Repeated lessons from the archives

I'm calling these repeated lessons because they seem to occur to me anew every time I get to an archive.

When I'm reading letters, I'm struck every time not only by the graceful way in which the letter writers express themselves (even when they're obviously annoyed) but also by how much of the language of the standard forms (congratulations, thanks, condolences) seems to be a lost art. It makes me want to seize my fountain pen and go forth and write--if only there were anyone who wouldn't think I'd taken leave of my senses to do so.

It's surprising, too, how much the pattern of a person's handwriting lodges itself in your brain, so you can pick it out immediately even if you're scrolling slowly through microfilm.

Along with pattern recognition, there's something else that happens: sometimes a phrase or word will puzzle me because of the handwriting, and I'll type two different possibilities for the transcription. If I look away or look at something else for a minute, though, and then look back--boom! The actual meaning of the phrase comes through as clearly as though it were typed.

The more I read, the more I start to feel as though archives of letters are a vast text in themselves but that I can only find out the narratives of the characters and their relationships if I keep reading and reading. If Mr. F is a mutual acquaintance of Miss Y and Mrs. Z, I can play "guess the context" better with every letter that I read.

It does no good to rant silently to myself about conventions of dating letters that range from "Saturday" to "July 17" with no hint of a year in sight. Sometimes the year is clear from the context (mentioning an event, a dinner,a visit, or a work in progress) and sometimes from the paper or handwriting. Still, when I find a correspondent who puts an actual year on the letter, I applaud. And I have it easy, comparatively speaking. I can't even imagine what you medievalists and early modern scholars go through between the handwriting, the abbreviations, and the various orthographic and language barriers.

When I'm working in an archive, I don't want to stop, or eat, or go home. There's always just one more source, isn't there?

(I'm trying a new template, but that's not a lesson from the archive.)

Reentering blogland

This feels like a strange place after nearly three weeks. Actually, since I haven't visited this blog or any other in that time, it may be more accurate to say that the blog isn't a strange place but that I am strange in it.

The Land of No Internets was its usual nineteenth-century self, even though I didn't spend as much time there as usual. What did I do there (besides a lot of cooking)?

I read. It was kind of surreal catching up on my reading of people like Lisa Gitelman and N. Katherine Hayles in a place where the electronic world felt far away.

I watched the wild geese and the foxes. The goslings were about half-grown at this time of the year, and they'd eat while the adults stood guard. The foxes watched them but didn't chase them.

I paddled the kayak for miles up and down the shore, looking at birds, rocks, trees, sailboats, old houses, and new houses built to look like old houses.

Time to reenter the world, I guess.

Slow blogging for a while

I will be in the Land of No Internets for a while, so posting will be spotty. The Land of No Internets is a place where I spend a lot of time cooking, baking, washing dishes, filling the washer with water from buckets, and other nineteenth-century pursuits.

Also on the agenda: watching the rain and reading. Lots of reading.

Marc Nouri 's warning to ambitious, pathetic, "lonely and isolated" academics going up for full professor

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Marc Nouri writes about "premature promotion". As best I can tell, being promoted to full professor means "you have demonstrated all the necessary qualifications," which would mean "not premature" to most university administrations. (See Historiann's post on this, too.)

But Nouri draws a distinction between being technically eligible and some transcendent state that embodies Full Professorhood or Professorliness or The Force or something:

That honor, in a more intrinsic and meaningful sense, is reserved for those who take a different path, a more patient, methodical and dedicated path, driven by a deep desire to be something really special as a scholar and as a member of his or her university community.

This kind of reminds me of the old academic system, borrowed from British universities, in which it was thought presumptuous to think about publishing a book until you had 20-30 years of teaching and learning about your subject under your belt. I even knew a few graduate students who believed this back in the olden days; they thought it was presumptuous and careerist to submit an abstract for a conference, let alone try to publish something, and would ridicule mercilessly anyone who did anything so crass. Those who tried to "professionalize" were, in their sights, no better than grade-grubbing students.

A few more of Nouri's points:

1. I don't know why he pegs those who go up for full when they're allowed to by their departments as "eager early birds . . . who are lonely and isolated, and for very good reason. No one likes them and their attitude," as though all they're lacking is a three-name moniker and a rifle to be the next serial killer.

2. Nouri says that you ought to be "A NAME!" or the go-to person in your field before you have the chutzpah to go up for full. What have studies consistently shown about male and female faculty and their respective willingness to (1) put themselves forward, (2) negotiate hard for raises, and (3) do what it takes to catch the positive attention of the powers that be?

3. Not to get on my pink glitter gender horse again, but while all that university service and that "patient, methodical path" may sound good for the Platonic ideal of the full professor, the way most people have to get there is through research as well as service. Gosh, do we know anyone in the university who's likely to be stuck at associate level through pursuing the "patient, methodical path" of unacknowledged service? Anyone?

Thoughts?

Writing as habit

I shouldn't even be posting this, but I really need the writing inspiration.

From Rachel Toor's "The Habit of Writing" at the Chronicle:

"I only write when I am inspired," Faulkner apparently said, and added, "Fortunately, I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning." Most of them say that you need to take writing seriously, to treat it like a job.

That's probably good advice. It just doesn't work for me. For me writing has become less a job than a habit.

A friend who wanted to start running said that he'd heard it takes three months to form a habit. I don't know whether that's true. It sounds both facile and pseudoscientific. But over the years, I seem to have performed a trick of mind, managing to convince myself that getting up every day and going someplace to write was as normal as brushing my teeth, making my bed, or watching reruns of House. Whatever psychological move I used, it seems to have been successful.

And in the comments, a quotation from Philip Glass:

In my student days I knew a lot of composers, many of them more talented than myself. But I learned one thing most of them did not: good work habits. When I was still a teenager, I forced myself to write music during a set period every morning, and I also forced myself to stop at one in the afternoon. I refused to take down musical ideas at other hours, even when they came to me. You might say I trained the Muse to come calling at my hours, not hers. And it worked. For years now, I have gotten my ideas in the mornings and never in the afternoons."

Now back to work.

Eight things no conference-goer wants to hear

1. "I'll skip this part in the interests of time, but in it I discuss this idea . . ."
   
2. "How many of you have read Mildly Obscure Author?" (Half the audience raises their hands, because why else would you go to a panel where said author is likely to be discussed?) "That's great--great! He should be better known. Well, Mildly Obscure Author was born on this date in . . ."
   
3. "How much time do I have left?" "You're two minutes over." "All right, I'll just skip to my last few pages, then."
4. "Since there aren't that many of you in the audience, let's move our chairs into a circle and we'll just talk about what our papers would have said if we'd read them." (This can work on occasion, but usually not.)
5. ". . . and I've brought along a number of her books so that I can share some passages with you . . ."
   
6. Twenty minutes into a supposedly twenty-minute paper: With several pages left to go, Presenter looks up from reading the paper and starts extemporizing: "You know, this reminds me of her other work, Y, in which . . ."
7. Paper read in a quiet, rapid monotone with no emphasis on any one word so that it's hard to grasp the ideas. We call it "reading" a paper, but we actually should call it "performing" the paper. Sometimes people are nervous, and it can't be helped, but practice the paper ahead of time.
8. "Our time is officially up, but we can take a few questions from the audience . . ."

Most presenters don't do these things, but there are a few. What else don't you want to hear or see at a conference?

On writing, from ProfHacker

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Planned Obsolescence) has a good post up at ProfHacker, "The First Half-Hour of the Morning":

This is a lesson that I've had to re-learn repeatedly. I'll find myself, about mid-semester, having a hard time squeezing any writing into my schedule, and it will only slowly dawn on me that the situation is being worsened, if not created, by the fact that I'm starting my day in crisis-management mode, which is a mode I can never get out of once it's set in.

On the other hand, if I start my day with thirty minutes of writing, I'm far more likely to be able to return to the project in some random free block of time later in the day.

