July 2008

Why this is important

According to Tinto, student retention is significantly improved by academic and social integration.

Academic integration includes identifying with one’s role as a student (such as in Tip 5′s suggestion to have students sign a paper stating they agree to abide by class rules.)

Social integration includes personal contact with academics, making friends at school, and being comfortable around campus.

The issue of social integration is the focus of this post, specifically the section on making friends at school. Many students, especially at non-residential colleges, don’t really have any means of getting to know other students outside of class. I realize that the classroom’s main purpose is not to allow students to make friends; having said that, however, I believe that we can encourage our students to stay in school by giving them an opportunity to meet other students.

Introduce each other.

This is why, as in Tip 5, on the first day of class I have them get in small groups to meet each other and then have them introduce one another out loud in class. It breaks the ice for the students and it lets them know if and where similar students in the class are.

Have them respond to questions.

Again, as in Tip 5, ask the students questions and have them answer them on the first day.

Favorite restaurants as a question lets me know where the students hang out, lets them know if there are others with similar tastes, and is (generally) a fairly innocuous question. Even with students from severely limited socioeconomic status, there are usually still favorite restaurants.

Another question I ask is what is the farthest distance the student has traveled. This could be a bit odd if one student has never been anywhere, but I could easily discuss the fact that such a thing is more common in England and that, in fact, folks from New York City don’t usually move around or visit. If I felt they were very embarrassed, I would use this to segue into a discussion of how hard 9/11 was for people who never left town and didn’t know anyone outside the city. In addition, this question allows me to recognize and thank our veterans.

Have students move around the room in a mixer.

I have done this a couple of ways.

One is a fill out the questionnaire game. In this I come to class with a list of questions that I think someone in the class will match. Then the students have to go to people, introduce themselves, and ask the person a single question (if you have lots of time) or if they fit any of the criteria (if you don’t). This gets them talking to each other.

Sample lines from the questionnaire would be:
I have at least three siblings.
I was born here in Houston and have never lived outside of Houston.
I am married.
I am a business major.

Another way is to have the students stand up. Then give each corner of the room a number. You call out a question- How many kids are in your family?- and have people move to the corner that matches. (Obviously the fourth corner could be four or more.) Then people have to meet everyone in their corner. Then you go to the next question.

This idea is a bit messy. Some classes don’t like it. And it can get loud.

But it does get the students introduced to each other, which is the point.

Use collaborative work.

I do not like collaborative work much. It’s too easy for one person to do all the work.

But I still have group work in class so that students will have a reason to talk with each other. It is usually to answer questions from a reading we did in class, since that way I know they have all done it.

I’m all for keeping our students in college. And if it helps keep them in my class, it’s a blessing to the class as well.

William Deresiewicz writes on this topic in The American Scholar. He has some interesting points including:

That just because people don’t go to an Ivy League doesn’t mean they aren’t smart.

My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. …I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

That being book smart isn’t the end all of intelligence.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

Read the whole thing.

Gary Rubinstein has a blog for First Year Teachers that is very useful and has lots of good tips. His audience is secondary school teachers. I think that his post on Common First Mistakes is NOT useful for college teachers.

I can see where high school teachers would need to show the bored and blase attitude of their students, but I don’t see why college teachers should avoid enthusiasm.

Give them a good syllabus.

As you get more experienced, your syllabus can be more detailed and, I believe, it should be. But at the beginning at least let them know what you will be reading, writing, and covering each week.

See other posts on Syllabi including How to Create a Syllabus, 5 Useful Online Sites for Preparing, and 5 Ways to Strengthen a Syllabus.

Go over the syllabus.

They aren’t going to read it if you don’t present it. So go over it, at least mentioning the major sections.

Ask them to agree they have read the syllabus.

If you do this, you must go over each section. But it is a good thing to do to stave off, “But I didn’t know that.”

You can have them sign a paper saying they agree to abide by the class rules. Those should be spelled out in the syllabus as well.

Get them talking to each other and grouping together.

