The Classroom Conservative

Teaching, Week Three: Attention To Detail

There is such a flurry of activity in my class at this stage in the semester that it difficult to stay organized.  We emerged from the preparatory readings to tackle The Waste Land.  I assigned an outlining assignment, and we had our first reading quiz.  I heard from one student, someone who attended only the first class, asking where was the website where assignments could be downloaded.

There isn’t one.

When we interview for office jobs in the Faculty, we spend a lot of time talking to candidates about their organizational skills, and we really look for attention to detail.  Reinforcing the importance of these principles is something I attempt to do in my classes: they represent transferrable skills.  I am always surprised by students skipping class.  Attendance is almost perfect through the orientation, and then life intervenes, and some folks try to go it alone.  Then some folks start completing work in a haphazard fashion, just for the sake of having work to submit.

Let me be clear: this problem is not critical with all students, but many students suffer from a “good enough” syndrome.  The reading quiz I gave this week resulted in an average score of 3.8.  I gave the same quiz to two friends in the office, people who had not been assigned the material, and their average result was 3.5.  The conclusion I draw is that, as a class, my students skimmed the reading, waiting for me to review it with them.  On an unannounced retest the next day, they scored 6.5.  I would like it if they first prepared to a “C” and then used class to refine their understanding to an “A.”

At considerable expense, our department had constructed a wall unit for the submission of essays.  From the corridor, a series of assigned slots are visible, and when pushed through these slots student essays land in a locked box.  Some of my colleagues do not use it, but I like it.  Like my old Oxford lectures, then, our class time can be concerned with the material discussed; work can be submitted independently.  In spite of my instructions to the contrary, I had outlining assignments slipped under my door, handed to my colleagues, and sent to the Dean’s Office.

These are minor irritations, I recognize, but the issue is more than simply that of an old curmudgeon yelling at kids to keep off his lawn.  The work I got, the work I get, is often improperly formatted, as the inability (or unwillingness) to follow instructions grows endemic.  While the MLA sets out that indentifying information goes on the top left of the first page of a paper, I get cover sheets and assignments formatted for the top right.  The next assignment is the creation of an MLA Works Cited.  Last year, no one in my class could format ten entries without error.

You might think that students would chafe against my curmudgeonly ways, and I suppose that they do.  But some students have no patience with the sloppiness of their colleagues.  The outlining assignment was simple: try the assignment, answer two questions, and get full marks.  I had some submissions that answered only one question.

“Should these students get half marks?” I asked the class by email.

Most of the respondents counseled zeros.

Teaching, Week Two: Beneath the Arc of the Hermeneutic Circle

Discounting the class devoted to class policies, I have just three sessions to prepare my students to read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  We had, this week, seventy-five minutes on the principles of modernism and seventy-five minutes on interdisciplinarity.

The teacher’s conundrum is that of the learner.  You cannot know something until you understand it; you cannot understand what you do not yet know.  As a result, we have to tell students enough for them to be alert to the possibility of significance, but, if we tell them too much, they lose the opportunity of discovering that significance themselves.  The opening lines of The Waste Land provide an excellent demonstration.  The poem begins, perhaps, with a woman named Marie looking back at incidents in her life.  It is possible that there are two voices, one making a general declaration in the first seven lines before Marie begins.  The first line asserts an irony about spring, as modernism relies so much on the ironic.  The juxtaposition of memory and desire suggests, for some, a Freudian reference to how we are reminded of and drawn to a prohibited longing.  Marie’s privileged, aristocratic life is metonymic for a Europe that no longer existed by the time Eliot experienced it.

Now, the first lectures in a course like mine can talk about the social upheaval of the early twentieth century and the influence of Freud on modern creativity.  They can assert that modern poetry relies on certain figures of speech.  To say these things simply without context is a little hollow; the poem itself will provide the best examples, of course.  The most rewarding thing about teaching such a work comes when students come to see it as more than the sum of its parts.  They should see each of the things that I outlined above as tones, some of which are experienced as melody and some of which are experienced as accompaniment.  Only when all these things are grasped and appreciated simultaneously can students appreciate the work, fully.  That, of course, is difficult to achieve – especially on first readings.

I have often said that our courses prepare students not to approach works for the first time, of course, but to approach them in rereading.  There is an undeniable excitement to introducing students to an idea for the first time.  But, as this week reminds me, these discussions are really just investments that we all hope will pay off later.

Teaching, Week One: My 8am Class, Our 8am Classes

I have a realistic view of my contribution to our teaching program.  Although I am technically – oh, so technically! – considered a “senior administrator,” I still supervise graduate students, honors candidates, and independent studies.  In addition, I teach a senior-level course each year.  Inevitably, I choose a twentieth-century topic to correspond with my research interests, and I am not the only person teaching in what we call “Category 6.”  So, while my courses still draw reasonably well, they are not essential courses.  What I mean to say is that we must be more careful when, for example, scheduling the Shakespeare class or the Children’s Literature class so that it is available to all majors.  But I let the department plug me in wherever they think that they need me.

Their first proposal for 2011-12 was Thursday nights, and this caused me a problem.  I have a meeting with the student services staff every Thursday morning, meaning that I would be obliging myself to one fourteen-hour shift every seven days.  Could it be done?  Sure.  Is squeezing three hours out of me at the end of a long day the best pedagogy?  Probably not.  The department’s second proposal was 8am, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I have taught just about every slot available over my fifteen years here, but I have never before been assigned this first class.  I am a morning person, so why not?  I found myself immediately apologizing to prospective students.  I sent out an email, with a tentative syllabus, to the first group to register, explaining to them that although the class is early, twice a week, I still require regular attendance.  The Registrar’s Office kindly assigned me a classroom near my office, but I changed it to one adjacent to the campus bus depot.  I have tried to do everything I could to make 8am palatable for them.  But what about me?

