March 2010

Why I Attend Small Conferences by Kevin Brown, from Inside Higher Ed has some really good points.

First, I actually get to interact with peers from colleges and universities that are more like mine.
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I am able to receive encouragement, support, and constructive criticism on the papers I present. There are too many horror stories of young professors and even graduate students who have been flayed by the questioning at national conferences.
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smaller conferences offer opportunities for leadership that national conferences often do not.

One thing I like about the small conferences is that you can get to know people. This allows more collaboration and more contact across schools. That’s a blessing to us and to our students.

I was at Web Use the other day and saw a book that might be interesting to own and read:

This collection of essays aims to fill a notable gap in the existing literature on research methods in the social sciences. While the methods literature is extensive, rarely do authors discuss the practical issues and challenges they routinely confront in the course of their research projects. As a result, editor Eszter Hargittai argues, each new cohort is forced to reinvent the wheel, making mistakes that previous generations have already confronted and resolved. Research Confidential seeks to address this failing by supplying new researchers with the kind of detailed practical information that can make or break a given project. Written in an informal, accessible, and engaging manner by a group of prominent young scholars, many of whom are involved in groundbreaking research in online contexts, this collection promises to be a valuable tool for graduate students and educators across the social sciences.

Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have

My students are either doing well or poorly. Very few are riding the fence.

Example from one class:
Homework (28 grades) averages
7 As
8 Bs
1 C
9 Ds
5 Fs

I grade homeworks fairly leniently. People with low grades have multiple (5+) 0s.

The Prof Hacker offers an interesting post on “The Conference Abstract.”

Some of these points I thought were obvious:
meet deadlines
follow length requirements
but if Prof Hacker is mentioning them, perhaps they are not.

Proofreading, an excellent recommendation, requires that you be prepared to send your abstracts in early.

You need to have at least 24 hours to go back over what you wrote and decide if it will work.

Also, I have learned this from personal experience, if you can only give one talk at a conference, only submit one abstract. Make it your best. It’s not considered kosher to send multiples out, where you might be accepted for more than are allowed.

Why Children Shouldn’t Read is a post by a teacher. It is an interesting presentation of reading and what it means to people. I’m going to have to come back to it later and discuss my perspective.

Would our students cheat if they knew that they would make two letter grades lower on exams?

The Chronicle has an article on cheating research in physics classes.

Not surprisingly, the cheaters performed far worse than other students come test time. But the degree of impact surprised Mr. Pritchard—students who frequently copied their homework scored two letter grades lower on comparable material on the exam. More students cheated later in the semester than in the beginning, and many students surveyed said that time pressures led them to copy a friend’s work.

I have an interview this week.

I am alternating between feeling very prepared, totally unprepared, and panicked.

I guess I should work a lot on getting very prepared so that I will know exactly what I want to do with this.

Things to take:
Reading list
syllabi/calendars (Brit Novels I, Brit lit I, freshman comp, comp and lit)
The article from Changing English. (Since it’s in print and they can’t see it.) NOTE: I think I have an e-version of that on my school email.
Template completed that they asked for.
Handout I would use with this 50 minute lesson.
Copy of the video for the example.
Copy of my CV?
Print out the reading list from Latinoteca
diversity: generational, cultural, linguistic, economic, disabilities, gender, race, religion
business cards

Central Florida Community College has an interesting page of links specifically looking at community colleges and math and English, developmental and first-year.

As writers, we value words. We value writing. We especially value our own writing.

That is one reason why it is so hard to get articles back from journals that are filled with red ink. It’s useful. We learn where our sentences weren’t tight enough or our thoughts derailed the topic. But it’s painful.

No, I meant that sentence to be unclear. (Okay, I didn’t, but I don’t have any thoughts on how to say it better.) No, I really liked however at the beginning of the sentence rather than in the middle.

BUT, and it’s a big but, we have to deal with it. Seeing all the ways my paper could be made better, ways I didn’t see on my own, gives me a sense of frustration. Why couldn’t I write it that well to start with? But it also makes me grateful. Someone cared enough about what I wrote to try and help me make it better. Most of the time, they are right. Sometimes it’s just a personal style choice. Sometimes it’s a big deal. And sometimes it is very hard to agree to the changes.

So I am telling you what I am telling myself, as I review all the changes (100s- Am I really that bad a writer?) for an article. The point of the article is to share what I know and to get published. Don’t get too attached to the language you used to originally make your point. If your point gets made more effectively and more efficiently, isn’t that better?