Confusing: update

So I offered to talk directly to John Doe, apologize face-to-face, tell him that I had no intention of insulting him -- only trying to give real, specific feedback that I thought would make the website better.  I told the dean that it seemed to me that the misunderstanding could be cleared up by a real conversation.

Dean said that I couldn't talk directly to John Doe: " Before you talk to [John], I feel that I should find out if he is OK with the conversation--again, since [John] and I don't work together and I have been asked to step in.  Can you give me a little time to make sure [John] is comfortable with this approach."

Well, yes, I told her to let me know what John said.  Here's that message: "Hi Julie--I received an email from [John].  He does not want to meet.  Thanks for your patience."

Patience, indeed.  Now I'm trying to figure out how to convey feedback at our college -- especially tech-related feedback.  I watched a college Facebook video about Learning Communities today and noticed one misspelled student name (my Hannah is not Hannan), one misspelled instructor name (PaKou is not the same as Pakou) as well as the wrong name of my friend (who is Cullen Bailey Burns, not Cullen Burns).  The video kept pausing, too, not for "buffering" but to "load" while it was in Facebook (this pausing doesn't happen in YouTube).  Hmmm . . . did the creators actually watch it after they created it?

Our tech infrastructure is so tenuous -- and evidently so are the egos of our IT folks.  Today's college-wide network crash (at about 2:00 p.m., as my students were trying to save and print the work they'd completed in class) provided another real-world example of the fragility of our IT infrastructure.

How to talk about all these things on my campus?  I'm not sure . . . .

Confusing

On Tuesday night, I received an email from my dean, asking me to a meeting she'd set up so that we could "have a conversation about a concern that she'd been asked to address."  When I asked for a bit of info so that I could prepare, she said it was "best" that I just show up.

So I did, today, after conversing with quite a few people yesterday about how weird it was that I was being asked to talk about a "concern" yet not told what it was.  One friend said it was a "set up"; other friends encouraged me to bring along a union representative.

Anyway, the dean started the conversation with "I need to talk to you about your email to John Doe."  John Doe?  I wracked my brain, trying to figure out who that might be, what email I might have sent or someone else might have sent.

Turns out I'd sent feedback, submitted via the "feedback" link on our new college website, that insulted the recipient, John Doe.  Feeling hurt and insulted, John had told his supervisor, who'd told the academic VP, who'd asked my dean to handle it.

It never occurred to me that the "feedback" link would be a *specific* email to a *specific* person.  Usually, info given via feedback is routed to the folks who can deal with the concerns.   Not at my college: our "feedback" goes directly to the webmaster himself.

Evidently, what upset him so were my capital letters on "EXTREMELY" and my final comment that our college website has been used by other colleges as what not to do (I'd heard that this summer, and was a bit chagrined).

*Sigh*.  Our college's infrastructure and communication has been bad for all the years I've been there, and now the technology is exaggerating the gaps.  It's worse than I've ever, ever seen, anywhere.  Our "public face" embarrasses me and confuses students.  We have put the entire design of our college's website in the hands of a easily-offended fellow who does not have a four-year degree and therefore is intimidated by faculty.

Why didn't we hire a webmaster who had earned at least a bachelor's degree?  It seems shortsighted to choose someone with an AA degree as the designer for a *college*'s web presence.

Telling the Truth

I've been thinking of using this blog to tell what really goes on at my college: the happy stories are easy, of course -- like the goofy summer-school student who stopped by my office today, pleased to spend an hour chatting because she had two hours "to waste."

She wanted to show me a book she'd checked out of her public library -- "The Gay Rights Movement" -- wondering how she could buy it.  I spent 45 minutes with her, analyzing "The Children's Hour," hearing about her classes, including ear-training and logic (the textbook's cover photograph of trees in mist really confounded her: how is that the image of logic?).

But what about the not-happy things that occur all around me?

• Tech writing students who, asked to talk about "usability," immediately begin sharing horror stories about our college's new website.  
• The faulty registration system that did not screen the students for honors courses; as a result, both students and faculty have been surprised this week to find that what they thought they were signing up for is not what they've received.  
• Faculty and student training sessions led by someone who treats all the participants like children ("If I raise my hand, that means you should stop talking!").  
• Financial aid not distributing vouchers for book purchases until the second week of the semester -- so students cannot begin the reading unless I lend them my personal books (which I continue to do). 

I could write a longer list.  It might be healthy for me to purge in this blog, but I'm not sure . . . should I tell the truth about how much worse the infrastructure has gotten since I arrived 9 years ago?  Many, many things are worse, and part of the reason I think is that our president has hired his pals instead of smart people: young men who are protecting their fragile machismo by treating others badly (especially the women who run the joint).  It's just so classically sexist that it's almost funny.

*Sigh.*

Better Blogging

While I have been taking a break from this julie@century blog this summer, I have been working with another blog with my online tech writing students.

The course ended yesterday, and I have to say that asking students to write and share blog posts has been a *terrific* learning experience for them, the best blogging I've read since I've been using this assignment. Here's how it works:

• I asked them to sign up for Google Alerts to get messages about "Technical Writing" in the news (analogous to the in-class discussion we would have if we were meeting f2f). The news stories show up in their email inboxes, usually 4 or 5 a week.
• I put the instructions for how to set up this alert right in the syllabus -- it's a first example of instructions, which is the second assignment students write for the class. (A syllabus is a piece of technical writing, after all.)
  
• I have created a private blogspot blog for the class, and I add new students to the blog every semester. I keep adding students instead of creating a new blog for each class because I want students to see what others have written over the years -- examples of good and bad blog posts (practicing genre analysis!) help them write their own.
• Students should post eight times in the eight-week semester: 4 times before midterm and 4 times after midterm. Commenting on 3 classmates' posts can substitute for one of their own posts. They can decide when to post, but only one post per day counts. (I used to ask for weekly posts, but students would forget. And one semester, students posted all their posts at once, which defeats the purpose of getting them to think and share.)
• Posts are worth 10 points each -- totaling about 1/10th of the points for the course.
• I don't check spelling, grammar, mechanics -- the only comments I make are about analysis: simply summarizing or copying the news item is not sufficient. Students must post what they *think* about what they've read.

Overall, this semester the students have realized that technical writing is all around them. Some profess to have more respect for technical writers, seeing for the first time all the hard work that goes into creating documents at their workplaces. Here are some example student posts, just as they appeared (weird formatting, spelling errors, and all -- be sure to notice that one Ethiopian student liked a W.B. Yeats quote!):

You can Learn Writing Style- What is Techncial Writing

I received this article in my inbox this morning and thought it would be interesting to read through it since it pertains to what we have learned in our online technical writing class. This article was written by: stevesheriw. he describes technical writing as a way to inform, instruct or persuade, argue within a document. He also goes on to say that what ever you write is some form of technical writing as in resumes, memos, letters, reports, instructions, etc. Some of these forms of technical writing styles were some of our required assignments for this class which made it clear as to why they call it technical writing. Steve also points out that there are 7 steps to consider when writing a document, these steps are; Purpose, audience, content specific to it's purpose and audience, write clearly and precisely, make good use of visuals, and last but not least; be ethical in your writing.

Where have I heard this before, oh yeah, I read about it in the reading assignments and the introduction of our handbook.
http://www.technicalyp.com/?p=372

Top 5 Technical Writing Skills That Pay Big

http://technicalwriting.phoenix-blogs.com/top-5-technical-writing-skills-that-pay-big/

The article goes over the top 5 tech writing jobs that pay big- the reason that I enjoy the article is because over the past semester I have truly payed respect to technical writing. It is a field that will be around forever to meet the needs of people from all types of society. The top 5 payed jobs are as follows:

- Information design

- Information architecture

- Training material development

- Illustration

- Typography

Everyone in the class should appreciate what a vast field technical writing is. It effects everyone (especially college students) in their day to day lives! I have enjoyed the short and challenging semester of technical writing, and I truly believe that it is something that everyone should have a basic understating of. Writing skills are a necessary thing in a society that is based around commercialism.