So I discipline myself: I climb out of bed, brush my teeth, feed the cats, make the coffee, and then sit down at the computer -- and do not open my email. Instead, I open whatever document I'm currently writing in and set a timer for thirty minutes. And I spend that thirty minutes focusing exclusively on that document.

Because whatever new crisis my email is going to bring me that morning isn't going to get any worse in the next thirty minutes, but getting my focus back once I've allowed the crisis into my morning simply will not work.

This post has stuck with me, even though a lot of bloggers (myself included) have talked about setting aside writing times before. Although some of the commenters say that you can block out any 30 minutes in a day, it's not as easy to shut off your mind as it is to close the office door and turn off the internet.
Fitzpatrick's post reminded me of this study:

She [Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life] recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

I've noticed this, too: my attention span shortens throughout the day, until it lengthens again in the evening and I can concentrate once again.

A side note: I like ProfHacker, although my reaction is often "hey, I wrote about that a while back/have been doing that for years." What ProfHacker posts on productivity do, though, is remind me of this: if you've written about this before, why aren't you following all those precepts you've been writing about for years?

Application fail.

Service and gender equity

Profgrrrl, Dr. Crazy, Historiann, and Female Science Professor have some great posts about issues that Dr. Crazy grouped together as "Gender, Equality, Mobility": spousal hires (Profgrrrl), salary compression and gender equity (FSP and Historiann), and all three (Dr. Crazy). Go read their posts for some thoughtful commentary.

I'd like to add a fourth one loosely connected with gender: service and promotion.

The MLA Report "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey" says it best: "On average, it takes women from 1 to 3.5 years longer than men to attain the rank of professor, depending on the type of institution in which they are employed and regardless of whether they are single, married, or divorced or have children." According to the survey, women report that they do not spend significantly more time on service than men do, although they spend more time on teaching.

I wonder about this, although all I have is anecdata. Do women really spend the same amount of time on service as their male colleagues, or do they just not count some of the kinds of service that they do perform?

I'm thinking of conversations with colleagues from other institutions who are irritated that "the men" in their departments aren't doing X or Y service task. When I asked them why they didn't give the tasks to "the men" instead of taking those tasks on themselves, they laughed and said, "They wouldn't do it! It would never get done."

My belief is that if "the men" wouldn't do Task X or Y, the department would soon figure it out. Either (1) something would go badly awry in the operations of the department, in which case the faculty member who hadn't done the work would come under scrutiny, or (2) it wasn't worth doing in the first place, in which case the female colleagues should give it up, too. Either way, the colleagues weren't doing either themselves or "the men" any favors by completing these tasks.

Were "the men" really slackers, or were these colleagues just unfairly painting an entire gender with the same "slacker" brush? Did my female colleagues count the extra work that they did as service?

Are the kinds of service that women do different from the kinds of service that men do in departments? Does that service have anything to do with rates of promotion?

So how's your new employee, writing boss?

• The first week of the "pay yourself" plan went pretty well. I finished the edits on an accepted article and got it sent back, made some inroads into a conference paper due soon, and got some textbooks ordered and a secondary reading list started for the fall. The textbook order and reading list weren't the scholarly work I'd assigned myself to do, of course, but it did need to be done, and I got to perform the magical operation of crossing an item off the to-do list. Yes, I am one of those people who will write an item on the list just for the pleasure of crossing it off later.
  
• Once again, I discovered that my favorite time to write is really in the evening. The house quiets down, the sky opens out in darkness, and it's just me, the computer screen, and ideas. This would be perfect if I didn't wake up unbidden at 5 a.m. every day regardless of when I get to sleep.
• The write at night/get up early syndrome may explain why yesterday was a trance day. I got a fair amount of reading done, but every time I stopped moving for too long, I fell asleep.
• On the other hand, getting up early means that I can walk early, thus being exposed to the smell of early morning (which dissipates by about 9 a.m.). I can't explain it, but the air just smells different at that time. I'm working on a theory that it is somehow much better for the brain to get out and walk then since there are some kind of special chemicals that will make writing better later.

[Edited because no one needs to hear my Cassandra-like political ruminations.]

Being your own boss, scholarship edition

Since September, I've been putting some money in the bank each paycheck because I wanted the time to write this summer instead of teaching a summer course. This is in part an extension of the "book review mantra"; I can manage with less money (I hope), given what I've saved, but I can't get back the writing time that I'd usually spend grading and teaching.

Now here's the part that sounds a little crazy: what I've saved isn't exactly as much as a summer course, but I'm thinking of it as my salary for the next 6 weeks. I have $X amount per week, and thus $Y amount per day, that I am paying myself to write. If I don't write, I'm not only wasting time; I'm wasting money. Every day I don't write is not simply a day that I could have gotten some writing done; it's a day when I could have been teaching and making money instead.

In a way, it's not terribly different from what we usually do when we think about writing and productivity. Somehow, though, having to account for that $Y at the end of the day as well as for a word count seems to give the whole thing a different twist.

Lessons from Mom

Lessons I'm glad I learned from my mother (although she didn't put them in these words), with commentary:

• A person who treats you abusively once will do so again. Make the first time the only time. You're better than that, so walk away and don't look back. This was phrased in terms of if a boyfriend ever grabbed you roughly, but it's a great lesson for psychological abuse as well as physical abuse--and men aren't the only ones capable of being abusive, either.
  
• Don't make any rules you're not willing to enforce consistently or statements you're not willing to stand behind. I picked this up from her based on parenting, but it really applies to pets, children, students--really, everyone. For example, don't write a policy on your syllabus unless you're willing to enforce it. If you're going to have exceptions, make them available to everyone, not the students who will beg the hardest.
• Trust your instincts.

Lessons I wish I hadn't absorbed:

• Education is all right, and so is working for a year or so as a teacher, but the real goal of a successful woman is to get married so you don't have to work again ever. She denies now that this is the case, but it was the clear message when I was growing up. I may have been the last person in the U. S. to hear this message.
• Only stupid people need to do homework or work hard at school. A B without effort is better than an A you worked for.Boy howdy, did this one cause me problems!

If they only knew . . .

• that sometimes their papers are so interesting that I have to set a timer so that I can stop commenting and go on to the next one.
• that sometimes their papers have so many problems that I have to set a timer so that I can stop trying to untangle their sentences and go on to the next one.
• that sometimes I laugh out loud because they've said something so clever or witty or insightful or true that I can't help it.
• that sometimes I try to stop myself from exclaiming out loud if I've entered the paper zone known as the Howling Wilderness of Factoids and Generalizations.
• that the test of perfection in MLA citation style is its invisibility: if it's done correctly, I won't notice it and will feel more free to concentrate on what they're saying.
  
• that in reality I care a whole lot less about correct MLA citation style than they think I do.
• that although I am impartial in that I look at each paper as a fresh start and not based on what the student has done before, sometimes I can hear their voices as I read.
• that although I have an elaborate bookkeeping system for tracking who turned in what and when, at this point in the semester I may forget that something came in a little late.
• that if they didn't turn in something despite a reminder from me, I have to tell myself it's not my fault, and I spend more time thinking about their failure to turn it in than I should.
  
• that I think about this even though I know that they may be attending my classes for all sorts of reasons, and doing the best work that they can do may not be at the top of their list of life priorities right now.
• that I'm looking forward as much as they are to the real end of the semester, when finals are over and grades are in, and I can be put back into my pod person teacher closet (as they see it) until next fall.
  

From The Chronicle: "A Gentle Reminder to Special Collections Librarians"

"A Gentle Reminder to Special Collections Librarians" is not for the many friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable Special Collections librarians out there. No, it's for the ones who look at you as though you are standing there with matches and a can of gasoline if you ask to see an item. It's by a Yale Special Collections librarian, Todd Gilman, who was not able to see a collection he was both knowledgeable about and interested in because it was guarded by Cerberus a librarian who "believed she was doing her job—that her behavior was justified because I was foolish enough to just 'turn up' expecting to use 'her' collection." He adds this as the lesson:

Let this, then, serve as a gentle reminder to rare-book curators that your job is not to keep readers from your books but just the opposite: to facilitate readers' use of the collections. If altruism or professional integrity aren't sufficient motivators to get you to play nice, you might consider the fact that you have a job only because people want to read what's in those collections, and you will keep your job for only as long as readers feel welcome to approach you to make use of the materials.

