Category: Teaching

Posted on

Sprung

I have meant to post here about a variety of different things– some articles on assessment I read a while ago as part of my “reading academic journal articles” series, some iPad things, some garden things, etc.– but I’ve been more busy at EMUTalk.org and I have been swamped by the blessing and the curse that is “spring term” here at EMU.  What everyone else in the world calls “spring,” we call winter (e.g., the term that runs from January until April/May). “Spring” is the first 7.5 week term that runs from the first week of May until late June– specifically, June 2o this year, and then there’s “summer,” which starts up a few days after spring ends and finishes another 7.5 weeks later in August.

The good thing about teaching in the spring is money:  basically, I get paid “extra” or “overtime” money for teaching in the spring and/or summer terms.  It’s a significant amount, too– 10% of a faculty member’s base salary for each class taught in load– and its money that I have come to count on to pay for some very specific bills and for other “extras” like paying off debt, trips, etc.

The bad?  I suppose the main thing is it’s work, which is the opposite of “not working.”

It’s intense for everyone because, as I say frequently and mantra-like to my students, it is not half as long as a regular semester so much as it is twice as fast.  Students in both of my classes (I’m teaching a f2f section of “freshman comp”— which is only sort of about “freshman” in the spring since a lot of the students are juniors and seniors– and an online section Writing for the WWW) were voicing concern about the workload, and someone in my comp class asked aloud and a little indignantly just how much time did I expect students to spend on the class.  So I did the math.  The class meets for about six hours a week, and I always tell my online students that they should expect to spend at least as much time online and engaged in the class as they would if it were meeting f2f.  While I have never believed the classic college advice of spending three hours studying/working on a class for every hour spent in class, I do think about two hours per hour of class is a reasonable guestimate for outside of class reading, writing, studying, etc.

Give or take then, I told my students to figure on about 20 hours a week per class in the shorter term.  Add another class into that mix plus a job plus some version of “a life” and it is no wonder why so many students struggle in the spring, and no wonder why I feel pretty spent myself.

It’s not all bad, of course.  Students in the spring/summer terms tend to have some interesting “life” stories, and I have several of those students in both classes.  For the most part, the ones who have stuck with it have been doing well.  And while it is not quite as good as “not working” at all, a) there aren’t quite as many other meetings and such during spring and summer (though there are plenty), b) I do have some time to do more spring/summer activities (I’ll be gardening yet this morning), and c) I do like money.

Incidentally, two teaching strategy-type things based on stuff that happened in the winter are beginning to pay off for this spring.  In the online class, I have instituted an “online attendance” policy which more or less requires a student to post at least twice a week at different times of the week to demonstrate “presence.”  Mind you, this minimal attendance earns the student a bad participation grade, but the idea is that if a student is not posting at all, they are absent.  And, as is the case with face to face classes, if a student misses too much class, they fail, regardless of any other grade in the course.  I think this has “worked” in the sense that it has given a few students reality checks on what it takes to do an online class successfully.

The other different approach thing is based on last term’s “Gradeinator” approach with google docs.  Instead of doing all that, I’ve taken a much more simple approach in my English 121 class this term.  For each of the major peer review sessions of the class, I’ve set up a single Google survey.  Students complete the peer reviews for each of the writers in their groups, and they fill out the simple survey (here’s an example of what I’ve done so far) for each writer they review– typically three or four times.  Besides being dramatically easier, the nice thing about this approach is it keeps all the data on one spreadsheet (though I still have to go through some rig-a-ma-roll to get the results to individual students) and it makes it very easy for me to keep track of who has (or hasn’t) done a good job being a reviewer.  So this is a keeper.

Anyway, 18 more days.

Posted on

Mysterious “Thank You” package makes my day

I have a variety of things I want to blog about– some reading on competing networks of assessment, a bunch of links I need to put someplace– and I have a variety of other things I need to do/stop procrastinating from– I’m talking to you, Written Communication web site– but I had to post about the mystery package from yesterday first.

