Random bullets. No, really. They're very random.

Horace's post about reading as productivity was right on target. I can read and read and READ and read and take notes--but that doesn't feel as productive as writing, however necessary it may be.

I am making a conscious effort to greenify, if that's a word, my daily life. I've been using my laptop instead of the big computer (it's cooler and quieter, so logic dictates that it is more energy efficient, no?), walking most places, getting the garden planted, unplugging the toaster and other instant-on appliances, and eating more leftovers. I had converted some time ago to CF bulbs and the lovely space-alien green glow that some of them give off (PR on these says "this doesn't happen," but they haven't seen them in my light fixtures), so I can't do any more in that way except use less light.

Does anyone else have a collection of small metal boxes left over from Altoids, loose tea, and spices? What on earth can you do with them? I hate to throw them away, because they look as though they'd be good for something, but they're starting to rebel and leap out of the cupboard because there are so many of them.

I saw a moose the other day when I was out driving, the first one I've seen around Northern Clime. It was a young one and seemed confused by the traffic. It can be as confused as it wants to be, as long as it doesn't leap in front of my car, which isn't much bigger than it is.

OT: A reminiscence sing

My mother called recently with the news that an elderly (and not close) relative had died at the age of 94. I knew her in a weddings-funerals-and-Easter-gatherings kind of way and had not seen her in some years.

Still in her teens, Great-aunt X had married in the depths of the Depression and had gone to live on her new husband's family farm, where the household included a fairly, um, exacting mother-in-law, assorted relatives, and eventually six children of her own. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of work that she had to do every day to keep everyone, including a bedridden mother-in-law, fed, clothed, and clean, let alone to do the work that women did on farms back then.

She lived on the farm, by herself but with family nearby, until going into the hospital about a week before her death. She was living there last summer and, at 93, was still canning peaches, tomatoes, and sweet pickles as she had done for the last seventy years.

She was the most cheerful person I have ever met.

Although I don't usually talk about my family, I mention her here because for years when I've wanted to whine about how much work I have to do and how demanding people are and--well, you know how those whines go--I would think of Great-aunt X and the work she did. What it reminded me was that there's the work I do, and then there's work.

Conference notes

Being at a conference: useful. Getting back from a conference: priceless, and worth every one of the premium chocolate-covered almonds that I scarfed down as a reward when I got home.

My paper went well, as did the other obligations I had at the conference. Secret message to panelists in the session I chaired: thank you for presenting your papers in the time allotted.

Secret message to people who congregate outside the open door when a session is going on: yes, we can hear you. No, we don't want to hear you; you're drowning out the panelists. Go away or shut up, please.

Secret message to the person who sat behind me and coughed and coughed and choked and coughed and coughed, only to leave momentarily, return, and begin coughing again: I know you want to hear the panel, but the rest of us do, too. Please reconsider sitting in the audience instead of standing by the door.

Is it a compliment to hear someone praise a point you made in the previous session if that person announces the point as though it has just struck him at a new idea? Is there such a thing as oral plagiarism?

Did you ever noticed that for some people you see at conferences, you only have about 5 minutes' worth of conversation and after that you don't have much to say, even if you like them?

The best part: taking a long walk through the city in absolutely perfect weather, seeing all the signs in a language that I couldn't read, smelling the fresh and dried fruits that I couldn't identify, and watching the people going about their daily lives because it's not Fabulous City to them; it's just home.

Conference world

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth; I've just been in conference world, a rewarding place in many ways but also a busy and tiring one. They could have held it in my back yard for all that I've seen so far of the Fabulous City where it's being held.

Reality check

If you were a student, and you knew you had signed up for an online course, and you knew that it was being held in Blackboard, and you knew how to sign in to Blackboard and had even posted comments on the discussion board, what would you say if you saw the following?

An announcement on the first page that announced the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

An email from me announcing the first WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

An icon, obviously clickable, that led to the week's work, which included a page called WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

Lecture materials that referred on every page to the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

A menu item, visible from all pages, that said "Syllabus," which coincidentally discusses the WRITING ASSIGNMENTS for the course.

