Merry Christmas

It may be off-topic, but I hope all of my fellow academics have a very lovely holiday today... Try not to think about the new semester. ;)

Stratego.

I'm betting we all get at least one of these emails every semester:

Professor,
The drop date already passed for freshmen. Can i email you before the final to see if you can tell me how much more or less I will need to score on the final to pass your class because I really want to pass. If I need a higher score, I will look over the information more for the final.

I replied, "You need a higher score. Look over the information more for the final."

I mean, that kind of request just BURNS ME UP. It's very much in line with this post from Rate Your Students:

Here's the deal. Know the shit I taught you. Read the material. Stop trying to second guess what's on the fucking examination and apply your pea-sized brains to learning what you ignored all term. I swear I could give you all the questions in advance, and that a third of you would find a way to fail anyway. Stop being so strategic about your "education."

I truly don't understand that "strategic" tendency of some students--the ones who want to know their exact numerical value in the class so they can "aim" for an exact numerical value on the final--as if that were possible!--so that they can pass the course with a bare minimum of 59.6%.

I mean, if you've been scoring 50s on all your essays this semester, and are clearly failing, in no uncertain terms, by the end, WHY would you be concerned with exact percentages on the final? Wouldn't you just want to do the damn best that you can in your effort to salvage the course???

Student essay advice needed

I know that we're all swamped right now, and that none of you are checking this on a regular basis lately (at least, I'm not), and so this question probably won't get an answer today, but I've got a weird student essay that needs some quick advice.

The assignment was a simple proposal essay on, well, anything (and I've been getting everything from campus parking to, surprise surprise, legalizing marijuana), and this particular essay is on overpopulation in India (the proposal itself is very weak, something about more awareness programs to promote condoms?).

There's nothing wrong with writing about India, but I question the student's motives, and, therefore, his actual authorship. I mean: why on earth does this student care AT ALL about overpopulation in India? I'm not saying he shouldn't, but 99% of my kids write about things that directly affect their lives. This student has no connection (that I can see) to India: he's a white Texan, kinda the punk/grunge/slacker type. If I had to predict what he might write about, it'd be something about girls, guitars, maybe immigration or something campus-related. But overpopulation in India?

The paper isn't terrible, but it's not great either. The language seems like a student's language, so I don't think he plagiarized off a website; but the information is also rather bland and impersonal, as if anyone could have written it. So what I'm picking up on is a big disconnect between the writer and the material, which is, logically, setting off some alarms in my head.

I can't prove he didn't write it, but can anyone offer some advice on what to say in my comments? I guess I need a nice-ish way to question his motives, his choice of topic, his connections. I need of way of saying, "Why, in heaven's name, did you want to write about this? You're not worldly enough to give a flying fuck about India, so you couldn't have written this paper." Well, SOMETHING like that. I'm not really that concerned about catching where he plagiarized--I just don't know what to say at all.

Suggestions?

Some cheer during a tough time in the semester.

I want to post this email I just received from a student, because this kind of email is so very very rare.

I gave my students a worksheet full of horribly incorrect sentences that they were to correct as an exercise in proofreading. The sentences were compiled (mostly) from student papers from last semester.

This particular student--the absolute brightest student I have had the pleasure of teaching--just wrote me to say that she had finished the exercise, and:

HOW DO YOU EVEN GRADE THESE??! These sentences are ridiculous. I don't understand how these kids graduate from high school when they can't even put together a clear, cohesive, complete sentence! I'm sorry, it just blows my mind. Is it because they're just lazy, or do they really not know how? It seems like they really don't know how. Now I'm even MORE depressed!

This is why I could never be a teacher - I lack the necessary patience and understanding. You're my hero.

Aside from my feeling rather self-satisfied right now--isn't it SO NICE to hear a student view the classroom from our perspective?!

P.S. I wrote her back to tell her, among other things, that I have no such "necessary patience and understanding." I just fake it well. :-)

Video on the state of higher education.

I don't even know how to introduce this. Please watch:



I need to gather my thoughts, but I think it says some interesting and powerful things (and some things I disagree with as well).

I think I am going to assign some kind of extra credit assignment to my students in conjunction with this video.

Insanity

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955).

Hmmm???? Makes ya wonder huh?

The Gonzo Way . . . .

Lesson 1.
Learning - That's What It's All About.
Lesson 2:
It's Wrong When It Stops Being Fun.
Lesson 3:
Politics Is The Art of Controlling Your Environment.
Lesson 4:
We Is The Most Important Word in Politics.
Lesson 5:
Truth Is Easier.
Lesson 6:
Buy The Ticket, Take the Ride.
Lesson 7:
Never Apologize, Never Explain.

by Anita Thompson

What is the feeling on this?

Question

Okay, so then why do we become teachers?

A quickie on testing.

Came across an interesting idea on Inside Higher Ed:

Educators at [Penn State] hope the [testing center], which opens this spring, will lead professors to embrace computer-based testing while at the same time acting as a major cheating deterrent. Students will have to swipe their ID cards and allow staff to match their faces with a photo on file. Each test taker will get a specific computer assignment, and the person they’re sitting next to might not even be from the same class.

