The Classroom Conservative

What Is Remembered

I gave a talk in St. John’s a few weeks ago.  When I finished, a woman in the back row stood up and said, “I took a class from you fifteen years ago…”

How would she finish this sentence?  And you gave me a lousy mark?  And the grammar advice you gave me was incorrect?  And you know nothing about American literature?  It is funny to reflect on how many options can run through your head in less than one second.  It is equally funny to reflect on how all those options are negative.  Why do we believe that people hold grudges more readily than anything else?

“… and I came here today to support you.”  Over the next couple of minutes, she explained to the audience how she had been a nervous, mature student and how I had helped her adjust to her return to school.  As she spoke, I welled up, and I was thrilled that she did not actually have a question to ask me.

The experience was a remarkable one, and it is some indication of how St. John’s has remained a close community, even as it has doubled in size in recent years.  I checked my records, and the woman was indeed a good, dedicated student, the kind of student who sustained me as I taught sessionally and raced around the continent trying to secure a full-time job.  My glowing memory of her will forever be of that afternoon in the music conservatory when she took time out of her life to return to campus in order to provide me unsolicited sustenance.  It is a memory from 2012 and not from 1997-98.  You could forgive audience members for imagining that she was a “plant,” that we had kept in touch and that I had arranged her “performance.”  But that was not so.  I had not spoken to her for fifteen years, and I still have no idea how she learned about my talk.

While we may have vague memories of our students, and while we might remember specific events from the classroom, I am starting to think that students remember the time they share with us in broadest terms: we, and the classes we teach, most often leave general impressions.  This student remembered fondly the time she spent with me, her time in English 1110, but when trying to tell the audience what stood out for her, specifically, she recalled my thoroughness, my general support, not a particular thing I said or did during a particular class meeting.

We have hundreds, thousands of students, and while we cannot remember each by name, we do remember faces, we do remember particular classes and the people who took them.  For richness of detail, we look back to particular events.  I remember our Vice-President’s daughter asking me an embarrassing question in my first year, here; I remember the questions I asked my first graduate student at defence.  Our students have far fewer professors, and we provide them each day with an hour of impressions.  While I suppose it is possible that one remarkable gesture – positive or negative – can fix us in their minds forever, I am starting to think that the standard for us is both higher and more forgiving.  They remember, in a sense, everything that happens, but no one thing necessarily stands out.  We are always under surveillance, in a literal sense, and so we have both the chance and the responsibility to improve upon the impression we are making, day after day after day.  We cannot expect to fix ourselves in the minds of our students with one brilliant comment; hopefully, one clunky lecture will not do so, either.

Talking To The Taxman About Research

Every six months or so, I clean out my inbox and take down from my tackboard all the receipts for my professional expenses.  For a couple of days, I get to play amateur accountant, looking for all the world like the cliché of an American small business owner preparing to engage the IRS with a shoebox full of slips.  It is not that I am complaining: I am fortunate to have a job where the costs associated with teaching, research, and service can be reimbursed.  But these funds are a negotiated benefit, of course; if we did not have them, we might have a higher salary or different medical coverage.  While it is fabulous to be able to afford to order from the United States an edition of a textbook not yet available in Canada, please do not begrudge me my grumbling as I try to determine the proper exchange rate to use when indenting for said purchase.

I love my accountant friends, but I am not an accountant.

The kindly older gentleman who used to oversee the ham-fisted attempts of academics to manage their petty expenditures used to call our submissions, with great affection, our “swindle sheets.”  It is not that we try to mislead; it is simply that some of my colleagues are woefully inexperienced in the close tracking of money.  I remember once applying for and receiving a travel grant, $1,100 to give a paper in Quebec City.  By using airline loyalty miles, I discovered that I could continue on to Philadelphia to give a second paper, only to learn that, because I did not list this gathering on my initial application, none of my incidental expenses (hotels, meals, taxis) could come from that fund.  Still, it was in my dealings with another financial officer that I reached the end of my rope.  I used research funds to travel to an archive to review manuscripts.  “Why?” he asked, with no hint of humour, “could you not just go to a library in Calgary?”

If my attempts to impress upon my professional colleagues something of the research world have not always been successful, I have embraced the strange world of financial auditing with enthusiasm.  Combined with my love of speaking with people about their jobs, I have bored hotel clerks and cabbies around the world with explanations of how we track money at the University of Lethbridge.  On a recent trip to Arizona, I told the woman on the desk at our hotel that I needed more than the invoice that had been slipped under the room door that morning.

“My receipt must show a balance of zero,” I explained.  “Otherwise, my institution might think we had cheated them.”

“Cheated them?” she looked surprised.

“Imagine that this invoice asked for $500, but you agreed to charge me $200 in cash,” I continued.  “With an invoice that requests $500, I might be reimbursed for an extra $300 that we had arranged to split.”

