The Classroom Conservative

Teaching, Week Eight: Return Of The Reading Quiz

Over the course of the semester, class results on unannounced reading quizzes have improved, but this does not mean that this has been achieved without much grumbling and gnashing of teeth.  Senior students resent giving up even five minutes of class to be asked factual questions about assigned readings.  The fact that many people fail these quizzes does not help, either.

Why quiz?  Well, I believe that students must be familiar with the material in order to facilitate discussion, and I believe discussion to be essential to an effective class.  When I examine wrong answers I discover interesting patterns.  It is clear, for example, that some students begin but do not complete readings on time.  I have never understood my colleagues who want to talk about the beginning of texts with students who do not know how those texts end.

As common, though, are students who skim material.  I can sympathize.  I have a short attention span, and one of the important moments in my own education was when I realized that I had to reread passages I completed but had not realized I was reading.  You have had that experience: you drive home by the same route so often that you often do not even register that you have been driving.  Just as you must be mindful behind the wheel, you need to be mindful of your texts.

The proper way to evaluate mindful reading is a matter for some debate.  I have, in the past, asked students to outline and explain a particular concept covered in their reading.  This takes longer to write and grade, and it is subject to the same kind of blarney and obfuscation as the in-class essay.  I have used fill in the blanks and matching, true and false.  But the multiple choice is my favourite, even if it does favour students with the innate logic to negotiate reasonable guesses.  One might also question what degree of detail students should retain.  I have always remembered an old professor of mine asking, on such a quiz, the name of the Compson family dog.  For the life of me, I cannot fathom the significance of that fact, twenty-five years later.  But when I ask my students, for example, what literary period Greene favoured in Orlando, it is important for them to remember that it was the Greek.  This pining for the remote past was something that worried Virginia Woolf, and this character’s view of literary tradition demonstrates this concern nicely.

That also helps explain why the quiz results improve.  Though students might be more attuned to the kinds of things I will ask, they do get a better sense, in the study of modernism, what kinds of things might be relevant to the subject of the course.

Why Do You Want A Research Grant?

I attended, last week, a meeting of Alberta humanists where we discussed matters of mutual interest.  The conversation eventually turned to research funding, as these gatherings often do.  I rehearsed my old saw: we pursue research funding, in part, because securing a grant is one way to demonstrate our viability as researchers; we need money, and we would accept as much as is on offer, but it is a mistake to assert that we always need a lot of it.

The large research grant is a model rooted in the science experience, where the enterprise depends on supporting a large lab over a career.  SSHRC has, mercifully, recognized that there is room to support small grants in the humanities and the social sciences, and – in fact – when I have served as an adjudicator I have gone out of my way to champion those projects where a modest investment can make a big difference.  Unfortunately, changes in funding programs have also made more explicit a preference for formal collaborations.  There are situations where partnering with colleagues, sometimes in other fields, makes a lot of sense, but any assumption that every project is strengthened by thinking about how other people can be pulled aboard represents just another example of people from outside our disciplines imagining the humanities as they imagine it could be.

All that said, my usual plea for modesty in funding met with a new resistance.  It is clear that people are relying more and more on research funding to underwrite graduate programs that have become more important to a wider variety of universities across our province and across our country.

How things have changed!  We train students, and so our research must always be relevant to our teaching enterprise, but the idea that students should be central to our research programs always felt to me a little forced.  Scientists need lab help, and the skills they teach their students define them as “Highly Qualified Personnel.”  I have students undertake literature reviews, and this is helpful to me and beneficial to them, but it hardly puts them on the road to taking over the shop.  Someone got the idea that stuffing our humanities grant applications with busywork for students would make the applications more attractive.  I have been in more than a few adjudication rooms that echoed with the following refrain: “Read your books on your own!”

But with the cash shortage in graduate programs, programs that are growing, there is a new urgency in seeking money for our graduate students.  Are we any better at imagining research tasks for them that might better justify their inclusion in our grant applications?  I am not sure that we are.

