Graduate students/teaching

I go to lots of conferences. Twenty-two in the last three years. (Seven a year is a lot, isn’t it? Or do I just think it is?)

Scott Belsky has 5 Tips for Making the Most of a Conference.

The one I most relate to is the first one.

I just went through my notes from the past two years of TED conferences, and I realized that I had never even re-read my notations from the 2009 event. Little observations and quotes that I particularly enjoyed were still scribbled amidst many pages of notes.

Belsky offers a way to mine these notes for their gems, even as they are being created.

[T]he Action Steps that I had come up with during the conference had fortunately been captured separately and addressed after the conference. During the conference, I had recorded these Action Steps with a star next to each – making it easier to decipher them from the other notations. There were people I planned to follow up with and a few ideas for improving one of our products.

The first thing I do after every conference is review the notes and transfer every starred item into my task management tool. Some people I know use a different color for the actionable stuff. Whatever your system, recognize that conferences are liable to overwhelm you with notations. You must enter and leave with a bias-towards-action to capture the gems for post-conference execution.

How much reading/preparation would you expect a grad student to do each week? Where I am, we require them to read a book a week. That usually provides enough material for a 2 hour long discussion.

If you’re in a science-based field, you should consider assigning empirical articles rather than literature reviews ; the former seem to inspire more critical discussion because there are procedural and analtyical specifics to hang arguments, criticisms, and questions on (although the latter may be useful as “background reading,” especially for students with less experience in the field). I usually assign 3-4 empirical articles per 2.5 hr class session.

from the CHE fora

Selloutyoursoul.com has 35 Jobs for English Majors.

We should be pointing these out to our students.

Especially in light of the Washington Post article which had this (slightly tilted) graphic:

Forgotten Places: How Digital Media Can Help Support Small Rural Communities

Sean McCarthy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas, Austin, in the Digital Literacies and Literatures concentration. His dissertation explores the intersection between community literacy and digital literacy and community engagement theory and practice. As assistant director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas, Austin, McCarthy investigates online digital writing as well as traditional writing practices. His interest in community literacy and digital literacy led him to examine the role digital literacy plays in restoring relationships, building connections, and rejuvenating dying conversations in small, rural towns in Texas.

It includes a video of McCarthy talking about the Mart Community Project.

If I ever get to teach a class on visual rhetoric, which I might, I need to remember to use Scott McCloud’s work as a primary text.

Does he really have a book called The Vocabulary of Comics? (Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook says the eleventh chapter of this book is the second of The Vocabulary of Comics.) Or did the editors get this wrong and it is from Understanding Comics? I need to go look at my copy and see.

On the CHE I was reading a thread on “Teaching New Grad Students–Focusing them on methodology.” The author/professor had gotten papers that were not focused as they should have been. The problem in a grad class, where the first major paper was not due until late October, after months of discussion in class:

the class as a whole did not devote as much time and attention to the larger issues of methodology, scope, evidence etc., that were specified in the assignment instructions and which we have emphasized in seminar so far. In other words, too much time was spent discussing the conclusions of the pieces they addressed and not enough on how those conclusions were related to ways in which the authors conceptualized the question of the article, how the authors identified relevant evidence and generally approached the question.

Several responses were given including:
Have them write earlier in the semester.
Don’t have them start with a compare/contrast. Instead have them do a single work.

Then there was this answer which I really liked and thought might work:

Something I’ve done a couple of times is have the students (collaboratively in class) work backwards from the article they had to read to draft a (very rough) grant proposal. In other words, have them imagine that they are the author(s) and that they have to explain to someone who might be interested in funding their research why it is significant and how they plan to conduct it. I’ve found that it all but forces them to shift their attention from conclusions to research questions, existing literature, data, and methods, and it’s a nice break from the usual seminar discussions.

Jo VanEvery has a post on “Post-PhD Precarity” that gives some basic advice that folks who have just graduated (or are fixing to) should probably read.

Over-Qualified or Under-Skilled is a review of literature on what makes some of the problems in the job market.

The reason I read this:
I am wondering if PhDs are over-qualified and that is why they don’t get jobs (outside of academia)? Or is it because they either don’t have the skills needed or don’t know how to present the information that they have the skills needed?

It has some interesting points in it.

Other posts on related topics here at TCE include:
Other Careers for Academics
Is the Life of the Mind a Life that Can Be Lived?
PhD Social Network

As you know, I don’t recommend that everyone go to grad school. In fact, I have flat out told some students, “Don’t go to grad school.” So I was particularly interested in the blog that is billed as 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School. What would they say? Would I be hollering, “Yes! Yes!” when I got through reading? Or would I be a bit less enthusiastic?

The answer is the second. I’m a bit less enthusiastic.

I totally disagree.
The blog, as most do, posts the most recent first. So I started at 68 and went backwards from there. Each reason is not simply listed, but has a few paragraphs of explanation and discussion. So you don’t have to just take their word for the reason, you can examine the reasoning too.

Reason 68 is ridiculous. “Grad school is stressful.” Yes. Grad school is stressful. Everything is stressful, at least some of the time. Shoot, sleeping was stressful last night, because I had a horrible charlie horse that woke me up wanting to scream. But avoiding graduate school because it is stressful seems a bit of a whiny reason.

