More Reading...

Americans Are Closing the Book on Reading, Study Finds

by Jennifer Howard

Sneak Preview:

Americans aren't just reading fewer books, but are reading less and less of everything, in any medium. That's the doleful conclusion of "To Read or Not to Read," a report scheduled for release today by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Fighting for the throne
Transgender student elected

by Caroline An

PASADENA - For Andrew Gomez, the month of November was one of firsts.

First, he broke the news to his mother that he was transitioning from a female to a male. Then the 24-year-old transgender student was elected Homecoming King at Pasadena City College.

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What's college for?

Since we've been talking about colleges and universities over the past few weeks, I've been meaning to write a bit on this notion of the liberal arts education. We had this one fascinating discussion in class a week or so ago about the McUniversity. That conversation is going to stay with me for some time. What struck me was the way that the class was so shocked about the McDegree. And yet, given the career-minded focus of most college students today...why would a McDegree not make sense?

There was something I read recently that said that something like 70% of college students consider career preparation to be among the most important reasons for their decision to go to college. This number was up, I think, from maybe somewhere in the 30% range in the 1980s. There are a few things I want to say about this. First, if I was consuming a product valued at $35,000 per year, I would probably want to make sure that what I was consuming was going to help me get a job when I graduated as well. $35,000 x 4 = $140,000. That's an insane amount of money to pay for a college education.

So, in some ways, I can't blame college students for their singular, career-minded focus. At RWU, I notice this especially--with all the "construction management," "justice studies," and "architecture" students. These are all very practical and pragmatic programs of study, as is, say "education" or "teacher training" and we've got a couple of those students in our class as well. They're all good students.

Having said this, what I think is amazing is that some students don't know or can't imagine college or the university as existing for any other reason than career preparation. This is the sort of strange thing. They've been hearing for so long that you go to college to prepare for a career that they're like those horses w/blinders that you see in cities that pull the carriages--they are incapable of seeing the university as having any other purpose than preparing them for work.

There are two things to say about this. First, it's sad that we have taught our young people that colleges exist for them. Yes, part of what colleges/universities do is educate students. But they have a larger mission--to foster discussion, to create debate, to further knowledge, to provide a service to the community, state, nation, to provide a social good to the society and, hopefully, to create opportunities for groups of people who might not otherwise have had opportunities and who have been restricted from a college education in the past. And these purposes have little to do with individual students who come to colleges and universities expecting to get trained to become an architect or teacher or...whatever. If students don't understand this, and I'm not sure I understood it when I was an undergraduate, we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Still, right here at RWU, we've got important work going on that has nothing to do with career preparation. We've brought an Iraqi teacher over and we're providing him with a place to work while he pursues a doctorate (at Brown). We have labs and facilities that conduct marine research, given our unique location and the accessibility of the ocean. We have featured speakers galore...all these interesting people coming to campus to talk about their experiences and the world. We have a group of Afghan students to whom we've given scholarships so that they can obtain a college degree--a virtual impossibility in their home country. The mission of the university, of this university, RWU, is so much LARGER than what students imagine it to be. Too many students see the university as a place that exists to service their needs. Somehow, I think we've got to do a better job helping them see that colleges and universities are about a lot more than just job training. Again, I don't necessarily blame students for their ignorance. We, professors, administrators, must finds ways to make discussions about the mission of universities and colleges more clear to students so that they don't just think of this place as...something very small, selfish, and limiting.

Second. The focus on job training obscures something else that should, I think, be taking place on a college campuses: learning for the sake of learning. Ideas for the sake of ideas. Discussion for the sake of discussion. For so many students, they want to know how they're going to "apply" what they are learning. Well, on one level, I can't blame them. Students are always wondering about this--not just in college. They want to know: what is this good for, this thing you're asking me to learn. Why should I learn it? What am I going to need it for?

These are important questions--but the thing is, it's hard to explain why everything you are asked to learn you are going to "need." I remember being frustated, as a student, when taking classes that didn't interest me. I remember that same feeling: why do I need to know this? It's an important question for teachers and professors to keep front-and-center. Too often, teachers just drag students through material and/or information without conveying why they are doing it. Sometimes teachers are charged with teaching "intro" courses in which they must teach a large body of "background" material to students who are newcomers to a discpline, in which case they have no choice but to do their best and "cover" as much as possible.

So, perhaps students have a right to demand to know why they are learning something. IN fact, I think they do have a right to demand to know. And teachers have an obligation, I think, to try to convey why learning something is important.

But I guess what I'm getting at is that that thing you're learning may not have an applicability to your life...tomorrow, or the next day...or ever.

And I want to argue that that's okay. That not everything we learn needs to have an immediate application. That that's not what education is for or should be for.

And besides, there is the ludicrousness of setting up a system in which you educate people in a discipline or subject area in which they "think" they have interest, but at 18, having never worked in the field that the discipline leads to...how do they know? And given how fast workplaces change these days, and how much workplace training the average worker experiences over the course of his lifetime...well, this is just another argument against setting up college as "career preparation."

In the end, I get discouraged sometimes by students' lack of curiosity about the world. How is this going to help me become a... (fill in the blank)? That's what so many want to know. Well. Fine. But what questions do you have? And what should you know as a citizen--not as a worker. What should you know in order to participate effectively in this democracy in which we all live? We rarely frame our discussions of what college is for in terms of educating "citizens." And what about just a person? What about students' emotional and psychological growth? Students want to talk about future workplaces and teachers, I suppose, want to talk about their academic disciplines. What I want to know is--what are you curious about? And where can we go from there?

Sorry this was so long...as you see, I got on a bit of a roll here!

mm

Socrates Cafe (you should go to this!)

I saw this on MyRWU and thought of our class. Unfortanately, I don't think I'm going to be able to attend this event as I'm not usually in RI on Wednesday nights, but I thought this might be a very interesting event for members of our class, given the conversations we've had this semester. (I want you all to go so badly that I'm even trying to imagine ways to bribe you to go...Any ideas?):

Socrates Café will explore the pros and cons of liberal arts degrees

BRISTOL, R.I., November 2007 – If you’re a student considering a liberal arts degree, you might weigh the pros and cons of obtaining a well-rounded education versus a narrowly focused degree. Are degrees in subjects such as history, English, psychology or foreign language marketable in today’s work force, or not?

Members of the Roger Williams University community will gather to examine the those questions on Wednesday, Dec. 5, at the University’s next Socrates Café discussion, titled “What Good is a Liberal Arts Education?” Dr. Jeffrey Meriwether, professor of history, will moderate the discussion.

The event will begin at 7 p.m. in the Mary Tefft White Cultural Center in the University’s Main Library on the Bristol Campus at One Old Ferry Road. All Socrates Café discussions are free and open to the public as space allows.

Looking for Something to Read?

Here's a place to start.

I was moved by this piece. It's written by a professor from a small liberal arts school in the midwest. He's sharing and thinking through his experience, having worked his way up from a working class background and now, working in academe (higher education). He feels odd about his experience and he feels that he is a "traitor" in some way...interesting reading, especially in light of some of the conversations I've had with my CORE Lit/Phil class these past two weeks:

A Class Traitor in Academe

Wow, this is quite an article about the admissions process, its corruption, and...well, the belief by the author that the books he is reviewing miss some very important things. The article is long. It is a book review of four books on the college admission process, all of which, if I understand the review correctly, come to the conclusion that the admissions process is rigged in the favor of wealthy white kids. The reviewer, himself an admissions representative at a large southern flagship university, agrees with the arguments made by those whose books he is reviewing, but throws in his two cents as well! A good read, if you have the time and the attention span.

