January 2010

I was looking for a good source on eighteenth century literature and I found one that I really like. It isn’t even clunky. If you go to the bottom, there are arrows to push so that you can advance without having to go back and hit the next year you are interested in. The website isChronology of Eighteenth-Century Literature.

I really like it because it also has music, art, theater, politics, and science as well. So you are not looking at the literature in a vacuum but can examine what else was going on at the same time.

This is a story I tell in my classes, but I didn’t have the exact sources beforehand.

I also pass out a sheet that shows what the news media considers plagiarizing. Here’s the original and the plagiarized version – and the columnist who was found to have done this (before he ever got his washingtonpost.com job) resigned, and the editor said he would have fired him:

Murray had written:

“Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They’re known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.’ ”

Domenech wrote:

“Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They’re known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human.”

Washington Post

This shows them that plagiarism doesn’t have to be 10 pages of direct copying to ruin your career.

This is from avaya on the Chronicle’s fora.

I just received notice that I have received my college system’s writing award. They give one out per site. We have 60,000+ students and well over 1,000 teachers of various levels. And I received a writing award.

I am stoked!

Of course, I don’t have any place on my CV for awards, since this is the first I have won. Perhaps I need to get cracking on other possibilities. Gotta beef up all the sections of the CV, right?

I have taught Basic Writing (Remedial English, Developmental Composition) at four different colleges. I love teaching it. In fact, I decided to get my PhD so that I would have more credibility in arguing with faculty that developmental students did belong on campus.

Because of that I was particularly interested in Culture Cat’s “Thoughts Basic and Not-so-basic Writing.”

She discusses the two methods for teaching:

1. The Sequential Method

This approach has the goal of getting rid of sentence-level errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation (GSP). When the writing is clearer in this regard, the instruction can then proceed to issues of genre, argument, etc. Proponents, at least the ones I’ve talked to, sometimes make the “you have to learn to crawl before you can learn to walk” comparison, which, by the way, isn’t true for babies. Writing assignments may be sentences or paragraphs as well as essays; there’s a pretty well-established collection of “paragraphs and essays” writing textbooks, many with GSP worksheets and exercises, tailored for this approach.

2. The Tandem Method

This approach, which seems to be favored in the scholarship I’ve read, calls for students to learn GSP and conventions of academic writing concurrently, so students would learn about making claims with reasons supported by credible evidence, analyzing audience, academic genres like annotated bibliographies, etc.* while learning GSP, but only the GSP the specific student needs to learn. The student may have subject-verb agreement mastered, so no sense spending time on that, but still need help in semicolon usage, for instance.

She also gives some of her assigned readings. And she discusses reasons and rewards for doing the two methods.

As a former high school English teacher and a former pre-remedial college English teacher, where the sequential method is taught, I would also suggest that the sequential method (and the tandem) give the students vocabulary they did not have before.

Some students have no formal exposure to grammar prior to our classes. A sequential method allows those students to learn the rules of grammar that are related to the reading they have (hopefully) been doing in some classes, at least. For students with no previous exposure, I found that the sequential method was very helpful.

They couldn’t have been only introduced to grammar issues they needed because most of them had no grasp of grammar at all. You think I am kidding, but I am not. Some of them did not realize that a sentence had to start with a capital letter and end with some sort of final punctuation.

I am not saying they had not been exposed to this concept before. Certainly somewhere in their elementary school years someone at least modeled this. However, the students I was teaching at Small Public University did not remember this. They didn’t know what nouns and verbs were. They didn’t know how to organize a sentence.

In their favor, they did speak fairly standard English, so once they learned the vocabulary and rules, they could apply those to their own sentences. It wasn’t like learning a second language.

How did they get into college with such rudimentary literacy? They all graduated from area high schools. One student frankly told me that he earned his As in high school English by earning blue ribbons showing his bull. When he earned a blue ribbon, his English teacher gave him an A. I would assume that he had the same teacher all four years. (Yes, in small rural towns, this is not only possible but likely. My uncle taught 7-12 grade science in his community until his retirement 10 years ago.)

Caveat
I am not saying that the sequential method is the preferred method. I teach the tandem usually. However, if the students have no comprehension of grammar, the sequential method can be useful.

