That Panicky Feeling

I wonder how many students realize that instructors feel the same end-of-the-semester panic as they feel - okay, maybe not the same, but similar.

The final reading-through of student work enables me to see who's taken advice, who's not able to do so (for a variety of reasons), who's needing to take the course again. With writing, because it's a skill, taking the course a couple of times gets students up to where they need to be.

I am plowing through my files, looking at final re-writes, grading revisions, recording scores, calculating attendance, getting reading to do some calculations. Actually, I don't like calculating their final grade until the end of the semester because I don't want to interact with a student in a way that says "Oh, this student isn't ever going to get more than a X grade, so why bother with substantive comments?" I think that ALL of my students deserve to be taught, even those who won't pass my class this semester. They've all paid their tuition, so they all deserve my engaged attention. It's too easy for me to write-off the slackers if I know that they're flunking anyway - that seems unfair to me. So I refrain from doing any math until the end of the semester. But I still feel panicked and pressured about it!

Late Night Peepers

My Comp 1 class has just ended - 9:57 p.m. It's supposed to go until 9:50 p.m., but with workshop tonight, the last few questioners hung in there. One of the joys of a late night in the office: dark outside and the frogs chirping-peeping-singing outside my window. Even though it's not open. Even though I'm on the third floor and quite a ways from the pond to the south of campus.

Those spring persistences: hardworking students and chirping frogs.

Don't want to lose her . . .

An *excellent* student has just sent me an email message saying she's feeling overwhelmed and needs to drop the course. This email has arrived AFTER the drop date for the semester, AFTER I'd just returned a lovely essay by her (one of the best in the class), and AFTER an especially insightful series of contributions she made to our class writing workshop. I know that students have full lives and that my class is only one of her priorities, but I'm shocked at the (potential) loss of this excellent student.

She's a returning adult who thinks college isn't the place for her - but it is! I see her just once a week in the evenings, which isn't enough time to make those casual "nice job" or "good to see you" comments that you can make when you see students a couple times a week. I've sent what I hope is an encouraging email asking her to stay. I hope she can.

Grammar Ninja

I have been assisting Scott Simonsen's ITT 2080 Technology Planning and Architecture class, all computer guys. I had hoped that Grammar Ninja would be fun as a starting point for talking about sentence construction. Unfortunately, none of the classroom computers could access the game, not through Windows or Linux. They all claimed it was because Flash sucks, but I don't know. They all tried valiantly to access it - some could hear the game but not see it; others could not hear it but could see part of the questions. Very frustrating. But they were good sports.

Creating an Exam

The process I go through for creating a fair, reasonable, challenging exam for my students always wears me out. I spent three hours creating one for my night class, and this is after I brainstorm with them about the content they'd like to see on the exam. "Knowledge is socially constructed," I tell them, "so tell me what you've learned this semester so I can ask you some questions about it and you can show me what you know." Often, students just want to list names and stories ("I remember Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl'!" or "I liked Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'!"). So I can create a matching section with this information, but it's not exactly higher-order thinking (remember Bloom's taxonomy?).

Anyway, I'll say more about this in a while - after I answer the phone that's ringing right now!!

What's wrong with this picture?

Late January - I return for the new semester to teach in my usual computer classroom. It's been painted (very pretty curried squash color), but the back-wall whiteboard is missing. I submit a request asking if/when/can the whiteboard be replaced. I use the web-based request system that I've been instructed to use (clicking on a link called "Information Technology Service Center" and filling out a ten-field form that I have filled out many times before but which cannot retain my identifying information).

Late April - I receive a voice mail message regarding my request for the whiteboard, a nice man who notes that it's been a long time since I submitted the request. He says that I submitted the request to the wrong department and must resubmit to "Facilities," which I look for on the web-based request system. There, I find a link called "Plant Mainenance Service Center" with an ten-field form that's identical to the "Information Technology Service Center" form, except for the word "Maintenance" in the header. I must re-fill in all ten fields because this form does not recognize my computer. I submit my request again.

Even later in April - I receive an email notification from an Automated Mail Service that my request (called a "Work Order") has been completed. The notification reads as follows: "I reclassified this. It was submitted as a bulletin board request. White Boards are not covered by the policy. Status: Completed. Please do not respond to this email."

So now what do I do? Who is the "I" above? Will the white board ever show up? And who could possibly have mistaken a white board for a bulletin board?

Infrastructure and communication: two HUGE problems at my institution.

