The Classroom Conservative

Sessional Angst

Students at the University of Calgary have set up a website in support of Dr. Allison Dube, a sessional instructor in Political Science so beloved that he has won four teaching awards from the Students’ Union there.  Why Dr. Dube needs at this moment the “saving” sought is not wholly clear from the site, though it does proclaim that “he is at the point where he can no longer afford to continue his excellent work with his students…”  Dr. Dube’s story was featured in a Maclean’s article last March examining the working conditions of sessional instructors at Canadian universities.  If his departure from the UofC is in fact imminent, it would be a terrible loss for that institution, and his story is sure to renew interest in how universities staff their operations.

   

I, too, have been a sessional instructor, someone hired on a short-term contract, and so I have a perspective on the issue that I’d like to share.

   

Preparing the last chapters of my dissertation at Oxford University in early 1996, I found myself wondering about how I might live in Europe after my fellowship ran out.  I had been doing some part-time teaching while I studied, and so I was sure that I could thus keep the rain off me for a few more months.  The English government was unlikely to catch up with me before Christmas, but it still seemed prudent to go on the job market back home.  Over the course of a few humiliating months, I sent out resumes, and I was told repeatedly that no one believed I would finish my degree in three years, and no one wanted to gamble on an international plane ticket to interview me.  It became clear that my parents’ basement beckoned.

   

So it was that I found myself back in Newfoundland that September, and I was able to secure a sessional contract from the institution that granted me my first degree.  I was grateful for the chance to teach a course – and, when a colleague fell ill, I was given a second.  I was promised two more for January 1997.  I earned $14,000 that school year for teaching about 150 students.  If I applied for Employment Insurance at the end of April, I could make ends meet until the following September when more teaching would likely be available.

 

Some indignities were obvious; others I faced were not.  I was certainly the only Oxford D.Phil. driving his father’s beaten pickup to lecture at the university.  Budget cutbacks eventually cost me my office telephone.  I went back on the job market and got a call from a department chair at a Western Canadian university with a provisional invitation to his campus for an interview.  When I heard nothing else for two weeks, I called back and was told his search committee had changed its mind.  Generally, though, it was a wonderful year of romantic poverty that only a twentysomething could appreciate.

   

And yet, I decided, I could not continue along this track.  I had no definite deadline, and if push had come to shove, I suppose I would have done a second year.  In the meantime, I looked at jobs with university advancement offices, hoping to draw on my writing skills.  Having done some newspaper work before I went to graduate school, I applied for the job Martin Levin eventually got as “Books Editor” at The Globe and Mail.  (No, I did not even get an interview, though I did get a fabulous, personalized rejection letter.  This was a courtesy I remember fondly whenever my newspaper is late or thrown into the street.)  Fortunately, the day after my last sessional payment, I was offered a two-year term contract here in Lethbridge, and I remember the day I told my tearful family that I was moving west.  I suppose they imagined, as I once did, that I might stay.  I am certain that some of my sessional colleagues believed that if they hung around St. John’s, something would eventually come along.  But I knew that if I wanted to be a university professor, I would have to go to the available job: I could not wait for it to come to me.  That was my choice – and when I won a subsequent tenure-track competition, that decision was vindicated.

   

I suppose my point is that sessional instruction, in my experience, works best as a bridge to help someone pursue a more lucrative job.  There are exceptions to this rule, of course.  Some people are so rooted to a place that they wish to use sessional teaching to try to piece together a living there.  Some of my Newfoundland colleagues plug along happily, trading the job security I have for ocean air, pints at the Ship, and the chance to see Ron Hynes play more than once a year.  Other people use sessional teaching as a sideline: they have jobs during the day and offer their specialized expertise to universities at night.  This is not to denigrate the contribution of sessionals.  As the dozens and dozens of people who have posted to www.savedube.com will attest, the contribution of these instructors is real.

   

What, then, might prevent everyone from using a sessional job to leverage a better one at their current institution?  Why was I determined to leave the sessional track, even if it meant giving up on teaching entirely?  Well, first of all, although I might have assumed, reasonably, that there was ample teaching available, it would never be guaranteed.  Beyond the uncertainty of their budgets, something that prevents universities from replacing a half-dozen sessionals with a permanent employee is the vagaries of its needs.  I teach twentieth-century American literature, but if the department also needed some Shakespeare, a touch of Canadian, some creative writing, a bit of intro, and some freshman composition, it would be hard to imagine that I would be able to provide the necessary expertise.