I've had both kinds of treatment (mostly good) in visits to archives, but I always assumed that the few instances of bad treatment occurred because I was not one of the Elect in whatever way the local librarian chose to define it.

Have you found helpful librarians, or is Todd Gilman's experience more universal than not?

News from the flying dinosaurs front

I've been talking this semester about my class in "flying dinosaurs studies," which has just ended, so I thought I'd share the results of an end-of-semester survey that I usually do so that I can choose texts for the next time. I did this in my other classes, too, with similar results. I ask them what their reactions were to what we read, what they'd like to read that we didn't read this semester, etc.

• "I liked what we studied." I can live with this one.
• "Why didn't we study the stegosaurus? I studied the stegosaurus in high school and wrote a paper on it for my class last year, and we study it in every dinosaur class ever offered, so why wasn't it included in this class?" What part of flying dinosaurs was unclear to you in the course description?
• "I really wanted to study T.Rex. T. Rex rips things apart, and there's a lot of blood and cool stuff to look at with T. Rex. I've read about a hundred books on T. Rex, like everybody else in the class, so why didn't we study more about T. Rex? Also: zombies." What part of flying . . . oh, never mind.
• "Why didn't we discuss the color of dinosaur claws in more depth? They are pretty. We talked about the wings a lot, but we only spent a little time talking about the claws." You've got me there.

Seriously, though, if they're given a choice between something they haven't read before and something they have, why do they go for the familiar text?

Hoovering through

When I was in junior high, I used to walk to school with a sort-of friend. Every day I'd stop by her house to pick her up, and sometimes I'd stop on the way back, too. Invariably, regardless of the time of day, her mother would be hauling around a gigantic upright vacuum cleaner on the blue shag carpet; the vacuum cleaner, like the house, dated from the early 1960s and looked as if it were all steel and built to survive Armageddon. "She's Hoovering through," my SOF would explain, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to be totally attached to a vacuum cleaner all day.

I think I have been Hoovering through with teaching: chained to it at the hip, getting teaching epiphanies, worrying about students who checked out of class long ago (one of whom has decided to withdraw, thank goodness), and generally concentrating all my work/cleaning time on it day and night. On the plus side, my Excel gradebooks have never looked more cleaned-up and shiny, whereas usually there's an "oh, rats, I have to turn grades in" moment in which everything on paper gets entered into the spreadsheet at the last minute. I can actually tell students how many points they have for X or Y without saying "let me get back to you on that" and making frantic calculations. On the minus side--well, we all know what the minus side is, don't we? Although I did write and deliver a couple of conference presentations recently, that momentum didn't hold. Oh, no. Apparently I'm compelled to Hoover through.

Part of it is just being on campus all the time (and I'm not done for the week yet). The last few weeks of the semester are a favorite time for students whom you haven't seen all semester to materialize at your door and for administrators and faculty to schedule receptions, celebrations, award ceremonies, meetings, and presentations.

But now a few secret messages before I put the vacuum cleaner away for the day and concentrate on work:

• To the technology gods: if you had to bestow a massive, class-ending technology clusterfail on me, and apparently you did, thank you for leaving it until the end of the semester.
• To the student who wants to know if I've had a chance to grade the weekly work from February, March, and April that he tried to turn in all in a heap yesterday despite knowing that the deadlines have long passed: no, and you're too late to get credit for those.
  
• To the "oh, are you here today?" colleague from an earlier post: thanks, because your comment annoyed me so much that I went on the offensive with this, asking you, "which day are YOU here? I didn't see you last week."
  
• To the students who are excited about the options they chose for their final project and said so: I'm glad. It took a little longer for me to come up with those assignments, and it'll take longer to grade them, but your engagement in and excitement about the material makes that extra time worth it.
  

Short takes on deep thoughts

After a ridiculously busy week, I visit the blogosphere and discover that instead of celebrating April with daffodils and bunny pictures, everyone has good posts filled with deep thoughts.

• Notorious Ph.D. has a pair of posts asking graduate students how faculty members can best help them ("honesty").
• Historiann points out that mothers are once again being blamed and asks why it's so difficult for Americans to acknowledge the difficult realities of family life.
• Dr. Crazy contemplates a change (possibly generational) in the makeup of the academic blogosphere.
  
• Professor Zero provides the real translation of an exchange with an arrogant and clueless colleague.
• Ink had a week filled with testing (of the doctor kind) and grading (of the grading kind).
• tenthmedieval comments on the works of academic rock stars and, you know, rock star rock stars.
• Clio Bluestocking responds to messages composed of equal parts racism and incivility.
• New Kid gets exasperated by advice on professional dress that boils down to the perennial (and sexist) "don't dress in a way to distract men ('sexy' clothes) or make women jealous of you ('wear a big engagement ring').
  
• AnnieEm describes the reasons behind choosing a set list of questions for interviews.

Here is the only thing I can offer in response: [there used to be a bunny picture here, but it disappeared.]

Machines need rest, too: an animistic theory of the universe

Just to clarify: I don't really believe that there's a mystic connection between machines and human beings, since (sorry, Tracy Kidder) machines don't have souls.

But it sure helps to act as if they do, doesn't it? Do you stand there in front of a class and mutter "come on, come on" when a particularly balky overhead projector or computer is creaking slowly through its deliberate startup routine?

Do you maybe think to yourself, "Right, then--if you want to be that way about it" when about 1 time in every 10 it won't work at all for no apparent reason? If I weren't in front of a class when that happened, I'd go through the startup routine until I figured out the problem by eliminating variables, but for some reason students seem to find this a less-than-gripping entertainment when they're ready to talk about literature, so I don't do that any more.

Do you ever feel a mixture of bracing yourself up for battle and a willingness to accept defeat when you're trying to use media at a conference, since whatever machine has been set up might take a dislike to your USB drive or your computer and refuse to show anything but a blue screen?

Have you ever had a machine that just stopped working, and you put it in the garage or just left it turned off for a few months or a year, and then you plug it in and it works again? I've had that happen too many times to count and have simply concluded that machines need rest, too.

Or, closer to home, all of a sudden Firefox stopped showing up for work this week. I don't know whether it was tired of browser duty or what, but I'd click on it, and I'd see it in the "running processes" list, but it never actually opened. After several days of this, I interpreted the theory to mean "sometimes browsers need rest, too" and uninstalled it. I'll reinstall it in a week or so, after it has had its Florida vacation or whatever it needed to recover from its fatigue.

Has any of this happened to you?

The iPad: techno-envy

If I had a dollar for every review and blogpost I've read about the iPad over the past two weeks, I would have enough to buy--well, not an iPad, but maybe a cover for it.

I know all the drawbacks: why buy this when you have a netbook? It doesn't do anything a laptop can't do. It's a content-consumption device, not a content-creation device. It's expensive (although I have a rebate from something else that I could put toward buying it.) On and on.

I don't care. I at least want to get my hands on one to see if there is a Mystical Connection between woman and machine.

It isn't rational, this feeling. I just am drawn to the idea of it, the way that (stereotype alert) many men are drawn to cars and apparently, as Dr. Isis has taught me, most women care about shoes. (I don't.)

I waited two years for my Kindle envy to go away, and finally it did, but what's the use if iPad envy took its place?

Maybe I need to wait until this wave of techno-envy goes away.

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).]

Getting back on the horse

I try to keep a record of writing productivity, a la Silvia's How to Write a Lot, but that particular spreadsheet isn't one I've opened in a while. "Here I am," it says to me, and I'm off in another room with my fingers in my ears, singing "La la la, I can't hear you. Look! There's another book on flying dinosaurs to prep! Another paper to grade! Another set of response papers to read!" I have never used teaching as a distraction and procrastination device before, but lo and behold, that's what I've done this semester.