Editing vs. Grading

I don't think I've mentioned that I've been doing a bit of editing/proofreading - something I love and have to say that I think I'm pretty good at. And editing isn't the same as grading: I get to suggest changes without assigning any evaluation to those changes. How refreshing!

One big document was a legal thing: report about a child custody dispute. The other document was a manuscript: novel/memoir that moved me enough to email my own mother (the protagonist's mother dies of ovarian cancer). For both of these projects, I did have to call my pal who's an M.D. to check out the "facts" about specific medical terminology. She never fails to answer my questions, and she's one of the smartest people I know.

Here's where playing softball comes in handy for an academic: softball friends know a lot about a lot of things, and I can ask my softball pals (with whom I've been playing for probably 20 years) about a range of topics: medicine, other health care topics, social services, the phone company, high school teaching, private school administration, small business ownership, computer-geekiness, physical therapy, city administration, accounting. These are all specialities of my teammates.


My message? Anyone who teaches in a college should play a team sport. :-)

Safety First?

Yesterday, I was going to post something about the Virginia Tech tragedies, something related to education, something like "We education professionals have always been at risk - this tragedy could happen anywhere" or something like "What could have so profoundly affected this young man that he had to act in such a ferocious, powerful, permanent way?"

Today, I hear the spin and pop of our media: clamoring for first-person accounts from student witnesses, attempting "analysis" that only reinforces the racial and class divides in our country, setting up an ugly clash between pro- and anti-gun groups. As if the Second Amendment has anything to do with the current state of violence in our country.

Our college president sent a message to the entire college community, a good move, I think, although his focus on safety seems wrong to me: a human being can't be kept "safe" from incidents like these.

Century Colleagues,

It is with great sadness that we extend our sympathies to the students, staff, and families at Virginia Tech. We share in their grief and distress over the senseless shooting deaths of 32 students yesterday.

As our thoughts turn to the safety and security of our own campus, I want to reassure you of our commitment to keeping the Century campus safe and secure. The College has policies and procedures in place designed to prevent such tragedies, and our public safety staff remain in a state of heightened awareness and vigilance. We will continue to monitor what is learned from the incident at Virginia Tech, and we will use that knowledge to improve our own response plans and campus security.

Please contact Mark Holper, Director of Public Safety, or Ron Anderson should you have concerns about the safety of any member of our campus community. This terrible loss reminds us all of the value and the need for supporting each other as a community.

Larry Litecky
President

'tis the Season

For letters of recommendation! I've been asked by at least a half-dozen students, which makes me feel proud. I'm pleased that they consider me a good judge of their achievements and skills. Most of the students who've asked me to write are exceptional, and it's a pleasure to articulate this fact to the awards committee. (I write an awesome letter, if I do say so myself.)

Even more important to me, though, is that the students themselves hear how exceptional I think they are: I always give them a copy of the letter for their own files. I remember how proud I was when my professors praised me - I'm returning the favor.

Actually this semester, I've been trying to be the kind of professor that I wished I'd had as an undergraduate: I've been listening a LOT more to students who come to me to talk about their lives, their worries, their worlds. Sure, I'm behind on my grading, but when someone drops by and says (like yesterday), "I'm just bored so I thought I'd come talk to you," I'm thrilled. Okay, maybe a little panicked and irritated because I was trying to read a bunch of reports to prepare for a meeting, but what's more important that talking with a first-year student who's trying to wrap her head around Peggy McIntosh's "invisible knapsack" idea? Or the student who's working for the City of St. Paul and begun teaching her co-workers what she's learning in our technical writing class? Or the student who's started a gay soccer league and wants me to pass out his flyers to students in my Intro to GLBT Studies course?

Today, I'm feeling all the exceptional energy of my work: it's a good day.

Two cool things

1) I've been re-reading Mrs. Dalloway for my British Lit course, and I'm reminded that Virginia Woolf is a genius. I hope my students resist the urge to read SparkNotes or GradeSaver instead of the novel itself.

2) Lake Superior Community College has a helpful peer review site for faculty teaching online. We at Century should steal some of it!

PainInTheEnglish.com

Found this link when I was looking for an answer to my question about using "age" vs. "aged" in the following sentence: Zoe, age(d) 19, attends McGill University.

Still don't have a clear answer to that question, but the website I discovered is cool!

Too Long (or maybe too short)

Well, this week has been a long one - it's two weeks, really, I suppose. I said I was going to post something about the 4Cs conference, but I've not gotten around to it because I haven't even caught up with my students' papers! I didn't "work" very much over the break, which means that I didn't read/grade the midterm exams and midterm essays that my students turned in before they went on break.

