At The Chronicle: Don't like teaching? It's okay to fake it.

At The Chronicle, "I Don't Like Teaching. There, I Said It" is part of the "Do Your Job Better" series. (Huh?)

The advice that "Sidney Perth" gives is pretty straightforward: if you don't like teaching, fake it and don't worry about it.  Liking teaching isn't the same as being a good teacher, he says.  Good teaching behaviors make a good teacher. You don't have to like it; you just have to care about it.

Part of this rings true.  I can write a good administrative report, but that doesn't mean I like to do it.

I like to teach. I like the process of discovery, both mine and the students', and I like the energy of a good class discussion. There's an excitement to that process, which is probably why the MOOC idea is so threatening to me. Not every class is going to be great, not every student is going to appreciate what you do, but enough do to make the whole process worthwhile.

But why would you spend your life doing something that you really don't like? This is the part of the article that fascinates me. It can't be the low pay, or the long hours, or the Hunger Games-type competition for positions, or the sitting-over-a-dunk-tank feeling you get every time some fool on the internet or in the legislature decides that the humanities are the problem with the good old US of A.

In fact, I'd disagree with one part of his premise, which is that not liking teaching is like not liking puppies. If you profess too great a love for teaching, especially if you're female, that can be scanned in some people's minds as "isn't serious about research." Is this article really a humble-brag about loving research instead of teaching? I don't think it is, because he doesn't mention research.

Do you like to teach? Would you do it even if you didn't like it?

The non-grading "teaching professional"

From the Chronicle comes this heartwarming story of a professor with seven (!) teaching assistants who was still just too oppressed to grade anything. Her solution: outsourcing grading, which allows her to continue talking in front of PowerPoint slides with arrows on them:

Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. "Our graders were great," she says, "but they were not experts in providing feedback."

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's can. . . .
"People need to get past thinking that grading must be done by the people who are teaching," says Mr. Rajam, who is director of assurance of learning at George Washington University's School of Business. "Sometimes people get so caught up in the mousetrap that they forget about the mouse."

I do appreciate the professor's wish to have her students write more as an aid to learning, and it's true that she couldn't possibly grade all that writing in a large lecture class herself. Still, here are a few questions:

1. If the TA's are not up to the task just yet, how about training them and working with them until they can work with students' writing effectively? If they're teaching assistants, presumably University of Houston has some kind of graduate program in the field in which they're assisting. If they're graduate students, they're supposed to be learning and to be guided by faculty, aren't they? What am I missing here?

2. Doesn't this feed into the worst accusations of critics of academe that TA's are being accepted into programs primarily to teach (cost effectiveness for courses) and not to learn?

3. If additional instructors must be hired to help with the grading, it's good to know that there are absolutely no unemployed or underemployed M.A. and Ph.D. graduates trained in composition theory and experienced in the teaching of writing in Houston who could be hired and that outsourcing is entirely an ethical choice for the "director of business law and ethics studies."

4. I'm going to draw a polite curtain over the mousetrap/mouse analogy (students and their writing are the mouse, a mousetrap kills the mouse--oh, never mind.)

[Update: There are lots more comments on the article now at the original link. They range from "This is cost-effective; what's the problem?"(a few) to "For those prices, you could hire on-campus graders" (#18) to "What is teaching about, if grading isn't part of it?" (quite a few) to "Hire me! I'll grade them for $12 a pop" (a lot) to "You fat, lazy Americans won't take this job anyway, so why are you complaining?" (#43) to "How about we outsource administration?" (#47).]

Technology in teaching

The Chronicle has an interesting discussion with Henry Jenkins of MIT about using technology in teaching.

Extracts (with comments):

1. [Jenkins talks about] blogs as a way of sharing insights and experiences teaching -- as part of the process of mentorship within a department. Most of us spend far too little time talking with our colleagues about our roles as teachers and younger faculty are often starved for advice from senior members of their department but don't know how to ask. If a department created some blog or wiki that allowed for people to trade positive or negative teaching experiences -- everything from dumb things student wrote on tests to innovative ideas about classroom activities -- I think this would create a context for support for pedagogy within departments. Of course, the same can be done through fields.

Earlier, Jenkins had repeated the usual thing about those scairdy-cat faculty (I'm paraphrasing his idea) who won't use technology because they see themselves as lone operators who don't like to ask for help.

That aside, a wiki isn't entirely a bad idea, but does anyone think that people will truly open up, under their own names and in writing addressed to their colleagues about bad teaching experiences? How long would it be before students would be checking such a wiki to see Professor Blooper's Greatest Hits? How long would it take for the university to shut down such a forum on the grounds of FERPA and student privacy where quoting from papers is concerned? Also, every forum or discussion list I've ever seen (including the ones at CHE) where teachers relieved stress by posting student bloopers has had a few posters saying something along the lines of "this is not worthy of us as Educators."

Also, isn't he missing the point? Isn't talking honestly about teaching what a lot of us (anonymous bloggers) do? It seems to me that a version of this community already exists, although he doesn't seem to know it.

2. [Jenkins on low bandwidth issues]The MIT environment is very rich in bandwidth but every summer I spend time in the woods in the North Georgia mountain on dial up. I am always frustrated by the shift in how long it takes to do even simple operations and how many of the things I do easily in Cambridge are impossible to do in Clayton, Georgia. This is something that researchers in this area have not spent nearly enough time reflecting upon. It is frankly a blind spot in a lot of the research initiatives that involve new media for schools. I think any assignment needs to start from a realistic understanding of what it is going to be hard for students to do and what it is easy for them to do. One has to factor in the realistic constraints students face in designing activities. And one has to also know -- and inform them -- about resources on campus where they might be able to get faster connections or more expanded bandwidth. I am not sure there's any magic formula there.