Mary Grabar has an article entitled “Deathby Suicide: The End of English Departments and Literacy.”

I have to ask if it is true.

Have we talked ourselves out of relevancy?

I am thinking about quitting doing what I enjoy and get paid for.

“I don’t have time to write that paper, which has been on my wish list of things to do for over a month. Because, as can happen too often, my teaching gets in the way of my writing.” That’s what I said in a January 23 blog post here at TCE.

That is the biggest impetus for my rethinking all my adjunct work. I like teaching upper division courses, but I have been working for this particular SLAC for a year, teaching the full-time load. There has been no discussion of hiring me full-time. And I’m on the schedule for full-time in the fall.

Here’s the deal:

I am teaching full-time, paid 2x as much as my other college pays, and given upper division writing courses, some of which I have full design rights/responsibilities for.

I like that.

But full-time teaching, for that college would pay 2+x what they are paying me now. I put their name on my conference papers and publications already. Why should they hire me full-time?

So, I am thinking that I need to tell them that I can’t work full-time for them, unless I am employed full-time by them. That would mean giving up 1/2 my money, though. And that’s a big sacrifice.

It also means giving up two classes of sophomore level writing that I thoroughly enjoy. That’s a sacrifice as well.

But if I don’t, what incentive do they have to ever hire me full-time?

And there is the catch-22 in the whole scheme.

And this is why adjuncts have become such a significant part of the higher education workforce.

On the other hand:

This school is not very fond of adjuncts. They have them, but they try not to have too many and they try not to give them to much to do. Right now they have eight in my department, which is a lot.

Six of us have PhDs. Three of us are retired and do not want to work full-time. The opportunity to continue teaching, and to make some decent money teaching classes we love, is worth it. I’m not in that “we” though.

I am the only one of the eight who is teaching a full-time load. And they don’t have another instructor who can teach those classes. Not, at least, without severely handicapping one of their full-timers. (One ft person teaches two of these classes. She would have to teach all four of them with only that course each semester in order to take are of it without me.)

So, what am I doing about it? I am getting my name out there. They have a campus newsletter and I am trying to make sure I am in it every week. (That means I need to stay busy!)

And I am using the school’s name on my conferences and papers. I am hoping that someone will notice how many of those works are out there. So far, I haven’t heard anything about it.

And that is why I am re-thinking my plan to continue teaching courses I love for decent pay.

Maybe our students would be more interested in Shakespeare if they knew what came after a Shakespeare play.

Sexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains.

History Today has the complete article. I think the students might enjoy knowing this.

It also might keep them from thinking that they invented sex… Just maybe.

Have you ever done something foolish and not realized it?

That’s what I did.

When I set up the introduction to the course I did not set it up to track the viewers. So when I hit reports, there were none.

I worked through Automate to put up reminders that the students should access that course material, but I found that what I wanted to do I couldn’t, so I stopped. However, when I went back to look at the introduction to the course, that’s when I realized I had disabled the Track function.

So I didn’t really know whether they had looked at the material or not.

That’s something to make sure I check for each folder in the future.

By the end of the first week (not the full class week) I had 13 of my 20 registered students log into the course. If the other 7 didn’t log in by the end of the full class week, they would be dropped.

In a comment at Community College Dean, Phillip said:

The best way for someone to demonstrate that she’s a good teacher in a job interview is to talk about her teaching experience. What gets points at my CC is success with “non-traditional” students: first-generation students, mostly African-American and Latino.

How could I talk about my students?

SP, a foreign student in my classroom because she is no longer needed at home, as her children are all in high school, is one example. Her husband is not supportive of her education but she wants an education. I worked with her outside of class on her writing. She has improved significantly. Now she is in one of my upper division courses and is sailing through the writing.

TH, a Latina who is also a mother, is in my class to better her life. She felt I made a connection with her through the readings on health and illness in Mexican-American lives.

OP, a Hispanic who was getting the education on the outside that he thought he got while he was in prison. He was a conscientious student. The only day he missed was the day he had to go before the judge about his parole. I volunteered to write and wrote a letter detailing his progress in the class.

I’ll have to think of stories where I did something unusual. Usually it’s my students who do the impressive stuff.