I always love mystery packages.  One of my favorite (still) unpublished stories (but not really a story because it does more or less recount something that happened) was about the time that Annette and I received a package addressed to us in our Richmond apartment but that was clearly meant for someone else.  So I was intrigued with yesterday’s package, one which was delivered to EMU and was addressed to me.

At first, I didn’t recognize the name on the outside.  Here’s what I found on the inside:

On the right is the package’s main contents, a copy of a journal called Readerly/Writerly Texts. I had an article published in a special issu of it back in 1999, an article titled “Teacher Learning (Not Teaching) HTML with Students:  An Experimental Lesson Plan for Introducing Web Authoring into Writing Classes,” an article I’m tempted to give to a couple of my colleagues even though it is really ancient history.

Here’s a close-up on the front of the card:

Very nice.  And the inside of the card:

After reading the note, I finally put it all together:  as the handwritten part of this very clever card from Archelaus Fine Cards explained, this is from my former MA student Sheri France (I directed her project many moons ago).  As she explains in the card, Sheri was moving offices from one place of employment to another and she thought it would be best to return her long ago borrowed copy of the journal I loaned her.

Ha!  And they say there are no rewards in academia!

On the off-chance you are reading this, Sheri:  you’re welcome, no worries about returning that journal so late, and if you get a chance to drop me an email to update me on your professional life to share on the writing program web site, let me know.

Posted on

Five to Ten Minutes with an iPad2: A review

As a previously sanctioned iPad expert, I felt obligated to at least go and check out the iPad 2 in the Apple store today.  Now, if you want a long, detailed, and smart review of the new iPad 2, go read this piece at Engadget. But if you want my five to ten minute thoughts, read on.

First off, I showed up at the Apple Store in Briarwood at 10:30-ish or so and there was a line out front.  Am I going to have to stand in line to go into the fracking store?!? I thought.  Happily, no; this was for people who were planning hoping to buy one today.  More on that in a sec.

Anyway, that problem solved, I went in and started playing with a white iPad 2 (if I get one, I might go with white).  True, it’s thinner and lighter than the original iPad, but not that noticeably so, in my view.  It was noticeably faster with the new processing chip, though most of the apps I monkeyed with were the same on this as iPad 1.

From my point of view, the two big differences with this new one are GarageBand and iMovie.  I downloaded GarageBand for my current iPad just the other day, and it is a complete hoot to play with.  Now, I have no musical talent whatsoever and no real knowledge of audio recording technology.  The only thing I can do with GarageBand on my computer is record podcasts and other audio note/response recordings along those lines, and for all I know, the GarageBand for the iPad is, relative to these other tools, crap.  But it seems pretty powerful to me.

iMovie will not (apparently) work on the first generation iPads, and this might be the thing that really pushes me into the iPad 2.  It’s kind of a shame because recording video from another source and importing it to the first gen iPad seems like it would be a workable solution to me.  Anyway, frrom what I can tell, iMovie for the iPad is a lot like all of the other apps for the iPad (and this includes GarageBand, I assume):  they might be better called “lite” versions of the desktop software because they are just that, stripped-down versions.  I know more about iMovie than I do about GarageBand, and this was very clear in the few minutes I spent on it.

Oh yeah, and there are the cameras too.  Here’s 13 seconds of video I took:

The first lesson learned here is that it is perhaps best to video in landscape mode, but you get the idea. I don’t know if there is a way to zoom with this video, but I suspect there is, and I know that I could have cropped it in different ways in iMovie, either on the iPad or exported to the full version on a computer.

One other thing I learned in my 10 minutes:  those snazzy magnetic covers that are available with iPad2 don’t work with the original iPad, which is a bummer.

Will it be worth getting one?  Well, depending on how the rest of birthmonth works out, sure, I think so.  Though it might be tricky.  It turns out the store was sold out of them, and one of the guys working there told me that people were waiting there in the hopes that maybe– just maybe— there were some iPad2 in the shipment that was due to arrive any minute.  Jeez, it’s like trying to get a Wii all over again.  On the Apple web site, they’re saying 3-4 weeks for shipping.