“Oh, no, I could never do that!”  Her look turned to one of horror.

“I wasn’t proposing that arrangement!  No, no!” I tried to reassure her.  “I was trying to explain why I need to show my employer how I actually paid you $500.”

She looked wary.

I should have explained to her the joy of a library archive.  Right, I am going back to my receipts now: all showing balances of zero, I assure you.

Teaching, Week Fourteen: Those Late Withdrawals

The university changed its withdrawal policy this year so that students might remove themselves from courses until the last day of classes.  Previously, a student had to make this decision by the end of the ninth week.  Out of a class of thirty, I had two students withdraw after week nine, related undoubtedly to frustration with preparing their term papers, but I had no one leave at the last minute.  The term paper results were average, and there was nothing there to chase anyone out, I allow.

Some of my colleagues complained about losing people after putting in a lot of effort grading their work, and I understand the frustration.  On the other hand, it never feels any better to assign a student an “F” for a course.  I see that as wasted effort, as well.  Due to some ancient rule, the pedigree of which no one can remember, individual faculties would get the tuition only for students who completed courses; if a student withdrew, central administration would get whatever was not refunded.  Under these new rules, students would get no more money back by withdrawing in the ninth week when compared with that last minute withdrawal, but the faculty would still get paid for the latter.  So, in a perverse way, instructors would, indirectly, realize compensation for fruitless late effort where they go unacknowledged for the work of a half term, only.

The rationale behind the change, beyond the fact that the policy exists amongst our competitors, is that students get to leave classes they would otherwise fail.  It is a retention initiative, and I will be interested in seeing whether grade point averages rise.  One of the unintended consequences, however, has been a reconsideration of what kind of feedback a student deserves (and when) and when a grade has been assigned (and a course is over).

It used to be that a student expected to have a meaningful evaluation returned before the ninth week.  For many of us, that meant having the mid-term or calling due the first essay at some point in the first two months.  But with the “W” deadline moved back, is it fair to expect that the whole term mark be prepared by the last day of classes?  I take in term papers in the last fortnight, and I can usually turn them around.  If an instructor is used to asking for term papers on the last day and returning them at the exam, is that arrangement now unfair?  Equally puzzling is the common situation where, in lieu of a final examination, a colleague has a “last test” in the last two weeks.  If this is done through moodle or graded electronically, the final grade may be calculated before the last day of classes.  Is it fair for a student to know, precisely, what grade will be assigned before deciding whether to withdraw from the class?

Teaching, Week Thirteen: Term Paper Nuts and Bolts

I was up early this morning, grading student essays, and I caught the end of a television program where the evangelist talked about how God has numbered, and tracks, the individual hairs on our heads.  If this is the case, there are more to sort on my pillow than there are anywhere else.  What I do not pull out seems simply to fall out.

I find essays disheartening.  My expectations are so high, and it is clear that some students fail to put in adequate effort.  Too often, I read summaries of class notes, declarations that have little to do with the actual questions asked.  When I first started teaching, I remember agonizing over whether to assign one essay a “C” or a “C+.”  I cringed a little when I returned it, only to overhear the student afterwards: “Cool!  I passed!”

We have motivated majors, students who pass through on the way to law school, but many of our best students are training to be teachers, teachers who might never have to touch on the full significance of analysis in our field.  As I wrote here, recently, it is great when all the strands of these analyses come together at the end of the term, but too infrequently does this translate to the essay page.  There is a disconnection between their interesting ideas and their writing exercises.  Perhaps essays bear too little resemblance to the lectures they, too, will soon undertake.

There are two minor errors that I see all the time, little pet peeves that are indicative of larger weaknesses: the first is the use of “scare” quotation marks, as I just invoked, and the second is a reliance on unintegrated quotations.

Perhaps we suffer in the age of hypertext, but I suspect it runs deeper than that.  When students get to a point in a sentence where they wish to emphasize something, I mean really ‘emphasize’ something, they will often put a word or two in single quotation marks, to differentiate this from actual quoted material.  As I told them last week, as single quotations marks are reserved (in North America) for quotations within quotations, they might as well set off their emphases with four strokes, as with just one or two.  Why does this bother me?  The frequency of this utility makes it seem quite lazy; I suspect that if they could put things in a different color and underline them three or four times, they would.  The truth is that a properly constructed sentence, within a properly framed argument, should draw attention to itself.  It does not need bells and whistles.