I'm glad he mentioned this problem, which has been talked about since, what, 1988 or so when people really started using technology in teaching. Those designing (and those funding) the next new shiny thing that's going to transform teaching technology put it into the report somewhere and it's promptly forgotten when funding time comes around. Even common technologies aren't responsive to this; has anyone tried Blackboard or WebCT on a dialup lately? Apparently we aren't any closer to solving this problem than we were in 1988, but at least it's still mentioned as a problem.

3. [About teachers who are annoyed with students who use laptops in the classroom]: In some of our Intro to Media Studies classes, professors have asked TAs to do real time blogging during the lecture, throwing out links to web sites which are relevant to the content being covered. This way if students are multitasking, they may be reinforcing what is being taught rather than being pulled in a separate direction. After all, this is a generation that is used to absorbing information from multiple sources at the same time and often learns multimodally -- that is, by taking in the same information through multiple sensory inputs. So build on that.

First of all, this may be excellent advice--for a lecture. For a discussion class? Not so much. In my experience, when the laptop screen goes up, the urge to participate goes down. I had two students this semester who were good at participation--until they began to bring their laptops to class. Don't get me wrong; they're welcome to bring laptops if they want to. But in a discussion-based class, attention to the screen leads to "discussions" like this:

"Why might the heroine have said this to the hero, Student?"

(Looks up from screen): "What?"

"Why might the heroine have said this to the hero, Student?"

"Umm. I'm not sure."

I did take both of them aside and said something like this: "Look, bring the laptop if you want, but you haven't been discussing the works along with the class; this could affect your participation grade."

Second, haven't recent studies shown that this much-vaunted "multitasking" learning is a crock? Students think they're paying attention to everything, but they're not. Certain law schools, as reported in the CHE, have banned laptops or shut off wireless access in the classroom for this reason.

Do laptops really "enhance the classroom experience" as Jenkins says they can?

Summer school teaching, the absence of

For a variety of reasons this year, I didn't get to teach summer school even though I put in for it. This is the first time in several years that I'm not teaching a summer school class. Yes, it's taking a hit in my travel funds, the reason I teach every summer, but I've been fortunate enough to have some small grants this year to make up for it.

I didn't think it would make a difference in terms of time, since I try to teach the same class each year (an online one), so although there's some time spent in getting the materials together and grading, it's not like teaching a whole new prep. No big deal, right?

I was wrong, and here's why.

• Without teaching to take up that time, I don't feel that I have to reward myself by "treating" myself to fun sites and am spending a lot less time web surfing.
  
• Without grading, I don't have any way to procrastinate about writing; there's no "well, I have to get these papers back to them, so I can't write today."
  
• Since I don't have to check email constantly to see if students are contacting me, I can ignore it with a clear conscience--or turn it off entirely because there's nothing from colleagues that can't wait.
  
• I'm also finding out the truth of Winifred Gallagher's advice to sit down for 90 minutes of uninterrupted time early in the morning, since the intervals of attention I can pay to the writing diminish during the day.
  
• This works even better if I get up and go for a long walk very early, before sitting down to write, since that helps with the "get me out of this chair!" twitchiness that can otherwise occur.

By now you're probably nodding and saying "Of course you can write better if you're not teaching, too! Duh!" But you see, I thought the two were compartmentalized, that the time I was devoting to teaching wasn't having an effect (except in terms of time) on the writing. I was convinced that with sufficient time management skills I could do both.

What I've learned is that with sufficient time management skills I can do both--but there's no solution to mustering sufficient attention management skills except not to have the huge attention elephant of teaching a class at the same time in the room. It's a little humbling to realize that rationally compartmentalizing your time doesn't have any discernible effect on how much you can actually get done.

Teaching: What's love got to do with it?

Xykademiqz has a good post and cartoon up about how teaching is valued at a research university (hint: aim for "decent") and What Now? has a good post about the tyranny of the online gradebook in which she discovers that her students haven't been reading comments on their returned papers but just checking their grades.

These struck a chord with me because they're examples of a slogan that gets repeated often, and cynically, over at the CHE discussion forums: "You can't care more than they do."

In Xykademiqz's case, the "they" would be administrators who care about grant dollars and researcher recognition, with adequate teaching being a baseline that, if you go above it, might indicate a lack of research seriousness, as a colleague of hers keeps insisting.

In What Now?'s case, the "they" could be students who care about the grades but not the comments.  She started putting the grades in later, so they'd have to look.  I did that, too, for a while, but then got lazy and posted the grades with the papers.  The result has been that I'm not sure whether they're reading the comments or not.

  In fact, I thought about putting in a secret word on the comments and then giving them an extra point on the paper if they could identify the word by writing it down in class. I didn't do it, because I don't want to treat grades as a game (and I "can't care more than they do," right?), but I was sorely tempted.  With the final paper, taking advice from all who chimed in on this blog, I wrote a little note saying that since they wouldn't have a chance to write another paper, I wouldn't be writing marginal comments but would be available for discussions about the paper if anyone wanted to talk.  The range of those who took me up on this was 0%-0%.

But here's the thing: can you live with yourself and are you happy if you approach teaching from an absolutely rational standpoint?  Xykademqz, for example, has more midterms because she knows it's pedagogically sound.  I write comments for the same reason and meet with students whenever I can to discuss their papers--that is, when they ask to see me (because "can't care . . ." etc.). Yes, I know that "minimal marking" has its adherents and is supported by research blah blah blah, but I think they deserve to know what's going on, especially when it's plain that they have no clue whatsoever why there's a checkmark in the margin beside a sentence.

Think about the tradeoffs that we might make if we really treat teaching rationally:

1. If you have a choice of teaching a class with a cap of 40-50, for which you have no grader but that you love, do you request that class or another that enrolls, say, 25?  How about a class that enrolls 100 for which you are well suited but that takes a lot of prep?

2. Do you eliminate one assignment or an exam, even if you think the students might need it, because of the time demands?

What other kinds of tradeoffs do we make?