A menu item that says "Lecture Materials," among which is the page for the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

Would your reaction be this?

"I didn't know we had any writing assignments in this class."

Just checking.

[Edited for punctuation.]

What is to be done?

Two recent stories, one at The Atlantic and the other at Inside Higher Ed, raise an uncomfortable issue: what happens when the official policies of a college or university rub up against an instructor's standards?

The story at Inside Higher Ed is of the professor at Norfolk State who was denied tenure for failing too many of his students. Now, there may be issues here that aren't covered in the article--issues about expectations, for example--but this part is especially pertinent: Although school policy is that students must attend 80% of class sessions, many do not and receive passing grades anyway, since "there is a clear expectation from administrators — in particular from Dean Sandra J. DeLoatch, the dean whose recommendation turned the tide against Aird’s tenure bid — that 70 percent of students should pass."

The Atlantic story, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," is Professor X's meditation on the spot--between his shoulder blades, to be exact--where the good ideal that everyone deserves a college education meets his underprepared student, Ms. L:

By passing Ms. L., I would be eroding the standards of the school for which I worked. Besides, I nurse a healthy ration of paranoia. What if she were a plant from The New York Times doing a story on the declining standards of the nation’s colleges? In my mind’s eye, the front page of a newspaper spun madly, as in old movies, coming to rest to reveal a damning headline:

THIS IS A C?

Illiterate Mess Garners ‘Average’ Grade

Adjunct Says Student ‘Needed’ to Pass, ‘Tried Hard’

No, I would adhere to academic standards, and keep myself off the front page.

I'm troubled by both of these articles, so let's apply a little Lenin to the subject: what is to be done?

Institute more remedial preparatory courses at the college level? But in times of cutbacks, state legislatures and students taking out loans are both disinclined to lengthen the time it takes to get a degree.

Stop admitting "underprepared" students to college? This is troubling on a whole lot of levels, especially given this country's history of class, race, and gender prejudice.

Hire a lot more people to work one-on-one with people like Professor X's Ms. L? See the first point: who's going to pay for this?

Slide along and adapt grading standards so that the students who work hard can get the "gentlewoman's C-"? Isn't this what's happening, though, in the high schools where parents bully administrators to admit their kids into AP classes and then immediately start a campaign to water down the content since the classes are "too hard"?

Decide that college isn't for everyone? Professor X suggests this, but until there's equality of income and status for those who pursue alternate career tracks, it's not likely to fly.

What are your thoughts?

Graduation

"Watch the shoes," my colleague whispered as we settled ourselves into our seats, no small process where robes, hats, and hoods have to be adjusted lest they fall off at comical angles. She was right.

At graduation, the students are, for the first time in four years, all dressed alike. In fact, they are dressed like us: we all move somewhat stiffly under the unfamiliar dignity of robes at first, marching self-consciously to "Pomp and Circumstance." It's easier for faculty to relax, because they've been to a lot of college graduations and the students haven't. Then the students stop worrying that their caps will fall off and start to relax, too.

So, at the risk of sounding like a bad comparison and contrast essay, we are the same, yet different. They're wearing the regalia, varied only by the leis, stoles, and honor cords that signify their membership in various communities, and they're all there because they've achieved something important, as the smiles on their parents' faces attest.

Yet (comparison and contrast transition alert!) they are all different, too, and they--at least the women--want to express this through their shoes, the only part of the wardrobe that they have a choice about showing to people. I saw a lot of fashionably high heels with very pointed toes, and even though the wearers didn't always look terribly steady in them (these were very high heels; I have a pair and can only mince along in mine), these suggested women who weren't afraid that they'd fall on their faces in front of several thousand strangers when they got their diplomas. I also saw boots, sandals, sneakers, and some well-beloved shoes that were only a step up from flip-flops. I was later told that choosing shoes is a big deal, since they know that the shoes are the only thing people can see.

Yes, I listened to the speakers, heard all the songs, and was duly proud of the students I knew. Maybe it's just sentimentality (and I freely admit to being moved by ceremonies, even as I try to avoid them), but somehow I liked the idea that they were making this effort to be part of something that cost them time and money, that celebrated what they'd done, and that on the face of it emphasized how they were the same but that they'd adapted to show, even if just by their shoes, that they're all different.