I have weaned my students from overusing the long, block quotation by exaggerating and telling them that I never read these passages.  But instead of sewing a quotation into a proper, grammatical sentence, I will often find, in the middle of a paragraph of student prose, a sentence belonging to another, usually properly cited but without a tag.  It is as if those words were cut and pasted out of a secondary source and into a student’s argument.  It does not belong; it sticks out like a sore thumb.  Instead of an argument that asserts something, brings in an example, draws a conclusion, and relies then on an authority to reinforce that conclusion, I am supposed to interpret the presence of the words of someone else as a justification for what the student says.  It is as if they stand to the side, point to the authority and say to me: “See?  What did I tell you?”

Some mistakes are simply explained away as a lack of concentration, too little attention to detail.  Students will, in a list of works cited, fail to refer to the same kind of material properly, twice in a row.  But some mistakes, I think, tell us a little more about their intentions when they write.  And these errors remind me that we all have a long way yet to go.

Teaching, Week Twelve: What Is It All About?

For the most part, I have abandoned any in-term justification of our learning outcomes.  There are venues for this discussion, of course: recruitment evenings, advising sessions, and planning exercises.  Because we spend so much time teaching students to format, for example, there is hardly time to stop to reflect upon why it is important to pay attention to details.

But if a course progresses well, some of its practical significance should become clear, even before we undertake a summary.  We had a week like that this week, when the perpetual relevance of a study of the historical avant-garde presented itself to us all.

One of the surrealist challenges to the institution of art questioned the standing of the artistic artifact.  If one lived ones art, if it was impossible to make any distinction between art and life, was not the identification of a work of art – a book, a play, a film – a bogus activity?  Do not get me wrong: the surrealists painted canvases, of course, but they rejected any distinction between that canvas and the artistic standing of a conversation they had with someone, or the creative activity of taking a walk in the park.  When André Breton talks about the text he is writing, there is a palpable discomfort, but there existed for him no more appropriate nomenclature.

This examination of the artifact in conceptualizations of the institution of art leads us to a discussion of the artifact today.  What standing do the actual manifestations of works have with our students?  When Marcel Duchamps bought and signed a plumbing fixture, selling it as a piece of art, he was thumbing his nose at the idea of bourgeois appropriation of artistry.  A fortnight ago, Imaginus brought their travelling caravan of poster reproductions to our campus and did a brisk trade.  Except for the proliferation of images of women in their underwear kissing each other, very little has changed over the past generation.  We have all hung Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, or at least its inexpensive reproduction.  This is not the case with music.  Dorm rooms used to be filled with album sleeves, eight-track tapes, cassettes, and compact discs.  Students now download their music and store it electronically.  Why do they no longer feel the need to possess their music, as they once did, to hold the commodity over the heads of their friends?  On the other hand, when I was young we went to films and waited for them to be shown on television.  The idea of “owning” a film was foreign to us.  Dorm rooms now are littered with DVDs and Blu-Rays.  What is the significance of this distinction?  What does it tell us about the future of commerce and art?

Ultimately, the whole purpose of the historical avant-garde was to stand outside the society in which it existed to challenge the status quo.  How is it possible to do so?  It is as if one could levitate above a current along which one swims to watch fellow swimmers.  This problem was encountered by “Occupy” protestors, dependent as they were on the electronic gadgetry rooted in a manifestation of the system of capital they hoped to renounce.  These kinds of paradoxes presented themselves to the surrealists, as well.  The still had magazines and exhibitions; they hoped to use the tools of the artistic trade to undermine that trade, itself.  Are these protests valuable simply to draw attention to realities, or can they ever hope to achieve real change?  Looking up from their desks this week, I think that some of the students thought anew about what they hope to do when they emerge into a world that expects, at some level, their conformity.

Teaching, Week Eleven: Migraine

I wrote, recently, about conference travel during the semester.  The flexibility to cancel a class or two comes from the fact that, depending on the timeslot one is assigned, some classes meet more often than do others.  I burned two classes on conferences this term, using all my reasonable flexibility.

But this week I suffered from a migraine.

I have had them since at least my undergraduate days.  I have come to associate their onset with sleep deprivation, the consumption of chocolate, and the threat of a chinook wind, the last being a common occurrence in southern Alberta.  Over the past eighteen months, I have been getting them about once every six or eight weeks, but this autumn, on account in part of the pleasant weather, I had gone about three months without one.  On Wednesday, just after noon, I started getting symptoms.  By three o’clock, it had set in.  I cancelled a social engagement for six o’clock and hoped a short nap might break the cycle of pain.

No such luck.

A migraine sufferer knows all one needs to know of hell.  How could I possibly face preparing Thursday class notes?  Luckily, I needed only to add a few details: I try not to leave anything to the last minute.  But the larger question looms: what should a teacher do when ill?  These days, many of us have an enlightened view of not spreading contagion in the workplace, but even a necessary absence can be disruptive, if it has not been previously announced.