This morning, in trying to write and get back a sense of order, I took a look at the spreadsheet. The record has more zeros in it than a hedge fund manager's salary, except that mine doesn't have the mitigating number before those zeros that measures worth in millions or billions. No, I just have zeros where a record of days spent writing could be.

To be fair, a number of those days were on-campus days, usually 3-4 a week; that means 12 hours per on-campus day, counting travel, and an absence of opportunity to write between teaching, dealing with students, and attending committee meetings.

But that's really an excuse. What I've done is like making a big sandcastle instead of building a house: by the time the semester is done, all the writing on those papers, all the prep--everything--will be washed away, and I'll be standing there on the beach with nothing except satisfaction in what I did with teaching to show for the semester.

Now, that kind of satisfaction is valuable to me personally, and presumably the effort I put into teaching helps students, but in a count-happy culture (how many publications? how perfect are your evaluations?), it doesn't really matter to anyone except me. As we're constantly being reminded in a count-happy culture, and, as we remind our students, effort doesn't count. Product does.

So although it's not one of the traditional times to turn over a new leaf--beginning of the semester, January 1--I'm going to get back on this particular horse of writing, and to do that, I have to record the progress I've made. I'm going to stare down those zeros every day until they turn into something else: evidence of work accomplished.

This is not a real post

Grumble . . . reading other people's words . . . writing letters for other people's projects, awards, and evaluations . . . reading student projects . . . evaluating . . . evaluating . . . being on campus and kept from writing many, many days in a row . . . grumble.

Unleash the inner Puritan

One of the nice things about teaching literature that's not from the 21st century is that students get to have a window on the past and to think about things that they might not have thought about before. There are two areas or subjects, though, that they seem especially fascinated by: race relations and sexual mores.

Because we still (sadly) live in a racist culture, they "get" the racism of the earlier texts pretty well, although they bridle at the unfairness of racist practices and are angry at the laws reinforcing them. The whole white panic over "mixed blood," and the pseudoscience that supported theories of race in the 19th and early 20th centuries, seem to them so deluded as to seem incredible to any rational person--which it is, of course, even though we have to understand those attitudes in order to understand points in the plots.

The harder sell, I think, is the issue of sexual mores. Just think about the books in which either reputed sexual waywardness (by 19th-century standards) or evidence in the form of the unmarried mother appear:

Pride and Prejudice
Adam Bede
The Scarlet Letter
Bleak House
Daisy Miller
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
My Antonia
The House of Mirth
Summer

(I know there are more--commenters?)

The difficulty lies in trying to get them to see what a huge deal it was to be pregnant and unmarried in those days, and the amount of scandal that it would have brought not only to the woman but to her family. Even if she married the man who had impregnated her, she'd be at the very least a topic for gossip--and a target of barbs from malicious family members who refused to go along with the polite fiction that the baby was "premature" if born less than 9 months after the wedding. Other possibilities, if marriage wasn't an option, included abortion (illegal), being sent away to live with relatives or put into a home, putting the baby up for adoption, or even having the baby and then having the family pretend that the grandmother was actually the mother.

Students are problem-solvers, and even after they understand that unmarried pregnancy is a problem, they have a lot of questions:

"Why can't she just go and get a job somewhere?" Respectable employers aren't going to hire an unmarried woman with a baby, so she'll have to pretend to be a widow and risk being found out. Also, there's no day care, and "baby-farming" means the death of the child, pretty much.

"Can't she go back to her family?" She can--Tess does, for example--but a lot of families considered the disgrace too great.

"What if the man marries her?" Too late--the stigma is already there, except perhaps in a farming community like the one Antonia lives in, and Antonia doesn't marry the father of her child.

The really heartening part of this exercise is that they genuinely don't see what the big deal is about this issue. What that says to me is that huge portions of that whole pernicious culture of shame and secrecy and having one's life ruined over this issue are just not part of their vocabulary, even if they joke about the "walk of shame." But to get them to understand the literature and the importance that the characters place on their sexual situations, I have to put them back in that culture momentarily. I have to get them to unleash their inner Puritan.*

*Yes, I know: a lot of Puritan brides were pregnant before marriage, but you know what I mean.

Lessons learned over the weekend

• I read a book this weekend--not a newsworthy event for an academic, I know. But this was a book I'm rereading because a student is writing on it, and it's a book I first read and reread ages ago. I liked it back then, although it's not this author's Big Novel. (Think The Rainbow or The Plumed Serpent instead of Women in Love or Sons and Lovers.) Guess what? I still liked it, even though I can see the critics' objections better now than I could then. Lesson learned: I wasn't a total doofus for liking it back then, and it didn't induce in me some of the forehead-smacking embarrassment for enjoying it that I've experienced when going back to other youthful book crushes.
  
• If in your ecstasy to be at home rather than on campus you throw yourself with extreme enthusiasm into some home activity like moving furniture, chopping vegetables, or cleaning cupboards, be prepared for (1) bruised limbs, (2) cut fingers, and (3) seeing stars after you crash your head into a cupboard door that has mysteriously opened in front of you.
  
• Sometimes (see above), the universe is trying to tell you to sit on the couch and watch a movie rather than risk more self-inflicted injuries. That's what weekends are for.
• The quality of a weekend is in direct proportion to the paucity of work-related emails that you receive.
  

A test in academic diplomacy

Here's a hypothetical situation for you.

You're on campus and in your office (except for teaching) all day long, eight or nine hours at a time, three and sometimes four days a week. In fact, when you stop by your colleagues' offices, no one is usually there.

However, by some invisible decree, meetings are held on the one day you're not there.

Someone mentions a committee that you've volunteered for but expresses concern about your "limited availability" and asks, "Which day [!] are you on campus?"

To use the title of that children's book, what do you say, dear?

Random Bullets of March Teaching

• I almost took a picture of the bag of folders with corrected papers, all neatly paperclipped to quizzes and whatever else I had to give back. For one brief, shining moment, that grading was done in all its handcrafted loveliness.
  
• Yes, I did have one student come up to say . . . that he couldn't read my handwriting.
  
• An added benefit of spring break: students really do seem revved up and ready to discuss the texts.
• Or maybe it's just that from here, the end is in sight.
  
• I have put so much work into teaching the flying dinosaur studies class this semester that I'm going to be crushed if it turns out they didn't like it. They seem to be enjoying it, but you never know. They got into such a spirited debate today that I had to stop them so class wouldn't go over time.
  

Not much. How about you?

What I've been doing for the last week: reading other people's words.

• Reading student papers and expending good advice and ink upon them. Thanks, commenters, for the advice on writing comments by hand. The eco-unfriendliness of printing the papers (double-sided) is mitigated, I hope, by filling the fountain pens I used with ink from a bottle--and yes, I had to refill them a few times to get through the stacks.
• About grading: although the words I write are my words, sometimes, when I'm finished with the individual comments and am summing up, it feels like automatic writing, since the phrases are ones I've used before.
  
• Reading emails and responding to them.
• Reading and responding to drafts sent to me by students and colleagues.

What I haven't been doing: my own writing. I'm hoping to get back to it soon.

Lectures as warm-up

In "College 2.0: More Professors Could Share Lectures Online. But Should They?" Jeffrey R. Young interviews some professors who have put their lectures online and some who have hesitated. The reasons for hesitation vary from seeing the classroom as a "sacred space" to a recording system that doesn't let you log in even though you have the password (we've all been there, haven't we?).

There are a lot of interesting parts to the article, but the one that stood out was this one:

And lectures might just fall out of popular use in physical classrooms, because professors could just point to their past recordings or those of others and assign viewings for homework. To keep students interested in the classroom, some professors would focus more on discussion or group projects and things that can't be easily captured on video.

I can see how this would work for science classes, as Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at the University of Virginia quoted in the article, mentions in the comments. But what about humanities classes where discussion is already a big part of the class? What if the "lecture" is really a warm-up to and framing of the major business of the class, which is the discussion of a text?

