Education Blogging

creating and maintaining a professional blog, which, according to Google Analytics, in the last year had
63,206 visitors
75,118 visits
131,350 pageviews

I wrote this in February for my New Media Experience post.

Today I thought I would check Google Analytics for the last year for TCE. It says:
106,691 visitors
124,868 visits
194,394 pageviews

So almost twice as many visitors and twice as many visits, but only 50% more pageviews. (Okay, that’s very round estimation. I’ll call my actuary son for more complete math later.)

TCE has had 8.5% less visitors this month than last. I’m guessing that is because school has been mostly out. Snape as Byronic Hero has had 2000+ visits… I can’t believe that many people are looking for that, but it was a very interesting presentation.

Still, it does mean that TCE is getting quite a bit of traffic.

Also, the website I put up for my old college had 200+ hits and has not had any content added since April when I gave notice.

Which reminds me, I promised to get the website for a conference together. Hmm. Must finish chapter first.

I’ve been reading through TCE looking at ideas I logged here that I no longer remember. There are lots of good ones. Really.

Gotta get a hold of the teacher eval form my new college uses. That would be very useful.

Soon (maybe) I will post a link fest of links that I used this start of the semester.

This last eight months, compared to the same eight months last year, traffic to TCE has more than doubled. According to Google Analytics, I have gone from 30,011 visits to 73,749.

The top ranked articles are still the same. Students want to know how to write a character analysis and teachers want to know more about informal assessments.

However, the 5th most popular title is new to this year, as it is a post on a conference presentation. PCA: Conteuses and Sex in the City Movie has had over 4,000 page views since it was posted in April. If it stays at that rate, it will soon be second, displacing the informal assessments post.

EnglishTA is going to be blogging his experience with a brand new teaching assistantship in warm climes.

Even if he didn’t understand the point of “teaching heavy” (in this post), it will be an interesting experience.

Since he appears to have no commenting ability enabled, I will respond here.

Dear John:
I did not apply to R1 schools to work as I am a teacher, not primarily a researcher. Thus, your negative response to teaching heavy relates more to your experience with your professor than to my post.

What I was saying is that 200+ people applied to a position which is often looked down on by the academic community (since it is teaching heavy, which requires an incredible time commitment–especially in composition), which, I would expect, means that 1000s applied to the one or two SLAC, R2, and R1 jobs that were posted in my city.

Anyone who reads this blog for very long knows I love my students and my teaching. But they also know that I have experienced the discrimination against teaching in the academy.

I, too, taught high school. Yes, I prefer college teaching to that. However, it is not because it is easier, but because I have more control over my classroom and (as you mentioned) don’t usually have to deal with parents. (Let’s just say that ambassadors, state senators, etc, can get administration to override even FERPA. Though I won’t do it, I am required to give the info to admin who then does it themselves.)

I’ve taught 6/6/3, so I think I should be able to speak about teaching heavy without being the bad guy.

from CampusSplash:

What do you feel are some mistakes that most students in English courses make?
“A big mistake is that most students think about the page requirement for an essay rather than about the quality of the essay. If students write to a page limit, they end up putting a lot of filler in their essays. When students concentrate on developing their ideas, then the page requirement takes care of itself.”

This is pretty good.

I might use it with my freshman English classes.

I am in the process of moving from Big City with great Community College that I worked in this last year to smaller town with wonderful Small Liberal Arts College.

That means I am busy, calling insurance agents (again and again), trying to get gas turned on, figuring out why the water pressure is too low to water the lawn on the ration day, etc. So I won’t be doing a lot of blogging.

I am going to try to pre-post short things here that I found interesting, but there will be limited commentary, I expect, until I am officially moved August 1.

What would it take for an upscale proprietary college/university to succeed?

Community College Dean looks at Britain’s newest proprietary college, which has, he believes a flawed business model.

Then he offers an alternative model:

An upscale proprietary could work, I suspect, if it combined very selective admissions with low class sizes, an extremely narrow set of curricular choices, hotel-style student housing, and a clear identity. The “hear occasional lectures by famous people” hook won’t cut it, since anyone who wants to can go online and subscribe to TED talks for free. The structure would have to be intensely student-centered, with the hook being something like “project-based from day one.” The value proposition, aside from the self-fulfilling value of exclusivity, would be that if offers what the online world can’t. I’m envisioning something close to “spend four years in close quarters with smart people doing self-directed projects.”

Is this what a good SLAC should be aiming for? I wonder.

It’s something for me to consider as I move back into the tenure track at a small liberal arts college.

A Pew Research Study shows some interesting things about college that I think English professors might be interested in.

Are students getting worse?
First, it found that college presidents don’t think students today are as good as students of yesteryear.

A 58%-majority of college presidents say public high school students arrive at college less well prepared than students of a decade ago. Just 6% say public high schools are doing a better job at preparing students for college than a decade ago, while 36% say they are doing about the same job. Once the students are settled on campus, the outlook remains equally pessimistic. More than half of college presidents (52%) say today’s students are studying less than students did a decade ago. Only 7% say students are studying more, and 40% say students are doing about the same amount of studying as college students did 10 years ago.

What do we think the value of college is, in general and in particular?
The study also showed that:

A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend. An even larger majority (75%) says college is too expensive for most Americans to afford. At the same time, however, an overwhelming majority of college graduates (86%) say that college has been a good investment for them personally.

Monetary Payoff. Adults who graduated from a four-year college believe that, on average, they are earning $20,000 more a year as a result of having gotten that degree. Adults who did not attend college believe that, on average, they are earning $20,000 a year less as a result. These matched estimates by the public are very close to the median gap in annual earnings between a high school and college graduate as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2010: $19,550.

So we like it ourselves, but think it doesn’t do a good job for other people. It’s too expensive, but way more people are going. If you go, you make more money. If you don’t, you are less likely to make money.

Perception is clearly at odds with reality.

Why go to college?

Just under half of the public (47%) says the main purpose of a college education is to teach work-related skills and knowledge, while 39% say it is to help a student grow personally and intellectually; the remainder volunteer that both missions are equally important. College graduates place more emphasis on intellectual growth; those who are not college graduates place more emphasis on career preparation.

Since finals were recent and many people are talking/writing about them (and since I hadn’t read any blogs for about a month), I am a bit late to CCDean’s party on “Final Grade Windows.”

CCDean has a point that I agree with in this particular post:

If it were up to me, the answer would be to do away with final exams as final exams, and to have classes run to the bitter end. But the folks who like to give “common” finals across sections don’t like that — they have a point — and the folks who effectively start vacation a week early would prefer not to rock the boat. Between the two groups, it’s hard to get critical mass for a change.

I think that I may be agitating for either two “common” finals for second semester freshman comp OR for identifying the exam as an “exit essay” worth 10% and NOT list it as a final exam.

Yes, I know that is rhetorically hiding the pea, but still… It would allow me as a rhetorician to focus primarily on rhetorial analysis and to do the final 10% of class on poetry analysis.