October 2009

Learning from Mistakes from Math Curmudgeon… Quoting from an article in Scientific American.

People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning. It’s an idea that has obvious applications for education, but could be useful for anyone who is trying to learn new material of any kind.

You can read more here.

Learning to Write, an article from Digital Digs:

If I were to look at my early writing experiences, I would identify three contradictory practice.

For academic writing assignments that were uninteresting (i.e. most of them, not that there were many) my strategy was to take the path of least resistance. My English lit classes were all New Critical. I think there was one course where I needed to do library research. No process; no rough drafts; no revisions; barely any proofreading. And in return I would get a few checks in the margins with a comment like “Very Good” and then a letter grade. Looking back, I’m sure I was in a series of co-dependent literacy relationships where no one was paying much attention.
For interesting classroom assignments and the creative writing I was doing, I would essentially follow my own instincts and interests. I would experiment. And I wouldn’t care too much about the reception of the piece or the grade I received. Plenty of rethinking and playing around, but not for any extrinsic purpose. Only for my own pursuits. I’m not suggesting, btw, that this is a practice to imitate. But that’s what I did.
And then all the technical and professional writing I did, where I was writing to meet another person’s standards and the point was effective communication undertaken in an efficient manner. Here the idea was to avoid revision if possible, to work quickly, to operate within recognizable genres, and to steer away from unnecessary complications. In other words, in many respects this writing was opposite to the expectations of academic writing.

I recommend the whole thing.

Poetry for Community Colleges from Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article on the sixteenth poet laureate.

She was a CC adjunct for decades.

Of course, for a community college instructor, herself a community college graduate, to be the U.S. Poet Laureate at all — well, that’s no small thing in itself. “I’m doing the project without having to do anything,” Ryan laughs, “just by shouting from the rooftops, ‘I spent my life teaching community college, I graduated from one, and I think they’re great!’”

I have a thing about not quitting, even when it is obvious to everyone, even me, that I should quit. I hate to do it. That’s not how I was raised and it’s not how I want to be.

But I just received an article back for a fourth revision. The editor has been amazingly good at holding a newbie’s hand and I think versions 2 and 3 were significantly better for his input.

Now, however, he wants me to revise the article to say something other than what I wrote it to say. What he wants me to say isn’t the point I wanted to make.

I think I’m going to have to let it go.

I appreciated the help he gave me to improve my article.

I am so sorry to have to quit. I hate quitting. But I just don’t think the chance of being published (in a good high impact journal) is worth writing a different paper… Or that’s what I was thinking till I wrote the parentheses.

Is it savable? Can I say what I want? Is it worth editing it again for an opportunity?

I can’t say what he wants with the article I wrote. I might be able to write the article he wants, but not in the time available.

So, I quit. I hate that for me, for the time I put in and the opportunity I am losing. And I hate that for him, for the time he put in and the article he might have been counting on.

Maybe I will look at it again in the morning and, seeing it with fresh eyes, be able to at least pare down some of the verbiage of my personal style.

Update: November 4, 2009

I woke up this morning and realized that the reason the editor thought it should be the other article is that I had a quarter of the article I sent him that was actually on the second topic. So I went off on a tangent and he liked the tangent better. Even though the deadline was November 1, I sent the article back again, minus the quarter off topic (and with a fixed spelling error–I had left out a vowel.) and asked him to consider it. I also told him, quite truthfully, that I am working on the second article now. I hope he accepts the work.

I just now saw the CFP for Computers and Writing. It’s at Purdue this year and I was absolutely planning on going. Debbie W (colleague at grad school and in tenure track) said she would go with me. I would love to see Dr. Lauer again.

But the CFP is for tomorrow. Do I have a computer-type idea that I have been wanting to get down?

I know I was thinking of something pedagogical… Three Refinements for Existing Computer Activities… Would that work?

I guess I’ll have to write it up, send it, and let them decide.

A good adjunct article from The Chronicle has some interesting ideas. I particularly like this one:

“Teaching writing is a way to show students they have a voice,” says Ms. Williams, whose writing courses are geared toward students whose first language isn’t English. “I think teaching at UIC in this discipline allows me to enact my idea of social justice. I do feel like I’m making a difference.”

Stephen T. Asma, writing for The Chronicle, said that monsters are on the rise.