I go around the class and ask students their names and a question or two. These are usually things like favorite restaurant or band. Then I have students get in groups of two or three and ask each other questions, such as major, family, work, and where they are from. Then the students introduce each other.

This gives everyone in the class something to say that is easy (because it is about someone else) and it gives me two chances on the first day to match the names with the faces.

It also makes them aware of people in the class they have things in common with. After this intro I will often say things like, “So we have three nursing majors. Yall raise your hands.” That way it helps reinforce possible groups.

This is important because students who are involved with other students on campus are more likely to stay in college. (Obviously if they are partying with them non-stop that won’t work, but if they’re going to do that they won’t need my help.)

After that, I go through the roll and try to match each student. I’m usually about 85% successful. Then I offer an extra credit quiz on student names or points if someone thinks they can name everyone.

Julie Coiro has a good short lesson plan series for introducing internet to students. It can be found at Educational Leadership; Oct 2005, Vol. 63 Issue 2, p30-35 (6p, 2 charts).

She offers four strategy lessons to help move adolescents (certainly we can include college students) into using Internet texts meaningfully.

She discusses:
Which internet link to follow
How to navigate within a website, which includes

Initially, the teacher should model for students seven steps for previewing a Web site, thinking out loud to show the decision making that accompanies each step:

1. Read the title of the page and the title of the Web site in the margin at the top of the window.
2. Scan menu choices. Hold your mouse over the navigational or topical menus that often appear down the left frame or across the top of the window, but don’t click yet. Get a big picture of the information available within the site.
3. Make predictions about where each of the major links may lead and anticipate a link’s path through multiple levels of a Web site.
4. Explore interactive features of dynamic images (animated images, or images that change as a viewer holds the mouse over them), pop-up menus, and scroll bars that may reveal additional levels of information contained within the site.
5. Identify the creator of the Web site and when the site was last updated. You can often find this information by clicking on a button on the home page labeled “About This Site,” but sometimes deeper exploration is needed to find the site’s creator. Consider what this information indicates about the site.
6. Notice and try out any electronic supports the site has, such as an organizational site map or internal search engine.
7. Make a judgment about whether to explore the site further. If the site looks worthwhile, decide which areas of the site to explore first.

How to know it is true
How to Synthesize without copying

These are some good ideas on basic lessons for internet reading and researching.

He died Friday. God bless his family.

I am not the only one wondering about this. The NYTimes has an overview article.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Isn’t what I do on the internet writing? If you are reading it, isn’t it reading?

What do we mean when we say reading books? Often what we mean is reading and analyzing literature. Certainly as an English teacher I think that is a good thing. However, I don’t think that is the end of reading. I often read history and science books. They aren’t always (or usually) stories. They are most often non-fiction, more like essays, more like long blog posts. I don’t think I read less because I read nonfiction. I don’t think I read less because I read online. But many of us in academics do think that.

I think it is the same thing that Faye Halpern called “reading badly” in her article in College English (70.6 (July 2008): 551-577.). “Beginning students read fiction to identify with the characters.” And that matches perfectly with what the NYTimes article goes on to say.

Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online.

Does the fact that a student wants different views and sees the net as a way of quickly accessing both sides of the question indicate a different kind of reading? If we are talking reading for information, that is far more akin to reading in the sciences than reading literature. We might need to make a differentiation in kinds of reading or in fiction/nonfiction reading. [This might be useful for my TYCASW paper.]

….Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Literature doesn’t always go from beginning to middle to end. And even the literature that does leaves blanks, taking out parts of a reality that are less essential to the story.

According to Department of Education data cited in the [National Endowment for the Arts reading] report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

I would bet they don’t. They know the grownups don’t count it. And sometimes when surfing the net, I’m not really reading. It’s more like I am at the library and pulling books off the shelves, looking at them, and then putting them back. However, many times I do sustained reading on the internet. I looked at the questions for the report and did not see anything I would interpret to count online reading.

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

Why can online reading not offer the same level of personal development? I agree that it often doesn’t, but it could. That’s more an education process. How do they decide what is legit? How do they determine credibility? Those are good rhetorical concerns that could be addressed by reading teachers, if they understood the answers themselves.