Technical Writing involves many things that need to be considered before writing a plain draft and Audience analysis is one of them.

This article points out about the kind of audience we need to consider while writing a document. There are 3 main types of audience: a non technical, a semi-technical and a technical. Gender and age also plays a role. As a technical writer we need to focus on the audience’s interest. When considering translation into another language for the document it is even more important to write a simple but clear language to avoid meaning changes. All those information make it clear that it is hard to write a document for multiple audiences. Satisfying all the readers is a hard task.

I liked the statement of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) used in this context: “Think like a wise man but communicate in language of the people” Not only in technical writing gives this success but also in other fields of life.

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/321195_why-keeping-your-audience-in-mind-while-technical-writing-is-important

Student typo

I love this line from today's Technical Writing student discussion post to another student: "I am sure you will do great in technical writhing this summer."

We all might feel like the course is "technical writhing" by the end of the summer! :-)

For Class

The New York Times section called "Vows" has a weekly wedding video. This week, it's a great video of a same-sex couple. Enjoy!

Punctuation

I just found this Salon.com article from 2008: "Is the semicolon girly?"

Hmmm. And of course the implication is that "girly" is undesirable, yeah.

The best line in the article is the last one: "Lynn Harris: Wait. And the period is manly?"

Makes me think of Gloria Steinem's 1978 classic "If Men Could Menstruate."

What motivates us

Check out this video, made from a talk by Dan Pink. (Double click on it to see the whole image.)

What if every organization could embrace these ideas?

Where I work

I work at an institution with one of the worse IT infrastructures I've ever seen. Here's the latest weird thing IT cannot do:

When someone changes her name (for example, by getting married) and needs to update her email address, she will miss out on a lot of communication because of this "fact":

"[T]here is no way for IT to forward e-mails going to my old address to my new address (or to make things come to my old address from my new address)"

So we have an IT department that can't figure out how to forward email.

*Sigh*.

Literature students

1. Reading end-of-the-semester work from my American Women Writers class, I've run into two surprises (more to come, I'm sure):
2. One student copied Sparknotes as her "reading journal," which is supposed to be a piece of writing every week before class to jot down some thoughts about the day's writers.
3. One student wrote this run-on sentence about poetry: "Then with [Audre] Lorde and [Adrienne] Rich it was the whole poetry thing, I just don’t understand it, its not that I don’t like poetry, but I think I like the more popular and classic stuff that’s a lot easier to understand, like Dr. Seuss or Shell Silverstine.”

Popular and classic poets: who knew?

Desperate Slacker

Here's an email response I just received (today, first day of finals week) from a student who has missed eight classes -- four weeks of our semester -- and has said, "If I do not pass this class, I do not graduate":

Dear Professor Daniels,

I wanted to bring to your attention, what I believe to be, a discrepancy in the attendance record you sent me in the last email. Although I was late I did attend class on Feb. 18th, I also participated in the on-line class on March 2nd. I’m going to continue working in hopes to finish this course with a passing grade. I know that you are aware of how critical a passing grade in this course is for me, based on our previous conversation. I truly appreciate the guidance you gave me heading into the conclusion of this semester. I know I should have sought a solution to my issues with the online blog earlier in the semester but if there is anything I can do to find my way to a passing grade so that I could graduate at the end of this semester I would be eternally grateful. If you feel there is no way to make up for my lapses this semester, then I look forward to your additional guidance in our future semester as I retake your course.
Thank you very much for your consideration.

Well, I wonder how s/he thinks s/he is going to "continue working in hopes to finish the course with a passing grade" -- the course is already finished. So it looks like s/he won't graduate, doesn't it?
*Sigh*.

"What I learned"

One of my pedagogical commitments is to ask students to reflect on their own learning -- and to articulate that reflection in writing.

One thing I ask sometimes is for them to write, anonymously, on two sides of an index card:

• 3 things I think everyone in class has learned/achieved this semester
• 3 things that only I learned/saw/achieved

Here's a list of "Only I have learned" from my American lit course:

1. I learned how to perform scansion when reading poetry.
2. I enjoyed doing the facilitation more than I anticipated -- especially the PowerPoint and video [this from a student who researched The Crucible's links to McCarthyism (I recognize his handwriting)]
3. Poetry can take on the most peculiar of forms.

1. how to notice nuances in writing to "see more"
2. the value/need to contextualize a text to really understand it
3. contextualizing research teaches you history and more . . .

1. Poetry is 50% interpretation and 50% research.
2. It is best to facilitate a discussion in an area you love.
3. Reflection after reading is pertinant in order to understand what you've read.

1. how to analyze works based on historical events happening at the time
2. how a short story can actually be a longer story when looked at through different eyes
3. allotting sufficient time to read is important to be able to focus on a piece and truly analyze it
   

1. I learned to stick with it, even when I don't understand the class completely.
2. I learned how to more respectfully disagree or keep quiet.
3. I learned a great deal about minority viewpoints in Am. Lit that were previously foreign to me.

1. American writers are very depressed writing. [this is a Pakistani student]
2. A lot of problems in the author's life forced them to become extraordinary writers.
3. I had lots of fun learning more about American lit.

1. Independent bookstores were a brand new experience for me [they need to visit one in a "field trip" experience]
2. Two lit courses in one semester is a lot of writing & reading.
3. Need to be more proficient Analyzing poetry!

1. To find symbolism & metaphor in writing such as the snake in "Sweat" & "Chrysanthemums" & "The Eyes".
2. That the cannon (sic) of literature will always evolve because of individual talents & new writers.
3. American Literature is unique because it reflects the many cultures that have come together and an endless search for identity & belonging vs. retention of individualism.

1. co-operation
2. tollerance (sic)
3. research skills [this fellow's "everyone learned" list was "co-operation, research skills, speaking skills"]

1. I earned more about the various interpretations of the pieces.
2. I learned more about the work of "The Awakening" through preparing our facilitation.
3. When our guest speaker, Kelvin [Monroe], came in and the facilitation on Jazz I saw the connection of the music of Jazz to Morrison's style of writing

1. Presentations go much better without games.
2. A writing journal really helps put thoughts/ideas in perspective.
3. The same exact piece of literature can be many things to many people.

1. Learned the importance of good exposition & good filler [did this student bullshit on her/his essay??]
2. I've found different reading strategies.
3. The importance of transitioning sentences

1. How to begin to decode poetry.
2. MLA referencing
3. How to tread lightly on fragile egos in group projects.

1. interpret an author's message within their story
2. enjoy an author's story that I normally didn't like
3. to read faster

1. about the author I wrote my paper on
2. feel more confident about future classes

1. more about the beat generation
2. about F. Scott [Fitzgerald]
3. how to better deal w/passive aggressive people [this student incited some heated discussion in class because she had a hard time listening to others]

1. The difference between an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet and a Shakespearean sonnet
2. How to make a formal presentation
   

1. I never knew anything about Henry Adams
2. I absolutely fell in love with "The Awakening" (and found it inspirational)
3. Appreciate the connection b/t Art, lit., and music.

1. The significance of Black American writers and their contributions to Literature.
2. How/why creative writing is necessary [I don't understand this point as related to our class]

1. Becoming more well read
2. Survived my first college course toward my major!!
3. I've read things I never thought I would

1. That paper grading is very arbitrary [this woman "has gotten As on all my class papers" -- she's really mad at me]
   
2. That Amrican (sic) Lit. is depressing all about abused women.
3. There is a lot of reading

1. To control my fear of failure. [this from a 70-year-old woman]
2. To control or work through anger so I could finish assignments on time.
3. To [she didn't complete her card]
   

Isn't this list amazing? A mixture of heart, heat, and reason; a mishmash of personal attack and personal revelation; a lively data set that reflects relatively accurately the personalities in this class of 27 (not everyone turned in their card). Mostly, this group of students was terrific.

Poetry Everywhere

I just stumbled upon this PBS website, narrated by Garrison Keillor, with clips of poets. I can't believe I didn't know about it before.

Naomi Shihab Nye (my cousins' best friend) amazes, and she's just for starters.