Online teaching: thinking like a student

One thing that online teaching does better than just about anything else is force you to think like a student.

Say you're in a face-to-face classroom and you discover that you've dropped a week in making up your syllabus. I do this often enough that I should trademark it as "Undine-style teaching,™ now with the magical disappearing week," so this isn't exactly a hypothetical instance. What I do is announce it, thank the person who brought it to my attention, issue an updated syllabus, and move on.

Or you hand out an assignment, and, as you're talking the students through it, some hands shoot up and ask questions about something you hadn't even thought to put on the assignment, because it never occurred to you as an issue. I like to think that my assignments are pretty carefully laid out, but then I hear this: "Do you want paper clips or staples?" or "If I don't use the extra time to do X, can I have it as extra credit points?" I answer the questions, make a mental note to add that information next time, and, yes, move on.

And anyway, it's not always what you did or didn't say. You hand out a quiz, say "this is an open-book quiz," and, two minutes later, five students ask, "Is this an open-book quiz?"

But when you're teaching online, you have to think like a student and try even harder to anticipate these questions from the beginning not just of the class but of the semester. First of all, you're not supposed to change anything once an online class has started.

Second, I've been teaching long enough not to break the cardinal rule: never change a deadline date, because even if it's to their advantage and you make the date later, someone who wrote the paper early will always, always complain about it on the evaluations. I don't like to think what would happen if a date got changed in an online class, where some students like to print out all the course materials on the first day and ignore everything but the Discussion Board thereafter even though they're cautioned not to do this.

Although there's a space for students to ask me questions about the class, and they can email me with questions, it's better if I'm as clear as I can possibly be about what I expect from them. This is always a good policy, of course, but when you can't see them, and they can't see you, it's doubly important. You have to think like a student the whole time. No wonder online teaching takes so much time.

Random bullets of teaching in the new semester: Zoom, teaching, AI

 

- It's my umpteenth year of teaching in person and my umpteenth year of teaching online as well. Does it take far longer than I ever imagined to prep courses that I have taught before? Yes. Is it exhausting? Yes. Do I still love it? Also yes.  

- I love the energy of teaching in a classroom and seeing the students' expressions.

- Teaching via Zoom on occasion: I still like it, and the students are old hands at it by this point.  But I had to stifle a laugh at the image that came to mind when they all logged on and then immediately turned off their cameras: it was like Sean from The Good Place sealing himself inside a cocoon whenever he heard something he didn't like. All those little black squares = all those little cocoons. (Image via DeviantArt.)

- That doesn't mean that I'm opposed to the Zoom cocoon. Indeed, during Zoom presentations when we're asked to turn off our cameras, I can listen a lot better, especially if I can move around. I don't know what it's called, but I can either (1) look intently at the speaker in person or on Zoom but not hear a word that they say or (2) look down, take notes, walk around, or whatever and be fully engaged with the topic. 

- Apropos of the last point: I think the MLA should place a walking meditation labyrinth in all of its larger meeting rooms, maybe in back of the chairs. Those who can watch a speaker and sit still and listen can sit in the chairs, and the rest of us can walk the labyrinth and listen in our own way. Activity is the key to engagement for some of us, as it is in the classroom, and conferences would be so much better if we could move (and also if the room temperatures were set at something less than blood heat).

- We are going old school in my classes this semester: writing drafts by hand and revising drafts in class. I have a lot of reasons for this: (1) replicating the experience of giving an uninterrupted space for students to write; (2) being able to comment on their drafts before they revise them; (3) giving them time out of their busy schedules to focus; (4) being there if they have questions. 

- The whole AI thing is about a distant number 40 on that list. Yes, I suppose they could have AI write their papers, but the vapid nonsense that AI usually spews out--like a mission statement on steroids--would be a waste of their time. 

- It would also be a waste of mine, and spending any time at all on wading through that slush and figuring out whether it was plagiarized or not would be maddening. Sometimes students write slush--don't we all? and haven't we all?--but if it's honest slush, it has promise. If it's AI slush--well, why should I bother to read what no one was bothered to write? 

- About reading what no one bothered to write: I grant you that the Washington Post and New York Times seem to have dispensed with their copy-editors--you know, those people who catch things like geographical errors and subject-verb agreement--but I'm not paid to read them, and if they have news (hint: read the digital images of the print edition rather than the fluffy stuff that they put on the front pages of their app), I don't mind as much. 

- Speaking of reading the news, I picked up and reread Rosemary's Baby the other day and laughed when I realized that I would rather read about the literal Satan incarnated than the former guy.

Preparation for teaching

Dr. Crazy has already responded to ghw's call for posts about teaching, and here's a short response to one of the questions posted.

What kind of preparation for teaching did you get in grad school? Was it adequate?

The preparation I had was considered good at the time but would probably be considered inadequate today. Those of us with tutoring experience (which I'd had) were put right into the classroom after an intensive few weeks of late-summer preparation, and our weekly seminar combined practical advice with theoretical readings. Some, like Mina Shaughnessy's classic Errors and Expectations, were genuinely useful. Others discussed points obvious to anyone with a lick of common sense in solemn and elaborately obfuscatory language as though they were reluctantly imparting the key to the Holy Grail. These works were useful, too, for learning that while complex ideas sometimes cannot be expressed in "clear" language, dressing up simple ideas in complex language doesn't result in theoretical complexity.

Although we had mentors who gave us feedback on our teaching as well as the helpful seminar, we really learned the most from the other TA's. The experienced ones could tell us how they taught "A Modest Proposal" or comma splices without resorting to the dreaded "lecturing," which was implicitly forbidden. We passed around assignments and techniques, talked about problem students, and moaned about grading papers.