College Admissions as Conspiracy Theory

The following is a report on the civic engagement of college students today. Here's a blurb from the website, first:

"Today’s students—part of the Millennial Generation born between 1985 and 2004— are more engaged in their communities and feel responsible to become civically involved. They recognize the importance of being educated and involved citizens, but discard much of the information available to them because of its polarizing and partisan nature. They are turned off by intensely combative political debate, the report says. We also find that colleges and universities are providing very unequal opportunities for civic participation and learning.

Nearly 400 students convened in 47 focus groups on 12 four-year college campuses across the country to discuss their civic and political attitudes and experiences."

Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Civic Engagement


One more...this one needs no introduction, but here's a blurb from the first page or so:

Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.

Is this just the latest example of American cultural imperialism? Or is it the triumph of planetary feminism? Neither. The globalization of the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world—with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East—toward a New Girl Order. It’s a man’s world, James Brown always reminded us. But if these trends continue, not so much.

The New Girl Order

On Politics

In my experience, it is the rare college student who follows politics with any frequency (usually only those "nerdy" Poli Sci students are the ones who pay attention). This is sad, but not surprising. According to the
Center for Political Participation:

Nearly 85 percent of college freshmen volunteer. Yet just 40 percent of Americans under 25, on average, voted in the last three presidential elections.

I started to develop a sense of political consciousness when I was in college, sometime around my junior year. Before that, it was all Greek to me. For those who would like to learn more about politics, especially during this exciting time, with the '08 election coming up, I would point you to two websites I've learned about in recent days that are geared towards students.

Campus Politico

Scoop08


Enjoy!

Students' Words...(from blogs)

Here are some of the passages I found particularly moving/interesting/curious from this past week of blog reading:

Lit. Phil.

After being in Lit. Phil for the past 2 months , i think Ive learned something allot of people don't know to much about themselves. That is to take things and look at them at different perspectives. Maybe that's not even the function of the course but now i find myself asking myself questions within questions of my own. For example, the other day i was just thinking about something non school related. I was thinking about parents weekend and what i needed to do in general. I would say to myself, clean up room. But i would then almost contradict myself and say why exactly am i going to clean my room? Then i could answer it by saying so it makes myself look more mature or something along those lines. Then it would come down to, well i am in college and passing all my classes thus far, i am more mature now rather then back then. But this is all the rest random thoughts i consider and the way i look at them.

Next, i ask my questions about the works i compose for all my different classes. I ask myself, what exactly does the teacher want that will get me an A? These questions help me to think more about myself and what i know deep inside that i don't want to bring up because it will take longer. This knowledge i want to bring up is all the knowledge i need to get a good grade on a paper. A solid thesis, evidence to support your claim, no grammatical errors, proof or rereading. All these we know to do, when it comes time to do it, par seems satisfying because you do not want to take that extra 2 minutes to reread your paper or find a quote to support evidence.

So all in all, i think this course is teaching me about myself which seems to be one of the 3 goals of the course. What do i know, what can i know, based on what can know, what can i do. It seems like i am heading down the right path for achieving these goals.

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Those Who Should Not Teach

First off, none of this post refers to you Professor Michaud.
Growing up, we all have at least one of those teachers that we can not stand, and that for some reason appears to be really unfair and unhelpful when it comes to school work. You click, and you clash, and sometimes you just cant seem to understand what those teachers are asking for. Then there is always the really extreme case when you wonder how the hell this person ever got hired as a professor, and how could they themselves POSSIBLY think that they would make a good professor. I mean I think it's determinable enough that one should know if they are JUST NOT RIGHT for the job. I'm not a professor, but as a student of professors, I think I may be able to underline AT LEAST some key points to knowing whether or not you would make a good professor.

1. Do you like people, specifically young people?
2. Do you like teaching or helping others learn?
3. Are you patient?
4. Do you enjoy the subject which you teach?
5. Do you have ANY idea what you are talking about?.. maybe even the slightest bit?

I mean if you are really impatient with others, I feel that maybe teaching isn't the job for you. Some professors just don't belong.

It is so frustrating when you have an overflowing courseload filled with classes galore, and some of your teachers, they really help you out but SOME... ugh. They are those teachers that try to meet the student halfway, and do their best to profess the material in an understandable manner. And I think those amazing and incredibly generous professors make it that much harder to deal with the other kind. The professors who basically announce on the first day, this is a self taught class, and who require you to attend things that aren't even part of the class and or required by the school IN ORDER TO pass the class. The professors who preach about emailing for help and asking questions in class, but never email you back and when you ask questions in class they throw a fit about how "you should know how to do this" even though they never taught it to you in the first place.

I mean seriously, what is their deal? If you hate teaching so much, then don't do it. Don't torture the students who are there to learn about something that will help them with their future career. Or maybe, give a little bit. Don't be so darn stubborn and unwilling to teach. LEARN from the students.

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I'm sitting here right now with both of my roommates out for the night. Although I am alone, I can still hear the normal sounds of the boys in the room nextdoor playing halo, and the boys on the other side of me practicing for his acapello performance coming up, as he does every night. I can hear the rumbling of the washing machines, especially washer #18 which goes insane whenever it's down to the last 10 minutes. Lastly, I can hear all of the people waiting for the laundry to finish. So in a sense, I'm never really alone. That has been a huge change for me in college.

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Learning Experience

Tonight was a good example of experiences you only have in college.

Tonight the Red Sox won the World Series. My roommates and I heard screaming and chanting coming from outside as we tried to fall asleep; we all have 8am classes tomorrow morning. Yet here I am, still awake, writing in my blog.

My entire building that had spent the entire weekend arguing and wrapped up in excessive amounts of drama suddenly put all of it behind us as we went outside to join the screaming fans. I have never seen anything like it.

I grew up and spent the entire 18 years of my life in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I went to private high school with a graduating class of 56 students. Seeing everyone from Willow and Cedar outside tonight chanting and crowd surfing as the cops began to sworm was something I had never experienced before.

Every other World Series or Superbowl I spent at home, watching with my parents and my younger sister. It was so much fun to finally be out and celebrating with people my own age. At the same time though, it also made me realize how much I miss my family. I miss how my dad and I would guess outcomes of the game before the pre-game show even. I miss how my mom would use the games as an excuse to bake brownies, pastries, and other goodies. I miss how my sister used to sit next to me as we watched, pretending to know what was going on.

It's amazing how much you realize you have once it's gone. It's amazing how hard it hits you, too.

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Reading Is Easy!

I think I have settled in on a problem. Reading. Maybe it's less of a difference, but more of a fundamental difference? I think it's a problem. Other people would probably disagree.

Anyway, back to reading. Why don't people do it? I never really thought about it, but it seems like almost no one I talk to reads. I go to the library a lot, not just to steady, but to keep my rotation of books flowing. I try to cap off 2 a week at the least, depending on the length/subject matter/the week. As previously brought up, I suck at sleeping, so I tend to do a lot of reading late at night.

Whenever I come back from the library with this weeks crop of books, I always get weird looks and questions about what class it's for. Why is reading for pleasure such a foreign concept? I think it's pretty awesome. I learn a lot, it helps my writing immeasurably [I think it's probably the only reason I can write], it's just an enjoyable experience, and it makes me a much better dinner companion. But whenever the subject of why I'm reading a book instead of doing [x] comes up, I am always met with apathy.

