Didn't do it

Of the twenty-two students in my afternoon FYC class, only two came with the completed homework today: a ten-item annotated bibliography. They'd had a week to do it.

Some said they didn't understand what "annotated" meant (okay, didn't hear me talk about it in class, didn't read their textbook). One said she didn't know what "item" meant (okay, I should have said "ten-source bibliography" I guess). Four hadn't been in class a week ago to get the assignment (indeed, have missed the last two weeks and so were woefully behind in our whole research process toward the researched essay).

As a result, I had to completely revamp what I wanted to do in class. We did *look* at this rubric for evaluating sources, but we couldn't *do* it or *use* it with our own sources because folks hadn't prepared.

How are they going to do their essays in the next two weeks? The past two weeks were supposed to be about finding and reading sources.

Grading, Grading

Grading never ends: conferences tomorrow to hand back all the essays I've graded today. Some of the conversations are going to be tough because it seems to me that I've done more research/writing on some students' research questions than they have. Not good.

What do I say to someone who dismisses out-of-hand Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe (and admits to not understanding it) yet embraces whole-heartedly Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle?

Good news

Courtney's doing okay - considering. She's got friends and family around her, and as she said: with the hospitalizations and illnesses these past few years, she's been preparing for this end all along. She's amazingly philosophical.

The memorial service is Saturday. My colleague Brian and I will attend for sure.

Another death

One of the students I'm closest to at Century is Courtney, the current president of the Q&S Club I advise. This morning, I was on campus at 7:40 to pick up Courtney and possibly another student in order to drive them to the Minnesota OUT! Campus Conference in Mankato.

After waiting almost 20 minutes for the uncharacteristically tardy Courtney, I called her cell and got her sister: Courtney wouldn't be attending the conference because her father'd died that morning. Courtney had gone in to wake him for a ride to campus and found him.

I'm devastated. I'd met him once -- he'd tried to hand me a $20 for gas money when I drove Courtney home from Pride this June -- and he was a kind, odd man. The two of them lived together, and I can't even imagine how Courtney is going to cope. Her family is fragmented, so I just can't imagine. And I have so little knowledge of how to act in this kind of situation.

Just for fun

Any cat fans out there?

From my colleague Brian.

What a week

I have to say that I've been nervous since my last post: I wasn't sure about the Presidential election outcome. I still remember the shock of 2000, of going to bed confident that Gore would be our President and waking up to the horror of Bush. Some friends had asked what I would do if Obama didn't "win"; I would joke about moving to Canada, but seriously I started quaking when contemplating a non-Obama future.

(This week, I've had a seriously hard time focusing on work, and I'm behind grading student assignments. I haven't talked with them at all about the election specifically (too many students with huge McCain Palin stickers on their notebooks), but we have had many discussions and exercises about detecting argument moves, conducting rhetorical analysis, uncovering logical fallacies. That's the most I could manage; I suppose I was fearful I'd have to engage in some kind of argument with a person whose strongly held values come from their parents.)

This year, I watched the formerly-red states turn blue on the big screen TV at my friend's house, watching the numbers roll in with my politic son and his smart friend (masters degree from Brown in public affairs and public policy). It's terrific to see history happening with smart, like-minded people, to watch a Harvard law grad give a calm, intelligent speech that suggests the calm, intelligent decision-maker and leader he will be.

Logical Fallacies, again

I'm always challenged when I teach logic in a composition course. It's not strict mathematical syllogism that the philosophers study/teach; it's the rhetorical syllogism Aristotle lays out for his students -- he calls this the "enthymeme."

I'm thinking of that kind of rhetorical reasoning as I read an article entitled "The Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid," which points out faulty causality. The writer is a smart blogger, Kathy G. of "The G Spot: Politics, Economics, Feminism, Labor, Culture, Ideas." She's responding to a Wall Street Journal article called "Vote Republican if You Want Equal Pay." The writer of that article "looked at Census data on women's pay relative to men's in every presidential administration from LBJ to the present. And lo and behold, he found that women's relative pay increased far more under Republican presidents than Democrat ones."

The cause? Well, you'll have to look at the article yourself, but let's just say that more than one thing can cause a statistic to rise (pay increases can show up in one group because another group's pay *decreases*). Kathy G. rightly points out that men's falling salaries during Republican presidents can make women's salaries appear to rise.

Uh huh. I like smart women.

What an experience!

Class Assignment: Evaluation essay, using the genre of restaurant review.
Student's Topic: Jax Cafe
Student's Sentence: "There is a waterfall and greenery along with a pond that has live trout that they catch and cook for the guests swimming around."

