The Classroom Conservative

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.

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.