Real Writing

As a teacher of writing, I strive to give all of my students -- in writing courses AND in other courses -- opportunities to improve their writing. I provide extensive feedback on drafts in literature courses and in my WGST courses. But how do I deal with writing like this (the first paragraph of an essay, copied exactly as it was submitted, about how the de Beauvoir phrase "One is not born a woman, one becomes one" plays out in our WGST readings this semester):

• According to the famous book: The Second Sex that was written by Simone de Beauvoir. This famous line was used "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." This quote from my view might be interpret as someone who might be born as a female, but later on in their life. They might change their sexuality to being a male because of the things that they learn and experience in life that maybe being a female does not fit their life style, and they like to fix cars, build houses and carry heavy loads like a man. In other cases in which it is classified as norms in society, a female should stay as a female throughout their whole life from the beginning of their birth throughout their learning in life. They should being happy to represent their sexuality as a female and being the sex as they were born with is the way how it should be. In addition to the quote by Beauvoir, there is many discussion about the process of becoming a woman as reflecting back to the quote once again that "One is not born a woman, one becomes one."

Okay, friends, what do I do with five double-spaced pages that read like this?

This student may or may not have had a composition course. This student may or may not understand the material. This student may or may not have achieved a level of literacy (either in English or his home language) to be able to understand or convey complex ideas in writing.

How can I respond in a way that will teach something about the material (that de Beauvoir is talking about the social processes of culture on the individual) and about how to express one's thoughts in writing?

It seems to me that many, many people think "teaching writing" is easy because it just means "checking grammar." But this student's sentences convey many more issues/problems/challenges than just "bad grammar" (of course that's a problem, too). But that "bad grammar" (or more accurately, "bad syntax") is more like "unclear thinking," perhaps.

If we understand the sentence to be the unit of thought, then this writer's thoughts are scrambled, incomplete, preliminary, immature -- or most precisely "inchoate": "from the Latin inchoatus, the past participle of inchoare to start work on, perhaps from in- + cohum part of a yoke to which the beam of a plow is fitted." I love that idea of the yoke: can I help a student yoke his thoughts to words?

More of the definition: "being only partly in existence or operation: . . . especially : imperfectly formed or formulated." This imprefection certainly comes through, although since writing is "endlessly prefectable," we can't expect perfection.

My point, I guess, is to convey the profound challenges in front of me -- and many of my colleagues -- who "teach writing." We are really heroic and underappreciated: our work is misunderstood. I'd call it "sisyphean" if I were in a bad mood, although I'm not sure what crime we've committed that angered the gods (or even who those gods might be in this all-too-mortally-flawed education system).

(Image from WriteThinking)

Stillness and Movement

Worth watching, listening, reading, resting:

Feeling Blue

It's that time in the semester: students either panicky or missing, rarely meeting deadlines, needing extraordinary questions/prompts/prodding/provoking/shenanigans in order to contribute to a class discussion.

Why? Maybe our semesters are just too long.

Or another possibility: unintentional [?] undermining. Here's what a student told me:

This guy is in my FYC course and wanting to write about the assessment test scores needed to get into various writing courses. He thinks the scores are too high (we just recently had to *lower* our scores to match up with other MnSCU colleges). He's in the dental assisting (or maybe dental hygiene) program and doing fine. "My teacher likes me so I'm getting good grades," he said. [I've typed out his sentence exactly as he said it: note the coordinating conjunction.]

"My teacher doesn't know why I have to get good grades in English -- the scores don't matter for us because writing doesn't matter in our jobs." [These words are almost exact; I'm paraphrasing, but the *teacher* is the one who said that writing didn't matter.]

WTF? I mean, can't we *college professors* recognize that writing has value in any profession? Or perhaps some of my colleagues are not really college professors, something I've long suspected: they're trainers at best, smiley-sticker awarders more like it.

I work so hard to combat the education myths circulating in our culture: just showing up to class is not going to result in an automatic A. Showing up is an opportunity to learn, to show what you've learned, to try wrestling with tough topics and new ways of thinking.

Of thinking.

It'd be so nice if my campus peers [?] would value thinking.

*Sigh*.

Writing is Revision

I bet you've seen this image:

Yep, the President's healthcare speech with all the revisions.

See the almost full page here, at the White House's Flickr site -- "President Barack Obama and Jon Favreau, head speechwriter, edit a speech on health care in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president's address to a joint session of Congress. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)"

It's so terrifically amazingly wonderful to have a literate President who cares about getting writing right.

Sincere Student Quotation

From a student essay: "I think that homosexuals are very interesting and one lesbian I know is a great person. She jokes about being a lesbian, has nothing against straight people, and has never had a problem hanging out with us."

Well, good!

T.S. Eliot

Every semester that I teach American lit with the Heath Anthology, I assign T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It always makes my students mad: they want literature to be about the author -- they usually want to know if the "story is true," by which they mean did the writer experience what s/he is writing about.

If the story does not come out of the writer's direct experience, my students often decide they don't like it or don't find it valuable. It's a weird perversion of the notion of "truth" because it ignores the power of human imagination, the most creative force we know/have.

So I assign this Eliot essay after they've also read part of two other critics: William Dean Howells, in "Criticism and Fiction," insists that a writer's world/experience *must* be conveyed in literature and is what gives the literature its value [Howells's "regionalists" or "local color" writers). Henry James, in "The Art of Fiction," conveys that an author does not have to have the experience, but can "glimpse" one and then use imagination to build a story.

Eliot seems to be a logical progression from these two, and he readies us for the 20th century and modernism (not to mention postmodernism!). I find that most students want to stay in the steady 19th century, though, with its emphasis on realism and naturalism. It's my duty to get them unstuck.

Eliot helps! He insists that powerful poetry is not about the personality of the poet -- or even the emotional experiences of the poet. Instead, the poet's mind is like a catalyst in the presence of two substances: feeling and emotion. The talented poet brings these together in some memorable way to create a poem that can take its place in the poetic tradition.

I very much like this idea, which focuses on the art instead of the artists. I guess I'm a New Critic, huh? Or rather, a fan of rhetorical analysis instead of biographical criticism.

[WEIRD! NPR's "All Things Considered" just quoted T.S. Eliot's "Prufrock" as I was typing this!!]

Keeping Up

I haven't managed to keep up with blogging -- my time seems to be so short this semester. I think I've figured out one reason why: all of my classes are basically still full. I tallied the rosters today -- 142 (our professional organization, the National Council of Teachers of English has a policy statement saying no more than 60 students in a term).

No wonder I'm tired.

This semester is unusual because all the students are staying in their classes. Usually by the fourth or fifth week, students have shuffled themselves around a bit, and my 28-person composition classes (13 more than NCTE's recommendation and eight more than their maximum) settle into about 22 or 23. That's a more manageable size, given all the writing I seem to ask my students to do.

In my literature/WGST courses, I begin with 35 or 30 and settle down to a more successful 25-30. In those courses, I assign essays, too, even essay exams -- what am I thinking!? Of course, I'm thinking that students show me what they've learned by writing. Radical idea.

Maybe I'm just getting old, or maybe too many students are named the same, or maybe I'm teaching too many variably-prepared students . . . but I'm having *such* a hard time this semester keeping up.

All College Day

I suppose I'm a bit weird, but I kind of like getting all the folks from my college together for a day of thought-provoking conversations and presentations (today's wasn't that thought-provoking, disappointingly: it just repeated what we already know because community colleges are like canaries in the coal mines -- we see all the stuff research institutions eventually get around to observing . . . we see it at least five years earlier). My conversations with colleagues were good, though.

Although I like these days, I do wish that it wasn't the only way we heard about important initiatives at my college. We have the *worst* communication I've ever seen, anywhere, ever.

Personally, I think it's because we've doubled in size since I've been there, but we haven't figured out how to keep up with the infrastructure. We still operate with the "Mary is the person who does that" mentality, when it's tough to know who "Mary" is or what her position is . . . we still operate as if we all saw each other in the "lunch room" once a day.

