adler-Kassner and Cathy Fleischer (the two folks who were the leads on this here) estimated that about 1700 students participated, and we (meaning me, Derek Mueller, and Steve Benninghoff, along with some great help from reps from Apple) uploaded about 400 things to the web site– pictures of hand-written activities, blog entries, and YouTube videos.  It was a tremendous amount of fun, but it was a huge amount of work and I still kind of feel like I am physically recovering from being that “on” for pretty much 12 hours straight.

Now, the NDoW was/is one of those kinds of events that is really easy to be cynical about. Someone– it might have been Clay Spinuzzi too– said having a National Day on Writing is sort of like having a National Day on Hygiene.  I don’t completely disagree with these sentiments.  As we were talking about the various activities for the local NDoW at different meetings, there was not an insignificant part of me that was thinking “this is all pretty goofy.”   Or worse:  how is the (capital D) Discipline of Composition and Rhetoric (or maybe more specifically, just Rhetoric) ever going to be taken seriously if we present it to the rest of the academy and beyond as merely Freshman Composition, or, as one of my students described the NDoW,  as the “Writing Carnival?”

But you know what?  We do every once in a while do need to celebrate things that are  mundane and something we all (should) do, like writing or hand-washing, simply because it gets little recognition and it’s simultaneously important.  What I saw on Tuesday was a lot of college kids having fun doing activities where they thought and wrote about writing, sometimes in surprisingly profound and interesting ways.  And I think it turns out that “goofy” and “interesting” are not mutually exclusive.

As one of the uploaders, my job was to take pictures of things written by hand or to upload videos that people took with flip video cameras.  Most of the students were at the event as part of a class or to get what we call at EMU “learning beyond the classroom” credit, but there was no requirement to upload anything.  These students, mostly college freshman, who came up to the upload station were usually rolling their eyes when they held up their work or handed me the video camera, a smirky and often not at all concealed “OMG, this is so stupid” look on their faces.  But then, after I uploaded the artifact and showed it to them on the web site, they inevitably let their guard down a bit and showed a little pride and pleasure that their thing– a movie, a six word memoir, a “PEOP,” whatever– was up there for the whole world to see. Given that the site had 28,000 hits on Tuesday, I think it’s fair to say that the stuff done at the NDoW has reached a broader audience than your typical academic essay, which makes me think that maybe serious academics ought to pay attention to some of the less than serious NDoW projects to get the word out.

And God forbid we do things that allow our students to associate “writing” with “fun.”

Anyway, go check stuff out at the EMU National Day on Writing site. As someone really interested in this idea of how people perceive themselves as writers (or not), I think there’s a goldmine of stuff there.

I learned via Dennis Jerz’s blog today and found more details at the Purdue OWL that the Modern Language Association is officially saying that underlining is out and italics is in.  I suppose the bigger news is MLA saying that URLs are no longer required (and I agree with Dennis that sometimes requiring URLs makes a lot of sense), but I have to say my geeky little English professor heart skipped a beat at the victory about italics.  My victory, that is.

Back in 1996, after I had finished and defended my dissertation, Annette and I were spending the spring/summer that year preparing for the move to Oregon for my first tenure-track job and I was running through the last details of submitting my dissertation to the graduate college for their official stamp of approval before it went off to the binary, DAI, and points beyond.  This is a process which exists at all graduate schools (at least it did– maybe these offices have been phased out with more and more electronic publication of these projects?), and it is mostly to make sure that dissertations and theses adheared to standard formatting in terms of a style manual and also in terms of dimensions of the document so it could be properly bound.

As I understood it, the office that did the reviewing at BGSU was staffed with graduate students on various assistantships, which meant that the level of scrutiny these documents received kind of varied. I was lucky enough to get a, um, “eager beaver,” as my reviewer.  I submitted my completed diss, and I got back what I believe was a print letter/memo (I don’t think it was an email, though I think I emailed my response) that indicated some real proof-reading errors I needed to fix, and two other global “errors” the reviewer insisted I correct.  First, this person said that I couldn’t use any contractions so I had to change all of them throughout the manuscript.  Second, I was told that I had to change all uses of italics to underlined text.

First off, I responded, there’s no rule in MLA style about the use of contractions, and I used them correctly.  Second, MLA’s rules for underlining versus italics was inconclusive, and I personally preferred the use of italics.  So, in effect, my response to the manuscript reviewer was “Thanks for your thoughts, but I’m not making those changes.  Let’s move on.”  The response I received was something along the lines of “While I will conceede that your use of contractions does not violate MLA style, I must insist that the use of italics is incorrect.  Please make the appropriate changes.”