My philosophy is that students should have a break at spring break, so I don't ask them to turn in their midterm work after break. But that means I have a ton of work during break. This break, I spent most of it at a conference, so I didn't get much grading done.

Hmmm, does this sound like whining or rationalizing? I'm not sure anymore . . . :-)

Back to real life - work

New York and 4Cs was amazing in almost every way: intellectually stimulating (I haven't thought so much about ethos in a while), professionally invigorating (met lots of colleagues from around the country), and sensually complex (wind-and-rainy days, best cannoli in Manhattan found on the Lower East Side, MOMA-orama, subway smells!). Now I'm grading my online students' work, trying not to procrastinate too much by feeling nostalgic for the heady environment of NYC.

Thought I might catch up . . .

. . . how silly! Sure, it's spring break, but I've got 4Cs to go to (and a paper to write for it!). Also, I told my office mate that I wanted to see the tabletop in my office - fat chance.

I've not written at all about how the local conference went (relatively well, given all the complications and mixed messages). I've also wanted to write about the task of creating exams, which I tell my students are "opportunities for you to show me what you know." That's true, but it takes skill to design something that will enable them to do this - maybe I'll write more about that later.

Meanwhile, I hope I can post something about 4Cs this week in NYC - I'm looking forward to it!

Conference Planning

Seems like a small job, really - how hard can it be to set up rooms, tables, food, vendors, technology, volunteers, parking, signs, escorts, publication for a small conference on our campus? I didn't even have to read the session proposals or figure out registration.

Not a small job. A really, really big job. Communication is amazing - amazingly complex. I'm weary. I've talked with at least a dozen people about many details, about hurt feelings, about misunderstood requests. I've emailed at least thirty different messages in the last 24 hours alone, one to the entire college community to clarify some complications.

I've done lots more - too silly to list everything here, but perhaps I will some time just to record the minutia. It's a learning experience, as they say (maybe I should learn to say "no thank you"?).

Gripes: Small and Small-ish

Small:
Why won't the html tags I insert in my "Keeping Track" list stick? I want the list to be a *list*, not a paragraph. Whenever I refresh, I have to re-add the coding to get the line breaks, and then as soon as I access it again, the breaks are all gone. Irritating.

Small, sort of: Last week during our "Student Success Day," an online student came in for a f2f conference. It was good to meet her - she's the best student in the online courses. But she "suggested" that I post everyone's grades for everyone's assignments so that everyone could "see where we are at." She said it would help her know how hard to work. I just don't get that. Maybe I'm just a victim of my own temperament and pedagogical training, but it seems to me that I should resist every effort at making students compete with each other. Education is about learning for me. And learning depends upon so many individual human factors that it seems ridiculous to think that you can tell anything important about your own learning by comparing your scores to your classmates' scores. I guess I'm an idealist. I thanked her for her suggestion and said I'd think about it.

A bit larger: Another student in one of my literature courses has been bugging me about "what's on the test?" She's the class English major, too. It's so discouraging. I don't think she's read even a tenth of the assignments so far this semester, based on her lack of contributions to class discussion, and the midterm is tomorrow night. She doesn't seem interested in analyzing literature at all; she asks questions all the time like "Do we have to know the author of this story?" and "What do we have to know for the midterm?" She seems to think that identification is all that matters, which is such a low-level learning outcome if we consider Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. I conducted the midterm review last week by asking them to pull out their syllabi, and we looked at the course objectives, which are what drive the activities I plan for the course.

These objectives all begin with "When you finish this course, you will be able to do the following:" For example, the first one is "describe the history and features of the genre of the short story" (okay, too many prepositional phrases). This objective directly ties to the work we did the first two weeks of the semester, where we read and discussed the history, and to the work we've been doing all semester in our class discussion about the elements of stories.
So in our review last week, many students -- non-English majors, mind you -- began looking through their notes and the text to pick out things they'd remembered discussing or reading. The second objective is "recognize the names and works of some important figures in this tradition, understanding why they are considered important." This one, too, resulted in most students shouting out names of significant authors (Edgar Allan Poe, for example, and Kate Chopin). The truculent student asks, "Do we have to know all of the stories they wrote?" (Each of these authors has two short or short-short stories in our textbook, stories that we've talked about more than once, one that we even saw a film about.)