The simplest things are impossible to find because our college website is rotten: just try to search for an org chart so you can know who answers to whom, who might be responsible for something if you have a question: impossible to find, or if you do, the information is out of date. (We even have courses listed on our class schedule that do not even exist at our college!)

So for me, it's important to go to these all-day events to see people and hear what the administration has in mind. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that our communication is rotten *on purpose* to force us to go to the all-day retreats!

Finally Booked It

The flight to India for spring break . . . that is. I had to contend with too many variables, which always slows me down, but tonight I got all the parts right, I think.

• Fly out of Chicago and back into Minneapolis -- why didn't I think of that a month ago?
• Josh as substitute teacher should I get waylaid -- why didn't I think of him a month ago?
• Delta's partner KLM for the frequent flyer miles -- why didn't I think of that a month ago?

I did toy with a flight that left me in Rome for 14.35 hours . . . looked around online to see how easy it would be to get from the airport to the city center (just 30 minutes for 11 euro on a high-speed train). For about 15 minutes, that scenario looked attractive . . . but I'd have to carry around my bag (but I do travel light . . .), so Rome will have to wait for another trip.

Yay - I'll be able to celebrate Padmini's 50th with her in Delhi!

Good work

I'm in the middle of the kind of work I love: editing a document that will be used at our all-campus development day. I get to compile a bunch of people's contributions, make them uniform, and then them into "user friendly" (does anyone even use that phrase any more?) break-out session activities.

At the moment, I'm having the most fun developing gender-neutral names and constructing sentences to avoid personal pronouns. Rosalie Maggio's 1987 classic, The Nonsexist Word Finder: A Dictionary of Gender-Free Language, would come in handy -- if my copy was at home instead of on my office bookshelf.

So far, here are a few of the gender-neutral names I've come across in my teaching: Adrian, Alex, Aubrey, Cameron, Casey, Chris, Dana, Devin, Jamie, Jess, Kim, Lee, Merritt, Morgan, Pat, Quinn, Reese, Remy, Robin, Rylish, Sandy, Shane, Shannon, Shawn, Terry, Tracy.

Anyone else have any others?

Doing the math

I've just added up the number of students I'm teaching this semester: 144.

Yikes.

That's 28 and 26 in my two sections of FYC. That's 30 and 31 in my two American literature courses. That's 29 in my WGST course.

All of them will be writing a lot for me, so I will be reading a LOT of student work. Not to mention all the reading I've assigned them: I re-read every semester, especially for the literature courses, because 1) I need the refresher and 2) it's fun!

I have *such* a great job, really -- I get to READ great literature (okay, and mediocre student essays) and then talk about what it might mean . . . with and to human beings who might not have a chance to talk about literature anywhere else but my class.

Yay.

Memorizing

So I'm working on memorizing an Emily Dickinson poem for my American Women Writers class tomorrow. I've assigned the task to students, so of course I have to do it myself. We're going to sit in a circle, with everyone reciting their poem. Some students have already emailed me about "alternate assignments" because they're so nervous.

I get it: it's tough! I memorized one poem a few years ago, the last time I taught this course, but I can't even remember which poem I chose! Just goes to show how weak my memorization powers are . . . as if this is news.

Takes me back to the first time I had to recite a memorized poem to a professor: it was Toni McNaron at the U of M who required this assignment. We would meet in her office and recite to her *personally*, which was scary. I chose Adrienne Rich's "Power," which begins something like this: "Buried, in the earth deposits of our history" but then I lose it: I know a bottle was buried: one bottle? brown I think?

The poem ends with "She died, not knowing her wounds came from the same source as her power" or something like that. It's about Marie Curie.

So of course now I've had to google the poem, to find out what it really says. Here it is:

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

It's interesting that I lost the "crumbling flank of earth" and the backhoe -- and that my memory changed the ending from Curie's denial to her lack of knowledge. None of the middle details remained, either -- the damaged body so concretely described.

The Dickinson poem I've chosen is also about death (but of course so many of her poems are!). I've known the first line of "1773" for a long while, but now I have the whole thing. I'll try type it here as an exercise:

"My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality reveal
A third event to me
As hard and hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell."

Okay, I got a couple of parts wrong: Immortality unveils, it doesn't reveal -- an important, Dickinsonian distinction; the events are "so huge" not "as hard" -- another important Dickinson metaphor. But overall, not that bad!

I'll have to work on getting another poem, since I have some opening lines in my head: "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant / Success in circuit lies" and "I felt a funeral in my Brain" and "Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me" and "I dwell in possibility / A fairer house than prose / [Something] for windows, / Superior for doors" (that first line the title of McNaron's memoir).

I should send Toni a "thank you" email. She started this.

She's teachable, I think

Dessa's music should impress students of all musical tastes: this MPR profile grabs me!

Time Flies

Prepping for the new semester is energizing, but I get in the weirdest time-warp. I'm just seeing the time, and it seems I have been at the computer, updating my course websites, for hours: the last time I really noticed the time was 4 hours ago.

Sheesh! Get to sleep! A big day tomorrow!

Starting up again

The holidays are almost past -- and I'm thinking about the new semester ahead of me. It'll be *so* great, with two comp 1 courses (I haven't taught that in a year), two literature courses (American women writers and American lit after 1865), and one intro women/gender studies course.

I should be able to read interesting work, talk about interesting ideas, and engage with interesting students.

The Dojka-Davis Brown Bag Series is starting up again, too: I have five volunteers and need to find three more. We're doing Tuesdays this semester, noon to 1 p.m. I think we'll alternate like that: Mondays and Tuesdays, 12-1 and 1-2. I hope it can keep going.

Officially Break

That's right: it's officially semester break for me. Of course, I have to do a bunch of class prep for Spring Semester (odd how spring starts in January), but for a few days I will be celebrating the winter holidays with friends and family. No grading. Amazing.

All but One

That's what's left for me to grade: just one class. I've submitted final grades for all my other classes. The class that had its final yesterday will have to wait until after the weekend.

Yay!

Too busy grading to blog

But I've finished two classes completely. That's good news. Still need to submit grades, though.

The other classes are in various states of uncompleteness: final essays/projects and final exams to read. Why do I ask for both, do you suppose?

End-of-semester Intimidation

I'm still reeling with suppressed anger/shock at an occurrance in my classroom over two hours ago -- here's what happened:

My WGST course ends at 5:15 on Wednesdays, and then another class is in the same room at 6:00. One student from my class stays in the classroom because she's in the 6:00 class -- it's comp 1, with an adjunct who I know a little bit -- so I don't lock the classroom for the 45 minutes between the classes like the college asks us to do (some things have been stolen from computer classrooms). The student who waits is responsible, and sometimes I'm not even out of the room until 5:30. Sometimes other students from the 6:00 class have come in as we're leaving.

Today, I was still talking with students at 5:30 (it's the end of the semester, lots of questions about individual papers/performance/etc.) when a student from the 6:00 class walked in and up to the table where I and about six other students were standing. It occurred to me to ask him to leave and wait outside for his class to start so that I could talk in relative privacy with my students.

He rudely refused.

I was stunned.

I asked again, tried to reason by explaining that we weren't done, his class didn't start until 6:00, so could he please just wait outside. No.

He escalated the situation, making many defensive claims (he pays tuition! he has a right to be there! my class is over! -- these are just a few of the things he said). Other students are watching, listening, and say things like, "Hey, dude, she's just asking you to wait -- we're still talking" which only eggs him on.

Did I mention that the door to the classroom was closed this whole time? That the student had to let himself into a classroom that had its door closed, a classroom that "technically" is not "his class" until 6:00. Can you say "privilege"?

Anyway, the thing is, this kid knows that our class is a women and gender studies course. The student who waits between my class and his even wrote an essay about her experience trying to educate some of the "vulgar" young males (her word) in her class about what she's studying. She'd been harassed for having our textbook on the table. To this woman's credit she impressively decided to turn that harassment into a "teachable moment" by interviewing four male classmates to find out if they might change their behavior if they knew more about the subject she was studying. I don't know if he's one the students she "interviewed," but she did say to me as she was leaving, "Now you know what I'm talking about in my paper."