Even for classes where you have to read, not everyone does. It is not like you are being asked to read Ulysses or something. Just read! It's good for you! What the hell people. Ugh.

Whatever, I'm not going to stop. Maybe it's the way I was raised? My dad always read, and always encouraged me to. That and crossword puzzles have taught me twenty times as many words as English classes ever had. In that respect, I'll add what I'm reading on the current day for whoever reads this blog (you poor, poor, soul). I plan on plowing through Stoppard's latest trilogy again, before some books I ordered through HELIN get here.

Maybe we should start a campus wide reading campaign. Like in 5th grade? Give out Trophies? I'm liking the sound of that.


An Interesting Survey...

Professional Development...what is it? In most, if not all, professional fields there is this "conversation" that takes place among practitioners about what they do. The "conversation" isn't literal--between two people. When I use the word conversation, I mean it in a different way. I mean it in a much bigger way. It is the way that people who do particular kinds of work--build commercial buildings, practice law, treat medical patients, provide human resource services, teach undergraduates, take care of children or the elderly--talk with one another about the work they do. How do they talk? Well sometimes they talk face-to-face. They do this in the literal workplace or, if they have worked elsewhere, they may keep in touch with former colleagues. They also talk face-to-face at various forums hosted by professional associations. So, in the field of commercial architecture or human resources, there are various professional organizations to which people who work in these field can join or become members. These professional organizations usually host "conferences"--sometimes they are international, sometimes they are national (U.S.) sometimes they are regional (i.e., New England), sometimes they are local (i.e. RI). At these conferences or gatherings, people with shared professional interests come together to talk with one another, face-to-face, about what they do. They ask each other questions, try to solve problems, try to learn about new techniques or new policies or new information. They network. It's a huge social gathering centered around a particular kind of work. Usually, if they are fun, they go out at night and have drinks and sometimes even party with one another (not the college professors though...they go back to their hotel rooms and read books by themselves :)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I attended a local/regional conference last month at the University of New Hampshire. I presented or shared my research there with other teachers on the teaching of writing. In another post, maybe I should go a bit more into detail on my research interests...but not here, today. I will be presenting my work at another professional conference in the spring, this one is the national conference for teachers of writing. It is, I am proud to say, the biggest and most important conference in the field of composition (my field) and it is attended by, literally, thousands of writing teachers. This will be, again, I'm proud to say (sorry if this is getting a bit arrogant!) the fourth year in a row I have had a proposal I submitted accepted by the conference (You have to write up a short proposal if you want to present your work at the conference. I learned recently that only about 1/3 of the proposals submitted get accepted:

The unoffical numbers for the 2008 conference: 1,645 proposals received, percentage accepted is about 31%.)

So, you have the face-to-face ways that people keep up with one another in particular professional fields, and then you have the discursive or written or non-face-to-face ways that they do it. For example, many professional organizations publish newsletters, magazines, trade publications, etc. People write things and submit them and the organizations publish them and then if you are a dues-paying member of the association, you get the publication sent to you on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly basis (whatever it is).

Another newer way that people in professions keep up with one another, non-face-to-face, is through email list-serves. I'm sure some, if not all, of you have subscribed to list-serves. I don't think I need to describe what a list-serve is, do I? (if so, let me know). Anyway, I subscribe to a list-serve for teachers or writing and receive frequent information about all kinds of things related to the teaching of writing and working in higher education. I came across this recently, and I thought I would share it with you. I'm sure that this data is not surprising for you all...but I thought it was interesting to see it collected in one place. The question I have is, given this data, what are the implications for all of us who teach undergraduates. What should we be doing, given this information? What more can we be doing? How should this data change the way we think about our teaching? (I hope you can see the ways in which I have tried to take such data into account with our course...?):

From the key findings ofThe ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and
Information Technology, 2006 comes the following paragraph:

Undergraduates are communicators. Nearly all (99.9 percent) create, read, and send e-mail, and more than 80 percent send instant messages, most of them doing it daily. They use their arsenals of electronics to write documents for coursework (98.8 percent), search the Web and institutional library (94.0 percent), and creat presentations (90.8 percent). Three-quarters of these undergraduates use course management
systems, most of them using it several times per week or more. Recreationally, 70.6 percent of responding students download music of video files and use social networks such as Facebook.com. Most of them (73.4 percent) play computer/video games. A smaller number of students appear to be engaged in new media. More than a quarter of respondents (27.7 percent) report using software to create or edit video and audio files, and 28.6 percent of them create Web pages.

"Undergraduates are communicators."

For full Key Findings, go to
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERS0607/EKF0607.pdf

The report is "a longitudinal extension of the 2004 and 2005 ECAR studies of students and information technology, this 2006 study is based on quantitative data from nearly 29,000 freshman and senior students at 96 higher education institutions." Full report is here: http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?PAGE_ID=12479&bhcp=1

Is anyone reading this?

Just curious...

Enjoying what you do...

Well, I'm at a point in the semester where the papers are really starting to stream in. I got a whole stack of them this week from one class and I have two more stacks coming in from my other two classes on Thursday. Students stress about writing papers. Professors, they may not realize, stress about reading them. Or, I do. One thing I have learned over the years is how important it is to create assignments that engage students, but also that engage me. I have only had a few experiences where I sat down to read a pile of essays and dreaded it. Usually, when I get over feeling overwhelmed by how many papers I have to read, I get excited to read what the students have actually written. There have been a few times in my life when this has not happened. I have, occasionally, struggled through reading student papers. Usually, this is when I have given an assignment, or someone else has insisted I give an assignment, where all the students must write on one topic. This is, I think, a sure way to commit professional suicide as a professor. Give one prompt, make it real specific, and ask all the students to write on the same prompt. This is my idea of suffering.

I'm more interested in creating assignments where students have leeway to create something that will surprise themselves and me. In an ideal assignment, I'll get 20 or 25 different papers. I don't want to read the same thing over and over again. This is part of the reason why I look forward to reading the blogs--no one writes about the same things. I am surprised and learn something EVERY time I sit down to read students' blogs. Usually, I think, or I'd like to think, this is because they have been surprised and have learned something through the act of writing. If there is one thing I have learned over the years, it's that if a writer isn't learning something and/or discovering something intersting through writing, the reader will probably not discover or learn anything either. Donald Murray and Robert Frost used to say: No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Another observation I've come to over the years, and I'm not quite sure how to word this one...there is a particular kind of writing assignment that produces essays that I find boring, tedious, unsurprising, and monotonous. It's when you give students a prompt or a series of prompts (you give them a series of prompts and this creates the illusion of choice) about, say, something they have read (but perhaps not fully understood), like a poem, or a novel or a short story and you ask them to comment on some aspect of what they've read. This kind of assignment is specific, I think, to English classes and English teachers. So, it might be something like,

What connections can you make between Beah’s A Long Way Gone and any of the five pieces we read in Christopher Biffle’s text, A Guided Tour of Five Works by Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, or Phaedo and/or the “Allegory of the Cave”)?

or

On the Course Description, I explained that in this course, we will attempt to meditate on three central questions:

• Who am I?
• What can I know?
• Based upon what I know, what should I do?

Use one of the readings in Christopher Biffle’s text, A Guided Tour of Five Works by Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, or Phaedo and/or the “Allegory of the Cave”), to reflect upon these three questions. How, or in what ways, does Socrates help you answer these questions (if he does so at all)?