   

Moreover, had I been relatively certain that my department would soon need enough courses taught in my area to justify a hire, I would surely have had to compete in a national search for the best possible candidate.  Universities use a lot of public funds, and we must be certain that they hire responsibly.  It is not impossible to imagine that had I put in three or four years as a sessional, gotten good teaching evaluations, and done some publishing in my spare time, I still may have lost out in an open competition to someone whose qualifications dwarfed mine.

   

To address some of these problems, some faculty associations across the country have been able to negotiate so that sessionals have an advantage in competitions or so that more experienced sessionals get some degree of job security and perhaps increased pay.  What is clear, however, is that the situation is almost never as simple as giving a permanent, professorial appointments to people who have been working sessionally – even if they have been doing exemplary jobs.

Nudity, Violence, and Contemporary Community Standards

Does it seem sometimes like coalition forces have, forever, been in Iraq?  It’s certainly been a long time: we are coming up on five years.  The early months of 2003 seem an eternity ago to me.  But news has now surfaced that the U. S. Federal Communications Commission has been watching television reruns from those days, slapping ABC with a $1.43 million fine for nudity shown in an episode of NYPD Blue that aired on February 25 of that year.  The episode, in fact, was called “Nude Awakening,” and it began with a brief scene in which a young Theo Sipowicz walks in on Connie McDowell, his father’s girlfriend, in the shower.  This moment of humor contrasts the later discovery that John Clark’s father has committed suicide.

   

It seems as though no one is laughing now.

   

In its statement, the FCC notes that the scene features “close-range views of an adult woman’s naked buttocks” and “the material is… dwelled upon and repeated.”  They find the depiction of actress Charlotte Ross is both “titillating and shocking.”  ABC contends that the material is “not presented in a lewd, prurient, pandering, or titillating way” but is meant, instead, to demonstrate “the complexity and awkwardness involved when a single parent brings a new romantic partner into his or her life.”  No one is suggesting that this is a seductive scene; no one is claiming that the intent of the scene is to depict a sexual response from a child.  But the intent of the material seems to make little difference to the FCC.  It is not the demonstrated effect of Connie’s nudity on Theo that concerns them – nor is it the supposed effect of Ms Ross on Austin Majors, the young man playing Theo.  (It is doubtful that Mr. Majors was ever in a room with the naked Ms Ross.  But, in any case, as a recent guest star on Desperate Housewives, he has had to endure much, much more.)

 

They are concerned about the effect of Ms Ross’s body on the viewing public, of course, about an apparent breach of “contemporary community standards” committed by NYPD Blue.  ABC argues that the program’s robust ratings and the relatively few complaints they received suggest the community is conditioned (and perhaps somewhat indifferent) to this material.  The FCC claims not to be moved by the number of complaints: they admit only to having received “numerous complaints, including thousands of letters from members of various citizen advocacy groups.”  This is code, of course, for thousands of busybodies who, having never seen the program, add their names to petitions drafted by shut-in prudes who have nothing better to do.  In fact, the FCC uses ratings statistics against ABC: because many people were watching NYPD Blue, this increases the “likelihood that children were among those who may have seen the indecent broadcasts, thereby increasing the public harm from the licensees’ misconduct.”

   

How stupid is this?  We have now had five years to assess what “public harm” was done by Ms Ross’s behind.  If we scour the papers for reports of sex offenders who blame Ms Ross’s behind for inflaming their monstrous passions, we will find none.  Ms Ross had just celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday when her wares were displayed to the American public.  Perhaps therapists could report as to whether they saw a spike in thirtysomething patients ashamed, by comparison, of their own bodies.  Were advice columnists besieged by letters from women feeling residual guilt because their children walked in on boyfriends in the shower?  Perhaps we can ask Dan Savage if “Savage Love” has subsequently printed letters from men whose children walked in on their boyfriends in the shower.

   

The indisputable fact is that in 2003, and during the years since, American popular culture has never hesitated to depict wanton acts of violence.  Primetime television is ruled by forensic investigation and police dramas that show people killing each other while the cinematographers wallow in the aftermath of that violence.  If were are going to accept that “contemporary community standards” reflect a taste for limbs dismembered from torsos, perhaps we should accept that the public might be ready to see these body parts in working order.