Teaching, Week Seven: Setting the In-Class Essay

The best teacher I ever had first evaluated his students before the class covered the material.  This is a sound, if unconventional, pedagogical tool.  Students are encouraged, genuinely, to pursue their own ideas, and they develop a foundation on which their knowledge can be built.  After all, our classes should not be about telling people what to think: they should aid in that thinking.

There are a number of reasons why this approach to in-class essays is not practical for me, though.  First, I have my students write persuasive essays of comparison, and it is unfair for me to expect that they have read, say, four or five weeks ahead to have initial, simultaneous ideas about two works.  Second, the kind of exercise I have them write, integrated comparisons that respond to the assertions of a critic, must itself be taught.  My students seldom arrive in possession of the skills to put together such an essay cold.

How, then, do I handle in-class essays?

Each semester, as I have suggested, I show students a sample question and, as we work through the material to be examined, we look at the sample question to determine how students might answer something similar.  Some semesters, then, I give the students a short-list of topics to prepare, and I give them three or four “live” questions on the day from which they choose one.  The idea, always, is to reinforce that one might actually study when preparing for an English evaluation.  Many of you will know the old chestnut that studying for English is impossible.  Not so.  If students know, for example, that their in-class assignment will ask things about gender, or tradition, or religion, or the nature of art, they can prepare that material.

This semester, I gave students, five days in advance, four “live” questions that I had prepared for the in-class.  (These four questions were added to two sample questions, as I described above.)  I told the class that they would be given two of these questions on the day, and they would be required to choose one and write a completed essay.  The idea, of course, is that if students prepared all four questions, they would have a choice, no matter what I asked.  If they prepared three questions, eliminating the one they could not abide, they would be sure that they would be able to respond to something on the day.  If they chose to prepare two questions, one question, or ignored the sheet, entirely, they would be taking a chance.

Giving students the opportunity to prepare so specifically is a gamble, of course.  Some students might simply be reassured by the questions and choose not to prepare.  Strong students, who would likely score a “B” or above by preparing the topics, might use this opportunity to prepare a little better and score a little higher, while dragging the expected standard upward.  Most likely, I hope, it will help the “C” student work into a “B.”  I feel the disproportionate amount of my responsibility rests in helping “satisfactory” students make “good.”

This time around, I added an additional wrinkle.  I encouraged students to email me after four of the five days of preparation and vote for their preferred question.  I would not announce the results and narrow the preparation further, but I would ensure that the most popular question was one of the two I included on the day.  The results were interesting.  I received votes from approximately 56% of the students in the class.  (A waggish colleague in political science quipped that they were preparing to be good, civic Albertans!)  Why so low?  In fact, of those students voting, nearly 60% preferred a particular question.  There were no duds; I spend about one hour setting individual questions, and I would have been happy seeing any used in the exercise.

I resolved, privately, that if my favourite question was their preferred question, I would include their number two.  As it turned out, my two was their one, and so I used my preferred question as the second option.  Although the sample was small, the two questions on the exercise represented the preference of 80% of the students from whom I heard.

What I found even more interesting is that, when they wrote their essays, I had, roughly, an even split in the questions chosen by the class on the day.  While I agree, heartily, that “polls (poles, get it?) are for dogs,” either the students who did not vote preferred “my” question, or the preference expressed in advance was not as one-sided as the choices made in reality.  I am just grateful that I did not get everyone choosing the same one question to answer.  I get deep sample to draw some conclusions about standards, but I do not have to read the same answer over and over and over again.

Teaching, Week Six: Beyond The Fourth Wall

I have had a lot of comment, off-line, about my RMP experience.  It seems that some of my colleagues are still smarting from their own internet evaluations.  Think about it: RMP came along when we had been using email for less than a decade, before many people adopted learning management systems for their classes.  What a rude introduction to new technology in the classroom.  I have one colleague who hounded the site to have comments removed; some people do not read it at all or read it, say, only once every six months.  But what emerged from the feedback is that instructors of my acquaintance are genuinely sensitive about what our students say about us beneath their cloak of anonymity.