I don't know why, but questions like this always prompt "canned" responses and a pile of papers that I just want to "get through." I guess I feel like very little is learned from such prompts. I guess its because what the students are supposed to do (or what they feel they must do) is, not think through something or learn something or discover something, but, instead, show the teacher that they have read the material. They are performing for a grade, writing as if to say "LOOK! I did read the material! Or, I read enough of it to throw in these few key terms that we talked about in class because, really, I didn't actually read much of it, now that I think about it, so, I better BS may way through this and show him that at least I got the parts he talked about in class." Does this make sense? It's not learning, discovering, etc. It's regurgitating.

Having said all this, I must say that I am enjoying reading A) students blogs (when I finally find the time to sit down and do so) and B) student essays. I'm thinking that this is something that students might not think about, though, when they think about their assignments: that professors actually do (or should, if they are smart) think about what kind of student work they want to read. If you create assignments that interest you, as a professor, sitting down to read them will seem less like work and more like an engaging activity because you're actually looking forward to seeing what the students did with what you created.

News stories of interest to students...

Tuition Increases at Public Colleges Outpace Those at Private Institutions, Survey Finds

College Women Still Face Many Obstacles in Reaching Their Full Potential

The Fakebook Generation

More from the blogs...

Music: Guster, "Ganging up on the Sun"

I came from a very small all girls catholic school. Where if you were even five minutes late for class, there would be a search party looking for you, nevermind not taking a "real attendance". There are many different styles of teaching and I am not so sure that I believe that the banking method is the most effiecent for me as it is the msot comfortable for me. I have to be honest and tell you when we went around the room last class and there was the akwardness between two student on how we could change class I wanted to just walk out. Of course I mean this in a joking way and I aprricate how much you care and value our opinions as your students. But i almost just can't handle the uncomfortableness between peers. I feel like that is something that the banking method eliminates. However the benefits of not using the banking method is very obvious to me as well. This is what I have learned being a learner...you have to almost find a way to teach yourself in order to learn.

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I think today in class, I really realized how important it is to be aware of your students in class and make sure you engage them as much as you can or they will not pay attention or retain anything you are trying to teach.

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I started going over all the information chapter by chapter and i realized that i did know alot of the information but there were still more to know. I made flashcards and wrote out everything a bunch of times hoping it will stick in my mind. By 9:00, I knew so much new information and i was surprised at myself and rather proud of myself. Usually i can never just sit down for that long and actually study. I went into the exam pretty confident.

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(this one is really lovely):

This past weekend was Columbus Day Weekend. I went home for the first time. It was AWESOME. I didn't realize how much I missed it. Being home made me think of a lot of things. Living in New Hampshire, fall is always annoying for us because flocks of people come north to see our foliage. Growing up there, I would be like "What's the big deal? It's leaves changing color." When fall came the normal stressors of longer lines at restaurants, traffic, and never-ending raking is usually what came to mind. When visiting this past weekend, I realized why people come to New Hampshire to see such sights. I have never realized how gorgeous it actually is. My boyfriend and I spent most of Saturday driving around looking at how gorgeous our town is in the fall. We have lived in NH for most of our lives, and never realized it. It was really cool to experience this. It also made me think of how different fall at home is from fall at college. Fall in NH is like nowhere else. Fall in NH is apple picking, pies, apple cider, pumpkins, hayrides, town fairs, foliage, and cozy fireplaces. For NH, fall is our Christmas. It entials certain events that most, if not all, residents take part in. At college, it doesn't even seem like it's fall at all. This might be because of the setting. I'm on the ocean, which would never happen at home during this season. The leaves barely change. Sitting here in the library right now, I'm looking out the window that overlooks campus and can see one truee that is starting to change to red, that's all. Due to the weather, passerbys are in shorts and t-shirts. I didn't know how much I missed the traditions of home until I was there again. I realized how much I miss the little things like getting out of bed without climbing down on my desk, showering without shoes, having my own bathroom, sleeping in a queen size bed, and eating home-cooked meals! Another prevalent thing was sitting in my bed with wireless internet! I also missed the freedom of driving from place to place. Although I hate to admit it, I also really missed cooking. Over the weekend, I made three pies, a chicken dinner, and cheesy potatoes. I think that I satisfied my need to cook for a while now.

--

In my high school, I had a mixed group of friends and we all shared the common ground of playing basketball. If I had not played a basketball with my black friends, I probably wouldn't have known that we shared anything in common. Now, whenever I see my friends, I don't think of them as black, I just think of them as just my friends. I believe that the key to defeating racism is to first find a common interest with a person of another race and once that initial connection is made, it is hard to even notice that they aren't the same skin color as yourself.

---

Shouldn't we all know a little bit more about the world around us?

---

I thought that our class discussion was very interesting. Although i did not really realize how much my life falls into her stereotype of not having any diversity in my life. I think that cheating and racism are all part of your environment. Although i am not racist at all i come from an almost all white school and and all white town. An example of how there is almost no diversity is my town and the towns surrounding me is when a black kid named Anthony moved into my town. We were playing soccer against our rival team and a player from the other team came up to me and asked me when we got the black kid and where was he from. We have so little diversity that the other team knew he was not from my town. I could not help but laugh because we both new. I did not come to this school because of the diversity ratio but when it comes down to it i do feel more comfortable around people of the same race. I do have black friends and friends of other races but i would feel weird if i was the minority at a school.

Students' Words...(from blogs)

I read the blog entries every other week and I'm just amazed at all the insightful things students have to say. Here are a few one-liners that caught my attention:

I feel like I finally have a handle on college.

College is definitely not as hard as i thought it was.

I was recently faced with something that I wasn't planning on.

I've learned something about...my learning...in the short time I've been here at RWU.

No matter how hard I try I am not going to do what I expect from myself.

I just loved these lines for their provocativeness (especially the last one).

Academic Conferences...

I've been meaning to write for a week or so on the topic of the academic conference. Last weekend, I attended an academic conference. It was a two-day event. I thought I would take a few minutes to describe such an event in an effort at helping students to understand my life as a professor a bit more fully.

At each college or university, professors are responsible for at least three different kinds of activities:

Scholarly work (research)
Service (in the form of commitee work, advising, department work, etc.)
Teaching

At some schools, the order (in terms of priority) goes:

Scholarly Work
Teaching
Service

At other schools the order (in terms of priority) goes:

Teaching
Service
Scholarly Work

Students usually have very little sense that their professors are engaged in work beyond just teaching. Teaching is the most visible kind of work students see professors doing, so they assume it's all that professors do.

The truth is, as I've tried to sketch out above, professors are busy with all kinds of work, only one of which is teaching.

So, what is this "scholarly work" piece? Research? What is that?

Students don't tend to think as universities as places where research is done and knowledge is created (again, they tend to think of them as places where young people are taught), but research is a big part of what some, and certainly not all, colleges and universities do. For many professors, whether or not they will receive tenure (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure) will be determined by the amount of their "scholarly output"--that is, how many articles (in peer-reviewed journals), books, and conference presentations they create, deliver and/or publish.

The conference I attended was at a large research university in the northeast. It began late on a Friday afternoon. The way the conference is set up, there are large-group "sessions" where everyone at the conference can come and listen to one speaker, and then there are "break-out" sessions. During "break-out" sessions, you can look at the program and there are a whole bunch of different smaller sessions that you can attend. The purpose of the conference, in large-group sessions and break-out sessions, is to share one's work, one's research, with one's peers. The conference I attended began late on a Friday afternoon and wrapped up late the next day, a Saturday afternoon.