   

When the nostalgic part of my soul gets a hankering for classic television, I pop in a DVD of Rawhide.  But the libertarian side of me must stand up for artistic integrity.  Have you seen the bowdlerized versions of The Sopranos on A&E?  All those “freakings” and “flippings” stretch credibility.  In Canada, CTV has decided that little eyes should be in bed after 9pm or 10pm, and after this “watershed” they show some unexpurgated programming.  This, of course, is how the matter is handled in England, where “timeshifting” is not an issue.  While CTV conveniently ignores the fact that kids in Alberta can watch “adult” programming on cable after 6pm, the FCC gets itself tied in knots by this fact.  It is hard to imagine that in the nanny state that is Canada, our broadcasters have more trust in parents to control what their children watch.  If you are a parent that lets your kid follow NYPD Blue or The Sopranos, you have already made a choice.  And I find it hard to believe that the kinds of parents who do not object to mob violence on A&E would object to foul language and nudity.  Are you picking up on the hypocrisy of industry watchdogs?

   

Have these folks ever surfed the internet?  Oh, right…  That shoe is left to drop.  As a society, we should spend time trying to shift “contemporary community standards,” teaching our children about the implications of rampant sex and violence.  But we should also support the right of artists to reflect our society back to us, instead of trying to pretend that our society is something it is not.  Perhaps television is not meant to be an honest representation of what we are.  But as long as we pretend it is so, we’d be a lot better off treating sex and violence in the same manner.

The Loneliness of the Office Hour

As I begin this post, I’ve settled in for one of my two regularly-scheduled office hours.  Over the years, I have set up two or three or four a week.  Some semesters, I have been assigned as many as three large classes, and there was demand for this much consultation and more.  Students always have the opportunity to make an individual appointment, of course, but there is something about the informality of someone dropping by to discuss the previous class that seems most effective to me.  Our institution is still small enough, and our classes are still small enough, that professors get to know their students.  But, steadily, over the past ten years, I have noticed student participation in the office hour has fallen off, and the situation is actually quite dire now.

   

Most of my colleagues experience some of the same thing, so it would still be nice to think that students no longer drop by because we are all doing a better job in the classroom.  I, for one, have a better idea now than I once had about both the difficulty of the material I teach and the expectations I have of my students.  As a result, I prepare handouts on fraught topics and presentations on essay writing.  I finish class with the invitation to drop by and discuss these matters further, but fewer and fewer students show up.  My certainty that I am wholly clear in presenting this material comes crashing down only when course evaluations roll in, of course.

   

A number of professors I know have eliminated formal office hours in favor of a more liberal appointment policy.  After all, if someone has one of three office hours on Mondays at 1pm, and a number of students have another class at that time, that established time is lost to them for the whole term.  Because my administrative responsibilities shift and change from week to week, I email my class at the beginning of each week to announce my office hours.  I call this, in honor of Ernest Hemingway, my “moveable feast.”  It is my hope that, over every couple of weeks, I will hit on times when everyone is available.  I do not play favorites, but I argue that essay grading can never be wholly objective.  When students come by and demonstrate their genuine commitment, it is easier to give them the benefit of the doubt when something goes awry.

   

The truth, of course, is that the academic day is more compressed than ever before.  Many students take their classes back-to-back-to-back so there is time available to them to work in the mornings or the afternoons.  The reality is that as university study takes on more of the features of part-time employment for students, they are seldom around outside of class time to participate in the sorts of informal discussions that augment classroom study.  Can you imagine staying behind at the donut shop to talk with the boss about confection sprinkles?  I have fond memories of the office hour, myself.  The best professor I ever had required students to come by to discuss their assignments before he would give them a mark.  I remember the conversations we had about literature, and also I remember scanning in wonder the shelves and shelves of books he had.  Other professors used their office hours to recommend to me the books that, in turn, influenced me greatly.

   

These days, I am still able to put these lonely hours to good use.  I have established a teaching office for fear that my administrative office is too intimidating for students, and I am able to drag lots of other work up here in case no one shows up.  I get a lot of student emails, and these quiet hours give me a chance to catch up on this correspondence.  But just when I conclude that the office hour is an anachronism, that students want powerpoints and handouts and email attachments, an essay is called due.  That’s when they come back – like repentant sinners responding to a call to prayer.

