January 2009

I can rest easier now knowing that I haven’t gotten a tenure-track position because I took 12 years to finish my PhD. If I hadn’t, I would be tt now, apparently. Inside Higher Ed shows that taking less time to get your PhD makes it more likely that you will be tenure-track after that.

It is a good thing to know if you are losing motivation to finish though. Do students in grad degree programs read Inside Higher Ed? I didn’t.

(Please note I was being facetious. I was tenure-track during my ABD phase.)

So are other people. And College Web Editor has a survey she is trying to get people to take.

Go. Take it. It will be a help to her and (eventually) to the rest of us.

in non-academic language.

Right Wing Nation has a great introductory guide to how English (and Scots) came into being, when they changed and why, and how they are similar and different.

I enjoyed it immensely.

If you have students, as I do, who come to you and ask how they can do better, point them to Study Hacks.

In this particular post, Cal Newport gives lots of hints that will help your students.

And, there are case studies.

How Tyler Aced a Course

How Allison used an iPod to Ace Biology

Doing Well in Discrete Math

He also has some good tips for the academics. I have borrowed liberally from his Three Simple Rules for Making Your Free Time Count… I have free time. Don’t you? My favorite is the Saturday morning project. I have to get published and do presentations. That’s when I write, even if I don’t all the rest of the week.

And his new semester resolution is great too. Start by quitting something. You are probably doing too much. Stop.

Bender and Gray’s “The Scholarship of Teaching.

Thinking about teaching begins where all intellectual inquiry begins, with questions about what is going on and how to explain, support, and replicate answers that satisfy us. With the blurring of the boundaries that we have long drawn between faculty roles in research and teaching–and a growing recognition of their common intellectual patterns of questioning, exploring, testing, and professing–a new phrase has emerged, challenging the stereotypes and calling for further amplification: “the scholarship of teaching.”
…
the scholarship of teaching itself tells us that learning in the classroom is collaborative, that the professor is not the only teacher in the room, and that what happens in it is not just up to us.
…
We identify and draw from our fields and disciplines what we want students to learn: skills of inquiry, skills of analysis, argument, and expression; attention to the pleasures and puzzles of the text, the maps of the genome, the enigmas of politics, culture, and history, the dance of the physical and chemical worlds. Teaching, by its very nature, is exploratory: when we choose our texts, design our syllabi, and devise assignments we are constructing experimental frameworks of learning shaped by the requirements, discoveries, and debates of our disciplines, past and present. Through those tasks we teach our scholarship.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has some great articles including “Using Scholarly Research in Course Redesign” and “Superhero as Metaphor,” which is about teaching ethics in business classrooms (and thus would be relevant to teaching ethics in business writing classrooms).

Joanne Jacobs has an article on how one school isn’t allowing students to skip turning in homework. They have to turn it in, regardless of whether it is late, and 98% of the homework is coming in on time.

This is an approach I took with my boys, when they were working with someone else. It didn’t matter if they didn’t get credit for the work; they still had to do it. Of course, for me, they had to make a 100%, but I was a little pickier than public and private school teachers have time to be.

Core Knowledge Blog links to an intriguing article on how the neighborhood effects student achievement.

Of course, the report’s authors say, it is difficult to isolate the physical aspects of environmental decline from the social ones. But those they spoke to saw a clear link between the physical symbols of urban decay and behaviour, truancy and teacher morale. The researchers found the link between the physical environment and exam results harder to establish.

The report’s chief author, Katy Owen, says she found that urban decay could “easily impact upon pupils and their teachers”. She says: “They may demonstrate poor behaviour in the classroom, have low self-esteem, little appetite for educational attainment and have little cultural or social capital to draw on. Their teachers may become disillusioned and frustrated with their limited ability to teach in a community where crime and incivility is rife.”

This has a lot to say about students from low SES, even in colleges. I think it is worth pursuing further. “One More Broken Window: The Impact of the Physical Environment on Schools was written and researched by Perpetuity Group, a Leicester-based research and consultancy firm, for the Nasuwt teaching union.”

Pedablogue offers “The Writing Teacher’s Taxonomy” which is garnered from a book edited by Safire and Safire. Teachers, he says, stimulate, organize, affirm, and interpret. Then he says, “The better writer you are, perhaps, the better teacher you can be.”

That’s an interesting thought and one I want to pursue when I have more time.

Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass offers an interesting discussion on the difference between reading and teaching. She begins with a quote, “The problem is that Poe has been so completely taught that he is very rarely read with the eyes of a reader.”

She says that all too often teachers introduce literature in such a way that the teacher becomes a crutch. Students don’t read for the love of reading and they don’t feel they can read without help.

I’m not sure what all that entails, though she hints at several points. But I am fairly sure I don’t do that. I ask students to take a point of view about the work and argue it from the text. I tell them that as far as reading goes, if they can support it from the text, it is correct. There is no “one right answer” in reading. And I tell them why and how this is so.

I often introduce problematic stories (like “Young Goodman Brown”) and we talk about whether the story is one way or another. We argue both sides of the question in class and leave it at a draw. It’s the way reading should be, I think. And I think O’Connor would be happy with my reading classes, since I too make the heartbeats for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which, by the way, my class is reading on Tuesday. (So I found this post particularly timely.)

News Alert asks if college is worth the price of admission. According to the video:
People don’t earn $1M more with a bachelor’s degree.
If you are in the bottom 40% of your high school, odds are you will never graduate from college.
Think twice before you go to college.
Instead they suggest vocational school.
People are status-driven. We have a myth that prestigious careers are the source of happiness.