I am no hero, but I am proud to have missed only one class, unannounced, over the past twenty years.  And, clearly, if I did not have a class on Thursday morning, I would have gone nowhere near campus.  But unlike my colleagues whose syllabi assign topics by the fortnight, those of us who assign specific topics to individual class meetings find disruptions to be very, well, disruptive.  I think I did a poor job with my Thursday lecture, but we did cover what I wanted to cover, one week before term papers are due.

I often try to remember what it was like when I taught in St. John’s and in London, Ontario, two locations that are prone to weather cancellations.  What did my syllabi look like then?  Clearly, they were disrupted on a regular basis.

Clearly, as well, I did not use any discretion or flexibility afforded me back then to travel to conferences.

Teaching, Week Ten: Hurray For Surrealism

We moved this week from Virginia Woolf to André Breton, and it was if a great light was turned on.  Some of our assumptions about students are true: they are, for example, drawn naturally to establishment challenges.  The surrealists refused to make any distinction between art and life; Breton wanted to live his art.  The historical avant-garde challenged everything about how works were created, disseminated, and received.  Although they found Breton’s primary work as impenetrable as everything else in the course, the class took to his ideas, asking pointed questions and providing insightful comments.

It would be unreasonable to expect that we teach only things that engage easily our students’ imaginations.  Of course, it is our job to engage their imaginations with everything from Ezra Pound to Eugene Jolas, but when our job is made easier, when the ideas sell themselves, we have to be ready to take advantage of those moments.  As a result, we had the two best classes of the semester this week, and that was not just because we turned back the clocks and benefited from an additional hour of sleep.

Surrealism appeals to students, but it did cross my mind that, after a couple of months, the class does have enough background in the subject to follow enthusiastically all the discussions in a course on modernism.  Is there anything we can do, I wonder, to speed along their coming up to speed?  Are there more background documents, more introductory material that can be taught in the first weeks?  Should we have a more restrictive set of prerequisites to ensure that students have more background before the course even begins?  Would moving to full-year courses leave us bored in January, or could we look forward to months and months of informed debate?

It comes down, once again, to the hermeneutic circle.  You cannot understand things until you have seen it all, and you cannot appreciate what you are seeing until you understand it.  The most gratifying part of teaching is seeing that light go on and benefitting from that glow.  We can do everything we can to rush to that point, but we spend each semester building to that moment, praying for it to come.

How that feels, how this week felt, is why I do this, and faith that it will come again and again is the best reason for a teacher’s optimism.

Teaching, Week Nine: The Snowy Streets Of Philadelphia

It is an inevitable fact that some of the most interesting academic conferences of the year will be held during the semester.  While some gatherings are known for meeting over Christmas or in May, for example, other conferences will interfere, inevitably, with teaching.  I tell my students that, while I have administrative and research responsibilities, they are my first priority during the semester.  So how do I reconcile conference travel with my presence in the classroom?

Well, this semester I scheduled two trips: one at the beginning of October, one at the end of the month.  The timing was not ideal, though it was better than travelling over successive weekends, say.  In both cases, I had skills exercises that were completed in my absence.  Because of the vagaries of scheduling -- holidays, the asymmetries of night classes, amongst other things -- there is an allowable range of contact hours across different sections, and so two missed classes fell within the margin of error.  The problem, of course, comes when unscheduled absences complicate the schedule.  As much as possible, of course, I now need to avoid illness, car trouble, or misplaced notes, the kinds of things that interrupt us at the best of time.

I was not ready for mother nature.

Early autumn in Pennsylvania brings weather in the teens.  Usually.  Last weekend, there was a snowstorm.  “Jack the Ripper Through a Wider Lens” was held at Drexel University, a half-hour stroll from the Independent Hotel.  I do not recommend walking in the slush in a mackintosh and Allen Edmunds.  By Saturday night, the return leg to Ottawa (continuing to Calgary) was in serious danger of cancellation.  What would happen if the itinerary was pushed back a full day?  I had a bag full of mid-terms, but getting home just before my return to class was not appealing.  Just before bed, I decided to have one more look at my iPhone: my flight had been cancelled at 11pm, ten hours before it was scheduled to depart.  The evening weather had prevented the U.S. Air equipment from arriving in Philadelphia.

By travelling through Phoenix, instead of Ottawa, after a nine-hour delay, I got through customs in Calgary after midnight on Monday.  In bed by 3:30am, after driving down to Lethbridge, I was able to take my place at an 8:30am Economics candidate lecture on technology investment and education in Pakistan.  I still had three or four papers to finish.

I find travel a chore, at the best of times.  When the clock is ticking and campus commitments beckon, it is even more stressful.  I would not trade my experience at Drexel for anything.  But the enduring lesson is to leave plenty of time on either end, just to make sure that one can fulfill our commitments to our students.

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.