Lovely reading

Friday night's event was terrific: great selection of poets and prose writers. Cullen's the best reader: serious, slow, respectful of the poem and of her listeners. Other writers read well, too -- one poet in particular who acted out her poem, but not in a cheesy way (a remarkable feat, actually). Only a couple folks seemed to zip or stumble through. Most writers were from MN and IA -- don't know if that's true for all of the contributors. Makes you realize we have *really good* writers in our neck-of-the-woods. One thing I noted, though: I'd forgotten how important it is to wear black to such events!

The gathering afterward in the auditorium lobby was a bit awkward: cramped space, food difficult to eat without sitting down (and the meatballs were terrible - like dog food!). Even in such straits, however, a nice red wine (even if its in a plastic "glass") can make an evening an occasion.

Water~Stone Review

TONIGHT, Oct. 24, at Hamline University, 7:30 p.m., the publication reading for the 11th issue of Water~Stone Review, a literary journal published locally by the Hamline University Graduate School of Liberal Studies.

GO! You'll hear the emotionally eloquent poet (and Century College faculty member) Cullen Bailey Burns read some of her exquisite poems. I don't know what she'll read tonight, but you can read these by clicking on them: "Involution" "We Just Want It to be Healthy" "Nostalgia"

Here's a tribute to Cullen by a former student: it shows you something of the powerful teacher she is.

Here's a blog entry about Cullen's publications on the side of Black Cherry Berry Celestial Seasonings tea boxes.

Here's another blog entry about Cullen's Sweet Apple Chamomile box.

Cullen's lovely book of poems is Paper Boat. Buy it!!

Loss. Prevention.

This morning is the funeral for a Century student, Jeremy Caulkins, who took his own life last week. His brother Chris is on our faculty and has been working on raising campus awareness about depression, the apparent cause of his brother's death (and the cause of Chris's wife's suicide some years ago).

Yesterday afternoon, I listened to the amazing writer Kate Bornstein talk about many things, among them her six close-calls with suicide: she planned it down to "a T six times," she said, but she never attempted it. She always found something to stop her, and she wrote a book about those alternatives, a radical-truth-telling book I immediately bought: Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws.

I'm going to recommend that our library order this book. Perhaps books truly are medicine.

Lost opportunity?

Education Minnesota, formerly known as the Minnesota Education Association, has its yearly conference in mid-October -- right now, to be exact. Educators from around the state, primarily in K-12 education, gather to hear speakers, go to workshops, and visit exhibits in the St. Paul RiverCentre. In other words, it's a normal conference.

I've just skimmed the Exhibitors list, and I see some higher education institutions have booths: Alexandria Technical College, Augsburg, Bemidji State, Bethel, St. Catherine, St. Scholastica, Concordia, Hamline, Mankato, North Hennepin CC, St. Cloud, UW-River Falls, UW-Stout, U of M (both Twin Cities and Duluth), St. Thomas -- even Globe "University" and Walden.

Notice anything about this list? Century's absent. Yet we have an "education program," a relatively new program designed to produce "paraeducators" as well as students who will transfer to four-year education programs.

Why isn't Century setting up shop at this conference? Especially when we are trying to grow our program. I really don't understand the choices our institution makes.

Video Your Vote

Check this out: PBS has teamed up with YouTube on a project called "Video Your Vote." They're inviting voters to take cameras when we vote, using them to record what our experience is like. Long lines? Confusing ballots? Broken machines? Video what we see and submit the videos to YouTube.

Wow - what an intersection of technology and democracy. What a *great* way to empower citizens, to document real experience, to reveal the material conditions of people around the country.

Can you imagine what Florida in 2000 would have looked like if folks had videoed their experiences with the "butterfly ballot" (does anyone even remember these)?

Technology: extending the speed and reach of humanity.

Feels like work

I've had a good day, accomplished some important things, it seems (or feels -- pick your copula).

My FYC students took their midterm exam, and my three-exam option evidently worked pretty well since they all buckled down and impressed me with their serious attention to the task. I made three exams: an "objective" exam consisting of multiple-choice questions, short answer questions, matching, etc. This one was in response to a student who really, really didn't want to write an in-class essay. I made five copies of this exam for my 25 students, estimating correctly.

The second and third exams were in-class essays, one a version of previous exams which included five options. These options ask students to refer back to readings from their textbook in order to answer the questions. I made 15 copies of this exam, printed on green paper, which turned out to be about right.