OT: Tech tips--Xobni and Autotext

These are probably not news to everyone, but they are to me, so I thought I'd mention them here.

Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is an indexer for Outlook. I usually use Google Desktop to find things, but this is faster. (Also, Google Desktop will sometimes tell you that you do have a message from the person you're looking for but won't open it, tantalizing you with its vagueness.) When you click on a message in your inbox, Xobni tells you the person's phone number (if the person has ever sent it in an e-mail) as well as telling you who else is in this person's "network." This freaked me out a little at first, because I thought there was some kind of web magic involved, but it turns out that it's all based on what's in your inbox already.

Autotext in Word. I've been using Word for years, but this was a revelation; it's perfect for inserting repetitive text ("You need a comma here") into student papers. If you're still running Word 2003--and everyone I know who has 2007 wants desperately to go back to the 2003 version--here's what you do:

1. Highlight the chunk of text you want to have as autotext.
2. Click on Insert, Autotext, New.
3. Give it a name in the box that pops up.
4. To use Autotext, Click on Insert, Autotext, Autotext, and scroll down until you find the short name that you gave it. I kept all the names to 2-5 letters for maximum speed.

Now, if you're like me and would prefer a faster way to do this than messing around with the mouse and toolbar, try this keyboard shortcut:
Alt-I-A-X and type your short name. The autotext appears in the document.
Want to put this into a comment? First, insert the comment: Alt-I-M. Then Alt-I-A-X (these don't have to be capital letters) and the short name.

I had never tried Autotext because of being scarred by Word macros at a tender age. To this day, one of my ancient computers has a copy of Word that, when you open it, opens Visual Basic first and demands that the macro be completed or canceled. I obviously screwed up the macro-making process badly at some point but could never get Visual Basic to stop harassing me. If I'd only known about Autotext, I'd have realized that I didn't need a macro after all and have spared myself two years of shutting down Visual Basic before I could open a document.

The benefit of all this is that I am, yes, actually looking forward to the first set of assignments from the summer school class because I'll get to practice my mad Autotext skillz on them.

Break between semesters

The grades have been turned in.
An old movie and a nap.
Summer school begins.

"Your generation"

Here's a hint to faculty members of all generations: do not use this phrase. No good will come of it.

Example, overheard in the hall, from shiny new faculty member to a senior (in rank) one: "I don't know if someone of your generation would know this," thereby placing the senior faculty member in age as being somewhere between John McCain and Methuselah.

How is the listener supposed to respond?

"That's right. In my day, we didn't have theories like that. We were too busy walking uphill both ways in the snow to teach our classes."

"Hadn't heard about that. I was too busy canoodling with my sheik in his Stutz Bearcat, drinking from a hip flask and reading that hot new novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald."

"Hey, kid, get off my lawn!"

It goes the other way, too, with implicit "your generation" statements:

"We did that twenty years ago, and it didn't work then, so let's not try it again."

"Who needs all this newfangled technology? The best teaching is done with a great teacher and a piece of chalk." (This may be true, in certain cases, but it's no reason to condemn all technology.)

"Technology has made all this so easy for you. You don't have to look up things the way we did."

There's a fine line between departmental history and Grandpa Stories, and sometimes one crosses over into the other.

I don't have any words of wisdom, except maybe this: when you're tempted to say something about "your generation" or to say something that starts "In my day," think again. It's possible to make a point without emphasizing the differences that divide us from our colleagues.

What's wrong with this picture?

As seen at The Edge of the American West, Fox reports on a possible "Lincoln-Douglas" debate.

They have entirely the wrong Douglas(s) and haven't even spelled Frederick Douglass's name correctly. Other than that, it's a swell graphic.






Don't history classes in grade schools teach about the debates between the Little Giant (Stephen A. Douglas, left, from the Library of Congress) and Lincoln any more? Surely they teach about this in college courses, don't they?

Or is history one of those frivolous liberal arts that are somehow dragging down the curriculum at places like the University of Toledo?