My response to this was (and I believe this is the technical phrase) I blew a nut.  I was not about to have my completed dissertation derailed by some underline-happy MA student.  To make a long-story short, I had to cite chapter and verse in MLA style to this person’s supervisor, who did admit that this person trying to hold up the process after my successful defense was perhaps overstepping their bounds just a tad.  So the italics stood, and have always made a point of instructing my students that either underlining or italics is okay.

I’m looking forward to now telling my students to ditch the underlining.

Let me offer three important caveats:

• I do not know Henry Louis “Skip” Gates nor am I that familiar with his work (though, obviously, I’ve heard of him as he is arguably one of the two or three most famous and influential African American scholars in the U.S. today);
• I wasn’t there when Gates got arrested; and/or
• My own bias is generally with Gates and Obama– that is, I do tend to think that if Gates were a white guy this wouldn’t have happened, I think that Gates was arrested mostly because he pissed the cop off, and, like our president, it would appear that the Cambridge Police handled this “stupidly.”

Having said all that, I think the one thing that I’ve seen missing from the popular press reports trying to analyze this story is about Gates’ pedigree as a very prestigious academic.  Gates might be the nicest guy on the face of the earth, but I’ve got to say that most very prestigious academics have a bit of a, um, “diva” complex.  So for me, it is very easy to believe that under the circumstances, Gates may have given the arresting officer a bit of ‘tude.  I can imgine something like this:

Officer: Sir, we have a complaint about a break-in at this address—

Gates: Do YOU know WHO I AM?!?  I’m the freakin’ Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard!!

Officer:  The who?

Gates: I’m the freakin’ Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research!!

Officer: The what?

Gates:  You really don’t know who I am or why I’m important?!

Officer:  No, no sir, I don’t.

Gates:  You Neanderthal.  Racist pig.  What is WRONG with you?!

Officer:  Okay, okay, my friend, you have the right to remain silent….

(and scene)

I guess my point is that if you are an academic and you think you are “a big deal,” probably best to check that at the door when confronting law enforcement.  My free advice.

Some very good and blunt advice from “Piss Poor Prof” in Inside Higher Ed, “Can You Afford to Be An Adjunct?” Just about everything he says here is spot-on to me: the money isn’t worth it, it is not a “back door” into a more permanent job, it’s something only worth doing while doing something else (e.g., finishing a novel or a dissertation), and be prepared to teach at a bunch of different schools at the same time.

When I was the program adviser, I used to talk to plenty of current or perspective grad students who wanted to finish our MA and then teach at an area community college or part-time teach at a place like EMU. I wish I had had this article to show them. Making matters worse– at least at EMU– is we just aren’t hiring as many adjuncts as we used to. The situation here has more to do with local politics and general education shifts, but I suspect that there is something similar going on at places where budget problems are being solved by increasing teaching loads. It kind of feels to me like academia has been in some version of a recession for a lot longer than the rest of the economy.

Anyway, good advice. If you want to teach one or two classes as an adjunct while doing something else– and there is something to be said for having one’s sources of income diversified in an economy like this– that’s great. But it ain’t a long-term solution and it ain’t a career.

Oh, and since I read some of the CHE stuff online after I read the above article: No, “For Adjuncts, Stitching Together Part-Time Jobs Into Full-Time Pay While Staying Put” is not a viable and long-term strategy for anyone– administrators, faculty, adjuncts themselves, and most definitely not for students. But yes, “Adjunct and Tenure-Track Professors Need One Another, Say Speakers at AAUP Meeting” and can clearly work together just fine, as is the case in my department. But when part-timers or non-tenure-track folks are put into positions that really should be occupied by permanent and tenure-track folks, well, that relationship gets testy.

A colleague of mine sent me a couple of links to articles in Inside Higher Ed the other day that I thought were actually kind of interestingly contradictory. On the one hand, there’s “The Distance Ed Tipping Point,” which is about the sorts of things that institutions need to think about when the percentage of online classes reach some sort of “tipping point.” To quote:

But what about after distance education takes off? At what point does the question shift from what a college does to offer quality online programs to how a college needs to change in its entirety when it reaches a tipping point in enrollments — and at what point does such a change take place?

(and then)

“What do we change — if we change anything?” said Dylan D. Mattina, director of information technology, in introducing the session. “This is something that many institutions will have to deal with at some point.”