To me, the real usefulness of these things for me are potentially in teaching, especially when it comes to things like the movie project I have students do in English 328, the “media authoring” course I’m trying to get off the ground at the graduate level, and/or the kind of simple multimedia projects students do in first year writing.  Basically, for $500 for the iPad2 itself and another $100 or so worth of software and maybe some other add-ins (a microphone, for example), you’ve got a device that can take (so-so) photos, record audio (including an instrument plugged into it), and record HD video.  And with iMovie, GarageBand, and Pages, you’ve got a pretty powerful and simple multimedia platform that is damn near perfect for teaching and the enthusiastic amateur.  And it all weighs less than a pound and has a 10 hour battery life.   Whoa.

Posted on

Das Gradeinator

I’ve been thinking about grading a lot lately– well, “lately” meaning the last year or so.  I had a few thoughts about grading in general here last year, and also here, where I reflected on a particularly unpleasant discussion with a student about a grade on a project.  At the end of last term, I had decided I was going to try an experiment in English 328, the “advanced writing” course of sorts I’ve taught at EMU dozens and dozens of times over the years.

Basically, what I did was this:

  • Each student would submit a draft without their name on it for peer review.  (I should mention a) I’m teaching online, so these students don’t necessarily know each other that well to begin with, and b) I combined two online classes into one big group, which I probably wouldn’t do again, but that’s a slightly different story).
  • For each student’s essay, I created google docs survey with rubric/peer review questions, some very structured, some open-ended.  That’s 28-30 or so surveys that are individual documents.
  • Then I figured out who would review who, striving to make it so that no one reviewed each other– that is, student 1 reviewed students 2, 3, and 4; student 2 reviewed 5, 6, and 7; and so forth.  This was a math problem for me that took a while to resolve.
  • Then I distributed the still anonymous essays along with corresponding google doc links  to each member of the class for them to fill out.
  • Then, I collected those responses from the surveys, dumped the results into FileMaker, and then distributed them back to students in a readable fashion.
  • After students received feedback from their reviewers, I then gave them the chance (via a SurveyMonkey survey) to review their reviewers on a simple number scale.
  • And then, I more or less repeated the whole thing, but for the second time around, students assigned 100 out of the 150 points for the project as a grade (the other 50 points were tied to the “review of reviewers” and my own assessment).
  • I reviewed the survey results for each student, read through each essay myself, assigned my portion of the grade, made any other adjustments I thought necessary (for example, when students clearly didn’t follow the assessment instructions), and then passed all of this back to students.

You got all that?

That was the “Gradeinator v.1,” or at least what I was calling it.  A better name will need to be in place eventually for marketing purposes, I’m sure.  Right now, I’m working with what I am calling “Gradeinator v.2,” where I attempted to use one very large SurveyMonkey survey (hundreds and hundreds of questions, with lots of skip logic) to handle all of the reviews.  My theory was that this would be easier than Google Docs/Survey, but as I am going through and tabulating things now, I’m not convinced that is the case.  That might be more about my lack of me knowing what I am doing more than anything else though; more on that in a bit.

Now, I suppose the first question any sensible person might have here is why in the heck would I do this in the first place?  It’s certainly something I’ve wondered about myself, believe me.

Basically, I was trying to do three things.  First– and I always knew this was a long-shot– I was trying to see if there was a way to save some time with grading.  Second, I wanted to make peer review a little more systematic, and, by adding the anonymous feature, I wanted to make it a little more “honest.”  My theory was that one of the reasons why students sometimes give kind of lame peer review was because they don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, and making things anonymous might make it more about the “writing” rather than the “writer.”

And third, I wanted to minimize my role as “the grader” and to empower the students as critics.  This is an advanced writing class after all, one where must about all of the students in the class are hoping to be secondary school teachers or professional writers of some sort, and it seems to me worthwhile trying a different way to highlight the critique process.  What I’m getting at is I wanted to find a way to emphasize my role of “facilitator,” while at the same time recognizing that the teacherly role of final decider really never goes away.