And not a bad reason for higher education, all in all

Steven Levy interviews Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, in Newsweek, 4/14/08:

Q: As a young man, you worked summers in a slaughterhouse. What did you learn from that?

A. To go to college.

Math and writing: I see a pattern here

The New York Times recently had an article about some research done on the way math is taught. It turns out that learning abstract concepts like equations can actually help rather than hinder learning.

The students who learned the math abstractly did well with figuring out the rules of the game. Those who had learned through examples using measuring cups or tennis balls performed little better than might be expected if they were simply guessing. Students who were presented the abstract symbols after the concrete examples did better than those who learned only through cups or balls, but not as well as those who learned only the abstract symbols.

It reminded me of the recent article in the Chronicle about Berkinstein and Graff's book.

Both rely on formulas, in a way, but--and here's the important part--they don't begin and end with formulas. The abstractions allow students to apply the concepts but NOT, as detractors fear, to stop at applying principle A to material B in a bad, evil, wicked, formulaic, five-paragraph essay kind of way to make students march in lockstep as prescribed by Satan's minions who want to stifle creativity. Instead, they allow students to conceptualize ideas in new and different ways.

It's like riding a bicycle. If you had to think about how to ride a bicycle every time you rode one, or reconceptualize it every time lest you not have the "true and authentic" experience of discovery, you'd be exhausted and you'd never get anywhere. You'd be so busy learning to ride that you'd never find the pleasure in riding.

Isn't there room for both discovery and actually learning--all right, even memorizing--a few concepts? I honestly don't see the problem with this.

Explainers

Professor Zero's post about an exasperating conversation and the comments on the post linked to an essay by Rebecca Solnit, "Men Who Explain Things." In it, as an aside to a larger point, Solnit tells of a man who was so eager to pontificate about her book on Eadward Muybridge, River of Shadows, that he didn't register that she had written it.

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

I've had this happen to me; haven't we all? It happened today, in fact, when I wrote a message to someone who not only missed the point by a country mile but, after assuring me that he took my concerns very seriously, used the occasion to boast about his experiences and lecture me about the Great Importance of his Field. What else can you do, but say, with the cutting irony of a Miss Manners, "Thank you for setting me straight"?

I have to say, however, that the particular combination of stupidity and arrogance that drives some individuals to patronize others under the guise of instruction isn't exclusively a guy thing. Although I have been instructed in this way by some males, including a male relative who said he would send me his first-year paper on author X (a person I've written about) so I could "learn from it," such a drive to instruct is an equal-opportunity curse.

Librarians have explained to me that the Dewey Decimal system was "really quite different" from the Library of Congress system and that typing a search term in the keyword box at the library site could yield some results.

A preschool teacher suggested parenting tips for my toddler as her own child sat in the next room, sucking her thumb . . . at the age of 6. In fact, various parents used to raise their voices above their own children who were screaming like banshees and trying to hit each other with cardboard bricks to suggest parenting tips for me to try out.

So it's not just stupid and arrogant men who explain things. Stupid and arrogant women explain things, too. You can argue with them, but they won't get it. Your best defense is to get away from them. In the meantime, practice this response:

"Thank you for setting me straight."

[Edited to add: Unlike the Mr. Arrogance who lectured Solnit, I've read her book, and it is very good.]

End-of-semester certainties

It's said that there's nothing certain in life but death and taxes. I disagree. If you teach, here are a few things you can count on:

1. The university's server will slow to a crawl and grind to a complete halt periodically as students try to access materials that they've cheerfully ignored all semester.

2. Students you haven't seen for a few weeks and whom you've assumed have dropped the class will write back to say this: "Hi! I was just really busy with the paper for another class, so I haven't been to your class for a while . I thought I'd drop by your office during finals week so we could discuss what I could do for extra credit to make up for the absences."

3. A flurry of awards ceremonies, receptions, and parties, although welcome and necessary, will cut into your grading time

4. You will find your affection for your students competing with your ethical sense of grading standards and will be reluctant to assign grades. Alternately, you will assign grades and then berate yourself for being (1) too lenient or (2) too harsh. You will vow to be better (more rigorous/less exacting) in the fall.