A Vote for Gordon Pinsent

With the Oscar nominations set to be announced tomorrow, amidst speculation about what kind of awards ceremony Hollywood can muster under the circumstances of a writers’ strike, I would like to register my vote early for the man most likely to be overlooked: Gordon Pinsent.  Mr. Pinsent is my countryman, and by saying this I mean he is a Newfoundlander, not just a fellow Canadian.  He was born nearly seventy-eight years ago in Grand Falls, about a two hour drive from where my mother grew up.  As a result, it feels as though I have always been aware of him.  His career had its start in typical Canadian venues before he experienced an initial “Hollywood” phase.  Through most of my life he has been a revered statesman of the arts in Canada, playing in everything from The Rowdyman (1972) to John and the Missus (1987) to the The Red Green Show,  but I’ve seen him in person only once: at the provincial drama festival in St. John’s in 1997.  This was before another celebrated Hollywood turn in The Shipping News (2001), where his Billy Pretty character steals the movie from a languid Kevin Spacey.

   

The current performance drawing acclaim is his portrayal of Grant Anderson, the husband character in Away from Her.  As more than one reviewer has pointed out, the story unfolds from Grant’s fretful experience.  When his wife Fiona, played with Oscar-caliber aplomb by Julie Christie, begins to exhibit early symptoms of dementia, Grant must work through the full implications of what is happening to them both.  When Fiona’s inevitable institutionalization opens her life to a new, unexpected act in a time reserved for closing credits, it is Grant who must come to terms with the legacy of a life spent and, sometimes, misspent.  This is not to diminish at all the suffering of Alzheimer’s, nor is it meant to disparage Ms Christie’s performance.  But this tale of suffering needs its teller, and it is Mr. Pinsent’s understated presence that lends an epic lens to the narrow experience of everyday existence. Ms Christie is likely to receive a Best Actress nomination, and she has an excellent chance to get the associated statuette – even if, because of the writer’s strike, it might be couriered from a press conference in California.  While it is possible to argue that the two best lead performances this year may be found in a single film, the truth is that Fiona carries with high drama what Grant is entrusted to establish.  I suspect that the heights Ms Christie achieves – not to mention stiff competition from the likes of Daniel Day Lewis – may overshadow the weight of what Mr. Pinsent has done.

   

Away from Her is, at the level of narrative, an unassuming story brought to the screen conscientiously by Sarah Polley, who has been staking her own claim to the status of Canadian national treasure over her twenty-year career.  Whatever muted Oscar spotlight possible this year will surely shine on Ms Christie and this film.  But when this inspires you to take a look at this picture, savor the performance of Gordon Pinsent, a professional actor whose studied assurance reminds us that life on the stage and the screen is both an art and a craft.

Course Evaluations: So Students May Sign on the Dotted Line

Brett Zimmerman of York University has published in the new issue of University Affairs a spirited look at course evaluations.  People who are familiar with this method of helping to determine teaching effectiveness will know that, generally, a questionnaire of some kind is manually distributed to university classes late in a semester and the results, compiled and summarized, are passed along to the instructor.  To protect the identity of students, they are told to complete these evaluations anonymously, and the professor does not get to see the handwritten submissions.  It is common for the results to be released to the professor only after final grades have been processed.

   

There are, of course, many problems with course evaluations.  Though collective agreements and faculty handbooks often limit their use for the purposes of professional advancement, the sheer bulk of them prove irresistible: we receive many of them on a regular basis, and many of them can be quite good.  Is it a surprise that, when arguing achievement, we are tempted to use them – warts and all?  And Dr. Zimmerman here uncovers all the familiar warts.  Evaluations can be completed by students blinded by their most recent negative result; they can be completed by students bearing a grudge from an offhand comment; they can be completed by students simply disenchanted with post-secondary education.  The comments made by these students will, inevitably, have little to do with the most salient points of a professor’s performance.