On Saturday morning, I presented my research in a break-out session. My session was attended by 5 colleagues--two friends and former graduate students at the school where I graduated from; my "advisor" from Iowa, where I earned by Masters degree, and two community college teachers from the local area. Five attendees is not great, but it's not awful either, especially given my topic. If you make a name for yourself in your field or do some really interesting or "sexy" work, more people will come to your sessions and, eventually, you will be asked to speak at one of the "large group" sessions. I'm not there yet (nor will I ever be...although who knows).

So, I gave my presentation on Saturday morning to this small group of colleagues/friends. It was a supportive crowd. Usually, such presentations last around 15-20 min. and then there's time for discussion. But, since the other person who was supposed to present his work after mine cancelled at the last minute, I had the full hour to myself to present and have discussion. And it went really well. I've been doing this now for about four years and the presentation I gave last week was, by far, the best presentation I have given so far.

One of the shocking things about these conferences is that many, many people who attend them and present their work just read from a paper they've written or prepared for the conference. This is INCREDIBLY tedious and can really bore the living daylights out of you. Still, the first few times i have presented I read papers, myself. In some ways, I think this is sort of natural--I'm new to the whole thing or was new, and so I just did what I saw a lot of other people doing. But to read a paper on a dry topic for 15-20 minutes can be a real sleeper for the people in the room. So, I've been moving towards Powerpoint Presentations, which make things much more interactive and much more interesting, I think.

And not only am I moving towards Powerpoint, but I am increasingly moving towards a model of presenting that I have seen a few others do where you use the session not to "present" on something you've already learned or discovered, but, instead, as an opportunity to "work through" some "problem" with your research. In my own case, this past weekend, I shared some of my data and then closed with two questions which I hoped would prompt some discussion. So, I'm not totally into the "working through problems" phase yet. But I'm moving in that direction, for sure. I just think it's more interesting for the audience, to be a part of it--not to receive the presentation, but to make it with the speaker. I've seen a few people do this well, and I've seen a few people just sort of bumble through presentations and the audience is just totally lost. I do think that nowhere else in our society do people just get up and read to an audience for 20 minutes or dense, academic material, so, that model really should probably go by the wayside at academic conferences as well. Better to get people involved and get them talking.

What good is all this? Well, I put this presentation on my CV (which stands for curriculum vitae, which is what professors have, a more elaborated form of resume) and this will, hopefully, assist me in my process of trying to get tenure. More immediately, the conference presentation allows you an audience for your work and your writing and, at least in my case, a chance to get feedback and in this way, it's incredibly useful.

Why do people go to these conferences, in general (not everyone who goes to the conference is there to present)? Well, professional development would be one reason. I think going to such conferences gives you an opportunity to hear what your peers are up to and this is incredibly valuable. But the best conference is an inspiration. YOu come away from it with lots of notes on things you want to look into or try. You feel a sense of renewal, as though you are ready to return to the classroom with new ideas. You also have the opportunity to catch up with old colleagues and here how they are doing. There are dinners and drinks, usually. The conference is as much a social event as it is an academic event.

I'm going to end here. I don't know how interesting this has been, if it has been interesting at all...

Teaching: UPS and DOWNS

Music: Kevin Mileski, "Through the Window"

I think that one of the interesting things about teaching is the "emotional roller coaster" piece. For people who work with people, this is nothing new. When you work with people, for your job, and not "widgets" you learn, pretty quickly, that people are complicated, inconsistent, sometimes neurotic, often exhilerating...the list goes on. I would be curious to talk to other teachers about how they "turn off" (or fail to turn off) the things that happen in class after the class is over.

I was reading over one students' transcript from her interview with a teacher recently and as I was reading, I kept thinking to myself how "down and out" the professor she was interviewing sounded. He kept going on and on about students needing to take responsibility for their educations and how so many students are unaware of how much their education is costing or how they fail to connect the price of the education with their day-to-day performance with school work...I read over this transcript and all I could think was, "Wow, I've been there before. That guy just had a bad day/class/afternoon-reading-papers and he's feeling terrible." I couldn't help feel bad for the student who was interviewing him. She knocked on his door to interview the guy and she had no idea what an earful she was going to get! There have been times I've felt the way that guy felt. I wouldn't have wanted to have some student come along and interview me at moments like that. I would have just wanted to tell all the students to please go away and leave me alone.

But then, like the guy in the interview, you remind yourself of the good times as well. Teachers, I think, are resilient and damningly optimistic. When they reach their lowest moments, they somehow are able to not forget or to remind themselves of the good moments, too. Maybe this is not unique to teachers, maybe we all do this. I don't know. One minute we're cursing students. The next moment, we're reminding ourselves of those one or two students from that one class who always impress us and whose writing we look forward to reading each time an assignment comes due and who we look forward to hearign from during class discussions. We're buoyed up by these people. Sometimes there are only a few of them, but it only takes one, I think.

I don't know where I'm going with all this. The ups and downs. Working with human beings, you have to sort of expect that you're going to have the ups and the downs. And in a classroom of 27 people, and four classes a day, there are A LOT of ups and downs there. I'm always struck by how powerfully I feel the ups and downs. There have been times I've driven away from a school where I am working on a total high, feeling as though I accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish and MORE that day. Then there are days I drive away, banging my head on the steering wheel because I feel as though something that was important to me was just not happening. The good times, you drive away and think--my God, I am doing the thing on earth that I was put here to do. The bad times, you go over and over in your head, sort of like if you have a fight with someone...you keep going over what you SHOULD have said or what you SHOULD have done differently. It is very much like that, in fact. But, you can't go back and re-do it. It's over and you sort of have to move on. Or maybe not. I don't know.

One thing for sure: I work really hard to try to remember what it was like to be a student and to give students the benefit-of-the-doubt. One thing I've noticed in the past few years is that, as people get older, they really do gravitate towards these sort of generalizations about "kids these days" or "students these days" and how things are different today than when they were younger. A very good friend of mine from college did this just the other day. I was a bit taken aback. I'm at that stage of life when people are just beginning to forget about what it was like to be young. This allows them to make generalizations about young people. They begin to romanticize their pasts--things were different when we were young. We had more...respect, courtesy, common sense...you name it.

I think it's a bunch of bull and incredibly unfair. Sure, things change. But not everything changes. The big things don't change all that much. It grates on me to no end to hear people my age and older talking about how they worked harder than young people today or cared more or were more courteous or whatever. It's no wonder young people come to resent older people. They feel as though they are being judged. It's one of the things I've committed myself to: arguing back when people my age start making sweeping generalizations about young people and what's wrong with them. I really don't think that much has changed since I was young. I really do believe that young people have good intentions, but are as likely to be lazy, stupid, loving, responsible (or irresponsible), hard-working or courteous as anyone else.

I'll get off my soapbox now. More posts to come soon...

Sunday again...

Music: Piano, no words...