I’ve learned a lot already and I’m learning more; in no particular order:

  • On the whole, this process has a certain amount of “truthiness” for me.  I do think that the peer review is better through this more systematic “rubric” approach and also when its anonymous, though these peer reviews are far from perfect.  My students tend to cautiously agree:  they tend to see the advantages of anonymous peer review, but they also see problems with it, notably that it isn’t really possible to ask “follow-up” questions about particular points of critique.  Though I should also point out that a lot of my students are thrown off by the “weirdness” of all this, and I am sure that the reviews at the end of the class will demonstrate that not everyone was on-board with this.  I will also be taking a poll for the next big peer-reviewed assignment on the process that students want to follow, and the results of that poll might be telling.
  • I like the process of reading students’ assessments and then making my own assessment, because what happens most/much of the time is I am able to build constructively off of my students’ comments.  That makes me feel more “coach” and/or “team leader”-like, rather than the final judge/authority/teacher, if that makes sense.  I have many more opportunities to say “I agree with what your peers said about your essay” with this set-up.
  • But I have to emphasize most of the time and not all of the time, because even well-intentioned and earnest students have given some not excellent feedback.  Even with a rubric and guidelines and my coaching/instruction and all the rest, much of the feedback has still been– to be blunt about it–irrelevant.  I’m talking about critiques of font choices, how the pages are numbered (or not), really petty (and debatable) comments on grammar, etc.  And then there were also a number of student reviews and assessments that are just lazy, comments along the lines of “good!” and just giving “A”s without anything remotely helpful. The kind of reviews that are useless to students are also  impossible for me to build off of in any meaningful way.  Though I know this is all part of the learning process and it appears that the comments on the Gradeinator v.2 are better.
  • Anyway, the next time I do this (if there is a “next time”), I’ll be assigning points to students on the quality of their assessments, either instead of or in addition to the quality of their reviews.  That’s the teacherly part of things, I suppose, but I kind of feel like some folks need to be held accountable for their less than stellar reviews.
  • The technical part of the process– setting up the surveys, dumping the data into things like FileMaker, on and on and on– is an enormous pain in the ass, far far more time consuming and tedious than I had anticipated.  It was a little easier to do this the second time around, but just a little easier.  Of course, the thing is grading itself is kind of tedious, so I can’t really say if this is more or less tedious than the more traditional sitting down with a stack of essays with a pen.  More time-consuming, but that’s slightly different.
  • A lot went wrong, and went wrong in unanticipated ways.  Some students filled out the wrong surveys.  Some students supplied letters instead of numbers for grades, and it’s hard to average the letter “B” in with two other numbers.  And when students are late in handing in work or in getting the surveys done, well, that can mess up the works for others– that is, if a student doesn’t do the peer assessment they were supposed to do, then that means one of her or his peers doesn’t get the feedback/grade.

I think the most useful, interesting, and/or frustrating part of this for me is what I’ve learned a lot about things like Google Docs and Excel, and I know even more clearly now that there is much I do not know about these things and much I wish I could know about relational databases and programming.

I do not know if this is actually true, but it feels to me like this is a system that could be largely automated.  First, a student go to a web site and uploads her document for review.  Then, probably based on being informed about this or maybe based on some sort of due date, that student goes back to that web site, enters in some identifying information, and she is then taken to the documents she needs to review.  She completes them and submits them back to the system. Then, when her peers have completed their reviews of her project, the student receives an email alert and a link to review those reviews.  And as an instructor, the idea is you can watch, participate, or otherwise intervene in the process.

If all this were possible– if this could be set up with some kind of content management system or other database program, and if it were easy enough to customize the rubric/review questions based on an assignment and goals and such– then it might both save a teacher some time and make for a richer teaching experience.  Maybe that’s a big “if,” maybe not.

Anyone out there interested in a programming project?

Posted on

The kids today and the internets

This is mostly a reminder post for 516 for winter 2012 (I assume I’ll be teaching it then) and some reading(s) I might want to add about participatory culture and digital natives, and it’s in my mind now because I literally came across both of these things almost at the same time while looking for other things.

First, there’s the book Born Digital, which looks like a much smarter version of the whole “digital natives” argument than Pensky.  Along these lines is the web site/group Youth and Media.