So what could I do? I ignored this boy, asked my other students to ignore him ("No, we don't need to talk with him any more") and turned back to the students I was talking with. Another young man enters.

I ask him if he could wait outside until we're done. He starts turning around to leave but then looks to his friend -- who's sitting at a table right behind me getting out his laptop cord, plugging things in, making his presence known. The new boy turns back to me and says simply "No."

The two of them then sit behind me -- the second boy just six inches from my back -- while I continue talking with a student who was having a particularly hard time with an essay revision. The boys don't talk much, but they shuffle papers, pushing them into my field of vision, as they get out their [exceedingly ugly] laptops.

I'm shaking through all of this -- reeling, really -- while trying to listen and advise. Finally, about 5:45, I walk out with the last student. I bring my files back to my office. I realize I've left my textbook and keys back in the classroom. I go back: glare, glare, glare. I then to go the office of my colleague who teaches the 6:00 class, telling him what happened, asking him if he'd be willing to come back to talk with the students. He's surprised, dismayed, and agrees.

Here's the thing: I wanted my colleague to tell these students that I had told him about the experience and then to ask them what happened, perhaps asking them to apologize to me. I wanted the students to see a united professional front to demonstrate that their behavior was exceedingly disrespectful. I wanted to give the students an opportunity to do the right thing.

Of course that didn't happen. The boys got *really* defensive, saying things like, "Oh, so were your feelings hurt? You were rude to me!" My colleague tried to talk with them, even going so far as to say that the classroom space was mine until 6:00 when his class started (they had been insisting that there were there early because " We're responsible, coming to class early because we're prepared" -- other bullshit like that). The boys also got really buddy-buddy with their teacher, using his first name to say, "We've been coming in here early all semester and on the last day she tells us to leave?"

Finally, I turned to my colleague and said, "I guess you're seeing an example of exactly what I was talking about -- here's the evidence." That *really* got one boy incensed: he kept saying things like "Don't talk about me like I'm not here; talk to me if you got something to say; I'm an adult!" Uh huh.

I turned so my colleague and I could leave the room, thanking him again for coming. He was apologetic, sincere, saying he'd email me with the names of the students. I hope so because I talked later with my department chair who thought I handled things well -- but perhaps might want to fill out a form for the Dean of Student Life to put in the students' files. I'm going to do that -- the first student just seemed like he was on such a short fuse. I would imagine he's been intimidating and disrespectful in the past. Our Dean has asked us to report incidents like this one because it provides evidence needed if (or when!) a student needs to be disciplined in some way.

Whew - it's cathartic to write all this, but it also makes me realize how much of the incident I'm forgetting. I need to remember some more specific phrases, things the boys said like "You don't have this room, what time is your class over anyway? You can't tell me to leave. I'm not leaving. You're causing this problem. There was no problem when I came in until you escalated things. You're the one who's making a big deal out of this. You're not telling me what to do." This turning of responsibility is classic abuser behavior -- perfect.

Phrases from the conversation when the other instructor was present: "She was all in my face. There were only a few students in the room so I thought it was over. Only one student was in here. She waits until the last day of the class to tell us this stuff?"

Okay, that's enough now -- wow, police reports must be pretty tough to write! I'm leaving out so many details that contributed to the harassing, intimidating, almost violent atmosphere. And I'm usually a pretty good at noticing details! Tone matters, though, and posture (standing close to me, taller than me).

What a way to wind up the semester -- it's not simply end-of-semester stress. It's a powerful illustration of the power of the patriarchy, of the sexist culture in which we all live.

"This game is well known."

This weekend at an antique mall, I bought a book from 1923 called Four Hundred Games for School, Home, and Playground (Ethel F. Acker, F.A. Owen Publishing Company, Dansville, N.Y.).

I bought it because 1) it was $3.00 and 2) I opened it to page 159 to find a language game called "Composition Relay" that began like this:

"This game is well known. Besides furnishing an exercise in grammatical construction, capitals, and punctuation, it is a good drill in spelling and penmanship."

Hmm, I thought, to whom would this game be well known? What would teaching be like if this game was still well known? Here it is:

"Each row of players forms a team. The last player in each row at a given signal runs forward, writes the first word of a sentence on the blackboard, runs to his seat, and hands the chalk to the next player, who writes the next word. The last player writes a word to complete the sentence and adds the necessary punctuation. The points are usually scored as follows: Speed 25 points, grammatical construction 25, spelling 25, and writing 25. If played during the grammar drill period the score should be: Speed 50, analysis 50. No badly written sentences should be considered."

So I love almost everything about this paragraph:

• the second sentence's parallel structure, which mitigates the overload of prepositional phrases
• the way points are "usually" awarded (imagine having to write legibly in chalk when you're rushing, your teammates are hurrying you)
• the assumption that a "grammar drill period" is usual, well known, common
• the last sentence! It's passive verb is so great
• the fact that students are *moving* in the classroom while they're learning language skills (can you say "kinetic learners"? Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences didn't appear until 60 years later!)
  

How I wish we could reintroduce these physical movements in our classrooms -- at all levels. I like my students to move . . . rearranging them to create sentences ("you're an independent clause, you're a dependent clause, you're a comma -- rearrange yourselves!")

But moving requires space. With federal constraints on education professionals, we end up dropping out these kinds of activities . . . phy ed classes get cut! That's simply unjust, not to mention unwise. Students find a way to move -- often inappropriately.

It should be "well known" that physical activity is essential for learning. Ethel F. Acker says it this way:

"Probably no other single theory in the field of education has made greater progress in the minds of educators and laymen in the past few years than that of the importance of organized play" (11 emphasis added).

Analogies

Or perhaps I should say "metaphors"? These "Internet Vices" make sense to me!

Dojka-Davis Brown Bag Series

This semester, I've organized a little "intellectual conversation" on our campus. I've called it the "Dojka-Davis Brown Bag Series" after two fierce, crotchety faculty colleagues who died in 2009.

Both Stefanie and Mark cared a lot about maintaining the academic integrity of the college; both cared a lot about ideas and their clear expression; both insisted on making intellectual inquiry accessible to students, not as watered-down worksheets but as a serious enterprise.

I'd talked with Stefanie many times over the years about having some kind of faculty sessions where we could share our research interests. In fact, the first time I met Stefanie was when she discussed her dissertation research on Jane Austen at a faculty brown bag session back in about 1992.

Stef wasn't the only one who wanted to share more than teaching techniques with her colleagues. As my colleague Judith Roy wrote, "Mark Davis pursued his research and scholarly activities right to the end, submitting another article for publication just a few months before he died."

Many of us do this academic work, work that is so often hidden or overwhelmed by the demands of teaching at an open-admission community college. But we have few venues for sharing that work. So I organized these sessions -- just did it. We have a Center for Teaching and Learning at our college, but it focuses on teaching tips and techniques.

Anyway, the sessions have been terrific: today was the last one, a lecture about Russian intelligensia after Stalin. We've heard about disability rights in Korea, theories of comics, and just war theory. Every session has had at least four participants, with the largest session drawing nine. Sure, these numbers might be small, but I look forward to increasing them next semester. (I've switched the day/time to every other TUESDAY, noon-1:00 p.m.)

So I guess you could say I'm feeling proud about what I've been able to accomplish . . . work that's not rewarded or even recognized by the institution. But work that's central to the mission of the college and to creating a healthy climate.

However, I still miss my two friends. These brown bag talks will never replace the cranky hallway conversations, the delightful and exasperated critiques both Stefanie and Mark shared with the rest of us.

Meaning Making

I'm working through the final weekly progress memos from my technical writing students. They've been revising sentences to improve them, often by finding buried verbs. Here's a funny revision from this morning!

• Original sentence: "This manual gives instructions to end users."
• Most student revisions: "This manual instructs end users."
• Unusual student revision: "This manual instructs you how to end users."

Just what kind of manual would that be? And would I let students write it as a final project for the course? :-)

It's Typo Season

Here's a good one from a student paper about high school education: "I believe if the government spit evenly the amount of money to every school, there will be available funds for everyone to invest in afterschool."