I think to some extent that we don’t teach these skills because we don’t have these skills. Many of our students have abilities we do not. And we need to examine the skills involved in online reading and incorporate their use into the academic classroom because they are reading on the internet far more than in the classroom.

Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.
….
The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do.

Reading skills are also valued by employers. A 2006 survey by the Conference Board, which conducts research for business leaders, found that nearly 90 percent of employers rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with bachelor’s degrees. Department of Education statistics also show that those who score higher on reading tests tend to earn higher incomes.
….
Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.

Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.

One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”
….
Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

I would think it would not be impossible, or even that hard, to find online work which could be cognitive enriching. Would it be that hard to present the tools for literary analysis and let the students go to their favorite fan fiction site and examine a story there with the tools to see if it is really a decent story?

There are plenty of times that reading on the internet requires sustained reading, such as this post, and even serial sustained reading, such as when you are looking at multiple sites for information on a single subject.

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

This is an example of the kind of skills we could give our students which would make their reading of the internet cognitively enriching. Cornell offers help for evaluating web sites. And New Mexico State University offers a good checklist of things to look for to determine usefulness and credibility. We as teachers wouldn’t even have to know the issues to use these lists. They are good for nonfiction online.

Still we would have to deal with fiction online, but there, I believe, the literary tools would be useful.

I found this via The Constructive Curmudgeon.

Ways of Knowing has an interesting post which includes questions about the nature of and limitations of various ways of knowing.

This example is from the section on language:

Language and Knowledge

* How does the capacity to communicate personal experiences and thoughts through language affect knowledge? To what extent does knowledge actually depend on language: on the transmission of concepts from one person or generation to another, and on exposure of concepts or claims to public scrutiny?

* How does language come to be known? Is the capacity to acquire language innate?

* If knowledge is based on an internal representation of the world does this imply that language is a necessary component of knowledge?

* In most of the statements heard, spoken, read or written, facts are blended with values. How can an examination of language distinguish the subjective biases and values which factual reports may contain? Why might such an examination be desirable?

* How apt is Voltaire’s view that ‘Error flies from mouth to mouth, from pen to pen, and to destroy it takes ages’?

Functions of Language

* What different functions does language perform? Which are most relevant in creating and communicating knowledge?

* What did Aldous Huxley mean when he observed that ‘Words form the thread on which we string our experiences’?

* In what ways does written language differ from spoken language in its relationship to knowledge? Can control of written language create or reinforce power?

* Is it reasonable to argue for preservation of established forms of language? Is it reasonable to ask for one language common to the whole world?

* What is the role of language in creating and reinforcing social distinctions, such as class, ethnicity and gender?

* What is the role of language in sustaining relationships of authority? Do people speak the same way to inferiors and superiors in a hierarchy? Does the professional authority speak in the same way as the person seeking opinion or advice?

* What may have been meant by the comment ‘How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words’? (Maurice Maeterlinck)

There are four categories on the post: perception, language, reason, emotion.

Are there other ways of knowing?

I think this post would be a good place to begin a discussion of knowledge or to work on ideas for a definition/illustration paper on knowledge.

Jonathan Bate offers this interesting portrait of the social standing of the widow in Elizabethan England.

…before marriage she was expected to be chaste and during [marriage] she was supposed to be submissive; once widowed she had more freedom. A widow even had a degree of financial autonomy that set her apart from daughters and wives, who in law were chattels belonging to their fathers and husbands. Widows, by contrast, could carry on their husband’s business. The legal fiction was that they were just minding the shop until they remarried, but the reality was that they often controlled their own affairs fo trhe rest of their lives… The widow, then was the joker in the pack, the wild card who was not obliged to play by the sexual and social rules. [In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, this character] is a free agent. She acts instead of being acted on; she delights in setting a plot. She has the same kind of boldness as Iago and the Edmund of King Lear has.

It’s useful info for class and could be used to introduce a study of widows in our literature.

The quote is from This Blog Sits, which gives the original reference.