Second, Clay Spinuzzi posted on his blog a useful review of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century By Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, useful not only for his comments but also for the link to the book.  Thanks Clay, and go read some more Jenkins– good stuff.

Posted on

On Sheridan’s “Fabricating Consent: Three-Dimensional Objects as Rhetorical Compositions”

I’ve been a bit tardy posting about my scholarly reading because the start of school last week has really kicked me in the butt.  Hard.  I’ve more or less triple-whammied myself.  I took on an administrative assignment: I’m the “Writing Program Coordinator,” which means I deal with our undergrad major and our MA in writing, and while this is something I’ve done before, I still have to get back up to speed and/or figure out what has changed since I did this a couple years ago.  I’m teaching an overload this term, which complicates some of the previously mentioned administrative work start-up time.  And I wasn’t really as “ready” for the new term last week as I ideally would have liked to have been.  The break is never long enough, but with trips to both Florida and Iowa and Annette at MLA for the first week of classes, it was really really not long enough.  Oh well.

Anyway, I have actually still been reading about an article a week, and last week’s selection was David Sheridan’s “Fabricating Consent:  Three Dimensional Objects as Rhetorical Compositions,”  which is in the December issue of Computers and Composition. It’s about the implications of the tools that are coming online for fabricating objects– so-called 3D printers, for example– and how that might be incorporated into composition and rhetoric, and it’s also advocating for a rhetorical exploration of objects.

There’s always the “why would you do this” question– one I’ll bring up again– and I think Sheridan does a really good job of naming the fundamental categories for answers to that question in the field generally, and he goes on to structure his article in response to these questions:

Because it’s possible. (New technologies increasingly allow rhetors to produce visual compositions.)

Because it’s powerful. (Visual rhetoric allows us to communicate more effectively than words alone can.)

Because it’s valued. (Visual rhetoric is valued in the personal, professional, and public spheres that students inhabit.)

Because it’s ours. (Visual rhetoric, is the domain of ordinary rhetors, not just a specialized group of professionals, such as graphic designers.)

These are all the reasons why I see including writing practices that go beyond “words in a row” in different classes– I’m thinking of movies, audio/podcasts, web sites, posters, etc., etc.  I have a hard time imagining 3D fabrications along the line of what Sheridan is describing in parts of this article, but that is mainly because I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of 3D desktop printing, period.  But apparently, as Sheridan cites pretty clearly here, affordable 3D “printers” are just around the counter, and I guess in a lot of ways, we’re in the stage now with this stuff that we were 30 years ago with the advent of desktop publishing.  I mean, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the idea that it would be possible to publish a newspaper or a magazine without laying out the physical page– skipping past stuff like the waxed column of print created by the linotype operators, light tables, blue grids, etc.– probably seemed pretty abstract.

Sheridan also gives us a good bibliography in this piece of all kinds of scholars who have written in different ways of how objects have the power to persuade in lots of different ways.  In fact, it’s enough stuff there to form the basis of a great “rhetoric of objects” sort of graduate course.  If nothing else, I might borrow some of this the next time I teach the Rhetoric of Science and Technology course.

But I think there is still a bit of the question of “why would you do this;” or, perhaps more specifically, “when would you do this?”  Sheridan cites Lanham’s essay “The Electronic Word” to get to the issue of “what business are we in,” offers several examples of things sort of like 3D compositions, and he writes:

I could imagine a colleague challenging me in the way that Bruce McComiskey’s colleagues challenge him: You’re a writing teacher! What business is it of yours to teach students to make t-shirts, mugs, lamp shades, and dolls. My reply would echo McComiskey’s: my job is to teach rhetoric, in all its forms, and 3D compositions are compelling rhetorical forms. My training as a teacher and scholar of rhetoric helps me to understand and teach the way compositions like an altered Barbie can function as powerful strategies of persuasion in certain contexts.

(The “altered Barbie” thing is one of the examples he discusses earlier about the Barbie Liberation Organization).