I did learn one other lesson. During one seminar, we were invited to talk about our teaching problems. From all those hallway and office doorway conversations, I knew that we all had a few: X was stumped over what to do with a student's third "dead grandmother" excuse of the semester, Y had a bunch of basketball players who'd pack up and leave whenever she had them do group work, and Z couldn't get his group of zombies to talk about any essay, ever. My classes were going pretty well, but I did have one problem, a bossy girl who wanted to run every group editing session according to her own feel-bad principles. The "discuss your problems" session went something like this:

Professor: "So, what teaching problems have you encountered?"

Undine: "Uh, there's a girl in my class who . . . (description)."

Professor: "That's too bad, Undine, that you're having such a problem. Perhaps you could . . . {don't recall what he said)."

Professor: "Anyone else?"

X: "No, my classes are going just fine." Y nods, and Z agrees. The whole class nods, pitying Undine for her ineptitude.

The lesson I learned, in case you haven't figured it out yet, was know when to shut up.

The art of the job letter

So many people have written such good posts about this recently that this post may be short. Check out the advice at Academic Cog, CitizenSE, Dr. Crazy, Bardiac, Tenured Radical,and Narratives, just for starters, and don't neglect the excellent advice in the comments. (I wrote about this issue last year, too.)

Some things to remember:

Your letter is just part of the process.. As the talk that Sisyphus heard indicates, you can have a letter perfect in all details, but if you look too similar to someone already in the department, or offer a subspecialty that isn't needed, or whatever, you might not make it to the interview stage. It's a matter of fit; it really is. Also, if the committee is searching in some area that overlaps with another area (women's studies, say), committee members have to be sensitive to the research areas (and touchy egos) of that department as well. These are things you can't predict or control, so don't feel as though you've done something wrong if you don't get an interview.

Make sure that you really are suited for the position. I know, lots of people now have jobs that they applied for and got even though they were a long shot for the position. If you just had one grad course in a field, though, or have just taught one course in it, do consider carefully before putting yourself forth as a specialist in the area. Even if you get through the committee's review, which is unlikely, candidates invited for interviews will still need to be vetted by diversity committees, HR, or other agencies that ensure that those invited match the qualifications of the job.

Make your research sound exciting. When I think back to the search committees I've served on, after questions of fit and suitability for the position, the excitement generated by the possibilities of the candidate's research program is really what sticks in the mind and makes the candidate stand out. Also, don't make us do the math: if it's exciting and has great potential for changing a field, explain how that's the case. If you are the first person to study the social significance of lawn mower blades in consumer culture, you need to tell us why that is important. You recommenders will do this, too, but it's your letter that we read first.

Ask a nonspecialist in your field to read your letter and especially your research paragraph. Some research paragraphs sound as though they've been turned out by an academic cliche generator: "always already," "interrogate" (which has come to seem an increasingly uncomfortable piece of LitCritSpeak, given the current political climate), "imbricate," etc. Everything will be "trans" and not "inter": transnational, transcultural, etc. Gender is always "performed"; hierarchies or binaries or boundaries are always "interrogated" or "deconstructed" or "destabilized." Some of these are unavoidable, of course, but if you give your letter or your paragraph to a person in your department (but not in your field) and his or her eyes glaze over, it's time to lighten the mix. Oddly enough, sometimes writers never mention the authors or texts they're working with in this paragraph, so dense is the theoryspeak. A little of both is better. The best research paragraphs use critical terminology but describe the projects in such a way as to make us see immediately the significance of what you're doing not only for your immediate project but for the discipline.

More on the research paragraph.. Also, if you have publications (or forthcoming publications), mention at least one or two of the relevant ones. I know they're on your CV, but again: we read your letter first. The letter tells us how we ought to read your application. If we've got, say, 200-300 letters to read, you can't count on us to scour your CV to figure out that you got X prize or that you have Y publication forthcoming. We will probably notice it, but we might not.

Tailor your letter for the institution. This is old advice, I know, but when someone sends what's clearly a piece of boilerplate (intro, research, teaching, and conclusion) rattled off with no regard to the institution or the specific needs of the department in regard to teaching, it gets less consideration. This is especially true if you're applying to a teaching-oriented school. What courses could you teach? How could you fit into the our department, and what needs would you fill?

Don't make us do the math. I mentioned this above about making the search committee ferret out your real area of specialization, but this goes for the CV, too. If you lump all of your "works in progress" and "works under consideration" in with your publications, we'll just have to sort them out anyway, and it won't make us happy to do so. Also, you can point us to your web site, but we probably won't go there unless we're really interested. I guess the sum of the advice is this: If you want us to know something, tell us; don't make us hunt for it. We don't have time.

Teaching is important, too. Your teaching paragraph should--surprise!--be specific and convey your excitement about teaching. Again, think about all those eye-glazing cliches about "student-centered classrooms" and "interactive assignments." What we want to know is this: how do you achieve this? What do you actually DO that's innovative or that works? You don't have to go on for pages, but an example or two would be great.

Letterhead or no letterhead? I'm with Tenured Radical: use the letterhead. It's not disloyal, and everyone else uses it. I'd say that fewer than 1 out of 10 letters won't have some kind of letterhead.

One complaint for search committees: I wish that job ads would specify the head of the search committee instead of HR or "Search Committee" or the academic coordinator as the person to whom the letter should be addressed.

And good luck to all applying this year!

Teaching

George Williams (link thanks to Mel)asks some interesting questions about teaching. I've been thinking about how my teaching practices have and haven't changed over time.

One thing I learned (and have written about on this blog) is that the either/or of the "sage on the stage" vs. "guide on the side" model has its limitations. Although I'm convinced that students learn most when they're coming up with the ideas, they don't always value their insights unless you're there writing ideas on the board as the students articulate them, nodding, actively listening to what they're saying. The best classes aren't taught; they're built from the insights of the students. It's invisible teaching and the hardest kind to do.
And sometimes a short lecture works really well. Admit it: don't you like to listen to a well-told story, one with some point and drama to it, especially if it's clear that the person telling the story is passionate about the subject? I do. Good lecturing is a higher level of good storytelling; it conveys ideas vividly and sets the stage for the discussion to follow. Like a good storyteller, a lecturer ought to know when to shut up. I heard a moderator say this one time at the beginning of an all-faculty meeting: "Remember, if you're the speaker, no one in the audience is having as good a time listening as you are talking."