On Thursday, I was up at 6am, as usual, but instead of poking about with the daily crossword puzzle and watching the news, I showered, dressed, and left the house by 7am.  It was sunny and still, already nearly twenty degrees, and – except for some mid-afternoon fatigue that most teachers experience each September, things went okay.  Ask me again in November, when it is dark, windy, and freezing.

I saw a few yawns wider than usual, but so far there are no complaints about the slot from my students.  I had thirty-two registrants, and I still have thirty-two.  I was more likely to shake students with my explanation of the assignments they, inevitably, hate: reading quizzes, persuasive comparisons written in the integrated (and not bipolar) fashion, and an annotated bibliography.

So, why all the fear of 8am?  I think that we are conditioned to fear it, as teachers and administrators, more by reputation than by reality.  Yes, the vast majority of student registrations are for classes between 9am and 3pm, stacked back-to-back.  But we have gotten away from pushing early and late classes, gotten away from pushing weekend classes.  When I was an undergraduate, the morning and afternoon classes, separately, rotated through slots.  Only lunchtime and night classes were held at the same time each day.  So, for example, my afternoon Psychology class was at 2pm one day, 3pm the next, and the final meeting of the week was held at 4pm on the third day.  By moving away from that arrangement, universities have created ghettos to which neither students nor instructors want to commit.  Who, except for someone with peculiar circumstances, wants to be in class from 4pm to 5pm on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?

We have an obligation to offer choice to students and accommodate their reasonable preferences.  But, by doing so in the fashion we have chosen, we end up squeezing much of our activity into the same six hours every day.  It is a self-fulfilling prophesy.  I submit that most of us are awake in the early mornings and in the late afternoons, though we might not want to commit to being available at those times, regularly.  Meanwhile, the classrooms sit there, empty and unheated, during what we now call off-hours, hours where many other people outside the ivory tower are already, or still, grafting away.

What would happen if we put our most popular classes in these slots?  Would we lose some competitive edge?  What would happen if the slots again rotated?  Would we lose allies amongst those employers who rely on our students for labor?

All For The Sake Of A Parking Spot

Dan Middlemiss, a History professor at Dalhousie University, resigned this week when he was unable to secure a parking pass for the upcoming academic year.  This story is like an onion: the more you peel it away, the more it makes you want to cry.  Let me begin by saying a couple of obvious things.

First of all, I am no fan of automobiles.  I have never gone in for the car pornography that makes the hearts of so many people go pitter-patter.  A car, for me, is a necessary evil.  When I have lived in cities with excellent bicycle and public transportation options, I have not owned one.  Now, I drive one to and from work each day.  For one who looks at this story and says that the real solution is a Halifax without cars, I could not agree more.  But I do not believe that such a solution is, currently, a practical one.  I lived in Halifax, off and on, for three or four years.  I was there less than two months ago.

Secondly, there is good reason to deplore the overselling of parking permits on university campuses.  What Dr. Middlemiss was able to secure, in past years, has been described as a “hunting permit,” the right to compete on a daily basis with three or four people for the same spot in the parking lot.  He would have to leave his house very early, regardless of whether he had an early class, in an attempt to park.  Of course, when he was successful, a couple of people who had also paid for a permit were not.  Dalhousie decided, this year, to issue only a somewhat more realistic number of permits, a decision since reversed, and it is for this reason that Dr. Middlemiss was unsuccessful in getting one.  The university front-loaded his disappointment.  I suspect that there are better ways to distribute permits.

One can imagine being a sixty-six year old academic with thirty-one years of experience, a scholar eligible for retirement.  Some people might even argue that Dr. Middlemiss should have been considering giving up his chair to a younger academic.  That said, resigning just before classes start does not constitute a succession plan.  But the bureaucratic morass he encountered is interpreted, rightly, I suspect, as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, the one final thing that he could not abide.  I have no idea whether or not Dr. Middlemiss is a misanthrope with a history of dramatic behaviour, but his story here speaks to me.

I cannot know his mind, but I can tell you what this case underlines: the false egalitarianism that blossoms on our campuses.  I have no time for foggy old dons who lord superiority over their students, and while I have been critical of the non-academic bureaucracy that has taken root in the Canadian university, I am not suggesting that only teaching staff deserve respect.  I have nothing but respect, naturally, for those who wish to be taught.  But it is very fashionable now for us to pretend that everyone on campus is exactly alike.  We eat together; we socialize together.  My students, in evaluations for my classes, ask me to consider that I, too, am here to learn – from them.  Really?  Since when do we live on Animal Farm?  And if we do live in an Orwell novel, we need to acknowledge that while all animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others.  In fact, in my experience, special treatment is finagled for all kinds of people, sometimes for no good reason at all.  So why not for a really good reason: to accommodate the professor who lives a long way from campus?

I am sure that it amuses some people to think of, by all accounts, a distinguished scholar who must stand in line for simply the opportunity to park at his place of employment.  These are the same people who refer to our students as our “customers” and point out, rightly, that we would not be here without them.  But that does not mean that we should treat our teaching staff like the shopping mall clerks told by their employers to park at the back of the lot to make room for consumers.  If you think a university is important enough to attract and retain world-class educators, come up with some viable plan to ensure that they have access to their place of work.