Some passages from this weeks' blogs which really struck me (strong writing!):

This past weekend was Columbus Day Weekend. I went home for the first time. It was AWESOME. I didn't realize how much I missed it. Being home made me think of a lot of things. Living in New Hampshire, fall is always annoying for us because flocks of people come north to see our foliage. Growing up there, I would be like "What's the big deal? It's leaves changing color." When fall came the normal stressors of longer lines at restaurants, traffic, and never-ending raking is usually what came to mind. When visiting this past weekend, I realized why people come to New Hampshire to see such sights. I have never realized how gorgeous it actually is. My boyfriend and I spent most of Saturday driving around looking at how gorgeous our town is in the fall. We have lived in NH for most of our lives, and never realized it. It was really cool to experience this. It also made me think of how different fall at home is from fall at college. Fall in NH is like nowhere else. Fall in NH is apple picking, pies, apple cider, pumpkins, hayrides, town fairs, foliage, and cozy fireplaces. For NH, fall is our Christmas. It entials certain events that most, if not all, residents take part in. At college, it doesn't even seem like it's fall at all. This might be because of the setting. I'm on the ocean, which would never happen at home during this season. The leaves barely change. Sitting here in the library right now, I'm looking out the window that overlooks campus and can see one truee that is starting to change to red, that's all. Due to the weather, passerbys are in shorts and t-shirts. I didn't know how much I missed the traditions of home until I was there again. I realized how much I miss the little things like getting out of bed without climbing down on my desk, showering without shoes, having my own bathroom, sleeping in a queen size bed, and eating home-cooked meals! Another prevalent thing was sitting in my bed with wireless internet! I also missed the freedom of driving from place to place. Although I hate to admit it, I also really missed cooking. Over the weekend, I made three pies, a chicken dinner, and cheesy potatoes. I think that I satisfied my need to cook for a while now.

--

I have just finished reading through chapters 5 and 6 within My Freshman Year. There was a lot of information and observations in these chapter which really appealed to my interest. Nathan examined many aspects of American ways which are more than true. I can not say that these observations can account for the entire American population, but many statements made by the foreign students which she interviewed stuck me as very interesting.

Throughout her interviews, Nathan stumbled upon and quoted many international students whom were both insulted and awestruck by the level of ignorance that American students hold for other cultures. To some students these statements may strike them as offensive or untrue, but in complete honesty, from my point of view I can verify that as an American college student I know very little regarding the cultures and lives of other countries. And why shouldn't I? I would never justify my ignorance upon a particular topic to the fact that it does not "apply to my major." So why ARE Americans so ignorant and uninformed when consulted about the cultures and lives of other countries. One of Nathan's French foreign exchange friends highlighted some assumed reasons for American ignorance as she stated, "Americans teach like the only important thing is America. There is no required history course in college. The history course I took on Western civ. at AnyU was middle school level, and it was very biased. I mean they taught how, in World War II, American saved France and saved the world, how they were so great. The courses don't consider what Americans have done wrong. All the current events here is news about America and what America is doing. If it's about another country, it's about what America is doing there. There's nothing about other countries and their histories and problems. [In France] we had lots of history and geography courses, starting very young. I learned about France, but then we had to take a course in U.S Industrialization, in China, Russia, Japan too. We got the history and geography of the world, so we could see how France fits into the bigger picture" (Nathan 89).

This chapter provided me with a minor epiphany. It's not that I'm not interested in the cultures of other countries, because often I think about how amazing it would be to go to another country and learn about the people within it and the country itself. It made me realize that as often as I had thought about studying abroad, I had never really considered all of the amazing things that could come from studying abroad in another country. I knew of course I would develop and learn different living habits than the ones I held at home, for living in another country poses so many new experiences and opportunities. I would have the opportunity to meet so many new and interesting people, but I would also have the opportunity to experience the culture of another country first hand, up close and personal.

Shouldn't we all know a little bit more about the world around us?

--

In my plans, specs, and building codes class on Monday, we had our first hour exam. All i knew is that it was going to be ridiculously hard because the exam was covered in a total of 22 chapters in three different books. There was such much information we learned over the course of the semester so far so i didn't know exactly how much i knew and how much i didn't.

Sunday night came around and it was 6:30 so i sat at my desk hoping to study the rest of the night and know all the information like the back of my hand. I wasn't used to studying for something this hard. In high school, i listened in class and soaked up all the information so there wasn't a reason to study. Now there is way to much information to do that plus the professor doesn't teach everything you are responsible for.

I started going over all the information chapter by chapter and i realized that i did know alot of the information but there were still more to know. I made flashcards and wrote out everything a bunch of times hoping it will stick in my mind. By 9:00, I knew so much new information and i was surprised at myself and rather proud of myself. Usually i can never just sit down for that long and actually study. I went into the exam pretty confident.

The way the exam was set up was that there were about 16 questions and each question's point value ranged from two points to 12 points. But the thing was, if you added up all the points, it was over 100%. The professor told us that you can only get a 100 and that if you get a question wrong, half the point value would be subtracted from your total score so guessing on answer wasn't the wisest. I handed my exam after 40 minutes and i thought i did pretty good. I didn't answer enough questions to get a 100 but i think i got somewhere in the low 90's or high 80's. I thought i did a good job knowing that the exam covered so many chapters. Now i jsut have to wait for find out my score.

Writing Processes...

Music: Ray LaMontagne: "Trouble"

This past week, in an effort to help my CORE 104 class find topics about which to write in their blogs, I posted a brief description of what I imagine students' writing processes to be like and asked if they could verify the accuracy of my description in their blog postings. A number of students responded and shared reflections on their writing processes. I thought I would take a moment to share a few of the excerpts that I found most interesting:

1.

The extravaganza usually ends with me telling myself that I will never do that again, and I will finally embrace time management. Previous postings reveal this is a lie. I never learn my lesson and I do it over and over again. I think I do this because I simply get by. I always get decent grades even when I do all of the work at once. So I figure, what is a few stressful hours one night, when I can enjoy all of my other free nights beforehand. Is it still wrong if I continue to do well in school?

2.

When I begin, I go over what it is I need to write and gather all my materials needed to complete the essay so I don't have to get up and hunt stuff down. I often times will stop after writing an essay and check the message board I post on, facebook, or myspace. I don't know but doing this has yet to hurt me. The entire time I'm writing I'm doing this, it's only until proof reading time that everything gets shut off and I focus on what it is I wrote about, to make sure I actually understand what I wrote, why and how it relates to the prompt.

3.

Your idea of the student writing process is pretty right on as far as I'm concerned. My process is basically the same, with a few extra steps added in.

1) Teacher assigns paper
2) Teacher explains the assignment
3) Student go back to their room and complain to roomates
- "Dude my teacher is crazy. Why would we ever want to write a paper about _____"
- "Ughh I have so much work. I just got another paper."
- etc
4) Student sits down and actually attempts to write the paper. Maybe a paragraph gets written.
5) Next class the teacher reminds students about paper
6) The night before the paper is due the student goes into what I call "crunch mode" where they're trying to bang this paper out as best and as fast as they can so it's ready for the next day.
7) In class students hand in papers and say to the person next to them, "I did so bad on that. I just finished it last night." And the other student usually says somthing to the effect "Your's can't be any worse than mine. I just printed mine before I came to class."
8) Teacher takes the papers home and grades them while the students barely think about it.
9) Teacher says they're handing back papers at the end of class and students say to the person next to them, "I don't want this back. I don't even want to know what I got."
10) Teacher hands back papers and most students got higher than they thought they were going to get, while others who thought they did well didn't get as high as they had hoped for.

This is the process that my life with papers follows typically. Usually tests and quizes have some of the same steps. Usually steps 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, and 10 can be applied substituting test/quiz for paper.

4.