I've also learned that it's important to realize that you may not see yourself as a performer, but the students do. As Slaves of Academe says in a post about teaching,"Put down by critics on the left and the right, academics are some of the hardest working entertainers in the Biz." It's a tightrope performance, and it can leave you breathless, figuratively speaking, especially in those moments when the students' ideas converge and there's an "aha!" moment.

I also learned early that the no-fault, full-disclosure syllabus is your friend. What I mean by that is that if you build in some "get out of jail free" cards (drop a low quiz grade, set a fair attendance policy), you won't have to play Queen for a Day (remember Alice Walker's mention of this in "Everyday Use"?) as students vie to come up with the most pathetic excuses. They're adults; we ought to treat them that way.

That brings me to a difficult issue: how do we ensure that they're doing the reading? I've tried a lot of possibilities (weblogs, questions, reading journals, short writings, listservs, Blackboard/WebCT discussion boards, etc.) and still use some of them; in fact, I'm especially pleased with the blog assignment I've devised for this semester.

But I also use (avert your eyes) the much-despised quiz on occasion. Although I agree with Dr. Crazy that these can be "infantilizing" to students, I don't think they have to be.

Here's why: quizzes helped me to learn to read literature. As an undergrad, I had a professor in a Victorian novels course who'd give us daily quizzes, which at first the class hated. Some of the questions were logical, and some, we thought, were insanely specific: "What kind of flower did X send to Y?" "What was the title of the book that A gave to B?" "What brand of perfume did Z buy before the party?"

Now, anyone can cruise through a Sparknotes site and get the general idea of The Scarlet Letter or Vanity Fair, but questions like this are too idiosyncratic and detailed for the Sparknotes crowd. When writing an in-class short essay, Sparknotes students can gas on for quite a while about plot and character, even themes, and if they're good writers, as teachers we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. But the quizzes in that Victorian lit class separated the sheep from the goats when it came to the reading. They made us learn to mark up our books and write notes in the margins. They kept us honest.

More than that, we (okay, I) got to like them. It became like a Jeopardy game to see how many I could get right. And better still, it taught me to look, really look, at the details and ask why. What did that choice mean? What did it say about the character and the work? Why would a character choose a rose and not a violet, for example? That led to discussions about the language of flowers, courtship rituals, and the rest, discussions that wouldn't have been possible unless we'd read the book closely. Like a lot of students, I could be led but not pushed, and those quizzes led me by piquing my curiosity and, let's face it, by stimulating my sense of competition. Haven't you ever gone over a quiz in class and heard students saying "Yes!" as they get the answers right? It was a test, but not a high-stakes one, so there wasn't any pressure. But it was a test, so a natural competitive drive makes you want to get it right.

So although it's not at all fashionable, and although I use a lot of other methods as well, I still think that the lowly quiz has a place in the classroom: five to ten questions, short answer, know it or don't. And I still remember some of the questions--and answers--from that Victorian novels class.

technorati tag: teaching-carnival

Harvard's new and startling teaching insights on teaching

Brace yourselves. At The Chronicle, "Harvard Seeks to Jolt University Teaching" is so revolutionary that you might fall off your chairs.

Insights:

"Faculty would need to provide timely and specific feedback, and move beyond lectures in which students can sit passively receiving information."

"The traditional lecture also fails at other educational goals: prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context."

"Writing is often an effective pedagogical tool, too."

"Taking a test on something is a very effective way to learn about it."

Are you shocked and surprised yet?

Out in the educational blogosphere, we've been over (and over and over) these ideas, especially the whole "let's get rid of the lecture" idea that crops up as a brand spanking new insight every year or so. (And yet we're encouraged to do podcasts of our classes, which means capturing a lecture through visual or audio means.)

I'm of two minds about this article. On one hand, it's good that there's a conversation going on about effective teaching methods, especially in rescuing the much-maligned test as a teaching tool from the current disdain for it. On the other hand, there is not one single idea in the whole article that hasn't been discussed repeatedly and for years in other venues, which makes me think that nothing has changed.

Random bullets of back to school

• It just wouldn't be a syllabus, would it, without a mistake on it? I don't mean a typo (which there mercifully weren't any of), but a mistake as in put the wrong date and so on. Perfection is an insult to the academic gods. That's my defense, and I'm sticking to it.
• If they are half as excited as I am to start the new semester, we're all good.
• I have to keep reminding myself that in the total scheme of things, the administration does not give the tiniest damn* about the many, many hours I put into creating a course, nor to teaching it, prepping for it, or grading the papers for it, although of course they would say otherwise, and that this in turn makes absolutely no difference to the way I approach teaching. It does not prevent me from spending too much time (and, to an extent, having fun) prepping for the courses. Part of why we all get incensed about the "lazy professor" nutcase rhetoric out there now is that it is hard, demanding, and absorbing work that we do because we're committed to it and want to do it well. Go ask Matt Damon if you don't believe me.
  
• Anybody who says teaching isn't (or can't be) absorbing intellectual work is a fool. There, I've said it.
  
• Reader, I banned them--electronic devices, I mean, a la the airplane speech, although I didn't actually give that speech. We'll be using them at some times during the classes, but let's see if that creates a mass exodus from any of the classes.
• Now back to course prep.

(*as in all administrations would like teaching to be done well, but what they reward in terms of tenure and promotions isn't primarily teaching.)

Two sides of online teaching

From Inside Higher Ed and Clio Bluestocking. Let's call them "ideal" and "reality."