   

But the essay also touches on a couple of points not enough discussed.  First, these evaluations are often, themselves, written quite poorly.  In institutions teeming with professionals who make a living by gathering information from people through surveys, this fact is shocking.  Why, asks Dr. Zimmerman, do we ask students what they didn’t like about a course rather than asking them if there was something they did not like about it?  Why do we encourage students to criticize us, thus?  Second, and more importantly, why do we allow our students to libel us anonymously?  I am held personally responsible for everything I say and write to a student.  Why do we allow students to write anything they wish about us without teaching them that they have some responsibility for those comments?  I think this is related to a movement away from personal responsibility in our culture, generally, and universities should never be complicit by encouraging bad behavior.

   

I am constantly shocked by how our society accepts recklessness and irresponsibility.  Our local newspaper has a “roasted and toasted” page where citizens can complain: it is like a letters page without signatures.  So, is it surprising that the most read page in our student newspaper for as long as I can remember allows anonymous students (who must be, granted, registered users of the paper’s website) to insult each other?  Various professor rating sites and social networking sites are little more than invitations to libel with impunity.

   

If you have a problem with a course and the way it is taught, you should always talk to the instructor about it while the course is ongoing.  I have never understood why students fear reprisals in such a situation.  How is it that we dignify such suspicions by structuring a whole system to protect people from something we only assume might happen?  If a student with a complaint was ever somehow punished for complaining, mechanisms already exist to investigate and reverse any manner of asymmetrical treatment of individuals in the classroom.  If the problem cannot be resolved, ultimately, if it is the kind of thing that should be reflected in a course evaluation, it is the principled thing to do to sign that evaluation, even though the instructor will not (and should not) see that signature.

   

It is my personal opinion, and only my personal opinion, that we should always require signatures.  If we are going to say things about people, we should have to put our names to those things.  We should send our students out into the world respecting the power of their opinions and better respecting those people on whom those opinions are brought to bear.

Bruno Arpaia, The Angel of History

In late September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou, Spain.  A Jew and a fierce anti-Nazi, the German critic had travelled from Marseilles through the Pyrenees in an attempt to flee Europe for the United States, only to learn that the local authorities planned to return him to France.  If you know enough about Benjamin to have read “The Task of the Translator” or “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” you will also know the ironic tragedy of his death: his travelling companions were soon after granted passage to Lisbon, Portugal, from which point Benjamin may have made it to waiting friends in New York.  Italian novelist Bruno Arpaia has imagined Benjamin’s last years of life in The Angel of History, a story that contrasts the suffering of the philosopher with that of Laureano Mahojo, a fictional Spanish communist who takes arms against Franco’s fascists.

   

The novel begins with Benjamin’s arrival in Paris, chapters narrated from the third person, and the philosopher’s meanderings through the city in the shadow of the German menace pale in comparison with juxtaposed scenes of combat.  Arpaia’s Spanish Civil War is vivid, and the Laureano chapters have the immediacy of a first-person account.  Surely the point is that war is felt at home as well as at the front, but this point is sacrificed to illustrations of a scholar’s inability to function effectively in a world beyond the dusty tomes of a library.  It is not the inevitable war that hampers Benjamin as much as his own nature.  Foreshadowing the anti-Semitism of Vichy France, The Angel of History is also unable to create sympathetic bystanders, initially, only indifferent ones, and Benjamin’s friends are historical figures introduced to do little more than demonstrate how the whole world comes to inherit the philosopher’s ineffectual mien.  By following Laureano, however, the reader gets an opportunity to savor his feisty friendship with Mariano, another communist fighter, and the desperate lust of his passionate affair with Mercedes, a Spanish nurse.  One could be forgiven for drawing the obvious parallel with the best of Hemingway’s war writings as Arpaia here leads us throughout a war-torn Spain.  He inherits from his American antecedent a real skill at situating characters on the landscape.  Perhaps because Arpaia’s Paris is limp and uninspired, foggy mornings along the Seine that belie a city of lights, Benjamin’s sections do not really pick up until the philosopher is drawn ever-deeper into the corrupt bureaucracy of wartime government.  Place is much less important as Kafka emerges as the primary influence for Arpaia’s writing, though the author does an excellent job in describing Marseilles as a maze – or perhaps a trial! – that threatens to ensnare Benjamin until the Gestapo can catch up with him.  As befuddled as ever, but crippled further by ill health, Benjamin grows more sympathetic as his fate is decided by the absence of a stamp no one will place on his travel papers.  One of the great European minds of the modern period is ennobled as he is reduced to detritus – while a whole culture faces its extinction.