So I guess, basically, she wants someone else to tell her what to know. We had a discussion about this tendency in my composition course when one student introduced everyone to "SparkNotes." I told them that this is what I think about SparkNotes:

"Does anyone in here know how baby birds are fed? Well, their parents eat and digest food and then vomit it into the babies' open mouths. Of course, this feeding has a legitimate function - it provides nutrition at the baby stage - just like SparkNotes has a legitimate function, to be the starting point when you're trying to learn something important about a new subject. But are you baby birds? Do you want your ideas about literature/history/philosophy/etc. predigested and vomited into your heads? Or do you want to feed yourselves by eating and digesting the literature/history/philosophy/etc. yourselves?"

So now we have a code phrase - "Baby bird?" - when we talk about where they've gotten their ideas. I kind of like it.

Online teaching vs. Online learning

I'm in the middle of grading a batch of assignments for one of my online courses. It's taking a very long time (a minimum of a half-hour per student) because of how long it takes to read and think and write comments to them. And this time is just the grading time, not the course instruction time (via discussion board, news items, emails). I'm not sure yet if it's more time than a regular classroom, but it certainly feels like it is - maybe it's the lack of variety in the mode of interaction I have with the students because everything is mediated by the technology.

I'm thinking that the right way to talk about the terms "online teaching" and "online learning" is to call it "online delivery" because the teaching and learning gets subordinated to the technology, at least in the courses I teach online (technical writing). When I first agreed to teach tech writing online, it seemed the perfect course because tech writing requires familiarity with technology and because it's about writing. Online courses are ALL about writing because every single student-instructor or student-student interaction happens via writing. Students and instructors write a LOT, so it's a natural fit in a writing course, I think, because my pedagogy relies on the premise that people learn to write better by writing. The more we do, the more we get better at doing it.

But I'm continually frustrated by the constraints of online teaching because my students are getting such a thin experience in the course, it seems. It's tough to provide substantial feedback to all of the students without getting just plain tired of writing the same thing over and over, keeping tabs on my tone and sentence structure, knowing that many students don't read it (they just look at their scores) unless they want to pick a fight with me. Thank goodness for the best students who take an online course (or any course) because they want to learn something, not just click through a bunch of modules in order to receive a score/grade that's acceptable to them (which is only an A or B).

This job I have is hard.

Collegial . . .

Just spent an hour reading a colleague's portfolio - one to be submitted for a Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Teaching. It's risky to show a colleague your work, your student comments, your assignments, your teaching philosophy. What I read revealed a lot about my colleague, and I'm impressed - frankly, honored - by the trust it implies.

I wrote an entirely-too-long email responding to the portfolio, an email that'll arrive approximately 18 hours before the portfolio is due. Will my comments be of any use, especially because they're not especially analytical or diagnostic: they're mostly questions, queries, musings about the uncomfortable places in the document. What would I do with the kind of information I just gave to a colleague?

Why did I think I could . . .

. . . keep track of the work I do?? I mean, I've been trying to keep a count of (trying to account for?) the student work I read, respond to, and evaluate. But I'm woefully behind in my accouting, even though I've handed back one set of papers to my Comp 1 class and two sets to my two Technical Writing classes. Oy!

What's in a grade?

On Wednesday afternoon, I was walking across the bridge that connects the two halves of my campus, through a flurry of snowflakes, on my way to an interminable but important meeting. I'd been grading papers all morning, and I was thinking about how someone who was an administrator instead of an instructor would hear that phrase "grading papers." It sounds simple, but what does it really entail?

For me, grading requires a lot: First I have to read the students' essays/documents. This means decifering (especially if they've handwritten their work), decoding (especially if they've used language and syntax in a way they think is sophisticated), understanding what they were saying AND what they were trying to say, diagnosing the issues behind that gap. So these are all the actions just for reading the students' work.

Next comes assessing, figuring out how this particular document compares with the criteria we're using to analyze writing, criteria that I've handed out to them, of course. "Is the lack of development in this essay a 10 out of 20 points or 12 out of 20 points?" This assessment is linked to the diagnosis above because the assessment is a way to help the students see what they've got to work on this semester.

Then comes composing the comment that I write to accompany the essay scores. This comment has to be sufficiently encouraging and yet critically accurate - no small feat. And I write knowing that many, many students don't even look at what I've written - they've been conditioned to react to a score or grade because that's what gets measured.

[Aside: I read a quote from Einstein: "Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted, counts." Yep.]

And finally, I must hand the documents back to the students, who're nervous, as am I sometimes, because they feel judged - their writing is *them* - and I completely understand this feeling. I can say over and over, "The score is for this artifact, not for you. The comments are to help you figure out how to improve your score if you choose to do so." But the whole institution of education conditions them to ignore these kinds of comments.

So that's what I've been doing when I've been "grading papers."