Mattina and others from his college discussed several of the choices colleges need to make as they reach either 50 percent or some other critical mass where the institution is changed by the success of its distance offerings.

The article goes on to provide strategies for things like hiring and training faculty, it discusses what happens with the question of local ties, technology, etc., etc. So in some ways, I think this article is describing a panel/group of people who are trying to figure out how institutions can deal with these changes and, in a way, maintain something that resembles the status quo in the face of these changes in teaching as a result of the internet.

On the other hand, there is also the article “Tenure in a Digital Era.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Among the “horror stories” Rosemary Feal has heard: Assistant professors who work in digital media and whose tenure review panels insist on evaluating them by printing out selected pages of their work. “It’s like evaluating an Academy Award entry based on 20 film stills,” said Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association.

Such horror stories abound. Even as the use of electronic media has become common across fields for research and teaching, what is taken for granted among young scholars is still foreign to many of those who sit on tenure and promotion committees. In an effort to confront this problem, the MLA and a consortium called the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory have decided to find new ways to help departments evaluate the kinds of digital scholarship being produced today. The MLA ran a program for department chairs at last year’s annual meeting in which chairs were given digital scholarship to evaluate, and that will take place again this year.

But it’s clear to me that dealing with multimedia scholarship is not the only reason for rethinking and reconsidering “digital scholarship;” it’s also because paper/tree-based scholarship is disappearing quickly:

One reason for the new effort is that shifts in publishing may make it impossible for a growing number of academics to submit traditional tenure dossiers. With many university presses in financial trouble and others — notably the University of Michigan Press — turning to electronic publishing for monographs, there will be fewer possibilities for someone to be published in the traditional print form that was once the norm for tenure.

The article goes on to give a list of principles for evaluating digital scholarship; in brief:

• Material shouldn’t be judged inferior when it is identical to traditional work in every way except medium.
• New systems are needed to evaluate scholarship that is unique in digital form.
• Peer review matters — and needs to involve people who understand the work.
• Digital work doesn’t fall neatly into teaching vs. research categories.

In other words, while part of this approach is to capture the kind of work that doesn’t translate neatly to traditional genres and forms (such as the example at the beginning of the article about evaluating a film or video), it is also an approach of preserving traditional genres and forms. That first criterion about not judging work on its materiality speaks to that.

So, when the internets creates a dilemma/opportunity/situation that potentially changes the way we teach, the reaction is to figure out the “tipping point” where this technology jeopardizes the stats quo, or, if we must teach online, how can we make these new classes look like the status quo? On the other hand, as the implosion of paper-based academic publishing picks up speed, there is some urgency among organizations like the MLA to reconsider the internets as a viable place to think about scholarly publishing. In doing so, we have a chance of preserving something akin to publish (albeit not on paper) or perish, aka, the status quo.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading these articles wrong, but it just struck me in my own head as a contradiction.

I’m happy to point out two things though. First, (insert “shamless self-promotion” tag here) I kind of feel like I was ahead of this curve in “Where Do I List This on My CV?” I originally wrote this in 2002, and I discussed in that piece some very specific ways in which self-published web sites “counted” as scholarship and the kind of problematic assumptions academics tend to have about how tenure and promotion is figured. (end self-promo)

Second, I am in a department that has embraced lots of different kinds of scholarship for a long time. In a way, I think that makes EMU a lot more forward-thinking and cutting-edge than many/most “research universities.”

Collin recently posted a very handy, realistic, and informative hand-out for PhD students in Syracuse’s Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program. It’s great advice, and considering the fact I chaired a search here this last school year and we hired soon-to-be Syracuse graduate Derek Mueller, I thought I’d offer some thoughts from the hiring side of things, though for obvious reasons, I have to remain vague on some aspects of all this.

