April 2010

The Chronicle has an article on (Dis)Liking Standards:

The fact that we don’t have such national standards often leads to confusion among our students. I can’t count the number of times I have handed back a set of papers only to have students come to my office and say, in genuine puzzlement: “But my teacher last semester never said anything about that” or “But that’s not how my last professor told us to do it.”

I don’t doubt them. I know perfectly well, from hallway conversations and department meetings, that I have colleagues who emphasize aspects of English composition that seem trivial to me, and who barely touch on things that strike me as essential. I would imagine that to be true in other disciplines as well. Do we do a disservice to students by not speaking more openly to one another about such discrepancies, and not establishing common standards to which we all aspire?

What does that mean for our students in the classroom?

Awareness of audience, I tell students, should help determine everything from the content of your argument to the choice of vocabulary in any piece of writing.

That’s a lesson that we should help students understand about their experiences in our classrooms as well. If we, as faculty members, conceive of ourselves as distinct audiences to which each student’s learning performance is communicated, then our differing expectations become a more easily comprehensible and justifiable norm for students.

Indeed, the ability to recognize and respond to individual professors may even be one of the most important lessons our students can learn.

In a delightful blog post, You Can’t Become an Expert in College, Dr. Robert Talbert, a math professor and the author of one of my regular blog reads, Casting Out Nines, ends with this comment:

We can’t make students experts in the time we have with them, probably, but we can put them in position to become experts later. Ironically, the harder we try to make experts out of everyone, the less we stress broad intellectual skills, and the less likely they are to become experts later. How are students supposed to continue to learn, practice, and perform to get to that top level if nobody teaches them how to think and learn on their own?

Go and read the blog post.

In his article, We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities, Dr. Peter Conn of the University of Pennsylvania says:

To cite only the most recent data, the latest jobs report from the Modern Language Association indicates that the number of positions on offer in English has dropped 44 percent in just the past two years, from 1,800 to 1,000 —the lowest number in 35 years.

In addition, attrition in humanities Ph.D. programs amounts to academic carnage. According to estimates from the Council of Graduate Schools, something like 43 percent of the nation’s graduate matriculants never earn Ph.D.’s. To be sure, attrition requires more interpretation than job placement: It is not self-defining as a quality indicator. Not all attrition is bad. We should encourage programs to make judgments about students who are not making satisfactory progress. However, that sort of attrition is exceptionally rare, at least at Penn and the other places I know something about. Most attrition represents a vast group of unsupervised students who spend as long as a decade enrolled in doctoral programs before resigning (or simply disappearing). In the years before their eventual departure, these students provide a pool of cheap and disposable labor that administrators at all levels can use to subsidize the salaries of more-expensive, long-term staff members.

Perhaps, in the absence of jobs, our national 40-plus-percent attrition rate might be considered —rather ironically—a good thing. In most other respects, it bespeaks negligence and indifference on the part of both faculty members and administrators.

He also talks about why the jobs aren’t there. We got rid of mandatory retirement. Folks lost their savings in the stock market drop. Etc.

Very interesting reading.

Erin O’Connor, a former English professor, writes about false advertising in colleges.

One of the arguments against universities’ growing reliance on part-time, non-tenure-track faculty is that it amounts to a form of false advertising: students enroll at Prestigious University X, and expect to receive an education from the world-class faculty employed there. Instead, they get taught by a cadre of grad students and adjunct faculty who work cheap, who are not the reason for the school’s top reputation, and who are, arguably, functioning as part of a shell game played with students’ tuition dollars.

Can a College Classroom be a Reading Zone? is an intriguing blog post. I often talk about the necessity of giving students the cultural background they need to understand a work… This post (and the book it refers to) discusses having the students learn the background themselves through reading.

The idea of the Personal Narrative as a book club is fascinating. I am going to suggest it to my colleague who teaches the equivalent of this class at my SLAC.

I could see doing this for a century of reading. An 18th century British Literature course could have two or three common texts and a list of choices. I think that would be phenomenal!

Even though we are 1/3 of the way through April, the Two-Year College Association is still accepting poetry in either audio or video formats for their National Poetry Month Celebration. There are some great poems already up.

If you would like to submit your work, Submit Your Poem has all the information you need.

I just submitted mine tonight. I worked pretty hard on the presentation and the webstreaming isn’t as nice as the full quality, but I didn’t think I could email the full quality… I still think it looks good. I really like how it turned out.

Hopefully soon my poem will be up with the others.

…Graduation Rates, 2002 and 2005 Cohorts is from the government and the news is not good.

Minding the campus says:

Graduation rates for both public and private 4-year institutions:

- Asians/Pacific Islander: 66.1%

- Whites: 59.3%

- Hispanic or Latino: 46.5%

- Black or African American: 38.9%

Wow. That’s…. terrible. Maybe we do have too many people going to college already.

Tell us about an assignment that you really like.

What 4 or 5 ideas do you value in a composition class?

How have your teaching practices changed over time?

How do you engage your students in active learning?

How do you deal with exceptions to your late policy, for example? Tell us about a time when you accepted an excuse and one when you didn’t.

The Chicago Tribune has an article on when people quit reading.

It made me laugh, too.

“Where does one begin with unfinished books?” writes Candace Drimmer of Chicago, a woman who won my heart right away by beginning with a rhetorical question. “It is all in realizing that books, like calories, can only be consumed in a limited number …” Alas, Candace, I am afraid that I am just as undiscplined in my consumption of books as I am calories. My hips, like my bookshelves, bear mute witness to this.

When do I quit reading? When the story isn’t engaging or I just can’t suspend disbelief or the pain keeps getting worse. I once stopped reading a book three pages before the end. It just kept getting worse for the main character and I knew there was no way that the author could redeem that pain by the end of the book, even if the author wanted to. It just wasn’t worth it to me. It was a fun read and I don’t take anything but literature if it ends sadly. I think there’s enough of that in life already.

I would love to know when you, my audience, the readers of this blog, quit reading.