Good cartoon for class discussion?

(click here to view)

Joel Pett Lexington Herald-Leader Nov 13, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

The hypocrisy of our current health-care "system" get summed up pretty well in this cartoon -- or at least one of the most egregiously sexist aspects of that hypocrisy.

Many more awful aspects to choose from, of course.

For example: why does no one talk about the *ethical* aspect of health care any more? Why don't we talk about the absolute necessity of *health* for anyone to exercise any of their human or civil rights? Why can't we have a system -- as do other democratic, industrialized countries -- that provides health care for all citizens?

A Writing/Reading/Texting Revolution

I'm reposting a message I received from a great listserv (techrhet, which means technology and rhetoric, the list where I find out all the cool stuff about technology).

One of the major list participants, Nick Carbone, noted SEED magazine's article called "A Writing Revolution," which he found via Andrew Sullivan's The Atlantic blog "The Daily Dish," a post he called "We're All Authors Now" (starting to feel like nested Russian dolls, huh? That's the power of the interwebs and the power of "reach" and "speed" as Laura Gurak once said).

Here's what Carbone sent to the list (emphasis added):

The key claim: Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's.

The article measures the rate of authorship from 1400 to the present age, with a graph to show rates of change in authorship. It defines authorship as having a 100 readers. So one who tweets to a 100 follows, or writes an email like this to lists with over a 100 members, is counted as an author.

The analysis unfortunately includes some cyber-enthusiasm that makes some claims that stretch the argument too far, like this example of what seems to be a logical fallacy: "When United Airlines refused to reimburse a musician for damaging his guitar, the offended customer posted a song online—“United Breaks Guitars”—and United’s stock dropped 10 percent." -- is that Post Hoc Ergo Prompter Hoc?

There's no doubt more to pick at, but the chart and the measures of writing growth, and the fact digital technologies provide at least the potential for every writer to find at least a 100 readers (there's no guarantee that will happen) is very cool to see.

Insight of the week

Students write poorly when they don't know what they're talking about.

It's not that they're bad writers. It's that they're trying to write about something that they don't understand. Or they're trying to make stuff up.

So maybe the lament "They can't write!" should be modified to "They're not ready to write!"

Home sick

Yikes - what's the protocol? I'm achy and drippy and itchy: all I want to do is sleep, but I'm happy to report there's no fever, although I've got sore lymph glands. My immune system is doing its job!

I've been feeling suspicious about impending "'flu" because my Eustachian tubes have been itching like crazy for a week or so. Now the bugs seem to have moved into my sinuses and down my throat.

So I'm hanging out on the couch, drinking lots and lots of tea, using lots and lots of kleenex, trying to grade . . . but going slowly so that my impaired state doesn't disadvantage my students.

Wish me well.

Speech Act Theory-into-Practice

Today's Nobel Peace Prize for President Obama highlights the important accomplishment he's achieved: words matter. Speech *is* an action.

In our age of instant, global communication, Obama's changed the conversation. He's begun to resuscitate the American reputation. We can be proud that we no longer have a bully as a leader.

It's Rhetoric over War that's won: we rhetoricians should be proud to see the Nobel Prize's affirmation that words are actions, as John Austin reminds us in his philosophical How to Do Things with Words.

Austin reminds us that speech has "locutionary force" (the words refer to something); speech also has "illocutionary force" (there's a purpose for the words); speech too has "perlocutionary force" (it has an impact on the listener, who may then act or change).

In other words [ahem! :-)]

• Words are accomplishments.
• Words *are* the results that some people insist are necessary for the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Obama's rhetorical accomplishments are an example of the Practice of Peace. Negotiation and diplomacy lead to a more secure and peaceful coexistence than does violence.

Inviting is always better than Bullying.

Student email

Here's a recent message I've received from a student whose assignments also contain these features: what to do?


Hi Julie-
I left a little not by the door just to let you know in case you didnt see me... sorry about that. I didnt want to both you two.
Thats ok thought, I had to start my other class, so I left early. Since its a bit late in the week, then Ill just see you on monday for class :) If needed Ill just go over some questions if I still have them. Most are already answered. If I need a recap Ill let you know.
Thanks
Student

Still teaching

I started this morning at 9:30 a.m. with online Chat, a way to meet my tech writing students (who have a "blended" class, with on-campus meetings on Mondays and online meetings on Wednesdays).

After 10:30 a.m. (when the chat ended), I answered emails from four students (two who have the flu; one who scheduled an afternoon appointment), read and responded to online discussion posts from students in tech writing, WGST, and Nature Writers, checked the Engl 90 blog to see who'd written lately, and commented on a blog post from the tech writers.

By 1:00 I was driving to school to arrive for office hours, an honors student conference, and class prep for my 2:15 class. That Engl 90 class always surprises me: even seven weeks into the semester, some students don't yet know how to access our course D2L website, and others can't remember to bring their written homework in a form they can manipulate in class -- EVERY DAY we use our computer classroom to workshop on writing. Every day. Two students had to completely retype things today, which put them behind on the day's writing objective, which was to understand the function of a topic sentence and supporting sentences (i.e., paragraph structure).

Class ended at 3:30, but students kept talking with me until 3:45, which is an enjoyable thing most of the time. My 4:00 class got started on time, with a slight technology glitch as I used the document camera. The student facilitation ended up being very emotional -- from the "Women's Health and Reproductive Rights" chapter, these students chose to focus on abortion methods -- and I had to intervene three times, asking presenters NOT to use incendiary, inappropriate language that could cause their classmates pain. Three times. I came away shaken by the experience because I had difficulty being respectful to students who were not being so -- I'm never a fan of raised voices or students who're merely mouthpieces for propagandists.

By 5:30 I was in the Writing Center, where I proctored an exam, read some Leslie Marmon Silko and Barry Lopez's "The American Geographies," and helped a couple of students find an online research resource. At 7:00, the writing center assistant left me alone with my books, and I prepped a bit more for Thursday night's class before going back to my own office at 7:30. There I composed/recomposed, and finally posted a news message about the emotionally draining WGST course, read the first two tech writing reports on our class blog and posted a "Reminder" message based on the omissions of those first two reports, and updated online quizzes for tech writing and WGST.

I left the office at 8:45 so that I could get home to attend the 9:30 p.m. online Chat with the tech writers. By 10:30, I was back to my email, responding to a student's question about a room request for next week's "National Coming Out Day" film. Then I started writing this chronology.

So I'm about done teaching for the day, 13+ hours after I began. Sometimes people ask how many hours a week I "work." The answer is either something like 100 (all my non-sleeping, non-eating waking hours) or 0 because it's not work: it's my life.

Fun day

Today's classes went well -- energetic activities, students invested in what we were learning/doing, jokes and happy faces. I need days like this!

The Engl 90 students were turning in their second polished essays -- and all the prep work they'd done to create those essays (at least a half-dozen pieces of writing). Because they're all such visual folks (they'd already drawn some pictures -- reading someone else's essay about a person of influence and then drawing a picture of that person), I had them do another visual thing with their words:

Wordle

I've talked about it before on this blog because it's just so cool: you paste in any amount of text or the URL for a website, and the software generates a visual image of the words. Bigger words means greater frequency. You can play around with the colors, fonts, sizes, orientations, backgrounds -- even the languages! I told students that I wouldn't be able to read anything other than English - dang!

Oh, and speaking of language translation, today is International Translators' Day [this link has Wordles!]. I learned this from an audience member at Maxine Hong Kingston's talk tonight. And one of my tech writing students decided to give his oral presentation on Monday in Pirate. Yep, it's been a good day.

Anyway, the Engl 90 students loved Wordle; some of them went to other websites and saw what happened. A couple of students realized that if the biggest word on their Wordle was "the," maybe they need to use some sentence variety. Yes!

And now: here's a Wordle of this blog post.

Allegedly Real

This answering machine recording is supposed to be the real message that parents hear when they call a high school in Maroochydore, Queensland, Australia.