From Inside Higher Ed:

“Most of the professors who teach at the university level have had no experience with pedagogy or instruction in general,” says Janet Buckenmeyer, chair of the instructional technology master’s program at Calumet. “They’re content experts, not teaching experts." . . . Since most professors have spent their lives holding forth from the front of a lecture hall, many have not had to engineer their lesson plans with the sort of rigor required of a well-designed online course, Buckenmeyer says.

Puh-leeze. Not again. Most professors "holding forth in front of a lecture classroom" without a clue about teaching? Can't they let this monster die, along with the "teaches with yellowing notes from 1963" deadwood professor? They're like Bigfoot: everyone has heard of him, but nobody's actually seen him. There may be some, but this is more a 30-years-ago situation than the case today, isn't it?

Here's what I'd like to tell the "education consultant": While university faculty may not have taken education classes, most of them have been taught or have learned to teach well through observation, mentoring, talking with colleagues, and, well, the kinds of critical thinking that we apply to research.

Think about it. No one wants to fail at teaching, and it'd be a rare person indeed who wouldn't spend massive amounts of time figuring out how to succeed--that is, how to engage the students, construct good assignments, and so on. We're eager to find out different ways to do things, different techniques, and different assignments. We look at what's worked for online and traditional courses and reverse-engineer them so that we have the principles of a successful course as we design our own. We want to improve.

We know already that we need to have a sense of the goals for the class and what our students need to do to attain them. We also know to let them know what those goals are and what our expectations for them will be.

What I haven't liked about my dealings with "educational consultants" is this: they have a one best way to do everything (sorry, but that's my experience), and even if you have a better way, they don't want to hear it. Blackboard is the One Best Way. Using a rubric defined by them is the One Best Way. Having a pointless splash page with nothing but the course title instead of announcements on the main page is the One Best Way to set up Blackboard. And they're patronizing about it, too, as they inform you about how wrong you are--again, your mileage may vary.

So I read with interest Clio Bluestocking's run-in with a consultant who wants all the online sections of a course to be identical and--here's the thing--unchanging, with a "designing instructor" and lowly underlings non-designing instructors who can grade but not change anything about the course:

Maybe I'm being unfair. The non-designing instructors CAN change things, they just have to go to the designing instructor. The designing instructor then calls a meeting of the "team." The team then debates the change. Then, if the change is accepted, everyone must adopt the change. A year later.

In short, we are not stupid. We want to be good at what we do, and, guess what? many of us are. Please do us the courtesy of believing that we know a thing or two when we seek your advice instead of telling us that we are mere "content experts" and not "teaching experts." For what it's worth, I don't think you can be one without the other.

Thoughts?

Academic Year in Review and next steps

 Apologies for the long silence (March, really?). 

The semester and the academic year is over, so herewith is a reminder/self-reminder about this year, including what to repeat & what not to repeat, as I look forward. 

1. I poured my heart into my teaching this year. I came up with new assignments and added new readings. I tried to reach out to every student every week and definitely did so in the online classes. I figured out how to temper my rage at AI, which does not seem to bother anyone else at Northern Clime, and came up with a solution (hint: better rubrics) that addresses the issue without sending me on a pointless quest to report it to admin. 

I met with students. I was on campus and in my office all day multiple days each week. I went to student presentations and supported them. In other words, I showed up. 

I loved it. I loved the reading and the teaching and the students. No regrets about that part. 

Would I do it again? Not on your tintype. 

Did my students appreciate it, and did I gain new majors for us? Absolutely yes. Did I give them the best experience that I could devise? Yes. 

Did the administration value it? What do you think? As you may have heard about a billion times, teaching at an R1 is not highly valued unless I am "reflecting on my teaching" in a public performance countable for annual review metrics. I am not the boasting type, so what I heard back was "yeah, okay, teaching--well, moving on, what did you publish?"

Don't love something that doesn't love you back. 

2. I didn't publish much because see #1 above. Will I change my priorities next year? You bet. 

3. For the first time since I gave up administration, I had an extremely heavy service load this year, which counts for the width of a gnat's eyebrow in terms of value. 

So now, having Learned My Lesson, I'm looking forward to the summer and the next year with energy and hope. 

1. The big archival project I've been working on for years: moving forward more swiftly to completion.

2. The book project: I hope the same.

Here's wishing everyone a happy and productive summer! 

The art of the job letter redux, part 2

Even though we're all saying similar things, some information about job letters may bear repeating:

• When you write the letter, think about your audience. I know, this goes without saying, but you'd be surprised at how many writers do not address the criteria for the job they're applying for. If a committee at Small Directional State U gets an application from Fancy U many thousands of miles away, one natural question is this: why is Fancy U Ph.D. applying here? If the letter is the standard research/teaching boilerplate, without any mention of the job except for the INSERT JOB TITLE HERE slot in the first paragraph, the search committee may deduce, probably correctly, that the applicant is papering the known world with applications and decide that the writer isn't serious.
• And then think about your audience again. If you're applying for a job at a teaching-oriented school, it's not just a matter of switching the paragraphs around and putting your teaching paragraph first instead of your research paragraph. The search committee will want to know how all those grandiose statements about teaching will translate into the courses you can teach for them. The job ad should give you some clues, even if it seems schizophrenic (eighteenth-century literature and modern poetry, for example). Use those clues, and talk about your teaching in specific ways.
  
• And again. This usually comes out only in the interview, if you get that far, but if there's any hint of condescension, of how grateful the school should be to get your expertise, coming as you do from Big R1, know this: such an attitude is not received well. At all.
  