The uses of monsters vary widely. In our liberal culture, we dramatize the rage of the monstrous creature—and Frankenstein’s is a good example—then scold ourselves and our “intolerant society” for alienating the outcast in the first place. The liberal lesson of monsters is one of tolerance: We must overcome our innate scapegoating, our xenophobic tendencies. Of course, this is by no means the only interpretation of monster stories. The medieval mind saw giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies—warnings of impending calamity.

After Freud, monster stories were considered cathartic journeys into our unconscious—everybody contains a Mr. Hyde, and these stories give us a chance to “walk on the wild side.” But in the denouement of most stories, the monster is killed and the psyche restored to civilized order. We can have our fun with the “torture porn” of Leatherface and Freddy Krueger or the erotic vampires, but this “vacation” to where the wild things are ultimately helps us return to our lives of quiet repression.

Is this an issue of monsters being too much with us or do the projections of monsters allow us to deal with the world as it is today? Is their usage a signal of our feelings of helplessness in an unfamiliar and/or estranged world?

It’s an interesting comment.

I personally think the most likely cause of the increase in monsters is that we no longer believe that medicine will have all the answers. Eternity is not in our reach. So we reach for something else which has eternity and which we would not wish to be.

Professional development for composition teachers is offered by Pearson.

There are eLectures by people such as Lester Faigley.

There is the Open Words Journal.

I’ve just started looking into it, but already there’s an eLecture I want to listen to and I am sending an article reference on to a friend who is doing research in the area.

Sometimes, I admit, I haven’t even read my own assigned reading for the day. It’s not that I don’t want to; it’s just that I had to take on those extra two courses at the community college and finish up the freelance article so I could pay the mortgage for the month. Winging it usually works OK. But sometimes it doesn’t.

My not being prepared for class is only one way in which the students suffer. More and more, I find myself completely drained by the end of the day. In the middle of a great discussion, a student directs a comment to me. To the detriment of the discussion, I stopped listening a few comments ago, thinking instead about my decreasing checkbook balance or the dishes that have been piling up as I have been grading papers. Or I stopped listening just because I have had similar discussions four times already today, and I am, frankly, bored and/or exhausted. At least once, I stopped listening because of the loud construction across the street, where the university is building a new performance center. And I couldn’t help but remember the news a week earlier that budget cuts had put my job in jeopardy.

from The Chronicle

I have a plethora of thoughts.

One: I am teaching six classes and I don’t do this. So he can do it too.
Two: Even if you are doing it, why would you let someone know?
Three: He put his name on the article. What was he thinking?
Four: Is this why adjuncts have a bad name?
Five: I can’t believe he does that.
Six: I really can’t believe he wrote that, even if he does it.
Seven: Maybe my husband was right. Maybe I am the exception among adjuncts. (Though I don’t think so.)

There is so much wrong with what he wrote that I just can’t get my head around it.

Yes, his students are losing out. And, yes, it would be easier to pay the bills if he were working full-time.

But he could have kept working full-time and taught part-time if he really wanted to teach and eat.

I tell my business students not to quit a job until they have their next job lined up because it is far easier to get a job when you are already working. Shouldn’t he have thought of that?

Why was Margery of Kemp so gung-ho on being celibate? She had already committed to a marriage. Was she bipolar? She seems to be happy with her husband (in the sections of her work I have read). So where did the whole, chaste marriage idea come from?

I’ve wondered that for a while. Now I know.

Judith, Juliana, and Enlene in their heroic chastity resemble the late antique and Anglo-Saxon lives of women saints described in the Old English Martyrology (ca. AD 850), and Aelfric’s Lives of Saints (ca. 994-early 11th century). While many of these saints are not Anglo-Saxon and while their lives are translated into Old English from the Latin, nevertheless their popularity argues at least for strength of interest in them in this period: these women behave heroically by refusing to succumb to natural sexual desires conventionally associated with the female, because of their spiritual weapon of faith in God. … Although a group of twenty-two lies merely describes briefly the life, miracles, or faith of the female saint, a second group of thirty-four lives portrays this miles Christi as abjuring all contact either physical or spiritual with a usually lecherous and pagan assailant. Six of these lives concern a queen or wife who remains chaste within marriage, either miraculously or voluntarily, and in addition a few of these convert their husbands or assailants to the Christian faith. (55)

I always thought Margery’s husband was a nut. But if there was already an expectation of this sort of thing, then to be the husband of one of these saints might make you famous in your lifetime or near after and would probably help you in heaven and/or purgatory.

The quote is from Jane Chance’s Woman as Hero in Old English Literature Syracuse UP, 1986.