For me, it’s all about contexts and purposes of the class.  If I ever get a graduate-level multimedia authoring class off the ground (it’s on the “to do” list), then some discussion about these kinds of 3D “fabs” would very much fit in.  As part of our first year writing program at EMU, students generally fabricate things and/or otherwise represent their writing in the kinds of ways that Sheridan talks about here in the “Celebration of Student Writing” that happens toward the end of the Fall and Winter semesters.  So I can definitely see it as a part of a writing course.

Having said that, I think that in a class like first year writing at a place like EMU, I would be doing students a great disservice if I spent too much time on learning how to fabricate t-shirts, mugs, lamp shades, dolls, and other 3D compositions, especially if it was at the expense of teaching “words in a row” kinds of writing skills and researching skills.  I want to stress “in a class like first year writing at a place like EMU” because we have a lot of students in those classes who are “at risk,” to put it euphemistically. A good number of these students struggle mightily with some very basic, traditional, and unsexy writing skills.  So to the extent that first year writing is a “service” course (and I am well aware that that’s debatable), I think we owe it to students to focus first on those arguably boring and traditional elements of a writing course first, and to incorporate other elements of writing (e.g., 3D fabrication, visual rhetoric, audio, etc.) only as it relates to “the basics.”

This is not a position that everyone in the computers and writing world has, but I have always been of the opinion that students need to first have a good handle on “words in a row” literacy before they venture into images, sounds, objects, etc.  Or at the very least, the images, sounds, and objects that are incorporated into writing pedagogy for first year students has to serve “words in a row” literacy first. I wrote an essay/commentary back in 2004 called “Yes, But Is It Writing?” that was more or less in response to some stuff I saw at the Computers and Writing conference that year.  I remember going to a presentation where the speaker (I have no idea who) was talking about incorporating Flash movies into a first year writing class, and where this speaker showed some of the (frankly, mediocre) work his students did with their movies.  As I wrote back then:

I’m not trying to suggest first-year composition courses are or should be just about the so-called basic skills, and, like most of my composition and rhetoric colleagues, I resist the idea that first year composition is a sort of remedial course. But at the same time, being able to “design” a cool looking web site or Flash movie is not the same thing as being able to “write.”

A class that focuses on intensely graphic projects, one where the teacher would inevitably have to devote a great deal of class time to helping students learn and use the multimedia software and hardware, might help students to be “visually sophisticated” and even critical readers of visual mediums like television or film. But it wouldn’t necessarily help student write decent paragraphs and sentences and “essays,” no matter how you define the difficult to define term “essay.”

So the same thing with 3D fabs:  best used with moderation, I think.

Posted on

Yet another collection of miscellaneous links

With all the news about delicious going belly-up (or not?), it seems more important than ever for me to park some links here that I want to keep track of:

Posted on

This blog post is worth 7 points

I had a conversation with a student the other day that continues to bother me.  I think for what are obvious reasons, I am not going to go into specific detail, but in summary, this person was unhappy with the earned grade on a project.  Very unhappy. So I of course scheduled a meeting with this person, assuming/hoping we were going to mostly discuss strategies for a revision.  Instead, this student essentially yelled at me.  I was told the assignment was not clear and that the student (in this person’s opinion, of course) had indeed fulfilled the assignment, regardless of my judgment and grade.

Furthermore, I as admonished for not being able to describe how many points certain portions of the assignment were worth and for not having (what this student had in mind as) a clear grading rubric.  How, this student wondered aloud and angrily, how could I possibly hope to teach anything absent a rubric that clearly describes what parts of the assignment are worth what points?