• But in a lot of ways, the choice isn't about you. For example, if you're applying to Small School near Big R1, you may assume that Small School is lucky to have you, and indeed, Small School might feel this way in other circumstances. But if Small School already has three or four graduates of Big R1 in its department, the committee may not think it wise to hire another, just because they want a faculty with diverse educational experiences.
• It really isn't. As a lot of other people writing about this have mentioned, committees and departments don't always know exactly what they want, although they've written a job ad that presumably addresses everything. But maybe when the applications pour in, they discover that people with expertise in X and Y also tend to have a background in Z. They realize that Z would be a "special added attraction" to the department, so to speak. Although it might be nice to cancel the search and cajole the powers-that-be for a new search next year that includes Z (as if that would be approved!), that's not how the world works.
• There may be reasons why an ad specifies a full dossier. It may seem, and even be, more rational to ask for a cv and letter in the initial job ad, especially because sending all that information is expensive. But the committee may in fact be using letters from references or writing samples to get from the list of total applicants to the list of those who may be good matches for the job. Also, an institution may have layers upon layers of bureaucracy that have to be negotiated at every step, and adding the challenge of sending for more information, having it arrive and be processed, and then sending all the necessary paperwork through the system to the next step (more paperwork, more processing) might slow up the selection process intolerably. You can't predict this, of course.

[More posts and more links here.]

Malcolm Gladwell on teaching

There's an essay by Malcolm Gladwell called "Most Likely to Succeed" over at The New Yorker this week. After having read (and listened to) some of his stuff, I always am a little suspicious, because everything seems to end up with the equivalent of "And that's why 2 + 2 really does equal 5!" Since I'm used to literary criticism, though, that doesn't bother me too much, and what he says about teaching does seem to make good sense.

Gladwell makes two major points: (1) for some occupations, you can't tell how good someone is going to be until he or she is actually practicing that occupation; and (2) good teachers have a quality that he calls (after Jacob Kounin) "withitness" and that I've always thought of as watchfulness. What this means is that a good teacher is always aware, as far as possible, of what's going on in the class--not just the activities, but the level of engagement.

It's easy to tell if students are engaged in a class if they're talking, but what if they aren't? Someone once commented after watching me teach, "you watch faces." I don't know if that's good or bad, but watching faces enables me to see if people are paying attention before they completely check out. Of course, no one can do this all the time; if that were true, Planner Girl wouldn't have gotten as far as she did with checking out of the discussion because I'd have noticed it earlier.

I've observed a lot of people's classes over the years, and "withitness," the ability to relate to individual students while keeping the group together as a whole, really stands out as something that keeps students engaged and motivated. Gladwell gives this example:

Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. “So let’s see,” he began, standing up at the blackboard. “Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.” He drew two triangles. “Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.” He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. “See what you can remember, Ben,” the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: “I’m going to give you a way to get to it.” He made a quick suggestion: “How about that?” Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. “That’s all right!” He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.

That's why, I think, teaching takes so much energy and we all talk about how tired we are at the beginning of the semester. If teaching doesn't take a lot out of you, in the immortal words of LOLcats, "Ur doin it wrong."

The two-headed conference Cassandra and other stories

 I know I wrote about this last time, but about conferences: can we just not?

Conference 1. Recently, for a conference in a month or two, I had to tell people that despite being vaxxed I was just not comfortable sitting in a crowded plane/crowded airport/crowded hotel rooms/crowded restaurants just now. Virtual was an option, so why on earth wouldn't we choose that? I didn't mention the $2000 (I added it up) out of pocket cost of going to the conference because there is no departmental travel money.

They looked at me as if I had grown two heads.  Really? Why do virtual when we could be in person and see everyone?

Conference 2. Then, for another conference in a deep red state that's unvaxxed and proud, I decided not to submit a proposal. It would have been another $2000 out of pocket, incidentally, but that wasn't the main reason.

People I talked to: why on earth not? Don't you want to go? Everyone will be there!

Because we're in the midst of a pandemic, that's why. I didn't say this, because again: I didn't need to be looked at like I'd grown two heads.

Conference 3: With plenty of time to spare, I told the organizers of a small conference that I always attend that I wasn't going to be there for a roundtable. No problem, they said, but again: really, you're not going?

I don't know about where you are, but here, hospitals are full. People can't get needed surgery. Oh, and also: people are getting sick and some will never get well. Children under 12 can't get vaxxed yet. There's a large contingent of people doing their "research" about lizard people and microchips and whatever other ridiculous nonsense the right wing is cooking up and deciding not to get the vaccine. They're storming school board meetings and banging on doors and threatening teachers in addition to being general maskholes and behaving badly in public places.

Oh, wait--according to the Washington Post and the NY Times, this is everywhere in the U. S. 

So both of my two heads and I will stay home from at least these conferences for a while. I will hope that everyone is safe from the virus while traveling and that, unlike Cassandra, who predicted the future and wasn't believed, I will be wrong and that COVID will spare everyone.  And unless I have to, I'll keep my mouth shut, because I don't want to be judged for not believing in the COVID-free conference bubble that the rest of academe seems to think exists.

**

Other stories:

• Teaching is going really well. It's great being with students again, and teaching and learning with all of us fully masked is not a problem at all. It was even okay that one day when (1) I forgot my whiteboard markers and handouts; (2) the overhead camera declined to work;  and (3) the computer didn't work, either.
  
• I am spending so much time on teaching that very little else is getting done. All the work on teaching I do now is work I won't have to do in the future, although right now there aren't hours enough in the day. Everything seems to take twice as long as it used to. I've started keeping track even more closely in my little black book: how many hours to write up this lesson/lecture, this quiz, answer these emails, grade these papers.
• A lot of the time is going into developing rubrics, which our LMS seems to like if not require; also, some students have written to me looking for them. As you know, I have had mixed--make that very little--success with rubrics, but I'm apparently willing to put 20+ hours into it to try to make it work. 
  
• Is anyone else exhausted this fall?
  
• On the plus side, our sweet elderly cat will stop braying at the door if we feed her canned food 3 times a day, so that is a win. 

 

 

Next stop: Academic Idol

From The Chronicle :

The chancellor of the Texas A&M University system wants to give faculty members bonuses of up to $10,000, based on student evaluations, but some professors are raising concerns about the plan, saying it could become a popularity contest, The Bryan-College Station Eagle reported.