Two posts back I asked a very important question:

What can be done to prove that an adjunct will be an asset rather than a liability?

Now, I am speaking as an adjunct, not as a full-timer who has been an adjunct.  But there are some ideas that have been told to me (by hiring committees) that I think are reliable.

Get involved on campus.

Do some of the things that full-timers do, even if you are doing it for free. But only some. Don’t go overboard.  They aren’t paying you.  So pick something you really will enjoy and do that.

I don’t think this will necessarily get you a full-time position where you adjunct.  But it shows other schools that you are a team player.

Apply to conferences.

You won’t get these if you don’t ask. In the last seven months I have gotten ten conference presentations accepted. Only one of those acceptances is at a national conference, but I am working on those. I’ve been turned down for five (two national), I think.

You definitely have to get out there. It’s work. I’m thinking of it as part of my job. It helps that I like to write and I like to tell people what I know.

I have a twenty-page document titled “CFPs I could do.” It’s where I put calls for papers when I see them and then I go through and look at them. I prioritize based on

1. importance of conference
2. ease of presentation

If the conference is a large one, I apply.  Period.  If it is an easy one, I apply.  The caveat there is I don’t want to be gone from school more than three days in a semester.  So this semester I have five conferences, but one is online and one is only on a Saturday.

I am scouting voraciously for conferences in the summer, when I am not working.

Apply for publications.

I have three publications in the same seven-month time period. Two are forthcoming, but one is already out. And I have a fourth accepted; now I have to write it. I have also applied to write two more.

I have a forty-page document on my computer titled “CFPs Journals.” They are only those I can do and they are listed in order of date and/or my preferences for working on them.

I have spent a great deal of thought deciding which ones I am most likely to be accepted for and which ones are most important to the career trajectory I am shooting for.

The caveat there is that most of my writing is on literature.  All three of the publications to date are literature.  The one acceptance is actually in history (which is a sub-field of interest).  The two I have applied to write are those that are books.  I think having a chapter in a book is a plus.  I have also applied to write an entire book.

Writing books:  I decided not to apply to write a book where the publisher wanted me to do market research.  I didn’t have enough time or interest in the topic to do that.  I did send a query, so if they are desperate they will contact me again.

I did apply for  a book that will be a lot of work.  I am not afraid of work.  But it is work that I am personally interested in anyway.  So that will help a lot.  It’s also (sort of) in my literature field. [My literature field is Old and Middle English.  However, that works out to Brit Lit to 1750.  This is within this.]

Apply for jobs.

It is very frustrating to apply over and over and not be hired.  But the only way to get hired is to apply.

I just applied for a job at a school I applied to last year.  Last year I had an interview.  I still want to work there, so I applied again.  I tweaked my cover letter, redid my cv and my philosophy of education, and went back over problems and positives with the interview.  They are hiring for the kind of work I already do.  I have good student evaluations.  I work hard.  So, hopefully, they will look at me again and this time I can convince them to hire me.

But even if they don’t, at least I have tried.

Virginia Postrel wrote on Dynamist Blog:

One reason working papers take on greater importance in a web-oriented world is that, shockingly, scholars usually do not own the copyrights to their published articles. Journals demand the copyright as a condition of publication. And, of course, scholars exist in a publish-or-perish world. It is usually illegal for a professor to put the final version of a published article on his or her website. Hence the importance of working papers–and the travesty of gated scholarship.

This is one good thing about the Computers and Writing conference. They are getting the working papers out there as an online conference. That means, I expect, that the ideas are available to be reused, even if the bulk of the paper (once it is published by a journal) is not.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this blog will be the site of multiple blog posts as part of the February online conference.

Of course teachers with offices, phones, computer access, stable schedules, peer support, a living wage, and a possible future with an institution might well do a better job than teachers without any of those things. But for all the reasons above and then some, beware the recent spate of studies linking part-time faculty members with such indicators of educational quality as graduation and transfer rates.

Steve Street doesn’t think that adjuncts hurt educational quality. As an adjunct myself, I would agree.

But perhaps the educational system which supports adjuncts over full-timers hurts educational quality.

In a system where 3/4 of the teachers are part-timers, where the full-time faculty report to the dean while the adjuncts report to the chair, where the priority is on keeping faculty costs down, the educational quality decreases. It isn’t because of the adjuncts. It’s because of the school.

Two of my colleges are 90% full-timers. They really don’t have many adjuncts. Both could easily replace most of their part-timers with one or two full-timers in English.

One of my colleges is 3/4 part-timers. They would be paying 3x as much for the same work if they dropped that 75% to nothing.

There’s not that much committee work at the one college. If most part-timers were dropped and became full-timers there might be a single committee work per person.

I don’t think that adjuncts hurt educational quality. But being an adjunct hurts them.

Yet the American Association of University Professors once reported that only 8 percent of new tenure-track faculty hires had previously worked as part-time instructors — an indication of what is common knowledge on the academic job market: Search committees deem adjunct experience to be worse than none at all.

I am finding this is an issue. Applying for jobs where I already adjunct has not been hurt. I have gotten interviews there. But schools where I am not an adjunct have been much less forgiving and much more “anti-adjunct.” (I have talked to people who work/ed there.)

What can be done to prove that an adjunct will be an asset rather than a liability?

I have some ideas.