A few thoughts:

  • This student was not without a point– that is, this person did suggest valid ways in which the assignment description was lacking.  My main problem is that this assignment is relatively new and some of the problems I am experiencing this term– this is not the only student who missed part of the point of the project– were things I had not anticipated and which were not a problem previously.  I know, kind of vague.  Let’s just say I will have to add some language to the project that I thought was somewhat obvious, but you know what they say when you assume. Of course, there was a vigorous discussion on the class site (it’s an online class) about what exactly the assignment was about and I gave numerous examples of possibilities, and there was nothing to stop this student from asking for clarification or from running an idea past me.  Students– particularly college students, particularly college students who are juniors and seniors– have a certain obligation and responsibility to ask questions about assignments they are unclear about.  But that is perhaps beside the point.
  • Another point this student had that I think is valid and that I see all the time is a discrepancy between peer review comments and my comments– in other words, in the peer review process, students say the draft is great, but my comments and grade disagree with that.  This is because too often student comments are not detailed and not constructively critical (e.g. “Great job!  I learned a lot from your essay!  This is perfect in every way!”), and this is generally because students often don’t spend enough time in peer review, and/or also because students are way WAY too nice to each other, even in comparably anonymous online environments.  I think I need to do more to get students to question these overly rosy comments (Derek had some good points about this, btw), but I am completely convinced that the main reason students are not as constructively critical as they could be is because they don’t want to offend anyone or make anyone sad.  I think that if the peer review process was anonymous, then students would give more critical advice.  But that’s an experiment/change for next term.
  • Several years ago, a student who came into my office itchin’ for an argument from me would have gotten it.  Just a few years ago, a student coming into my office to bully me into changing a grade (and I am not accusing this student of that–not exactly– and I am quite sure this student has a very different interpretation of things) probably would have been successful simply because I would have decided it was not worth it.  Nowadays, when students come into my office and yell at me (not that this happens that often), I realize that the problem here is probably not mine.
  • What I object to most is the appeal to grading rubrics and points, a strategy I have quite frankly seen from a number of students who are studying to be K-12 teachers who have had just enough exposure to an undergraduate methods course to be vaguely familiar with the terms “rubric” and “assessment.”  As I told this student the other day, the use of rubrics is complex and debatable, the assignment and peer review process constitute a “rubric” of sorts,  and I would be happy to debate the use of rubrics in writing courses– particularly formal rubrics, and particularly in advanced writing courses– with any one of my colleagues in Education and/or assessment.  The same goes for points.  Assigning points (or percentages, of course) to projects or parts of projects in a class focused on something as leaky, fluid and non-discrete as the writing class is a convenient fiction at best.  Or at least they are convenient fictions when the points/rubrics are not forced upon educators from some sort of outside assessment force.  The kinds of institutional/external assessments that happen in higher education (accreditation, for example) and the sort of fetishized testing and rubrics and assessments forced upon folks in elementary and secondary education are  entirely different kind of convenient fictions.
  • On the other hand, it never ceases to amaze me how magically powerful assigned points and rubrics and the like are.  If I had only accompanied my grade and comments on the final project with a chart listing discreet elements worth a certain number of points, no matter how “made up” and dubious that chart might be, I am quite sure I would not have had the unpleasant conversation I had today.  After all, how could rubrics and points possibly lie?
  • I do have a simple point system that helps me keep track of grades and that helps students to see where they’re at in a course.  The class as a whole is worth 1000 points, participation is worth 200 points, each major project is worth 150 points, etc.  The number doesn’t matter, of course because fundamentally, it’s just a percentage system, and in my view, what really matters is the dialog I usually have with students about their grades, about revising, about improvement, etc..  I have literally taught courses in the past worth 1,000,000 points, and if I were better with numbers, I’d teach a course worth one point.  The points don’t matter because the process (and the percentages, for that matter) doesn’t change.
  • And yet, the power of the point in even my simplistic system is indisputable.  I have conversations with students who are seven points away from a “B” for the term, and when I say to a student in a conference “see, the problem is you are seven points short, so there’s really nothing I can do here, you’re going to get a ‘C+,'” that student inevitably nods and says “yeah, I see you’re point.”  Never once have I had a student stop to think a moment and speak the truth to me:  “Yeah, but you can pretty much give me whatever grade you think you can justify, right?”
Posted on

Misc. Browser Links

I’ll post sooner than later (yet this weekend, certainly) about Thanksgiving at home this year, but in the meantime, it’s time once again to post a ton of links to stuff open in my browser that I want to and/or need to come back to sooner than later.  In no particular order here:

Posted on

A few thoughts on grading (on the eve of a big push)

I have planned badly grading-wise this term, something you would think I would have figured out after teaching for 22 years.  Basically, I’m teaching three writing classes, and all of them– the first year students, the juniors/seniors, and the grad students– all have some significant writing project due this week.  I know.  Brilliant.