The sticking point remains, of course, that we question what student reaction is actually measuring.  I have colleagues, for example, who believe that students respond better to them – give them more positive feedback – when they dress down.  There is the general perception that students rate younger, more attractive instructors more positively.  What worries me most, I think, is that I am no longer sure that students respond best to confidence.  I have been mentoring teachers for a long time, and my general advice is to be transparent and be certain of what you are saying.  I do not mean to suggest that genuine dissent is unwelcome in a class: it can be very profitable, in fact.  But if a student thinks that her or his comment has somehow derailed the discussion, if students think not that you are open to alternate readings but, instead, simply do not know the answer yourself, it can be like blood in the water.  Increasingly, based on student feedback, some of my colleagues are concluding that the less preparation they make, the more they, too, appear to be “searchers,” the better the feedback they get from students.  If true, is this simply a reflection of shared empathy in the face of difficult texts or an unjust universe?  Is that what our evaluations should be measuring?

This is not intended to be a post about evaluations, but I am coming around to the opinion that we need to define clearly what our goals for a course should be and concentrating on measuring whether we have achieved them, more than whether students feel that we are approachable or organized or respectful of individual thought or, well, whatever.

So, what did I do last week to salve the sting of my RMP dismissal?  I talked to my class about it.  I did not do so in either an aggressive or a defensive way.  I simply pointed out that I was aware that someone, likely still in the class, voiced some dissatisfaction with the course through comments on the internet.  I concentrated on three comments: “dry,” “difficult,” and “unhelpful.”  I said that I could not dispute “dry.”  That is a subjective assessment and, while I am clearly enjoying the material, I might not be communicating as clearly as I believed I was at 8am.  There is, I contend, not too much I can do about “difficult.”  Stein, Eliot, and Joyce are hard, but I would not draw a line under them with four per cent of the course evaluated.  And, in fact, as I would have expected, everyone did seem to be emerging from the dark wood in advance of the mid-term; Ulysses has enkindled a lot of class discussion.  But, finally, the “unhelpful” would have to be justified.  With the luxury of more time this semester than my teaching colleagues, I have made myself available through all reasonable means.  I have rewritten all my notes, as I have been going along, and I have prepared novel study materials to reinforce lectures.  Do not, I encouraged them, draw a conclusion until you have actually sought help.

Well, what happened?  This week, I had a notable uptick in email, and there were as many students in my office as I have had, in total, through the first weeks of the semester.  Some of these visits were useful in providing reassurance, but at least two were forty minutes or more, meaningful discussions about the material in the class.

This blog, as I explained to my mentor, is intended to be raw: the bald emotion of my team losing the super bowl in the last minute of the game, the shock of turning forty, failing to get the only job I have ever sought with unrestrained effort…  But I think that such frankness is inappropriate for the classroom.  I have to conclude that I found the right emotional balance on this occasion, and it is now my responsibility to build on the breakthrough that we have had.  My quiet little 8am class and I have opened up to each other.  What will we do with this greater communication through the mid-term, Orlando, and Nadja?

Teaching, Week Five: Rating Your Professor

No one reads “Rate My Professor," right?  It is so passé, isn’t it?  It is like My Space or even Geocities.  It is so 1999.  On my RMP page, some random compliments have, for years, stared out at me from the fog of 2008.  So imagine my surprise when this suddenly popped up: “This class is really hard.  I attended every class and did all the readings and still had a hard time.  He was not helpful and his lectures were extremely dry.  I will never take a course from him again.”

My jaw dropped.  I was, once again, a term-contract Assistant Professor, hanging on the every opinion of my performance put forward by my students.

Why do I care?