Faculty members can decide whether to participate in the pilot program, which is being offered at the system’s flagship, in College Station, and at its Kingsville and Prairie View campuses. Though details are preliminary, officials said, the goal is to offer awards starting at $2,500 to the top 15 percent of participating instructors.

Instructors, you've won a ticket to College Station to compete on Academic Idol, except that the voting will be without the benefit of comments by Simon Cowell and company.

What might this change?

1. Teaching styles. There's no question that this could affect people's teaching styles, but would it do so for the better? Philip J. Tramdack, one of the commenters at the Chronicle, says that if he had to teach again (he's a librarian), he'd pull out his popular "lounge act" style of teaching instead of the "casino act" in which he actually asked students questions. Sometimes you can teach students difficult concepts AND entertain them, but not always.

2. Syllabus. Hmmm, what to choose--800 pages of Bleak House or the graphics novel version of Bleak House? Or Bleak House in text-message format?

And what about writing assignments? Writing is hard, and no one likes to hear anything but "superb job! brilliant!" when turning something in. We all, professors included, have to learn to take criticism about our writing, however, and it's only natural to have a hard time separating the messenger from the message. With a fortune like $2500-10,000 hanging over your head, would you be more likely or less likely to wield the red pen as usual, even it if means student displeasure?

3. Academic rigor. Another commenter mentions that the evaluations ask about things like "this course challenged me" and so on--in other words, students are asked to judge the academic rigor of the course.

Here's the problem with those kinds of questions: students all want to take challenging courses as long as they can get an A in them. There's no glory to getting an A in an easy course. On the other hand, if the student doesn't get a good grade, it's the instructor's fault for making the course, as students sometimes put it, "to hard" with "to much writting."

It would be nice to reward good teaching, but making evaluations the sole criterion is daft. To quote our soon-to-be-ex-president, the question that's not being asked is "Is our children learning?"

The economics of wishful thinking about campus funding

Given the resounding thump on the head that the protections of tenure just took in Wisconsin (see Historiann's posts), I've been thinking about the implications of articles that call for universal tenure, or tenure-track lines for teaching, or vast increases in lines because humanities are a good thing, or even free state-funded tuition for college students.  (See Notorious's post on this issue.)

A few years ago, there was a call for tenure-track faculty to "just say no" to any hiring of contingent faculty instead of tenure-track lines, and if that meant courses didn't get taught, well, tough beans.

Now, I like the principles behind these idealistic stands, but I am wondering about how these would work in an economic environment like this one where state legislatures continually raid the higher ed budget to fund other things, where double-digit decreases in state funding are the norm, where tuition is mandated by the state not to increase, and where some governors may well destroy great university systems so that they can make the destruction a cornerstone of their conservative credentials. See

How might the conversation go at Everystate University?  I'm hypothesizing that it might go something like this in the worst case:

Words and Widgets Faculty: "We need to teach 100 sections of Words and Widgets 101 next semester, but we don't have enough faculty."

Admin: "Increase course sizes. Put 'em in an auditorium. Hand 'em some clickers."

Faculty: "No, we won't increase course sizes."

Admin: "Okay, hire some contingent faculty."

Faculty: "No, we made a pledge not to do that.  In fact, we need 10 new tenure-track teaching faculty in our department right away to teach 3 sections apiece. We will also need you to fund the search costs. If you don't do that, we can't and won't offer 100 sections."

Admin: sounds of crickets

Time passes. True to their pledge, the Words and Widgets Department offers only 70 sections of Words and Widgets 101.  Many angry phone calls from students later, the department and Admin meet again.

Faculty: "See? We can't offer these courses without enough tenure-track teaching faculty."

Admin: "Contingent--"

Faculty. "Not gonna do that.  It would threaten our educational mission and break our pledge."

Admin.  "Here's 70% of your last year's budget, then, since you only taught 70% of the students. Oh, and we now have an agreement with MOOCs-R-US to teach the other 30% online."

Faculty: "You can't do that. You have to run it through the Faculty Senate."

Admin: "Oh, can't we, though? Bwahahahaha!"

This doesn't mean that the noble ideals aren't worth fighting for.  They are. But in my pessimistic moments, I wonder about how these might fare in the world of academe as it currently exists.

Edited to add: See Bardiac's roundup at http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2015/06/teaching-track.html

Random bullets of gray November

• Here's a question: if the monograph is in trouble, dying, hard to publish, etc., then why does seemingly every presenter at a conference have a new book either just out or just coming out (or, in a bid to make the audience truly envious, both)?
  
• I think we ought to have an award patch for our blog sidebars that says something like "I survived my meeting with the Center for Teaching Awesomeness/Course Management System Gurus." These are often a requirement for getting access to modify the course no matter how much you've done in online in the past, so I kept my words to a minimum and my temper under wraps. On the 30th or so time I was told emphatically not to do something that usually works well because it would mess up their system of teaching for future people teaching the course, I finally said, "I don't really care about who teaches the course after me. Can't you just archive the course as it is now and put that one back in for the next person?" Archiving a course goes back to about 1999 in Blackboard if not earlier, so I think they could manage it. They said they'd look into it.*
• Why is it that budgets for Centers for Teaching Awesomeness never get cut, but budgets for paying fine teachers are being cut all over the place?
• I also plan to start a movement for the Abolition of Mayonnaise on Fast Food Sandwiches as a Default Option. Because of commuting and what's available, I have to eat at one of these places on some days and always order "no mayonnaise," something that gets ignored about half the time. When did mayonnaise become de rigueur on burgers,* anyway, and does anyone really need it who couldn't ask for it? (I told you these were random bullets.)

*Edited to add: An online course in which I am not permitted to add ANY external links seems to miss the point of online education, don't you think?

(** at least those with lettuce and tomatoes, which seem to trigger a mayonnaise auto-response.)