That's what my "lectures" really are, and they rarely last more than, say, 20 minutes. The purpose is to introduce concepts and terms for talking about the literature, and as I talk, I can see by looking at their faces whether I need to expand on a certain concept or give another example. I can stop, backtrack, or cut short something that they don't seem to need--or I can ask them directly if they need more explanation or if I'm going too fast.

I'm imagining how this would work if I just assigned them to watch a previous lecture, as the quotation suggests.

"So, did you all catch me last night on YouTube? Do you remember what I said about the principle of X? Stu Dent, can you summarize this principle for us?"

Maybe Stu Dent summarizes the principle, but maybe Stu Dent sits with a blank look on his face and the only sound I hear is crickets.

Given the trouble we've all had at points getting students to read the material, what makes us think that they'd be more eager to spend time watching our lectures?

Also, if given a choice between watching a video and reading an article about a subject, I choose the article because watching a video takes a lot more time. Wouldn't students feel the same way?

In a discussion-based humanities classroom, a lecture isn't a waste of class time that can be outsourced to YouTube or MIT for greater efficiency. It's a fundamental technique for focusing attention, for putting students and the instructor in the same classroom space mentally as well as physically. The point of the lecture is to put us all in the same place so that we can talk about the work, and immediacy is a key part of that.

News flash from the Chronicle: most people would prefer to work fewer hours, be paid the same salary

From The Chronicle: "Younger Professors Say a Successful Career Should Not Require Long Hours":

In conversations with a dozen faculty members, researchers with a project on work-life issues run by Harvard University have found that "Generation X" professors value efficiency over "face time" and believe that quality is more important than quantity in academic work.

Where to start?

Note the implicit oppositions being set up here:

Gen X faculty like efficiency whereas senior faculty don't know how to be efficient, not being digital natives, and prefer schmoozing (face time).

Gen X faculty prefer "quality" in publications whereas senior faculty wouldn't know quality if it bit them in the face and are forced to count "quantity" instead.

Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little. But it seems to me that this kind of study (or article) based on a sample size of 12 (twelve!), does a disservice to both Gen X faculty and senior faculty.

First of all, it uses the language of science to reinforce false generational cliches: Gen X is lazy and entitled, and senior professors are too old and stodgy to learn to work smarter. At least it recognizes that senior professors do work and are not simply (as they are over at some sites) deadwood lumps stuck in the middle of the road of academic progress.

Second, it presents as a radical new idea the concept that faculty members in Gen X would like to work fewer hours and not be in the office as much. Well, who wouldn't like to work fewer hours and be paid the same amount, especially in an era of furloughs in which we're being paid less and asked to work more hours? It's right up there on my personal to-do list along with achieving world peace and seeing a unicorn before I die. The point is that the real world has a way of correcting one's expectations. That doesn't mean that you're a bad person for having an ideal; it just means that you work as hard as you need to, and you learn pretty quickly how many hours that takes.

Third, the survey and the article buy into a syndrome of pitting generations of scholars against each other through cliches like this, giving a focus, and an incorrect focus at that, to the free-floating anxiety and resentment that's rampant in the academy today. In Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Marlowe is about to be beaten up by a couple of detectives who are at odds with each other. He says to one, "Let's you and him fight. I'll catch him when he drops." By using generational labels, universities are saying "let's you and him fight"--except that they're not going to catch either generation when it drops.

Grading by hand: the Amish quilt of the classroom?

Over at University Diaries, Margaret Soltan quotes from a newspaper opinion piece by Robert Duffley:

My loudest complaint is the impersonality of the online model. There’s something reassuring and intimate about a hand-corrected paper. To print a paper is to finalize it, making change all but impossible. Printing a paper brings the writer’s ideas and craft into the physical world. In a realm as tenuous and self-conscious as academia, tangibility provides a reassuring degree of legitimacy. A professor’s handwritten corrections are a sign that, even if the grade is poor, the student’s effort received individualized attention. Inserting feedback via track changes, or any online form, is chillingly anonymous and curt.

The commenters, mostly professors, don't seem to agree; I especially liked Anthony Grafton's comment that "My handwriting, always cryptic, could now be used to defend Google against Chinese hackers." That's been my experience, too: seeing a few students come up after class, I hope to hear something like "these comments were so helpful!" but instead hear "can you tell me what this word says?"

I'm of two minds about grading via inserted comments versus handwritten comments. For one thing, the inserted comments are easier to read, assuming that the students have some flavor of Word (which they mostly seem to use). Also, I then have a record of the paper and what I said, so I can refer to it if I have to write a letter for the student later.

But is this "chillingly anonymous and curt"? Do students assume that because I'm grading using a computer that the comments are somehow generated by computer rather than by me? Is there something personal and handmade, like an Amish quilt,* in writing comments on the paper by hand? I know one thing that I miss in the computer version: all the swooping lines, arrows, circles, and brackets that I can use to point out connections in the paper. There's a nonverbal but visual quality to those marks that can't be duplicated when typing on the computer.

As I veer back and forth, preferring first one and then the other, I wish I knew which one the students prefer. (When I've asked, the answer has varied by individual students; there doesn't seem to be a clear preference.)

Which do you use, and why?

*"Amish" because the quilts are "personal and handmade" by the thousands, like the papers we grade.

How to be an awesome researcher if you're at a rich school or have Ivy-connected friends

The Little Professor has a good post up about one of my pet peeves: those who extol the virtues of electronic databases for research when the cost of those databases is too high for many, perhaps even most, universities and colleges. She writes:

But I am railing at attempts to discuss the New Golden Age of Electronic Research in ways that do not acknowledge how localized that Age is currently proving to be. Yes, we have more free stuff; we also have lots more stuff that only a few, relatively well-funded colleges can purchase.

The Little Professor links to Professor Awesome Researcher's article in the New York Times arguing that "that a university’s tenure demands should keep pace with technological advances." Thanks to good connections--a friend at an Ivy--he found a bunch of hits in EEBO and can crank out a book faster, so what's wrong with the rest of us slackers that we're not doing the same?

Now, Professor Awesome has a point: it's easier to search for things electronically than to be to lug a stack of index cards to the long tables of reference books. But Little Professor's point, with which I would entirely agree, is that these resources aren't free and available to everyone, and access to them shouldn't depend on being a faculty member at Moneybag$ University or on having an obliging and well-connected friend who doesn't mind lending an access code.

This is one of the things that the NEH Digitization Projects do right; they state up front that "We strongly encourage projects that offer free public access to online resources. All other considerations being equal, preference will be given to projects that provide free, online access to digital materials produced with grant funds." But even NEH funding doesn't guarantee access; the Brown Women Writers Project, for example, is a subscription-only database despite its NEH funding. The question of access sometimes takes a back seat to the issues of preservation and digitization.

Although talk about the "digital divide" focuses, and rightly so, on the gap between those in the general public, especially schoolchildren, who don't have access to computers and the Internet, there's also a gap in the resources available to universities with less funding. If the "digital divide" is the Grand Canyon, maybe the academic version is the digital equivalent of climbing over a wall--a subscription wall. Pretending that digital access is universal and that the wall doesn't exist doesn't help anyone, least of all those who don't have a handy ladder in the form of a nearby institution that subscribes or a conveniently well-connected friend.

Where politeness dwells on the internets

No, not in the comments sections of commercial sites, which may demonstrate more (New York Times) or less (msnbc.com) civility and literacy, depending on the news topics.

Nor in the dying, spam-ridden embers of Usenet or Google Groups--remember Usenet?--or the outraged postings of abused purchasers at consumer sites.

Nor, alas, does it necessarily exist in the emails sent by students, which are sometimes correctly addressed to Dr. Lastname but sometimes to "Hey Mrs. Lastname" or sometimes (and most irritating of all) with no attempt at addressing me, just an abrupt launch into a request that I respond as soon as possible. These I leave until last when responding, needless to say.

But politeness does still exist--in professional email.

A few years ago, I started noticing that a number of academics didn't just launch into requests or whatever when writing emails. Instead, the emails began with the sentence "I hope you are well" or another courteous phrase unheard of back in the olden days.