Any others?

OT: Nonacademic needs and wants

What I needed to do this weekend was to grade final projects.

What I wanted to do, now that it has finally stopped snowing, is to get the garden ready for planting and go for a run.

Guess which won?

Are quill pens next?

There's something strangely retro about these news items:

From the Pew Charitable Trust's report "Writing, Technology, and Teens"(.pdf file):

Nearly three-quarters of teens (72%) who write for personal reasons say they usually write longhand, similar to the 65% of teens who usually write by hand for school. However, teens are much more likely to write only by hand when doing non-school writing. Nearly one third of teens (32%) never use a computer at all when writing for their own personal enjoyment; by contrast, just 9% do their school writing by hand only (19).

This is fascinating. For years now, we've been told by the pundits and educrats that the "digital natives" wouldn't know a pen if it bit them and that writing by hand was so 1970s. And yet the pen hasn't lost its charms, it seems, for writing that you really want or need to do--writing song lyrics, maybe, or recording a breakup in language that's too personal for MySpace.

And then there's this:

Some teens noted the benefits of learning a quick shorthand for taking notes in school...
I think [instant and text messaging abbreviating] helps sometimes because like when we’re taking notes we have to hurry up and take them and knowing the text language it helps to abbreviate. ... faster. – 9/10th Grade Girl, Midwestern City (46).

I have an inexplicable interest in shorthand, maybe because of its associations with journalism (do journalists still learn shorthand?) and Victorian authors, so of course this stood out for me. If you look at old magazines, you'll see ads for a word-based rather than symbol-based shorthand that read something like this: "F u cn rd ths u hv a futr n jrnlsm." What is this but an early form of text-message language, an abbreviation system like the one that 9/10th Grade Girl is using? As long as it's not used for writing-to-be-turned-in, isn't it possible that this may help with taking notes?

And finally, the laptop-in-class argument erupted again in the comments to an Inside Higher Ed column called "Hey, You! Pay Attention." In what could be seen as another retro step, the University of Chicago has apparently blocked Internet access in its law school, and the commenters rounded up the usual arguments:

1. Pro: Students from this-here new multitasking generation learn better if they multitask.
   
2. Pro: How is surfing the web different from doodling?
   
3. Pro: If I want to waste time on the web instead of listening to the professor, it's his fault for being boring.
   
4. Con: It's disrespectful and distracting when everyone is paying attention to screens instead of participating in class.

The thing about the web is that it's always going to be too enticing if you have access to it in a class. You know how they say that people tend to eat more when they're in an office where people keep jars of candy or boxes of cookies out on the desks? The internet is a jar of candy, and nobody's going to pass out from the lack of it for an hour or two when learning is supposed to be going on. There are times when it's useful in a class, but as a regular thing it's sure to promote cookie-eating (no pun intended) when abstaining would be better for everyone.

Still here, and a slave to Microsoft

It's nearly the end of the semester, which means this:

Grading and more grading.

Correcting proofs for an essay that'll be coming out soon. Yes, it is worth reading those twice and carefully: I missed some things the first time around.

Thinking about the summer class.

And did I say a slave to Microsoft? Picture this scenario:

Students are giving an end-of-year presentation. They are a little nervous. They're using my computer to project things on the screen.

The screen goes dark, and they look alarmed: "What did we do?"

Nothing, apparently, but you know how Windows usually gives you a choice about when it's going to shut down to do some of its incessant updates, nagging you every 5 minutes until you shut it down? Not this time.

The computer shuts itself down, warning that it needs to install the updates and that that'll take a while. The poor students have to finish without showing the things that they'd planned to show. I tell them it doesn't matter, and it doesn't, of course; that wasn't their fault.

But wouldn't you think the Dark Lords of Redmond would contrive to do the updates at some time that isn't the middle of a work day?

The hook

Pilgrim/Heretic recently posted about conference etiquette from the conference organizer's point of view. I'd like to ask readers what you do when you're the panel chair and you have to give someone the hook when he or she is rambling on far past the 15-20 minutes that are allotted for the presentation and far, far past the audience's patience.