I am not sure that i compose a paper the way other people do, but it has worked for me thus far. When i first get the assignment, like most, i groan and want to avoid writing it but know that i must do it. When i finally get myself to do the paper, i sit in front of the computer, get all my papers about the assignment that i need, open my notebook or book to the correct pages and lay is all around me on my desk. I read the assignment over again a few times to make sure that i know all the parts of the material that i must cover. I pull up Microsoft word, put a header on, and just start to write. Sometimes i feel that a detailed outline does not help me. It is just better for me to type type and type. What does help, is i get a piece of paper and write down what each paragraph will be about. Other than that, i do not usually write out an outline unless it is required. I find it much easier to plan out my thoughts as i go. I let the words go from my brain and into my fingertips, to the keyboard and onto the computer. I will usually introduce a paragraph with a topic sentence, explain that, use a quote that supports my topic sentence, explain that, use a similar quote, explain that, close that paragraph and this continues for however many paragraphs i need and how long the paper needs to be. This is how i was taught to write a paper since i have been doing formal papers. Pose an idea, support it with quotes, and explain those quotes. I review it, make revisions, press print, staple it, then it is ready to be passed in.

5.

Now to my actual writing process. First, I panic, completely stress over it, mark the date on my calendar and look to see if it's due on a crazy week or a somewhat manageable week. Then, I think about the paper whenever I can. After much thought I try to come up with a decent thesis to start with. Then I sit down and start writing whatever comes to mind. I revise that and work off of it. I have friends look it over and give me more ideas. Then I just keep writing and revising until the date it's due. Sometimes it's easy for me to write and paper and other times it's extremely difficult.
---

These were truly wondeful descriptions. They speak volumes about writing at the university and give a sense of the "behind the scenes" stories of how students compose. In many ways, they are not at all surprising. I think the question I would raise is what's being learned through these processes. Are these experiences helping students to become better writers and communicators? What responsibility do students have in this process? What about teachers? What other models or processes might there be? How should writing be taught? Who should teach writing? What should writing be about? How should it be assessed/evaluated? So many wonderful things to think about in regard to these postings. I guess the question I find myself asking is, should I care that this is what students' writing processes consist of? Is there a problem here? (I feel as though there is...) And if there is a problem, is this a problem of the institution or of individuals? There's lots here to chew on. Thanks to all those who shared their processes!

mm

New Feature: Student Reading...

Music: My neighbor's lawn mower. (seriously)

For years now, I've been reading The Chronicle of Higher Education, a great daily newspaper which deals with all kinds of issues that relate to students, academia, colleges and universities, teaching, etc. The articles cover a very wide range of topics. While the Chronicle is online, unfortunately, it's not free. It's subscription-based.

As I peruse the Chronicle each day, I often come across pieces which I think would be of interest to students. Thus, I am initiating a new feature of this blog. I will occasionally or randomly post links to articles that I think will be of interest to students. These pieces will come from a range of different sources, as today's first three do. There is NO requirement that any of my students read these pieces. I post them purely for your interest, with a one-sentence annotation of each so you can decide if the article/editorial is something which you deem worth your time:

A Death in the Family

A moving piece by a famous writer...a young man from California read his columns on the importance of the Iraq war, enlisted, went to Iraq and was killed this past January. The writer got wind of this and works through his feelings about his role in this young man's death. This one brought a tear to my eye, if you want to know the truth.

4-Word Editorial Proves Costly for Student Paper

Wow! A student at a Colorado university writes an editorial in which he drops the F-bomb. "The editorial, in The Rocky Mountain Collegian on Friday, read “Taser this … F- BUSH,” with the vulgarity spelled out." This piece contains a long and follow-up of posts where readers carry on an interesting debate about the first amendment, student newspapers, speech and appropriateness.

The New College Try

A NY Times Op-Ed piece about whether or not colleges really do serve the American creed about upward mobility. Here's a quote from the piece: "Despite their image as meritocratic beacons of opportunity, the selective colleges serve less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation." Provocative and will, I think, challenge many of our notions about what college is for and how it works.

Enjoy!

Ishmael Beah...

Well, today was the day that Ishmael Beah came to campus. Our class was lucky enough to go spend some time with him at the library, prior to his talk in the evening. I thought I might put down a few of my impressions.

I thought he was awesome.

I'm not sure there's much more to say than that. As in any situation where you are meeting someone "famous," I must admit that I was a little star-struck with Ishmael. I mean, here he was, just feet away, answering my questions and smiling at me. A particularly odd moment was after his talk. Usually when you go to these things, the featured speakers stay sort of "onstage" after their talk...they "third wall" isn't broken with the audience. They are whisked off by their host, out of site of the rest of us who go back to our dreary, boring lives.

But after his talk in the library, Ishmael just ventured out of the building with us and I ended up holding the door for him on his way out. This was a bit odd. But, it humanized him a bit. I was struck, as I have often been when meeting famous people (did I mention that I met Bono in an airport in Chicago in May 2006?), by how short Ishmael was. Why are people who end up becoming famous always short? I don't know. I once stood next to Bruce Willis at a urinal in a seafood restaurant on Martha's Vineyard. Not only was he short, but he had chicken legs.

Anyway.

I enjoyed Ishmael's talk. One woman asked him to speak about his "destiny." It was a sort of "ishmael-worship' moment. It's always the middle-age women who gush the most at these author-events and this woman was no exception. She said something to him like--I think you're on a journey or its your destiny to be doing what you are doing. I can't help feeling that that sort of question would make anyone feel uncomfortable, but who knows. He answered graciously with, I thought, a good response. He spoke about the chaos of war and of battle zones. He spoke of the way, in a battle zone, nothing really makes sense. He spoke of a kind of inherent illogic to all that happens. I've heard others talk about this--Tim O'Brien, especially, in The Things They Carried, for example.

A few students in our class asked questions, and this made me feel good. I was a bit struck when one student asked him to comment on the end of the book, the metaphor about shooting a father or a mother--I don't recall it off the top of my head. Anyway, his response, and I'm struggling to remember what his response was, was not at all what I was expecting. I think that in class we had talked about the end of the book as a kind of metaphor for why he wrote the book--he wrote the book with the hope that, by telling his story, others would not have to live it. I'm blanking on the exact translation of this to the story about the child who must decide which parent to kill.

Anyway, a student in our class asked him to comment on this and I believe his response was something along the line of, once you pick up a gun or a rifle, things are out of your control and bad things will happen? I don't remember, exactly. This is something I'd like to debrief with the class on, maybe next week.

I think that the thing that interests me most about Ishmael is his pacifism. In his responses to questions tonight, and in his answers on Open Source, with Christopher Lydon, I got or get a real strong sense of his moral stance against violence--any kind of violence. In this vein, it seems he joins a long-line of thinkers--Gandi, MLK, JC and others. There is, in him, a complete repudiation of violence as means of solving problems and this is refreshing and interesting because I don't know of anyone today who speaks so forcefully and with such great conviction and certainty about the dangers of violence. I was really struck by this. I think that Americans just accept violence as a part of their life--violence, as Beah pointed out, "over there" or "out of sight." So many of us, sitting in that room with Beah tonight, have so little direct experience with violence. And because it is an abstraction to us, we are, I think, okay with it, have sort of made peace with it. We don't necessarily associate the bombs we drop on the earth with violence. We think of them as...what? I don't know... Getting rid of the bad guys? It seems to me that Beah is right. We have no experience with violence, so we don't abhor it, as we should. His abhorance of violence is natural, given his exposure to it. But must we be exposed to it in order to feel a sense of abhorance about it? This is an interesting question and I believe it was Beah's question, or a point he was making tonight.