The third version was a completely new exam, asking students to conduct a rhetorical analysis of two short essays that appeared this month as editorials in my NEA Advocate newsletter. They had to read these new essays and find some of the rhetorical strategies we've been talking about this semester, strategies readily apparent in the essays (sadly, one exhibited so many logical fallacies and FYC infelicities that it's embarrassing the writer is a higher education professional!). I printed 10 copies of this option, more than twice what I needed, on yellow paper.

The other important task for today was getting the Q&S Club Lending Library set up - finally! I started this task in August before the semester began. But I hadn't labeled all the books (thought it might be a task for the Q&S Club members, but no one's been showing up to meetings except the club president). Today I printed signs, created the sign-out sheet (the honor system here), and stacked the bookshelf outside my office. So far, 35 books are available, mostly non-fiction. I hope they'll be safe in the hallway without monitoring. (Speaking of monitoring, the club president and I put up a table full of literature about "ally week," hoping that the materials don't get discarded by a bigot -- it's happened on campus before.)

So lots of work done: exams created, essays collected, students tutored (good online office hours today with my online students), library created, collegial conversations had with many (don't get me started on Turnitin.com, which one of my colleagues thought might be a good thing to purchase -- NO!).

What could students learn

I'm fascinated by the interplay of images and text. This video via The Margins of Error impresses me on so many levels, but how can I use it in class? Ideas welcome.


Oh, yeah, and then there's this kind of visual argument: this comic is a brilliant way to teach so many things.
via xkdc: A webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language. Click to enlarge and see the message.

Students don't realize

In all my courses, I give exams. But these exams must be tailored to every class because my pedagogy requires me to teach the students who appear in my classrooms, not to teach subject matter.

In the liberal arts, my students and I become a community of learners that focuses on something slightly different every semester. This variation is especially common in a composition course because it's a skill-building course, not so-much a "content specific" course.

So this week, I've asked students what they'd like to see on the Midterm Exam because my philosophy of exams is that they're opportunities for students to show me what they've learned. I really want them to do well, to show me their strengths, to tell me what they feel confident that they've understood to this point in the semester.

This conversation often seems like a role reversal for students because when they ask me "What's on the exam? Will you give us a review sheet?," I say, "What would you like me to ask you on the exam? What do you think you've learned so far?"

Eventually, we negotiate a reasonable exam that meets the criteria I have, the learning outcomes I want them to achieve, which include being able to support their own points, as they do in during this negotiation. :-)

But they do not realize how long it will now take me to create the exams: two sections of FYC are getting slightly different exams. The third course will get an exam I create out of whole cloth since we're using new books this semester. All told, I expect to take more than 10 hours to create these exams.

I doubt some of my students spend that much time producing the essays that are also due at midterm, do you?

Why it matters

Attending the Nobel Conference every year always stimulates my thinking, especially because my science background is sketchy.

This year, the question/topic is "Who Were the First Humans?" To begin answering this question, this year's scholars/researchers have come from around the world (Arizona, Leipzig, Stanford, Oxford, the Smithsonian) and from a range of disciplines (anthropology, paleogenetics, archaeology, cognitive biologists). Their talks are lucid, complex, profound, and their interaction with each other is polite, fraught, complicated.

Here's the message that becomes increasingly clear, a message I need to keep emphasizing with my students: Claims are asserted and supported (and perhaps persuasion happens) because people make inferences using logical reasoning.

Many of my students think that "evidence" is the only thing that can support a claim. But often, we don't have tangible evidence ("demonstration" Plato and Aristotle called it). Often we have to use our logical reasoning skills.

I need to give my students LOTS more practice with this important "first human" skill.

Must Watch

Check out Lawrence (Larry) Lessig's talk at/for TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), a most amazing, smart, necessary, relevant thing:

The "mash ups" at about 10:00 impress me: the voices of "young people" on the screen. How do we get more people to understand and have this conversation?

Will this work?

Here's a video aimed at young people. I'm intrigued.

The reverse psychology reverses. I'm wondering how young people will respond. I'll have to ask.

I was inspired to do some online research about rhetoric after attending the CPTSC Conference today at the University of Minnesota: an excellent way to spend my day. Of course I had my laptop, so I was able to engage my online tech writing students while I was there. Teaching isn't what it used to be!

It's been a while

I haven't read Robin Morgan, author of Sisterhood is Powerful, in a very long time. My mistake. Here's her latest commentary column for the Women's Media Center: "When Sisterhood is Suicide and Other Late Night Thoughts."

Great, tough, funny, outraged thinking/writing. Inspired. Inspires.