   

The novel, ultimately, is about fate, about the forces - some external, some internal - that conspire against us.  Both Benjamin and Laureano test their wills to live, and while readers may be surprised by that exhibited by the former, the latter does not disappoint in his ferocity.  Though Benjamin imagines a hunchbacked dwarf who has accompanied him through his tragedy, a doppelganger from whom he cannot finally escape, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus remains after the philosopher’s death the novel’s most potent image: “the angel of history” who contemplates our horrific folly and fails to prevent further tragedy.  While he is called to paradise, it remains to more worldly beings to tell our stories.  Laureano is a fine storyteller, but Bruno Arpaia is a masterful one.

Paradigm Shift

There is news today that the government of Prince Edward Island is ending a ban on the sale of soda in cans, a ban that goes back more than twenty years.  The side of me that supported the introduction of Sunday shopping in Nova Scotia applauds this move.  While wealthy folks in the tony outports of that province fought the loss of a charming anachronism, the truth is that the old legislation in Nova Scotia had only enough loopholes for them to buy some caviar at Pete’s Frootique and a macchiato at Starbucks.  Folks unlucky enough to work for a living lost a valuable day to do some of the necessary retail chores forgotten about in all discussions of the “quality time” the sabbath might give to families, like it did in films set in the 1950s and 1960s.

   

You see, this is one of the problems with an unthinking nostalgia sometimes confused with conservatism, as I define it, or traditional values, as I understand them: people try to apply it piecemeal.  I, too, mourn the loss of the Pepsi bottling plant to be closed in Prince Edward Island – the end of a couple of dozen jobs in a place where that still means something, as well as the ginger ale, lime rickey, and orange flavors that sprung from the operation.  It is difficult to force islanders to drink their limes out of bottles when, after a jaunt across the confederation bridge, contemporary “smugglers” bring back cases and cases of canned Coca-Cola.  Why should island retailers be prevented from selling in a format in which people, apparently, want to buy their product?  And isn’t making people drive to New Brunswick to get it, or at least making it an indispensible part of any trip to the land of spruce trees and freezing rain, a trifle unfair?

   

Would it be refreshing – or at least as refreshing as a ginger ale made from Tignish spring water (they must have springs in Tignish?) – if people voted for the anachronism with their feet – or their taste buds, in this case?  Wouldn’t it be nice if, this time, people’s desire for old-fashioned orange was worth the inconvenience, apparently, of foregoing cans? Now, I am not against progress.  I am simply for giving people a clear view of the implications of their choices before inevitability has caught up to them.  And from the number of people who still, apparently, want vinyl records and wood stoves and bicycles, newer and flashier and more convenient and better marketed is not always what people really want.  Indeed, I think we can find examples where the newest and flashiest is not always best.  Email is so much better and more productive than letters and phone calls, and yet how has the Blackberry helped turn us into a generation of Bob Cratchits, begging for one day a year away from the demands of the work-a-day world?

   

Would consumers on Prince Edward Island have made the choices they made if they had known the eventual implications of those choices?  Would they have foregone convenience?  We are not flush with examples of people having chosen thus, but I can think of one example related to this very issue.  When I was a child, and perhaps even an adolescent, back at the time during which the government of P.E.I. banned cans, littering was a very common activity.  Everyone did it.  Rather than stockpiling trash, it was widely and enthusiastically thrown from car windows.  Roadsides were covered with the stuff.  I still think, strictly speaking, it is easier to litter today, but I would no sooner throw a Tim Horton’s cup out the window on the long and desolate drive from Calgary to Lethbridge than I would club a baby seal in the town square.  Relative merits or demerits aside, the public taste would never stand for it.  In our lifetimes, we convinced people that it would be better not to choose the demonstrably more convenient option for the sake of a greater public good.  Does anyone remember how we got here so effectively?  Could anyone tell me how we might, then, apply this strategy to dependence on fossil fuel, rampant personal debt, and general retail excess?