In vaudeville days (or so I understand) or at talent competitions, there used to be an actual hook that would emerge from the sidelines and drag people off the stage, to hoots and jeers from the audience. I've only seen this happen in old movies, so I don't know if it really happened or if that was just a plot device.

But at conferences, sometimes you're the chair and you have to get the presenter to shut up so that someone else might have some time. What do you do?

Here's what I've seen:

Panel chair sits in the audience, moves to the edge of her chair, and beams at the offender with a bright and determined smile, trying to catch his eye so that he knows that time is up.

Panel chair sits at the end of the table and tries pointlessly to catch the eye of the presenter, who is now gesticulating wildly at the podium as other presenters cross big chunks of text out of their papers.

Panel chair sits next to the presenter, who's standing at the podium. Chair tugs at the presenter's coat, since it's obviously not possible to catch his or her eye.

Panel chair passes a note. Sometimes, if the chair is sitting at the end of the table, you can see all the stages of this: chair looks at watch, writes something in large letters on a piece of paper, passes it along the row of panelists (each of whom looks at it with something like relief), and finally sees it in the hands of the startled presenter, who says, "Oh! I will just have to skip to my last three points and my conclusion, then."

Well-prepared panel chair has the sign already made up and passes it along to the presenter.

A year or so ago, the MLA tried installing lights (green, yellow, and red) that panel chairs and presenters were supposed to use, but I didn't see any of them go off. In the sessions I saw, most of the lights were unplugged and left up at the podium. So much for the technological hook.

Is there any really graceful way around this dilemma? Have you seen any panel chairs that were really good hook-wielders? Inquiring minds want to know.

The value of formulas

At the Chronicle, Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff have an opinion piece that is right in so many ways that you should just go read it.

Their point, although they make it much more elegantly, is one I've made before: a formula, even a 5-paragraph essay, can be liberating and not restrictive. Instructors were so busy not hampering my creativity, for example, that I was in graduate school before I ever heard of a thesis statement or the five-paragraph essay. Of course, my general cluelessness and inattention was probably a big part of it, but--here's a thought--aren't students just maybe as clueless and inattentive as I was?

Here's some of what they say. I can immediately see how this would translate into some good class conversation during writing days:

A far more engaged writing formula can be found in the work of the composition theorist David Bartholomae, who recalls a professor of his suggesting that, when stuck in his writing, he use the following "machine":

While most readers of ____ have said ____, a close and careful reading shows that ____.

Similarly, the composition specialist Irene Clark, drawing on the work of John Swales, Joseph Williams, Gregory Colomb, and others, asks graduate thesis and dissertation writers to fill in these blanks:

My thesis will address the following question: ____.

It will fill the following gap in the literature: ____.

Formulas like those help students make arguments without abstracting themselves from the conversations that surround them. As a result, they have all of the benefits of the five-paragraph theme without its liabilities.

Building on Bartholomae and Clark, we teach our own students that persuasive writing rests on a single ur-formula, which we call "they say/I say," in which you summarize someone else's argument (they say) in order to set up your own (I say). Some versions of this include:

Although it is often said that _____, I claim ____.

I agree with X that ____, and would add ____.

Group X argues ____, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, . On the other hand, ____.

I used to think ____. Now, however, after ____, I have come to see ____.

Debates over ____ tend to dominate discussions of ____. But these debates obscure the far more important issue of ____.

At this point you will probably object that ____. While it's true that ____, I still maintain ____.

Far from turning students into mindless automatons, formulas like those can help them generate thoughts that might not otherwise occur to them. And such formulas aren't set in stone. Students can and should be encouraged to modify them to suit particular arguments and audiences.

Many students fail to pick up those moves on their own, however, either because they don't read widely, or they don't read with an imitative eye. That is why representing the moves in explicit formulas is often necessary. Teachers who think they are being progressive and student-centered by rejecting such prescriptive methods are passing up a chance to demystify intellectual practices that many students find profoundly puzzling.(emphasis added)

This might not be for all writing assignments or all students--but if it helps a student get unstuck, wouldn't the dangers of prescriptiveness be worth it?