Category: Teaching

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Academic Holding Pattern

When it comes to writing the generic “start of the term” post, I have a couple of problems. While our trip to Europe earlier this month was a lot of fun, it wasn’t exactly relaxing. It was more of one of those great “trips” that require a bit of a “vacation” for recovery. So in a sense, I have kind of been making that vacation now, even though I’ve been sitting in on the training sessions for graduate assistants that Linda AK is leading before she hits sabbatical and hands me the keys to the first year writing program store– more on that in a bit.

And then there’s the whole faculty union stuff. But that’s the subject of a different (tomorrow’s?) post.

In any event, even the threat of a strike casts quite a shadow on the beginnings of the term, especially when it comes to the advising and quasi-administrative work that is going to make up the bulk of my work this year– again, more on that in a bit. I found myself last night going through a backlog of email and telling students, potential students, and other advisees that I will be available next week– unless we’re on strike. That’s kind of annoying, and while I suppose the union negotiators can be blamed for some of this, I mostly blame the administration and I really REALLY blame the lawyer that the university hires to break negotiate with the union. I am certain that if this guy was not at the table, the folks from the faculty and the folks from the administration would have worked out a deal months ago. But the lawyers get paid by the hour, and they get paid to bring us to the brink, right?

Oh wait– I said that was going to be a different post….

Besides this academic holding pattern created by a combination of my body/soul forcing a post-trip “break” and the relative uncertainty of the start of the term, I feel like my non-academic life is in a bit of a holding pattern, too. Our son doesn’t start school until after Labor Day, and oh my, we are all soooo ready for him to go back to school. The Washtenaw County Rec Center, which is where I go to work out (when I go to work out) is closed until September 1, which has thwarted my plans to start getting in shape right after our trip.

Anyway, I know this hold will end eventually. And when it does, when the term really does start, I will begin what will be I hope a very interesting year as a sort of faculty/administrator. I have been the “writing program coordinator” in our department since January. My charges in that job are to more or less run the undergraduate majors in professional and technical writing and our graduate programs in professional writing and teaching of writing. In addition to that, I’m going to be the “interim director of first year writing,” which is what Linda usually does and which is more akin to what most people think of as a WPA. I’m the go-to person for the 120 or so sections of first year writing we have each term, I’m the one who has to do all sorts of miscellaneous paperwork and meeting associated with all of that, and I’m going to take over the teaching of the course our grad students take to get ready to teach first year writing. Linda is teaching the part that meets for two weeks before the term begins right now.

So thing number 1 on my agenda for next year: Don’t screw up the Interim WPA thing too badly. Given the great incoming students we have and the support I’ll be getting from some other folks here (along with Linda from a short distance away), I think this is a goal I will be able to meet.

Agenda item #2: read (and not write) some scholarship. There’s two basic reasons for this. First, with my various quasi-administrative roles, I just don’t know how much time I’m going to have to work a lot on new articles or whatever, God forbid a book. Second, as I elluded to in my earlier posts about my academic mid-life crisis, I kind of feel like that if I don’t have a “burning project” I just have to do, then it would perhaps be a better idea to not do anything for a while. So I’m looking forward to just reading stuff for a year or so.

Well, other than at least one conference presentation.

Finally, there is agenda item #3: Get in better shape. This is an annual agenda item for me, of course. But given item #2, I might actually have a little more time to do this one this year….

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One Laptop Per Child to roll out this Fall

Via Kairosnews, this Linux news web site, this blurb at Arstechnica, and the One Laptop per Child homepage, here’s some pr-type info on the progress of the One Laptop Per Child initiative from MIT. The computer they’ve developed and are ready to test is called the CM1 (Children’s Machine 1), and it will cost about $140. The goal is to get them to kids in the developing world, but quite frankly, I think there are a lot of kids in places like Detroit who could use these things too.

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Catching up on blog reading

I did have relatively good Internet access while I was in Europe. It came at a price of between 2-4 Euros an hour, which isn’t too cheap, but it was everywhere. I didn’t take a computer with me, something I will reconsider on my next trip overseas– it would have been nice to do some writing and to watch some DVDs, though there was no WiFi access as far as I could tell. So I went to Internet cafes and I got online about four or five times, mostly to check my email for anything super important, to post to my unofficial blog about our travels, and to check the news.

It’s funny to think about; the last (and only other) time I was in Europe was on my/our honeymoon in 1994, quite a while before Internet cafes and news web sites and such. It was tough back then to even get newspapers and magazines in English, at least where we were. As a result, we found out about OJ and his infamous white Bronco ride a week after it happened while looking at a magazine on the way back home in the plane. This time, we had the ‘net, we had CNN Europe, we had access to USA Today. And as a result, I can tell you I think this John Karr guy is probably just a nut; I’d be very surprised if he did indeed kill JonBenet.

Anyway, even with this connectivity, I didn’t get a chance to read much in the way of blogs while I was away. So, in no real particular order, here are a few things I came across this morning via my RSS reader that might be helpfu to me later on and/or that I just thought were kinda interesting:

Okay, I know I missed a lot, but there you have it.

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The Grades are In, Let the Summer Vacation Begin, and an Official Blogging Hiatus

I just got back from turning in my grades. Funny how comfortable we get with new things. When I first came here in 1998, the way you turned in grades was all on paper and in person. You filled in the little scantron bubbles, walked the grade sheet over in person to Records and Registration– do NOT give your grade sheets to someone else to turn in!– signed, double-checked, stamped, etc.

A few years ago, they went to an electronic system for turning in grades. Initially, there was much complaining of this new-fangled system (what if something gets lost? what if the computer is broken? how do I do this?), but that quickly died down since showing up and R&R in person is annoying and the online system is easy.