Premature Pronoucements… Or The Semester’s Falsest False Start

We received from Brenda’s family this Christmas the BBC series Planet Earth on four discs.  We didn’t get around to opening the set until we were taking the tree down, but with finger on the shrink wrap she noticed something along the top of the title that had not caught my attention in the ten days I had been looking, casually, at the package: “HD DVD.”  Now, we don’t have an HD DVD player.  (I’m not getting stuck on the wrong side of the proprietary HD v. BluRay debate.  I am happy to remain a luddite until that nasty little slapfest works itself out.)  Apparently, this gift was a hot ticket this Christmas, and the in-laws pounced on the only copy, seemingly, available anywhere in Nova Scotia. Luckily, Brenda had some business in Calgary, and the folks at BestBuy there happily exchanged the set for one in the conventional format, even refunding the difference in price.

   

I appreciate that customers have to have some flexibility.

   

I am not wild about the customer trope as it is applied to students, but there is some validity to it.  Their “purchases” are heavily subsidized in Canada, but they still make consumption choices.  We have seven courses on offer at the third-year level this semester in our department, for example, and a student enrolling in mine might not know until classes start that I have two essays and a final examination, that I take attendance, or that I am teaching André Breton’s Nadja.  They might not know that I give extensions only with a doctor’s note (though, seemingly, the whole world now does).  I teach at 4:30pm, after my day of administration has (nominally) finished, and perhaps between registration in November and the first week of classes, a student has picked up an evening job.  There are countless reasons why students might register in a class they cannot – or no longer wish to – take.

   

We have roughly a week at the University of Lethbridge for an “add/drop” period.  In these days, students may leave a course and add another with no transcript record.  Obviously, if students run into problems later on, there is a mechanism to remove themselves, trailing perhaps a “WC” (“Withdrawal with Cause”) in the record.  Class lists during the first week of the semester, then, are quite fluid.  The group I had last week is different from the group I’ll have today, and registration changes made at the last second may even need another class or two to be processed.  In short, I will, at the end of class today, still have only a reasonably good idea who is in my class, though some of these folks will have missed, without the taint of illegitimacy, as much as an hour-and-a-half of instruction.

   

This creates an awkward situation for a professor.  A range of contact hours is set out by university legislation, and the students pay for a certain number of hours in the classroom.  I cannot simply cancel the first couple of classes.  If one of the purposes of the “add/drop” week is for students to audition me under “warranty,” it would be counterproductive to do so.  In my courses, we establish a critical background in the first couple of weeks necessary to undertake all future readings, and so this initial material is important.  I know some professors who would like to have a preliminary reading quiz in this time, and so how do we accommodate late joiners in this situation?

   

Our Faculty has been clear and consistent that students are responsible to make up any time lost at the beginning of a semester, but the students must be given an opportunity to do so.  In the case of an early reading quiz, a professor has to offer a make-up; however, students could never appeal a grade with the argument that a tested topic was covered before they joined the class.  For this reason, I use far more hand-outs and undertake more formal lecturing in the first three or four classes than I do throughout the rest of the semester.  Beyond this initial period, we have more informal discussions during which students take their own notes.  These two styles, this stumbling out of the gate, is just a reality of our situation.

   

Things were even more complicated this semester.  We started on Wednesday, January 2, and the first day of class was the next day.  Except for three-hour (usually night) classes scheduled for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, everyone had one point of contact during New Year’s Week.  Unfortunately, few students who live outside Lethbridge came back from home before January 7.  As a result, my first class – a 45-minute course introduction and a 30-minute lecture – had about two in five registered students in attendance.  I aborted the lecture, and find myself now a half-class behind right from the start.  This time around, the false start is more false than usual.

From the Neo-Con/Axis of Evil?

Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the attention.  A modest little academic blog with fifty readers a day suddenly starts getting ten times that many hits, and its author cannot help but feel flattered.  When I am able to get a link to my upcoming book, I hope you will come back and take another look!  The good folks at rateyourstudents.blogspot.com linked on Monday my blog on extensions, and chronicle.com/blogs linked my piece on doctor’s notes on Tuesday.  Well, these things got conflated somehow, and the comment section of the Chronicle site starting carrying comments decrying the beastly professor who will not accept doctor’s notes and who shows no compassion for the terminally ill.  I spent a good deal of time on the phone this morning defending myself against claims that I represent academia’s “Neo-Con/Axis of Evil”!  Oh, the power of the internet.