And the complimentary closes of the emails became more polite, too. Although a lot of people still apparently prefer "best," I've seen comments at the Chronicle saying that this is too curt, and in the last couple of years, I've seen a lot more variety in this part of the email, too: "best regards," "warm regards," "all best," "with best wishes," "cordially," and so on.

Of course, this doesn't always guarantee that the person types a name below the close. As often as not, the person closes the email without typing his or her name, letting the signature file (which has grown from the customary 4 lines back in the day to a 6 or 7-line mini-cv listing titles and posts) do the work.

I'm charmed by this politeness. It makes me feel as though I'm in a Jane Austen novel and am receiving a letter, not an email.

Now my question: have you noticed this, too?

You can count on me

• If we're in a meeting that's supposed to be at an end, and I have class in a few minutes, and you start engaging people in a discussion of a department issue that has nothing to do with the meeting at hand, you can count on me to interrupt and say, brightly and loudly, "So, we're all agreed on X, then? Good. This meeting is adjourned."
  
• If you're an administrator, and you've been asking for various kinds of responses from me, and I've been sending them without getting any response from you, you can count on me to stop by your office and say, "So, you got the X I sent, right?"
  
• If you're a student, and you already have some absences that weren't when you were sick (because I saw you on campus), and you write to me now that you're sick and wonder what "extra work" you can do to make up all the absences, you can count on me to reply courteously and tell you that there isn't any "extra work" you can do.
• If you're a random person from outside the university--say, a student at another university--you can count on me to consign your email to the trash bin if it's demanding ("I need to know this right away") or implies in any way that it's my job to answer your questions. It's not.
  

Random bullets of February

• Still as corny as Kansas in August, high as a flag on the Fourth of July, and all that, about teaching flying dinosaur studies, even though I haven't finished grading their papers. I'm enjoying the other classes, too. (If you don't know the song, it's here.)
  
• Have finally looked at my research journal and have discovered that except for minor revisions and materials for a project that someone else is organizing, I haven't written anything for at least a month. Apparently it's all teaching, all the time here at Chez Undine, at least for now. I have to get writing and stop treating teaching like a new toy.
  
• This infatuation with teaching doesn't include the less-fun-than-a-root-canal process of pulling together materials for the annual review. The administration has decided to ask for extra materials about impact of what we're doing, which makes the whole process just so much more pointless special. Dame Eleanor Hull and Bardiac have said it better than I can.
  

Print books and e-books again

The New York Times asks "Do School Libraries Need Books?" in a recent issue. Some snippets:

1. James Tracey, headmaster of Cushing Academy (which pretty much said "no, in thunder!" in answer to this question), is still a no-books enthusiast but says that students "need more help from librarians to navigate these resources, so we have also increased our library staff by 25 percent." Wait, what? I thought the point of school was to teach students to think and to find materials for themselves rather than to foster an increased dependence on librarians.

2. I'm more with Matthew G. Kirshenbaum on this one:

Even the grossest physical failings of books and libraries, the maddening frustration of the book that is lost or checked out just when you need it most can instill an important lesson: knowledge is proximate. In the digital world, that proximity is less about geographical locale than about licensing, digital rights management, and affordability; but all the more reason for students (and teachers) to know that not everything is always within reach of a mouse.

3. Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed gives a well-reasoned but not especially hopeful update on the "let's kill all the libraries" movement: “The administrators who provide library budgets may be reluctant to fund new facilities to house print collections and may question large expenditures to support both print and electronic formats." My not-especially-helpful reaction is that we could support a lot more books if we got rid of administrators who thought like this.

4. Although I don't condone book abuse, I've known people (ahem) who have done the following at various times out of carelessness or necessity:

• dropped them
• tossed them in the back of a car where they were unaffected by the hot sun pouring down through the windows
• used them as spider-killers
• rested laptops on top of them
• used them as a handy writing desk
• scribbled phone numbers and directions in the back
• read them in the bathtub and dropped them in the water by mistake, leaving said book's pages to blossom out like a giant flower radiating from the spine when they dry.

If you drop a book, you still have a book. If you drop a Kindle, Sony, Nook, or their kindred, you have a brick.

(I don't have anything to add about the Huntsville tragedy, but please read Historiann and University Diaries for some useful commentary.)

A PSA about disabling Google's privacy nightmare, Google Buzz

Dr. Isis alerted us yesterday to Google's horrifyingly intrusive new opt-out privacy nightmare, Google Buzz. It apparently tracks where you go, links you up to blogs, and generally shreds your Internet Invisibility Cloak.

Oh, and it's on by default. If you breeze by it on your way to your Gmail inbox, it's still gathering information and posting updates for your followers.

Even if you click "turn off buzz" using the tiny, tiny link at the bottom of the page, it keeps going.

If you want to stop it, Jessica Dolcourt over at CNET tells you what to do.

Technology in the classroom, Office style

This was at The Chronicle, so it'll probably be popping up on a lot of sites.
With tongue firmly in cheek, I offer this view about technology. Rule #1 of technology use (even before "what pedagogical purpose does it serve?") is that you have to be stronger than it is: mind over matter. If you're weak, it senses your weakness and refuses to work. A video clip won't play? A program freezes while the class sits and stares at you with amusement? You know what I'm talking about.

A little reality on the rocks, please

One side effect I've noticed from the post-sabbatical reentry into teaching is that, like Don Corleone, I take things personally even if they're just business.

I'm still excited about my courses and the students and still happy that they mostly seem to be engaged with the material. But on days when some of them aren't? When a few busy themselves with their laptops (and one, as I got to see when sitting in the audience during some presentations, got all caught up in Facebook instead of looking at the speaker) or seem disengaged? Outside, I'm the same, except that I exert even more energy. Inside, I'm a wounded tulip: "I put this really interesting text on the syllabus and have all this good stuff for discussion, and you're not interested? What did I do wrong?"

The answer, as my rational self tells me, is maybe nothing. Maybe the text or my presentation is at fault, but then again maybe they have other things going on in their lives. Maybe they didn't read it. Maybe they're sick or tired. Maybe they're just bored and don't feel like being in class.

This isn't the majority. But just as you notice the one bad evaluation in a stack of good ones, the disengaged students draw a disproportionate amount of my time and attention in the class.

So this wounded tulip needs to toughen up inside as well as outside and get back to some kind of equilibrium that doesn't have me obsessing over teaching as I did when I was a TA. I'm not going to follow Don Corleone's methods, but I'm going to have some "it's not personal; it's just business" on the rocks, with a chaser of "forget about it."

(Also, a quiet talk with Facebook Student.)

Random bullets of this week

Things are bound to slow down now that the semester's begin, right? Right? Until then, some random bullets.

• What I'm finding about the flying dinosaurs studies class is that all the reading I've done over the past several years (and much of my recreational reading has been in flying dinosaur studies) is now emerging, unbidden, in various relevant ways as I lecture, lead discussions, and answer questions in that class. All that reading wasn't a waste of time and a creative means of work avoidance after all!
• This semester, I built in a lot of in-class short writing, out-of-class response papers, etc., and while it's good for the students, it's killing my own writing time even though most of the assignments are "comments only" and not graded.
  
• And about that kind of writing. I've heard for years about the tips for managing these things: assign a journal to students but don't read it, assign response papers but only look at a random 5 of those handed in per class, etc. The logic is that it's good for them to write even if they aren't getting immediate feedback, that more writing is always better, and that the students will adjust to it as long as you explain the system ahead of time. Well, maybe that's true in comp classes, although even in those, the students wanted me to read what they'd written. They would ask me questions in their journal entries so that I would respond. My belief is that if it's important enough for me to require that they write about it, it's important enough for me to read it--otherwise, why would they bother taking it seriously as an assignment and why would I have assigned it? It'd be a lot like writing those pointless committee reports that we all complain about, the ones where no one is going to pay attention to the recommendations anyway. I don't want to inflict pointless writing on students, even though I can't avoid it for myself.
• Although I have a lot of students this semester, far more than usual, just about all the students in the classes seem to be pretty engaged. I say "most" because in one class, a couple of them (who talk loudly about what "A" students they are) like to chat incessantly with each other throughout the class. Funny thing about that: if you asked me to draw a Venn diagram of all the A students I've had and all the students who have chattered incessantly and disruptively in class, the two circles would never intersect at any point. Go figure.