Anyway, there were a couple of pretty humorous and wise posts about grading out there on the blogosphere that I thought I’d reflect on before I dive into the breach tomorrow.  First, there is this post from the “not that kind of doctor” blog, “the five stages of grading,” which went “viral” (sorta) and seems to have taken the blogger by surprise.  Then there’s “Procrastigrading; or, How to Grade Efficiently” from Nine Kinds of Pie, another blog I had not previously read.  The five stages of grading = the five stages of grief (kinda funny), and “procrastigrading” is a technique where one collects work from students and waits for six days to grade it, doing it all in one marathon session.  This is advice I inadvertently follow far too often.

In any event, mostly to remind myself for the grading frenzy that starts tomorrow, a few thoughts/self-reminders about grading:

  • When it comes to the teaching of writing, it seems to me that commenting/assessing/grading writing is a part of the teaching process, unfortunately.  I say “unfortunately,” because while I often like reading student writing and I think it would be totally wrong to pass this grading off onto someone else and/or to not really do it all, I admit that grading can often times be the least interesting part of the teaching process.  Having said that….
  • …. I have heard all kinds of stories of cutting corners in very dubious ways.  One of my very senior colleagues told me a story about how he was very pressed for time one term and limited his commenting on student papers to circling what he thought was the strongest sentence in an essay and underlining what he thought was the weakest.  I have often thought about how much easier my life would be if I simply wrote “good!” on the top of all the assigned essays and simply given everyone an A.  I’ve heard stories of faculty (not here, but I suspect it’s happened) hiring grad students or part-timers to grade stuff on the side.  I haven’t done any of these things and I wouldn’t, but that is not to say I’ve never been tempted.
  • Effectively and efficiently commenting/grading on student essays is something that takes a lot of practice, and on the chance that there is a newer teacher or a grad student of mine reading this who has just spent 10 hours dealing with their first big stack of first year composition essays, it does get easier.  Honestly.
  • The truest thing that Phillip “Nine Kinds of Pie” Nel writes is that “Grading devours all the time you give it.  You need to limit its diet.”  Very very true.  Toward that end, I tend to use two techniques (well, three, if I count to the too frequent “procrastigrading” approach of waiting until too long to start grading a batch of papers in the first place.)  The first technique, which is based entirely on the “Procrastination hack” from 43 folders, is using a timer.  I give myself 10 minutes at a time to read/comment on a student project, a time limit that is usually not enough but is often close enough to comment on an essay.  So, doing this 10+2*5 approach means I can comment and grade about five essays an hour.  That’s still not exactly “super fast,” but it makes things a little more manageable.
  • The second major technique is to remind myself what I’m grading/commenting for in the first place, and this is the one that has really developed with my experience and confidence as a teacher.  When I first started teaching– and really, for the first 2/3rds or more of my time as a teacher– I would write a lot of comments on student essays, including pointing out errors and/or offering editing advice and (often lengthy) end comments that were as much about justifying my grade in my own mind as anything else.  In other words, I wrote a lot on a student’s essay to reassure myself about the grade I had assigned and not to offer advice about improvement. Well, at some point in my process, I decided that this self-justification didn’t help students and wasted my time.  So nowadays, I write very little as far as editorial/line-by-line sort of commentary (more with first year students, though), and I make it as clear as I possibly can to students that I am always happy to meet with them in person to talk about both my grading and about ideas for revision.  Arguably, not all students who could/should take me up on this and then they are left with my less than complete comments.  But these less satisfied students are not the ones who are seeking copious commenting in the first place, and I have seen the problem of commenting too much on student work often enough to convince me that the students who want more comments will ask, and the students who don’t ask probably don’t want that many comments in the first place.

Cynical?  Perhaps, a little.  But the process can make you a little cynical after a while.

Which reminds me:  a little reading and soon to bed to prepare for a three or so day long grading bender!