   

If one actually reads the two blogs, and I can only assume that most of the critics did not, you will find two separate issues.  In the first instance, I have eliminated casual extensions for folks who because of time management issues will ask for a last-minute reprieve.  In return, I have given the whole class extra time, and I have established firm dates for assigning, calling due, and returning material.  That a student could, potentially, ask for one of these causal extensions is seldom advertised by professors, and I think we could argue, then, that they are not fairly and consistently available to all.  As the blog says, if you have a crisis that can be supported by a doctor’s note, you can still have an extension.  For those people who imagine that this is a drain on the health care system, I can confirm that we have a health unit on campus that can help in such a situation.

   

The second issue is balancing the right to privacy with a professor’s need to verify excuses.  We have here at the University of Lethbridge a “Disabilities Resource Centre” that authenticates chronic conditions and sets out necessary accommodations.  I will receive from them a letter telling me that a student has an ongoing issue and needs, say, to write for “time-and-a-half” in a separate room.  I would never question this accommodation, and I don’t need to know here, specifically, that the student is dyslexic and has attention deficit disorder.  But as the system currently exists, a student with a cold who has neglected to write a term paper can solicit from a doctor an “under medical care” note and use it to try to pass in the paper a week late.  Unlike the situation presented by the student with the documented disability, here the health care professional does not stipulate (or even recommend) an accommodation, and so the student in front of me with a request could be suffering from anything from a cold (something that is unrelated to the academic difficulty) to chronic migraines that may persist throughout the semester.  Again, I am not interested in imposing on the privacy of my students, but is there no value in my knowing, aware as I am that the reading will grow heavier as the semester proceeds in a certain class, that my student in the latter situation will likely miss more work because of what is happening?  We need balance between privacy and a useful disclosure of some additional detail.

Right to Privacy and Vague Doctors’ Notes

I have no interest in knowing which of my students has been prescribed Valtrex or Lithium.  I have had parents call me to describe their children’s symptoms, from transparent skin to swollen genitals, and I am not interested in that kind of detail, either.  But a note from a doctor that says “So-and-so was under doctor’s care on this-and-that day and was unable to come to school” does me no good.

   

We guarantee a student’s right to privacy, and even if there was no strict provincial legislation to follow, it would still be the right thing to do.  I would never want to add another layer of awkwardness to classroom interactions, and it would sadden me if students thought their personal problems were fodder for discussion with my colleagues and my family.  I am not looking for the kind of detail necessary for faculty administration to grant a “withdrawal with cause” from a class or a readmission after asking a student to leave the institution, but I do need to know what is going on.

   

If a student missed class because he is being treated for, say, a minor disfigurement – imagine a rash, if you like – that might be a legitimate reason to stay at home, but is it a legitimate reason not to have completed a term paper?  If a student sprained her wrist, she might not be able to type, but would a sprained ankle keep her from the computer keyboard?  If a student is being treated for a psychological condition of some type, might it not be a good idea for me to know that this situation could persist for the whole semester, differentiated from an acute ailment that costs a student a day at the library?

   

I often see notes, quickly ripped from a pad of templates, presumably, as a student is leaving a doctor’s office.  I know physicians are harried and modestly paid, but is that any excuse for spelling mistakes on those notes prepared in advance of my students’ visits?  Okay, okay…  I’ll stay on topic.  Even if filling in a template is all a general practitioner can manage, I think it is unreasonable to ask that the doctor scratch along the bottom something like “physical ailment that prevented typing for three or four days” or “ongoing malady that is not physical but has the potential to affect attendance during initial stages of treatment.”  On my syllabus this semester, I have counseled students that while I respect their right to privacy, I need to have their ailments identified on doctors’ notes so that I might judge properly an appropriate accommodation.

   

There are good reasons not to let students and their doctors make these judgments for themselves, alone.

   

When I was a kid, there was this wonderful old doctor in the community next to mine along the shore of Conception Bay – God bless you, sir, whoever you were and wherever you are now – who would, on the basis of a cold, excuse me for a week from the drudgery that was Newfoundland secondary education.  I could usually catch up with my studies by noon on the following Monday, having spent the previous week reading and playing ball hockey in my parent’s basement.  The only drawback was that while out of school, I had to report to the doctor’s office each morning for a needle.  My friends and I put a terrible strain on the supply of antibiotic shots and vitamin boosters from St. John’s.  I cannot recall for the life of me what my doctor’s notes used to tell my homeroom teachers.

   

Please check out the update here.