Reason 67 is true, but it is also true for the business world. People get paid more at some companies, in some jobs, in some groups, because someone somewhere thinks they are worth more. Why should academia be any different than anywhere else?

Reason 66 is goofy. You shouldn’t go to grad school because some people will ask why you are studying your field/subject/specialty/topic? Really? People ask that about undergraduate majors, too. “Why are you studying that?” or perhaps “What are you going to do with that?” Sometimes that question isn’t an indictment of your stupidity for studying something. Sometimes that question isn’t an indication that the speaker knows more about your field than you do and thinks you are wasting your time. Sometimes the question is an actual desire to solicit information. “Why am I studying the semantics of humor? Well, I know my jokes aren’t particularly funny and I think that play is going to be important…” Off you go. Give them a legitimate answer.

Now, if you don’t KNOW why you are studying the field->topic, that is a different basket of grain entirely. If you don’t know why you are studying, then you probably shouldn’t go to grad school.

Reason 65 has me stumped. If you have never taught before, how will it be less rewarding for you? If you have never taught before, then the sight of laptops open will simply indicate that the students are following along in the online calendar.

If the author is saying that teaching now is less rewarding than teaching twenty years ago, I will say, nope. I was teaching twenty years ago. The students then were getting an education for less money (not adjusted for inflation at least), but they still were consumers and felt like they were paying to get the grades they expected. Twenty years ago I was told my grading system was too hard and not in line with my colleagues’, so I needed to give out better grades. Inflation? Or reality? That hasn’t changed in twenty years either.

If the author is saying that students are less interested now than they were twenty years ago, I will refer them to the speaker to our campus who mentioned that he hated going to class, that he got drunk every weekend, and that he sat in the back of the class because he didn’t want to know what was going on. That was forty years ago! So, no, interest levels haven’t changed either.

Twenty years ago you couldn’t tell who was taking notes and who was writing notes to their girl friend. So today I can’t tell who is actually following along and who has a second screen open? Big whoop.

What would I agree with for Reason 65? I might agree with, “Students Sometimes Don’t Want to Learn, Which Makes Them Hard to Teach.” I would agree with that.

Are any legitimate?
I would not say that most of the reasons are legitimate. In fact, I would say that few of them are.

Despite the fact that I don’t know that any of them are totally false, they are negatively slanted and biased. They can’t give a balanced view on a topic and sometimes the slant is just so sideways it’s not anywhere near true.

Things to think about:
Some legitimate concerns, or things that should be thought about, are included in the list. The two-body problem (Reason 48), or even the one-body problem (Reason 58), is an issue. But it is an issue for any household with two income earners. It isn’t that much more relevant for academics than for accountants.

Other ideas may be legitimate, but probably aren’t relevant for an individual, such as Reason 27. The Academic Bubble May Burst.

Some of the reasons are an indictment.
Reason 47. It requires self-discipline. Yes? And what doesn’t?
Reason 39. You are asked to do the impossible. Isn’t everyone? At some point? Because you aren’t asked to do it all the time.
Reason 28. Writing is hard. Really? The author is implying that you should never do anything that is hard. Good luck with that.
Reason 46. You may not finish. Wow. We should never start anything, because we may not finish.
Reason 62. You have no free time. That’s ridiculous. You have to prioritize and plan, but you can and should have free time.

These reasons are ridiculous. They say that people contemplating grad school are lazy. I don’t think that is true.

The problem with all these not true, not legit, not really relevant reasons for avoiding grad school is that they hide the reasons people shouldn’t go to grad school.

Are any of the reasons legitimate?

You betcha’!

Reason 8. There are very few jobs. That’s the best, most telling, most important reason to avoid graduate school. Every year hundreds of students graduate with a PhD (and very few full-time positions are available to someone with only an MA), but only a handful of jobs open up each year, due to death or retirement. The jobs that open up due to someone moving to another school aren’t new jobs. They’ve just switched where the open position is.

Every once in a while, a job will come up because the school has increased enrollment. During boom years, a lot of jobs will come up. But boom years aren’t common. We haven’t had any in a while. And right now, most schools are both not hiring new and not replacing old who leave. Some of the schools, perhaps many, have let people go or are planning to let people go. There just aren’t very many new jobs due to enrollment increases. That’s because even though right now they may have an enrollment increase, anyone with a brain (hopefully all academics and administrators) can see that we are in a bad economy.

That bad economy leads to Reason 14. Adjuncthood awaits. This is also a good, valid, legitimate reason for avoiding graduate school. There are too many folks with more experience, more presentations, more publications, more ideas out there and they are getting the full-time jobs. You’ll be trying to make a living as an adjunct. Yes, it is possible. Yes, it can be done. But, no, it isn’t what I would want for anyone, much less some of the brightest minds I know. Did you know that 250 people applied for the job at an inner city community college as an English teacher last year? Yep, they did. Do you want to bring the number to 251?

On the other hand
The folks mentioned in this blog post should definitely not go to grad school because they are totally unprepared for the experience.