I'll be back to posting for real soon.

Be careful what you wish for--but it's all good, really

Not so long ago in a cold galaxy not so far away, a professor dreamed that she would create a new course. The new course would be based on materials that she was familiar with but had never taught, in a slightly different field from the one she'd been teaching in. It's a field she's excited about and really wanted to teach a course in. Let's call it "flying dinosaur studies." Now, the professor had taken courses in flying dinosaur studies during the last ice age and has kept up with it since, pretty much.

She's aware that flying dinosaur studies is not her area of primary expertise. Every word that comes out of her mouth about a flying dinosaur is one that she's had to read about anew. The materials for the course have, of course, evolved (heh) since the last ice age when she took her courses in the subject, so she's had to investigate and reinvent those, too. She can't talk off the top of her head about the structure of the pterosaur* wing, as she can--and does--about just about everything that she regularly teaches.

But she loves flying dinosaur studies. She wakes up thinking about it every morning, even though she has other courses that she likes, too. She thinks about ways to present the subject and other materials that she can bring in. It helps that the class is full and that the students seem as excited as she is.

It's exhausting and it's exhilarating.

And that's why I've been ignoring this poor blog.

*Edited to add: Not actually a flying dinosaur, except in humanities blogland. See the comments for an explanation.

MLK

From Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment:

King's eloquence endures, drawn as it was from ancient sources--the Bible, the spirituals, the hymns and folk songs. He was young at his death, younger than either Kennedy; but he had traveled farther. He did fewer things, but those things last. A mule team drew his coffin in a rough cart; not the sleek military horses and the artillery caisson. He has no eternal flame--and no wonder. He is not dead.

First thought this morning

• Oh, wait--you mean I have to teach this week, too? And the next? And the next?
  

Two items in the news

• I've been reading and reading and reading about the job crisis but don't have any answers or indeed much to add beyond what's at the links. The only answers involve (1) more funding, (2) more emphasis on education, and (3) more jobs in this country, including manufacturing jobs and a system of health care that doesn't depend a person's employment. I'm going to continue to do what I can (as faculty) to create better conditions about this but am not going to write about it.
• There are a lot of charities that are giving aid in Haiti, including Doctors Without Borders, and all can help.
  

Back

Will I lose all research credibility forever if I admit that being back in class is energizing? That I'm enjoying the students so far? That so far it's fun?

I know--ask me again in March how energizing it is. And part of that energy is getting a time-sucking monkey off my back, the monkey being a long piece of writing that drained a lot more time and energy than it was worth over the past few months. Compared to that, prepping to teach seems like floating around in the Wizard of Oz's balloon.

Random Bullets of Syllabus Writing

• Bardiac has a post on the various miseries of writing a syllabus, among them making rules that you won't be able to keep.
  
• There's a fine line between saying too much and saying too little. If you're vague, your syllabus may not stand up if there's a challenge.
  
• If, on the other hand, you spell out behaviors that you won't tolerate (texting in class), there's a chance that the students will be (1) insulted or (2) think, "wow, I didn't know you could do that in this class." True story: in religious education classes when I was a kid, if the public school kids (of which I was one) were late, the nuns used to say, in effect, "If you'd quit hanging out on the corner, drinking beer and smoking and trying to pick up boys, you wouldn't be late." We were 12 years old. Needless to say, we weren't hanging out on the corner, etc., but the implication steamed me so much that I could barely listen to what they were saying. Moral: If you treat people with excessive suspicion, they'll either enthusiastically try to live up to your worst fears about them or waste a lot of mental energy being resentful instead of listening to you.
• At some point, if you're teaching a new course, you'll think, "I don't know enough to teach this course." This isn't true. As a wise elder once told me, "You'll always know more than they will, even if it's not as much as you'd like." While this isn't true in all cases, it's mostly true.
• Those of you who have mandates not to print your syllabus but to post it to Blackboard or something may find this funny (I did): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7awiiWOefA
  
• [Edited to add] On the other hand, I'll be including some version of "don't text" in my syllabus, so maybe I have a suspicious nature.

The toys of teaching

They don't have to be shiny, these toys. I'm talking about the little enjoyable preparatory steps that you mess around with when you're planning classes. Since there's no weight to them yet (grading, prepping class), they really are kind of fun.

• Syllabus. I know--we have to do this, but if it's not also enjoyable, why am I taking so much time with it? What kinds of assignments? How many will there be? When will papers be coming in so I'm not snowed under by my own lack of planning?
  
• Thinking about grading. Since I don't actually have to grade anything right now, I find myself thinking about things like essay commenting programs (like eMarking assistant, which Peter mentioned in the comments to the previous post, or Markin, or just the tried-and-true autotext), contemplating rubrics, and setting up Excel gradebooks for the semester.
  
• New books. I ordered some different editions for this spring's classes, and while I'll probably regret it down the line, there's something energizing about marking up a new text for teaching.
  
• New pens in different colors. New ink for fountain pens. New notebooks.
• Folders that will soon be a sorry, dog-eared mess of ill-assorted papers but that right now sport neat labels that promise all kinds of order and efficiency.
  
• Checking the rosters and seeing if any students have taken classes with me before.
  

Of course, this may say something about the academic world that these would be considered "fun," but given how busy it'll be once the semester starts, I'm going to take what fun I can get. Are there any toys like this that get you interested in the semester?

Happy New Year!

Resolutions for 2010:

• To write something on current projects every working day, even if it's just for a little while.
• To grade papers right away. It's not as though they're marinating in that bookbag and will be more flavorful for the extra time.
• To dress a little less in MLA black casual and a little more in fashion fabulous. Picture at right? Totally my teaching outfit for May.
  
• To say this to myself when something (or someone) irritating comes along, sends me an irritating email, or otherwise disturbs a happy and uneventful day: "Do you really care that much, and is a response likely to change anything? Let it go."
  

Happy New Year, everyone!

NY Times: Books You Can Live Without

It's that time of year again, when you clean out your bookshelves in preparation for the new year, (or maybe you just want to forestall anyone submitting your name for future episodes of Clean House or Hoarders).

"Books You Can Live Without" asks several famous writers how they decided to clear out their libraries. Shorter version: (1) books I'm never going to read again; (2) outdated reference books; (3) books I'm tired of pretending that I'm going to read some day.

In a fit of cleaning not long ago, I did a version of this and got rid of a bunch of books, though not without a few pangs. Some I took to the used bookstore to be traded in for store credit (so I can buy more books, of course!) and some I took to Goodwill. Some, sadly, I couldn't even give away: I had to leave copies of old textbooks in the "Free" bin at the bookstore. I usually put them out on the Free Books table on campus, but I wasn't on campus this semester.

I needed to think about each book, but some were easier to chuck than others.

• Fodor's London 1992, from my in-laws' trip there? Other old reference books? Gone immediately.
• 10+ years of a print run of a journal now online? Gone.
• A couple of books of highly elaborate and stylishly difficult postmodern contemporary fiction from 10+ years ago that I bought from the bargain bin, never got around to reading, and have never heard about since? Gone to the bookseller's. Apparently they were neither pleasurable enough to read nor absorbing enough in a literary sense to make the effort of reading them worthwhile. Who am I kidding? If I need to read them--well, that's what libraries are for.
• Some ancient books of criticism--you know, the kind that talk appreciatively and in general terms about "innate female modesty and reticence" and "robust nature imagery"--that I picked up from a Free Books shelf when some equally ancient professors were retiring--gone.
  