Good writers

This semester, I'm teaching English 90 again, a course that's to help students get ready to write college-level writing (whatever that is). The students have so many different kinds of issues when it comes to getting their thoughts down in writing.

Issues range all over the place: from not having thoughts they can clearly articulate . . . to not quite understanding what a sentence is; from not knowing how to read . . . to never having used a computer before; from getting by writing the most banal things to "please the teacher". . . to sharing so much of their lives that I feel pity and awe toward them.

But this semester, I have a couple of the strongest writers I've ever had in that class. These young people are investigating their lives and experiences in a profound, real way. They're connecting what they read to their own lives. They're grappling with complex topics related to literacy, education, identity, and meaning -- topics I think some of my colleagues don't yet grasp!

It's a pleasure to read their work -- sure, it's a bit raggedy when it comes to things like comma use and consistent verb tense. Sure, they randomly veer from first person plural to second person singular back to third person plural. But so what: they're thinking and writing, writing and thinking. I'm lucky to have them in class.

Getting cheerier

I received a lot of feedback on my last post -- primarily on my Facebook page (I sort of forget that I have the two linked). Thanks to everyone who's been sympathizing, strategizing, and listening to me.

Now here's another piece to cheer me up: In a recent Inside Higher Education, the excellent scholar and professor Dennis Baron [ignore the IHE typo of his name in the URL] answers questions about his new book on teaching, writing, technology, and history. The book's called A Better Pencil.

Baron offers a perspective I know but often forget -- that people being what we are (and have been), there is (and has been) more good than bad when it comes to how people teach, learn, and communicate with each other.

I especially like these lines about online education because they reflect my reality:

"But I do see some significant downsides to distance education. . . . I fear that completion rates for many online courses are still disappointingly low, that the quality of much of the education is also lower than what happens in the classroom -- of course I’m thinking about the kinds of courses that I [and] my colleagues teach, ones which don’t require memorization of a body of knowledge but instead call for analysis, speculation, exploration. Courses where reading is intensive, where group discussion produces many insights, and where evaluation can’t be done by machine." (emphasis added)

These are the kinds of courses I value, too, full of the kinds of spontaneous insightful moments that can't be predicted but can only be recognized and cultivated organically by an instructor who's paying attention to all of the people in the room. This instructor knows that "knowledge is socially constructed" and that the room of people s/he's with is a social organism with knowledge-making potential.

The whole interview is good: read it!

Very discouraged

A few college situations are converging to make me feel like I don't belong at this institution any more:

-- continued student complaint about a borderline grade that I have absolutely no reason to cut student a break on: s/he got many, many breaks already during the semester -- my honest attempt to help -- but now I'm feeling as if I should never be "nice" to a student because it will bite me in the butt.

-- department discussion about online courses dominated by [insert adjective here] faculty who have a vested interest in increasing online offerings because the increase will line their own pocketbooks. These are faculty whose "pedagogy" consists of 1) worksheet-type exercises, mostly graded by the software, so they simply have to "design" a course and go the the cabin or of 2) lectures (called "discussions") about topics of interest to said faculty, never bothering to help students understand why such topics might be of interest to the students, who are simply a captive audience.

-- college-wide committee work that serves the programs relatively well but the general education (or "liberal arts") courses/programs very poorly. I've been sitting in meetings listening to colleagues say things like "why can't they think like us?" [okay, not exactly those words], and my [silent] response is, "because what you're doing isn't thinking."

I'm beginning to think our institution isn't about student learning -- defined by me as students actually grappling with the difficult developmental processes that go along with absorbing new information, figuring out how to solve problems that are new, attempting to think for themselves and then articulate that thinking in writing.

Given a new campus-wide initiative, we seem to be about "student retention" (make them happy by giving a good grade so they come back) or more simply "student tuition" (sign up for the classes, pay, and then you have a tiny window for changing your mind and getting your money back -- barely enough time to figure out what kind of class/experience you've entered).

When I first joined this faculty, the institution still had a bit of its old reputation as the premier liberal-arts two-year college, the premier transfer institution. That's gone.

When I first joined, I was eager to make this place a place I wanted to work: joined a ton of committees and initiatives; committed a bunch of psychic and emotional energy. I still do way too much, to a large degree. There's absolutely NO recognition of this kind of commitment by the faculty -- done almost exclusively by the female faculty for no extra monetary compensation of any kind (dollars or reduced course load). It's outrageous.

It's way too early in the semester to feel this way. But I'm about ready to let students pick their own grades, to let me classes out 20 minutes early every day and/or skip a day a week like many of my colleagues, to spend no time commenting on student writing (just slap a good grade), to quit the teaching part of my job. I can still do the entertaining, the one-on-one tutoring, the course design. But why do I really need to teach when it's not valued where I work.

Why?

Update

Well, the keys I lost turned up the next day in the lost-and-found. So I guess I must have lost them somewhere (how's that for an obvious statement). I'm glad my suspicion is unfounded. Now if I could just locate my annotated textbook!!

Klepto Class

I'm beginning to think I have a kleptomaniac in one of my classes. Two very strange things have happened.

Strange thing one:
On the very first day of writing class, Aug. 24, my textbook was missing at the end of class. That's pretty odd since I bring my texts to every class. I thought maybe a student took mine home by mistake, and the mistake would be realized quickly because my text had notes, post-its, bookmarks, paper clips stuck all through it.

No one had my book when I asked on Aug. 26. Two students had dropped the course in the interim, so I suppose one of them could have the book and not know it.

Strange thing two:
Today, my car key went missing from that same writing class. I wore unusual clothes today -- boy's jeans and a t-shirt -- because I was doing a "gender is performance" talk in my women-and-gender-studies course later in the day. I wanted students to notice how differently I was dressed for this class meeting: I've worn skirts every day so far.

As I was walking to my first class, the writing class, I had put my office keys and car key in my jeans pocket, but it felt weird. I remember thinking, "But the point is to carry your keys in your pocket if you're doing masculinity." But I don't remember what I did with the keys after that.

At the end of the first class, which was a wild workshop because students had so many questions about the first essay portfolio they were turning in, I looked for my keys on top of my books -- just my office keys. "Oh, I must have left the car key in the office," I thought, and ran to the restroom for a quick break between classes.

Taught the second class, went back to the office to grade and read, then finally at 7:30 got ready to leave: no keys. Looked everywhere I'd been: no keys. The car's still in the parking lot, so no one's stolen it (which would have been easy since the keyring has an electronic locking/unlocking device), but still I have no car keys.

Luckily, Laura came to get me. Luckily, I have a spare set of keys and a spare car so I can get to work tomorrow.

But it's extremely, extremely weird that two things have gone missing during the same class. What other explanation can there be?

Blogging is New

Many of my technical writing students -- mostly sophomores -- have never blogged, don't know what a blog is, are a bit leery of this thing called "blogging." We're using a blog, hosted by Blogger, to discuss "Technical Writing in the News," which they find out about by subscribing to Google Alerts (use "technical writing" as the Search Term and "News" as the Type).

This casual, audience-centered forum lets students try out some conversation about information we might be able to chat about if we were in a residential-campus setting: we'd perhaps read similar news items, looking for stories about technical writing, and then chat about them in the cafeteria, hallway, student lounge.

Since we're a commuter campus, I try to make the blog an online space for such chatter: you get a news alert that has "technical writing" in it -- perhaps a job post, a human-interest story, a "jobs going to India" story -- and then post what you think about it on the blog. Classmates can read the same alert and concur/disagree/expand. Students learn about audience, diction, technology, purpose: all technical writing concepts.

I like this assignment, and even though many students are completely new to blogging, they end up liking it, too.

High School Stars

Tonight, I helped out a pal of mine who teaches English at North High in Minneapolis: she set aside time for her AP students to come by -- in the evening! -- to get some specialized information to help them get prepared for their AP courses this fall. She asked me to talk about literary analysis in particular, so this afternoon I created a handout, not knowing if I'd be talking with 2 students or 20.

In fact, six young men showed up -- and one young woman about 30 minutes into the session -- who were eager, intelligent, highly energetic and accomplished athletes. They listened, asked and answered questions, offered interpretations that showed they'd had practice thinking of alternatives.