• Getting a line at places like EMU (that is, regional, public institutions that are traditionally under-funded) is not a matter of a phone call and a form to academic HR. It can take years to get a search, even if the need is obvious and acute. I don’t know if this is something that candidates need to worry about much or not, other than the fact that the stakes for these positions are often high and often involve a history that is a lot longer than one job cycle.
• I thought the call for applications we had for this position was pretty good: not so specific to describe an ideal candidate that doesn’t really exist, and not so vague as to clearly represent a fishing expedition. I don’t know if I should say how many applications we received on this here or not, but we had a really strong pool of candidates.
• And as an aside: I think that the climate that candidates are in and the advice that candidates are receiving have changed in recent years because all but a handful of the applications we received for this job were in the ball park of composition, rhetoric, and/or technology. When I was first on the market in the mid 1990s, it was very common advice– especially in literature– to apply for any job that moved. Perhaps this was because it used to be if a committee was searching for a comp/rhet person but the pool received an application from a really stellar Victorianist, then maybe they might change the intention of the search just to hire that really good person. I don’t think that happens much anymore. Or maybe it doesn’t happen at places like EMU with very distinct programs and searches. If that makes sense.
• Along the way to narrow down a pool for phone interviews (and this is where I start to get increasingly vague), we had to deal with the academic HR people to make sure that our ranking system was fair, that there was some sense of “points” being assigned to candidates, etc., etc. This was nothing overly intrusive from the administration, but I guess my point is there isn’t a lot of room in our process here to hire someone (or not hire someone) based on what I would describe as some sort of whim of the committee.
• We did phone interviews, and while my literature colleagues in particular are still believers in the face-to-face MLA interview, I think the pros of the phone interview mightily outweigh the cons of the MLA interview. I have a colleague/friend of mine (in literature, incidentally) who thinks that phone interviews are terrible and who has argued with me that if it is a matter of saving money, why not skip the interview process entirely and just hire someone based only on the CV? But the flip-side of this is also true: if the idea is we want to interview at MLA to get more of a “sense” of the candidates, why don’t we invite each finalist to campus for a month? You know, put them up some place, have them give a series of presentations, socialize with faculty, etc. The answer to that is obvious: it’d take way too much time and cost way too much money.
  
  
  Well, what’s the justification for the time and expense of MLA again?
  
  
  I do think that phone interviews to require a different approach on both the interviewers and the interviewees because the communication channels isn’t as “rich” as a face to face conversation. As an interviewer– or really, in our case, as an interviewing team– you have to have a set of questions that you want to ask. You can’t just “wing it” for a phone interview and kind of go with the flow. And you have to give auditory cues because the candidate can’t see you nodding yes if you want them to keep going in a particular vein.
• A lot of the process– who you phone interview, who you bring to campus, etc.– has much to do with this magical and vague thing referred to as “fit,” which I guess I would define as what is the combination of things a candidate brings to the table. Again, I have to be vague here, but we didn’t phone interview and also didn’t bring to campus some really REALLY good candidates only because we sensed that they didn’t quite fit right for the search we were doing.
• Being the chair of a search is a lot of work, and it has more elements of being an event planner/cruise director than I was anticipating.
• It’s worth repeating to candidates one of the main pieces of advice that Collin offers again and again in his handout: finish your dissertation, or at least have it well under control/underway so you know you’ll finish before taking the job. To use poker language for a moment: I think most candidates who exaggerate the progress diss to a hiring committee have a lot of easy to read tells.
• In the end, I think our search went smoothly and was successful because the committee was pretty much on the same page, because we had a plan, and because we had fantastic applicants. Especially that last one. We had fantastic candidates, in part I’m sure because of the many canceled searches last year, but I also like to think it’s a good job.

I wrapped up my winter 2009 term yesterday; here are some miscellaneous thoughts on the school year that was:

• I taught a full load this year, which in my department is three courses a term. Last year, when I was on quasi-sabbatical, I taught one course. The year before that, when I was both the writing program coordinator and the acting director of first year writing, I taught two courses, one each term. The year before that, when I was just the writing program coordinator, I taught two courses each term. In other words, I’ve taught almost as much this last school year as I did the previous three.
• Not that I’m complaining, mind you. My classes are a lot smaller than the classes most of my lit colleagues teach, and I like teaching more than I like release time administrating. I think. I don’t think there’s a lot of difference in terms of work-load, but there is definitely a different kind of rhythm to “just teaching.”
• In the fall, I taught all on-campus for the first time in quite a while. It was interesting to think of the similarities and differences between face to face teaching and online teaching. I was reminded of a presentation I saw once at the CCCCs a long time ago where some computers and writing big-shot (his name escapes me right now, but I think he has since retired– I’m not sure) gave a presentation about how not teaching in a computer lab for the first time in a long time. Among other things, he felt like he became “the server” because he was collecting and hauling around all this paper from his students. And I was also reminded of the section in Steve Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You when he hypothesizes about what people would think of the book if it came after video games. In any event, one of the ideas that’s been rattling around my head all year is a Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed-like article where I talk about the same thing with online teaching. The criticism/critique of teaching online is always “you can’t do ‘x’ in an online class the same way you can do it in a face to face class;” but what I kept thinking about last fall was how I couldn’t or wouldn’t do ‘y’ in my face to face class the same way I could in my online class, if that makes sense.
• I had students in both English 328 and in English 516 make movies of different types this year. The 328 students worked in small groups to make a short movie and then they each wrote essays about the experience. I learned lots and lots from the experience. What I found most interesting about the movie making for the 328 class was that as a collaborative project, it more or less worked the same in both the face to face classes and online classes. In the face to face classes, I had students get into groups to make the movies, gave them some time and help when the asked for it, and pretty much turned them loose onto it. Some groups got right down to business, some mostly stood around pointing fingers at each other about who’s responsible for not getting things done, and most groups were somewhere in-between. In the online classes, I had some groups get right down to business, some blame each other, and most somewhere in-between. Students who really were “distant” (and out of two 20 student sections of 328, I only had three or four students who really were a long ways away) tended to be the script writers, and I’m hoping to find ways to get them more involved in the actual production with other tools like taskbarn.
• For 516, I had students make movies as book review presentations. This is something I have been doing in the online version of the class for the last couple years, but for those classes, I let students off the hook by letting them use things like PowerPoint with sound files attached and by not having any real time limits. This time around, I specifically said they could not use PowerPoint and they had to be 10 minutes or less. But just like the online version of the class, I didn’t give these students any instruction on how to do this– more or less, I told them to go and figure it out. Well, almost no instruction; we did have one evening session where students spent about an hour working together to make a little movie right there in class, the point being that the available technology makes this really easy to do nowadays. Plus I did work with a number of students to get their projects to work. So given my “hands off” (mostly) approach to teaching this and my relatively low expectations, I was pretty much blown away by the quality of these presentations. As you can see from this link to the category of book reviews from the class blog/site, some videos are obviously better than others, but some of these are really quite good. This idea for 516 is a keeper for me.
• I like the projects for 328 I have now, including the collaborative movie and essay about it, but I did very much miss having my 328 students keep web sites where they posted their essays. I had a particularly hard time all year trying to convince students about the need to write for an audience beyond just the teacher, and I have to wonder if any of that is this lack of a truly public space where they post writing. Or it could just be my imagination. In any event, I’m thinking about having students keep Wordpress.com blogs because Wordpress has the distinct advantage over Blogger of allowing for static pages, meaning students could still post the assigned blog writings to the ongoing “blog part” of things while posting finished/revised drafts of essay projects to static pages on the site. I’d have to change some instructions on blogging, but I don’t know if Wordpress.com is that much harder than Blogger is nowadays.
• I had a kind of a troubling email exchange with a grad student this year; for obvious reasons, I’m not going to post any details about that. But the incident did make me reflect a bit on some of the downsides of the “student-centered classroom” and/or empowering students– particularly graduate students– in certain ways. I don’t have any of these kinds of problems with about 97% of my students, of course; but that 3% can cause troubles and that stick in my mind.
  
  Most of the time, the small amount of problems I have are pretty much harmless; for example, I can think of times when I’ve laid out some sort of activity for a class– say a small group activity or a peer review or something like that– and then a student says “I think I have a better idea about how we should do this.” Um… well, I am sometimes open to these kinds of suggestions, but no, probably not, because I usually plan this stuff out in advance. Sometimes, when the student thinks of themselves more as a “colleague” than a student (usually an older student and/or a grad student who is also a teacher as a graduate assistant, at a community college, or at a high school), this can become kind of problematic to say the least because, well, we’re not really colleagues.
  
  And sometimes, this sense of empowerment/entitlement can cross the line into a sort of weird student “bullying” of the teacher. I’m not talking about a student questioning a grade, though I suppose that completely legitimate conversation can cross over to bullying. I’m talking about a space where a student feels so empowered and entitled to get in the teacher’s “face,” usually metaphorically, in order to get her or his way. You know, a bully. Maybe a student bullies the teacher because they feel overly empowered (consciously or not) by a sort of warped idea that the student-centered classroom means that the student ought to get whatever he or she wants. Maybe it’s a part of the “student as customer” culture. Maybe some people are just jerks.
  
  Like I said, these are very rare problems and I don’t want to dwell on this too much. I had some fantastic students this year, I really did. But it’s funny how that one or two really mean students stick with you.

Anyway, that is the school year that was, and now it’s time for spring/summer break. Not that this means it’s time for a “break,” really; I am teaching in the spring term starting May 1, I’ve got a ton of other writing projects to get on, and there’s a whole bunch stuff to do around the house. But you get the idea.