• The one book I ever bought in the How I Went to Tuscany, Fixed Up an Old House, and Learned about Life from the Quaint Italians series or whatever that genre of book is called. I bought it in an airport one time but even a long plane ride couldn't make me get through it. This one--gone without a backward glance. Let's just say I never bought another book about privileged white women Finding Themselves while Learning Life's Heartwarming Truths from the Simple, Close-to-the-Earth People of Another Culture.*
  

But even though they might not pass the "will you read it again in 100 years test," I kept a lot of books. What are your criteria for getting rid of books, assuming that you have to get rid of some?

*[In case it isn't obvious, I think the whole idea is highly insulting to other cultures.]

More random bullets, or denial isn't just a river in Egypt

• I'm clinging desperately to a few remaining sabbatical days (think: by my fingernails while hanging off a cliff over an abyss that is the beginning of the new semester).
• At some point, the syllabus for the new course I've never taught before has to stop being like a jigsaw puzzle and become like a mosaic. I have to stop moving the pieces of the course around and glue them down so that the syllabus can be copied.
  
• In "Hybrid Education 2.0" over at IHE, Candace Thille of the Open Learning Initiative takes a few more swipes at what she sees as the dead horse/shibboleth of the lecture-only format. Apparently Carnegie Mellon has a new shiny way of teaching statistics and logic online (funded by Gate$$ fund$$) with an in-person assist from professors discussing the material according to student needs. The online logic course has only a "cursory level of instructor contact," though, and the instructors assigned to that are "glorified graders." What I want to know isn't being tested thus far: if a student takes Mr. Roboto's section of online logic in which choices are circumscribed, is he or she going to have the advanced (creative) thinking skills necessary for success in upper-division courses?
  

Random bullets of the season

• Getting a reprieve of two weeks on that piece of writing--now that's the holiday spirit. Thanks, editor!
• Yes, there are still some recommendation letters to be written. Aren't there always?
• Presents sent to the relatives--check. Cookies made and sent to relatives--check.
  
• I'm not going to the Big Conference this year, since I went to the other Big Conference in my discipline earlier this fall. To everyone who's going--enjoy MLA!
  
• Signs that the new semester may be approaching: a dream in which I show up at two different committee meetings, only to be told "you're not on this committee." Whew, I think--and then realize that it's time to meet my students for a new course, the one I haven't prepped at all.
  
• I read the MLA's new and grim report about the future of jobs but am not going to link to it, since everyone else has, but I will link to this spoof on the 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time (h/t Old is the New New).
  

Happy holidays, everyone!

Kate Chopin on writing schedules

Some wise man has promulgated an eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not preach," which, interpreted, means, "Thou shalt not instruct thy neighbor as to what he should do." But the Preacher is always with us. Said one to me: "Thou shalt parcel off thy day into mathematical sections. So many hours shalt thou abandon thyself to thought, so many to writing; a certain number shalt thou devote to household duties, to social enjoyment, to ministering to thy afflicted fellow creatures." I listened to the voice of the Preacher, and the result was stagnation all along the line of "hours" and unspeakable bitterness of spirit. In brutal revolt I turned to and played solitaire during my "thinking hour," and whist when I should have been ministering to the afflicted. I scribbled a little during my "social enjoyment" period, and shattered the "household duties" into fragments of every conceivable fraction of time, with which I besprinkled the entire day as from a pepper-box. In this way I succeeded in reestablishing the harmonious discord and confusion which had surrounded me before I listened to the voice, and which seems necessary to my physical and mental well-being.

from "In the Confidence of a Story-Writer"

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?

Robert Caro on writing

Apparently I can't get enough of the whole "writers on writing" thing, so here are Robert Caro's thoughts from this month's Esquire (in the "What I've Learned" series). I haven't read his Robert Moses bio or Master of the Senate but I really liked The Path to Power.

Always type out your interviews before you go to bed, so you remember the expressions.

Research is fun. Writing is hard.

It's so easy to fool yourself into thinking that you're working hard. It's so easy not to write. So you use any trick you can to make yourself know there's work to be done. That's why I wear a jacket and tie when I sit down to write.

Every time one of my books comes out, profiles mention that I write on a typewriter that hasn't been manufactured in twenty-five years. And people send me their old Smith-Corona 210's for free. I used to have seventeen spares to cannibalize the parts. I'm down to eleven.

Hemingway said, "Always quit for the day when you know what the next sentence is going to be." I do that.

There is no bullshit with books. What's on the page is what's on the page. It's either good enough to last or it's not.

I live near Columbia, and I see a lot of college students. My best moment was seeing one of these kids carrying Master of the Senate. I could never ask him if he liked it. What if he said "Mehhh, it's not so great. I have to read it for class"? That would kill me. So I never do that.

Winding down

As this sabbatical winds down, I'm doing two things:

1. Obsessively checking the enrollment stats for next semester's courses. Here's an academic conundrum: I (and we, really) want the courses to fill, because, like Sally Field, I want reassurance that "they like me! They really like me!"--conveniently ignoring that what they like, really like, may be a noon class or whatever fits into their schedules. Yet more students = more grading authentic assessment and hours of time devoted to it next semester. But I still can't stop checking the stock market of enrollment, as someone called it a few years back.

2. Frantically trying to get some more writing done before it ends while realizing how woefully short I've fallen from the rosy sabbatical plan I laid out.

What the sabbatical has given me more time to do is harder to measure than a simple word count. It's allowed me to read more, including primary texts, than I've been able to do in years, and it has allowed me to conceptualize the work I'm doing in a different way.

Here's an analogy from, you guessed it, Mad Men. In rewatching Season One, I noticed that amid all the retro flash that had the critics agog, every time the copywriters brought something to Don Draper (the creative director, for those who aren't MM fans), he'd ask them two questions about the product before pouring himself a drink. The first one was "What are the features?" and the second one was "What is the benefit?" The copy they produced had to make sense in terms of both of those questions.

As we all know from the Microsoft jokes ("It's a feature, not a bug!"), they're not the same thing. The first part, I think, appeals to the "ooh, shiny!" brain area, but the second one, the benefit, is the real reason for creating the product in the first place--or should be. One of the things that the sabbatical has let me do is to think more seriously about that second question in relation to the project I'm working on: not just "how is it different?" but "what is the benefit in thinking about the entire concept in this way?" I had ideas about this before, of course--no one writes without a purpose--but I've been able to think about it in more different ways, and, I hope, more creative ways that I'd done before. And although the report I write after I get back from sabbatical won't mention Don Draper or indeed this kind of thinking, it's one of the most valuable things that the sabbatical has given me.

Slowcoach writing

I think I first heard the term "slowcoach," as in "Slowcoach McClellan," in the sonorous tones of David McCullough. At any rate, I think I'm going to adopt it as a cautionary epithet.

Tenured Radical, a blogger I admire, said something in passing this week a couple of weeks ago that made me think:

But I should think that participation in group blogs that serve a field or a discipline should be taken into account as much as book reviews or encyclopedia entries, which everyone lists in endless, boring detail on their vitae as if they took more than a day to write. [and in the comments, in response to someone who challenged that timeframe] Two days. And seriously, why would they ask you for the entry unless you were an expert in that field?

I agree entirely with her main point, but the "one day" or even "two day" timeframe gave me pause. That pause was filled with writing speed envy.

Book reviews--okay, yes, those can be done quickly. Blog posts--nobody drafts those ahead of time, do they? Reports? Piece of cake. I can churn out administrativese at the speed of light.

But encyclopedia articles, even when I know the material, take time (at least at a slowcoach writing speed), which is why I've been turning them down lately. Here's what goes through my head with every single sentence:

1. Is it true? Am I misrepresenting the subject or the text in some way?

2. Is it useful? Is there a better example that I could use?

3. Is it new? Or am I just unconsciously plagiarizing myself or someone else?

4. Does it explain the concept efficiently and (let's hope) gracefully?

5. Does it relate to the sentences around it?

6. Does it hit the right balance of detail to generality?

Most of these questions apply to regular scholarly writing as well, which is why it's possible to wrestle with writing and rewriting a paragraph for an entire four-hour period and still not be entirely satisfied. But it's good to have comparisons of how it could be done if I were more efficient. If I don't speed up, someone's going to remove me from the Peninsular Campaign.