I was impressed with the truly beautiful combination of rowdy joshing with each other and respectful listening with me (and the other teachers present, who were all known to them).

Ideally, they'll all attend college and earn degrees, but the demographics do work against them: ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic class matter. Here's hoping that these seven engaged young people defy the odds.

MIA!

The Voki avatar I made the other day for my online course "welcome" message took me about 45 minutes to create. I wasn't familiar with the software, and then the uploading to the course management system took more steps than were obvious.

But now, that work has disappeared! As I'm double/triple-checking the course websites for the semester that starts tomorrow, I do NOT find the avatar! I don't see the facsimile of myself saying "Welcome to this class" in the voice of Kate. :-(

Dang! What happened!

*UPDATE!* The issue is Firefox. With Safari as my browser, I can see the avatars. Yea!
*DOUBLE UPDATE* But I can't edit the html in D2L when I use my MacBook. Boo!

Does she look like me?

Revving Up

The new semester begins in three weeks (just less than that, actually), and I'm wondering where my summer went! Of course, I was teaching (both a f2f and an online course), driving around the country on great road trips (Bemidji, Madison, Chicago, New York, Montreal -- not always in that order), and next week I'll fly to San Antonio for a visit.

But I'm beginning to pull together ideas for my fall classes, and I found this new multi-authored blog: Ecology of Education | Exploring the Ecosystems of Learning.

Although the site seems primarily addressed to K-12 educators (the most amazing and under-appreciated public servants in our country), I'm finding some great information there, too. Just the metaphor alone needs to be more widely understood: Ecology, indeed!

Check it out.

P.S. Here's one more resource: a delicious.com list of sites for classroom ideas from Active Learning Carnival. I found it via the MnSCU CTL blog (see at right).

On another note

I have been considering whether or not to post the YouTube video of a bunch of boys (some quite young) harrassing a man after Sunday's Pride festival. Now that MPR has written a news story about it, I'll pass it along.

If you check out the original YouTube video, you'll see that some of the commenters just turn their hatred on the Somali boys: as if two wrongs make a right.

And one comment confirms Suzanne Pharr's assertion that homophobia is a weapon of sexism: the comment reads "you have to feel sorry for the guy, but in the few times you see him speak, he's handling himself like a 14-year old girl." Clearly, acting like a 14-year-old girl is NOT a good thing. Right.

Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world where acting like a 14-year-old girl was a COMPLIMENT? Something to aspire to? To admire?

No Dumb Questions

This weekend I "worked" (it was just as much fun as it was work) for the college at the Twin Cities Pride Festival. Although I was pretty frustrated on Thursday (schlepping boxes, a tent, a table drape -- all at three different locations on the campus, all involving parking in weird and even prohibited spaces, all while in a long skirt on a hot-and-humid day), by Sunday evening with the re-packing of my car I was happy and energized, reminded why I do this important work.

I probably talked with nearly a hundred people: some current students, some alums and former students, some really interested prospective students, a few faculty members, and many random interesting folks.

The stories I heard made me think about this good website, "No Dumb Questions," which provides video clips of LGBTQA folks -- stories we all need to hear. Here's a good example:

Woolf

Virginia Woolf's brilliance still shines out through the Hollywood hype that's become her life story: a testament to her genius. Although students wanted to know if I thought Woolf was bi-polar (why does it matter, I asked back), they also wanted to wrestle with her formidable imagination and intellect.

We talked about "A Room of One's Own" today, and despite the students' insistence on talking *way* too much about the title's significance (yeah, duh), the conversation did turn around to her important honoring of the legacy of women who wrote despite *not* having that room (Austen, Bronte, Bronte, Eliot, Cavendish, Behn).

Her work gets better every time I read it: at 20, I didn't understand much but knew I liked her non-fiction more than her fiction. Now I think Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most *true* novels I've read.

What a great opening line: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

Data!

I've just found out about a couple of pretty amazing websites:
"City-Data.com" -- type in your zip code to find out TONS of information about where you live
"Wolfram/Alpha" -- type in names, dates, equations, you name it

The web is becoming a space/place where we can find out almost any countable thing . . . which means we have to remind ourselves of a sign hanging in Alfred Einstein's office: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

This sentence is reversed at a terrific website: Philanthropy Potluck, the blog of the Minnesota Council on Foundations.

MIA

This morning's class meeting held some surprises for me: the good one was the *excellent* activity our facilitators devised for discussing Jane Austen's "Love and Freindship" (a parody Austen wrote at age 15!). They had pairs of students write *response* letters to Laura, imagining what Marianne might write. Most of the young women students were *really accurate* in their Marianne voices: a pleasure.

The not-so-good surprise had to do with the presence of three students who haven't been to class in a l...o...n...g time:

• One had only attended the first day, May 26, and has missed the last five class meetings (out of 17 total meetings).
• One emailed me yesterday to say she'd had strep throat AND had just moved (ahem) to explain why she's missed the last three classes. I read and responded to that email yesterday afternoon.
• One emailed me last night at 1:00 a.m. to say she'd been in Chicago (her brother was injured and her parents, who are on vacation in France, asked her to go check on him) to explain why she's missed the last four classes. I read that email after class this morning.

Now I'm not quite sure what to do. I thought they'd all dropped! None of them has posted on the class discussion board. They don't seem to have read the attendance policy for our course, and when they asked about it, I couldn't remember the nitty-gritty details myself (I tweak my policies for every course, depending upon the time-frame and subject matter, but the overall idea is that I allow a certain number of absences for any reason before consequences kick in).

Evidently, my attendance policy this summer semester (for a six-week course that's supposed to be the equivalent of a sixteen-week semester) isn't clear -- here's what the syllabus says [emphasis in original]:

"You can earn up to ten (10) attendance points per face-to-face class period, which I determine based on your attendance and participation, for a total of 170 possible points. If you must miss a face-to-face class meeting, you can recoup some of those lost points by contributing a substantial discussion board posting within 24 hours for the class period you missed (by 8:00 a.m. on the day after the missed class). This posting can earn you up to five (5) points. Missing two class periods without posting to the discussion board will cause your final grade for the course to drop by one whole grade. Missing four or more classes without posting to the discussion board will result in an automatic F grade for the course. Missing four or more classes even with posting to the discussion board will cause your final grade for the course to drop one whole grade."

I suppose all that is confusing when you look at it in a big block of prose like that -- I should format the information in a box/chart/table or something. But the numbers seem pretty clear to me, and we note this paragraph on our first day of class when we review the course policies.

Also, I guess it's just fine for students to attend a course that they've already earned an F in . . . some learning can still take place (not that taking a class has anything to do with learning for most summer students -- ouch, I'm cynical!). But most of the students said they were taking this summer literature course because it "was cheaper" (two students are earning master's degrees at two of our local private colleges, and this 200-level community college literature course somehow fulfills requirements for them!).

Hmmm. Thoughts?

Frankenstein

Video clip of the 1994 Kenneth Branagh movie: much more faithful to Mary Shelley's novel than the Boris Karloff versions! Although the relationship between Robert and Victor isn't quite right, at least Robert Walton shows up -- as does the icy North Pole!

Really Great Workshop

I'd been nervous about giving a three-hour workshop on our college's Common Book (The Latehomecomer) to my colleagues: what if I bomb? What if they've just signed up to criticize? But all went well.

My partner was easy to work with: professional and approachable, sincere in her willingness to share what she's done with the Common Book. My colleagues were colleagial, sharing what had worked for them and inventing new ideas right on the spot.

We received compliments all around: one person even said she admired the way I demonstrated the techniques I was teaching about. All in all, a nice afternoon.

How I hate

Hate, hate, hate our governor's attitude: in today's press conference, he called us higher education folks "whiny" and "complainers"! He *consistently* disrespects us public servants -- especially in public, in the media.

Good News

Here's a Google News site that just posts good news! It's a great resource for students . . . for showing how a fake news site can look legit.

Wouldn't the world be good if this site was NOT a fake?