In spite of the use of past tense, this has to be a current student.  I last taught this course four years ago, and, if someone had been bearing a grudge from that class, that student would no longer be here to take another course from me.  The one “W” I have to this point this semester is from a student who attended no classes, passed in no work.  Perhaps, with a student record upgrade in the Registrar’s Office, I have not yet gotten notice of the departure of someone who has drawn a final conclusion about a course that has evaluated about four per cent of the content.

Clearly, it smarts to be called “dry.”  The odd thing is that, while it is difficult to keep up energy for an 8am class, I am having the time of my life.  I love the works I am teaching, and I am putting in a lot of effort revising all my old notes while I go.  I understand why the student would say that the class is hard, but I have little discretion over the works, themselves.  The Waste Land is difficult; Ulysses frustrates undergraduates.  Gertrude Stein wrote the essays I teach, but I did not.

The thing that I cannot fathom is that I have been branded as unhelpful.  I have announced more than three office hours each week, and I have been visited by a total of four students.  Is there no obligation to seek help before concluding that none is available?  So far this semester, I have unearthed old essay questions I have used in past courses and, instead of requiring students to poke around in the students’ union test bank for them, I have distributed them as part of a participatory assignment.  Students were required to submit sample outlines with the offer to discuss their results before actually requiring them to answer similar questions on the mid-term.  Well in advance of that mid-term, I gave the class a short-list of topics, and I will give them this week four “live” questions from which I will require them to choose from two on the day.

What could be more helpful?

I draw a sad conclusion.  At some point in the fifteen years I have been doing this job, instructors of English – perhaps here, perhaps in preparatory colleges, perhaps in high school – have made a pact with our students.  Instructors will enter the classroom, tell students what works mean, and then students accept that – upon request – they will regurgitate these opinions for academic credit.  Perhaps I am unhelpful because I spend class time drawing students’ attention to the patterns created by the repeated thematic and formal preoccupations in the works we examine, connecting them to the aspirations reflected in the primary essays we read.  The conclusions that emerge from these discussions need to belong to the students, however.

Making this point is a good use of my tenure.  I can forge ahead, refusing to spoonfeed.  But that does not mean that I have to like being called dry and unhelpful.

Teaching, Week Four: The First Withdrawal

I had my first withdrawal this week, the first student to leave the class after staying past the add/drop period.  Usually, this happens after someone falls behind in the readings or after the return of the first graded work, so this departure was a little earlier than usual.

And I precipitated it, more-or-less directly, myself.

I do not like withdrawals.  When I first joined the university, the Dean at the time was a little obsessive about them.  If students stay for the whole term, the Faculty gets their tuition (less a central administrative fee held back).  If students leave a class early, take a “W,” they are entitled to a partial refund of tuition.  The whole portion not refunded goes to the central administration.  Essentially, I could teach a student for two months and the unit paying my salary not get a nickel.  I always felt an economic imperative, atop the moral imperative, to encourage students to stick around.

But when students are spinning their wheels, is there not a moral imperative to help students maintain the health of their transcripts?  At our university, students now can take a “W” at any point before the last day of the semester.  The requirement to return some meaningful, graded feedback by the ninth week of term used to be connected to the deadline to make this decision.  Presumably, students will now have almost all their term results available to them in order to assess whether they should submit to final grading.  But if I know, really know, that a student will not succeed, should I not say or do something before that time?

I suspect that you are thinking that there is more I can do to save struggling students, and you would be absolutely correct.  But students need to want to be helped, of course.  The student who just took the “W” had attended only one class, had not secured any missed notes, had not submitted any work.  My advice?  Ask the Registrar to authorize a compassionate late drop with no registration record entered.  The request would have been made only a week or ten days late.  I have no opinion as to whether it should have been granted.  It was not.  The student was charged partial tuition and given a “W.”

My advice was based on my certainty: I have never seen anyone do so little in the first three weeks and still pass the course.  So why not submit to the inevitable?