Well, with this weird 12 week class format I was working with this spring/summer, I had to turn in my grades on old-fashioned paper. It felt totally wrong to me, just not the same “ah-ha, now I’m done!” sort of feeling. I hadn’t been in the building that houses R&R in a couple of years so I had to hunt around a bit. I gave my sheet of paper to the person behind the counter tentatively, asking “is this alright?” Like I said, it’s funny how comfortable you get with new things sometimes.

In any event, that is (as they say in the film biz) a wrap. It’s time to get ready for the big trip: we leave this weekend for Europe, first to Florence, and then a town in Germany called Mittenwald. We’re visiting Mittenwald because we’ll be seeing my in-laws on that leg of the trip, and we’re visiting Florence because, uh, it’s really cool. Though actually, it will be quite hot, and, interestingly enough, quite cool in Mittenwald.

The day we get back here, the two week before school session of English 596 begins; fortunately, my very capable colleague Linda Adler-Kassner will be running that before she officially starts her sabbatical, so I won’t have to come in right from the airport and totally wacked-out jet-lagged.

I’m going to be bringing a little school reading with me, including some reading for my teaching in the fall, but mostly, I’m just taking a break. And speaking of a break, I’m going to be doing the same with the blog, too. It’s mostly forced because I’m not taking my computer with me to Europe and I’m uncertain about Internet access (and really, who wants to go to places like Tuscany and the Alps to blog and check their email?), but also because I just wanted to refresh a bit. If I do get online at all, I’m more likely to post over at my unofficial blog, but pictures and other cool stuff will have to wait until I get back.

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Some Misc. Web Browsing/Links

I should be spending my morning by wrapping up the grading for English 328 Online, but instead, I’m doing a little web surfing. I’ve come across some interesting links, too:

  • Duke University’s Ad*Access Archive, which is a huge archive of old ads for all kinds of stuff. Very fun and interesting cultural icons– these might be interesting for a fy comp assignment where you ask students to compare ads from the past with the present.
  • Something called Kip, which might make for an interesting software experiment to organize things both in my office/home and on my computers.
  • Reflections (perhaps seasonal?) on the job market here, here, and, on a slightly more cheery note, here (good luck with the new gig, Mike).
  • Yet another reason to buy a Mac

Alright, enough of that stuff. On to wrapping up grades and then on to cooking, including making some ice cream.

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12 Weeks vs. 7.5 Weeks: the conclusion (?)

I’m almost at the end of my online version of English 328— in fact, I think I finished up grading everything before revisions last night– and thus at the end of my 12 week “experiment.” As loyal readers will recall from this post and also from this post, I worked out a deal where I have taught a class that would normally last 7.5 weeks for 12 weeks instead. My reasoning for this originally was that I just didn’t see how students could possibly complete this online class in just 7.5 weeks. It’s hard enough to teach this class in a face to face setting for the short 7.5 week semester, despite the fact that we meet face-to-face six hours each week; I just didn’t see how it would work online.

Well, here at the end of this 12 week experiement, finally, and my sense is that I won’t be doing this again.

Now, the 12 week term has been kind of nice in that it has progressed at a much more leisurely pace than the 7.5 week term, obviously. I have also had a couple of students who tell me that there is no way that they could have done the class in a 7.5 week term.

But the negatives with this 12 week arrangement have been significant. First off and most important for me, the longer term did not help student retention; it might have even hurt it. I started the term the first week in May with 20 students, and it looks like 9 will finish. What makes the situation worse is that most of these students are just MIA, mainly because they didn’t drop the class in time since it’s considered a spring class (see below). I’ve had face-to-face versions of this class where I have had a lot of students drop and/or disappear, but over 50% is pretty extreme. And what’s interesting is that when I taught this class online during the regular school year, I had only a few drops or disappearances– 1 or 2 in the fall, 1 or 2 in the winter term– which to me means I can’t just blame the fact that the class was online.

Anyway, while I appreciate the fact that a couple of my current students said the 12 week term helped them, it seems unlikely to me that I would have had even more students drop/disappear if the term was 7.5 weeks long. In fact, if students knew up front that the semester was going to be short and thus they were going to really have to bust out and plan to be online a couple hours a day to keep up with the work, then maybe the retention might have actually been higher.

The second problem has been about the logistics of all this. Technincally, because “the system” at EMU is not really equipped to do something so out of the box as having a more or less customized semester (what big institution could do this, really?), my class has been a “spring term” class. This has had some kind of unexpected results. For example, the deadline to drop the class was very early in the term because the deadline was the same as for a 7.5 week class. This, I am sure, hurt some students who realized they were in way over their heads too late to get out of the class without penalty. The same deadline problems loomed for students who wanted to withdraw. Financial aid for the class was pegged to the spring term, which I think caused a few problems. The question of “load” for students was a problem because the class counted as a spring term class and not a summer term class, which screwed up students who, mostly for financial aid reasons, wanted to take a full load for the spring and the summer. The grading software/computer system can’t deal with the odd term, so I have to go through some rig-a-ma-roll to sort that out. And so forth.

Third, and maybe this is obvious, teaching for 12 weeks instead of 7.5 weeks has meant that I have had less “time off” than I would have otherwise. Like I said, the 12 week thing did make for a more leisurely pace, which has allowed me to teach and also take some family trips, play a fair amount of golf, etc. But while the 7.5 week term would have meant I would have been super-duper busy in May and June, it also would have meant that I would have been totally done a month ago.

Anyway, live and learn. Now I’ve got to go and start reading stuff about being a WPA….