The comments beneath the article certainly bring up a lot of possible negatives to this idea, but I have to say that I'm for it. If a center like this could operate like the GRE does, cheating would definitely be reduced; while the article focuses on copying-your-neighbor's-paper style cheating, the inability to access the internet while typing the paper certainly reduces downloaded papers. ALSO--anything that eliminates having to decipher student handwriting gets my vote!

Thoughts?

Upkeep.

All,

I try to continually add other academically-minded websites and blogs to the sidebar--if anyone knows of any they'd like to share, please let me know so I can include them! Same with books about writing, higher education, culture, etc. I think this site is a great place to compile some pooled knowledge--and, as I'm starting to notice, there are TONS of professors like us with sites like this one just so they can bitch about students like ours. It's GREAT.

Also--feel free to post any links or entries here. The comments have been awesome, but I'm the only one making actual posts. :-( And I've been a bit devoid of material lately, sucked up into grading as I've been. I could post about that, but there'd be nothing new to say! (Case in point: we're ALL sucked up in grading, aren't we? Mid-semester...)

Hope to get a new convo going soon. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions or changes to make to this blog, now that we've got it going, let us know! Thanks!!!

Isn't that something we learn in K-12?

I was writing my husband an email this morning--I talk to him frequently about teaching issues--and was musing on the difficulty some of my students have had understanding certain elements of persuasive writing. In particular, it strikes me as funny that the information I am teaching is almost as new to me as it is to them, so I'm copying what I wrote him below (lightly tweaked, of course):

This demonstrates to me what an education truly does. In four years of private undergraduate education and two years of Ivy League schooling, not ONCE was I taught argumentative structures, or any kind of persuasive writing whatsoever. [In college I skipped out of freshman English because of AP credits, and in grad school I took only one course that required a final paper from me (all others were creative). Yet, I have a job teaching a course that I never took myself, and, in fact, never formally learned.]

In teaching this material to my students, I'm only a few days ahead of them--I read the textbook, learn the information myself, and teach it back within 48 hours. [And while that is a bit embarrassing to admit, the truth is that I know my shit, and believe I teach it well.]

Why does it work this way? Because those six years of education taught me how to learn. The specifics of the content of those six years are generally irrelevant, but because I went through it, I know how to be a student; I know how to read; I know how to interpret, analyze, synthesize, rephrase, and rethink. Which means I pick up just about any material 20 times faster than my sophomores.

Okay, perhaps my class prep is a bit reckless, and certainly I don't have this problem with courses I have taught more than once. But otherwise--don't we often complain that our students' problems are that they "don't know how to be students"? If only they understood that I don't assign them readings because the content will matter to them years down the road, but because the skills they acquire in doing the readings will matter, oh, FOREVER. It's not like we ever stop learning--even in the corporate world, there are certifications and training! The ability to learn seems a rather important idea that perhaps students never really realize..

Oh, thank god, it's not just us.

Sorry to post again so quickly, but I just HAD to include this video. It's from February, so you may already have seen it or heard of it, but it was new to me:


Generation Me

Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions.

Another link, this one to a political theory professor. I think what she's saying here about students asking questions is related to my previous post about class discussions:

Learning how to ask the question, figuring out what a good question would look like and to whom and under what conditions is hard. In part, it's hard because it involves risking the stupid question. It can also be hard when the circumstances are new--different contexts have different norms and expectations. When so-called educators lie about stupid questions, we undermine students' actual knowledge that figuring all this [out] is a challenge. In this way, we deny their very real knowledge of risk and context, their knowlege about the conditions of learning. [my emphasis]

I think we'll all agree that we hear stupid questions ALL THE DAMN TIME from our special snowflakes, but what ARE these questions? The last one I got was in an email, something to the effect of, "Hi can you tell me what page numbers have the works cited information?" I wrote back, "Have you considered checking the table of contents?"

I think most of the stupid questions I hear are related to the nuts-and-bolts workings of the course--and usually they're only stupid questions because the answer has been given to the student repeatedly, and in writing.

But as for the class discussions? I don't get a lot of stupid questions on the material. And a student with a question at least indicates a CERTAIN level of thought and engagement--enough engagement to show confusion. (Some days, I'm grateful just for that.) Anyone else see something different in the "stupid question" issue?

Not enjoying the silence.

I thought for a first post of content, I'd link to this blog post by a professor at Swarthmore. It struck my interest particularly because my freshman students are positively, irritatingly taciturn. After reading this, however, it occurred to me that perhaps no one ever taught them how to talk in class:

[T]he teaching of analytic writing in college should be preceded (and accompanied) by the teaching of persuasion as an art and a way of life. Waiting until you’re in the thick of writing to talk about what makes a good argument, or how an argument flows convincingly from one point to the next, is too late.

There is a whole understory of small skills that are part of being a good college student that are even less often the explicit focus of instruction. I’ve talked about the skimming of reading assignments and searching skills before. Here’s another in the same vein: looking for something that is worth discussing in a reading assignment. [my emphasis]

What follows are six specific suggestions for what students should look for in a reading assignment--things to bring up in class discussions.

I think with a bit of editing, this could become a useful handout. I may even use it as a take-home assignment in conjunction with the readings. I am so tired of pulling teeth to get someone to SAY something, anything, in response to an assigned reading.

The revolution will be mediocre.

First blog post! Still getting the nuts and bolts figured out.

Looking forward to our discussions!