With all the military might we have in this country, and the number of bombs and bullets we have fired around the world over the past five years, it was interesting to come face to face with a man who repudiates violence, who cannot and does not abide or tolerate it. In this, I felt, perhaps most especially, that I was standing in the presence of someone truly exceptional or special. Certainly someone different than anyone with whom I come into contact in my day-to-day life. I admire his clarity and certainty. The price he has had to pay for it, however, is too great.

Thanks to the students who asked questions today during the talk--you did great!

Next time: more on writing conferences. And, a request for input on how to create contexts or content for student writing.

Writing Conferences

Music: Coldplay, "Parachutes"

Since I've started here at RWU, I've been conducting regular writing conferences with students from my expository writing classes. I have about 18-20 15-minute slots per week. I pass around a sign-up sheet each week and students can sign-up for a conference. Initially, I had asked that students come to (3) conferences per semester. But, as we've gotten into it, the conferences are all filling up each week with students and some students are already on their second conference and we're only just over a month into the school year.

I don't know of many places where writing conferences are a mandatory part of teaching first-year composition. They were at one other school at which I taught. This school had a unique take on the conference and they really put their money where their mouth was as far as the importance of writing conferences goes. The class itself met two times a week for 50 minutes (instead of 3). Then each student was required to attend one 15-minute writing conference per week. In this way, the program made a commitment to conferences by actually providing instructors and students one less class a week in exchange for a writing conference.

This was the most committed I have ever seen a writing program to writing conferences. I think that the problem with implementing official policies around writing policies is that anyone who has used writing conferences knows that they take time--a lot of time. They are labor intensive. This semester I have close to 40 students. That's a lot of conferences, but in terms of hours, it's about 4.5-5 per week. Here's the thing. Let's suppose I was to devote 4.5-5 hours a week to some form of work related to the teaching of writing--writing papers or conducting writing conferences. I would MUCH rather spend the time in conferences with students, talking about writing. I don't know, there's something isolating about sitting with a pile of 40 papers to read and comment on. This is not to say that I don't still comment on papers, but I do find that the more time I spend with students in conference, the less time I have to spend writing comments on their papers.

One of the tenets of writing instruction that I've always sort of held onto is the notion that writing teachers must intervene in the writing process while it's happening. This is the thing that writing conferences accomplish that I'm not sure other methods of feedback can accomplish: they allow me to talk to students about generating topics, about source material, about organization, abour claims and reasons, about sentence-level problems, about revision while these activities are taking place, instead of after students have generated the paper.

It's almost like you have to take the emphasis OFF the paper itself. I've thought of this a bit. There is this system out there about how the writing of papers works and I think to myself, because I think that this system is not effective for teaching writing, how can I interrupt the "dominant narrative" about how writing works in college classes (or any classes for that matter). I guess I would identify the "dominant narrative" in this way:

--Teacher creates intimidating assignment sheet with all of the requirements of the assignment.
--Teacher goes over assignment sheet with students in class and asks if anyone has questions.
--Students go home and fret about assignment for a while. (deadline is at some point out in the future)
--Teacher teaches his/her content and talks around the edges of the assignment, occasionally pointing out potential topics for the paper during discussions and lectures.
--Deadline approaches for paper.
--Students begin to have anxiety about deadline, some start drafting, looking for sources several days in advance of deadline. Many do not.
--Sometime around a day or so prior to deadline, students devote a LARGE chunk of time to work on the paper. This period is stressful and intense. Problems arise and some are resolved and others are not.
--Students hand in paper feeling an odd mix of feelings about the potential for success of their work.
--Teacher collects essays, takes them home and either looks forward to reading them or dreads reading them.
--Teacher finds time to sit down and go through papers, writes manic comments on papers, assigns letter grade with little rationale or explanation of grade at the end of paper.
--Teacher hands back paper to students and talks generally about the grades, etc.
--Students feel: relieved that they earned a higher grade than they expected, pleased that they got the grade they thought they deserved, cheated that they got a lower grade than they deserved.
--Class moves on to the next thing.

This is what I imagine the dominant narrative, or typical pattern to be. But I have no evidence for this. It's anecdotal based on years spent listening to students talk about their writing processes.

I wonder if this is how it does actually work. I wonder if I could get some of my students to describe, in bullets, as I have done, the process, as they understand or have experienced it. I guess what I'm wondering is if I'm "right" or even "close" in my imagined version above.

I have added a new feature to my writing conferences, totally spontaneously, this term--the email follow-up. I've got to remember to write a bit about this next time. In the meantime, I think I'll ask students to respond to my post in their posts to get feedback...

Reading Student writing and learning

Music: Keane, "Hopes and Fears"

Okay, so I jumped the gun a bit with that last entry...I have more to write (I may be having too much fun). I think that I will write one more blog today, a sort of "greatest hits" from what I'm learning from reading my students blogs today. Here I am, blogging about their blogs. That, in itself, is interesting.

1.

Surprises and connections. A student wrote about a connection she recently had between our Lit/Phil class and another class--human behavior, I think--and this surprised the $%#@! out of me! I was fascinated. Here is her post:

So I finished my paper on how the United States will become more sane. I wrote it on the Banking Concept of Education. While writing the paper, I began to realize how many things actually connect. I was shocked to see that ridding this concept actually would help the population to fulfill their human needs. From there, I started to think about how my classes are connecting. Many of the themes talked about in my core lit class correspond to the themes talked about in my human behavior class. This is probably because both are centered around the theme of who am I? What do I know? and given what I know, what can I know? I like to be able to use alternate examples to further produce arguments in the class.

Here's my response:

you can imagine my excitement in reading these past two blog postings. Let me get this straight...you have this assignment in another class, about how to make the U.S. a saner place and it has to connect to this campus, to all of us here at RWU (what a GREAT assignment, by the way!), and for this assignment, you decided to draw on Freire's piece, the one we read in Lit/Phil, in which he outlines the "banking" concept of education and proposes the "problem-posing" method as an alternative? I mean, is this really happening? Is this really a connection across classes? That's great!

2.

Another interesting moment. We've been talking in class about Freire's "banking concept of education"--here, I was able to connect it to one of the students' posts. Here's her words, first, followed by mine:

What is also different from highschool is the context of the reading. For the last ten years, when asked to read for homework, it was generally out of a textbook. Reading for college is completely different. You are given novels that hold some sort of underlying meaning which relates to the class. From this novel, you are challenged to make the connection as to what that is. I am actually enjoying this way of learning much better. Textbooks were never appealing, and at least with the novels, they hold stories and plots.

Here is the comment I wrote to her post:

Also, you are right. Textbooks are a problem. One could write an entire essay on "the textbook as banking method"...I mean, think about it--it's like the way the chairs are set up in our room: they direct all attention at the professor and take the emphasis off you all, or us. The important person, the room set-up suggests, is the professor. Textbooks do the same thing, sort of (I'm just making this up as I go here, riffing). Textbooks organize students' entire learning experiences for them and tell them "everything they should know." They are written by those who, in theory, have all the "knowledge" already and its the job of the textbook to transmit that knowledge to the students. The textbook is the "vehicle" by which banking is accomplished, right? Wow, I never thought of this before.

I love this idea of the textbook as the vehicle of banking or the means of banking. I really never had thought of this. I mean, I have often thought about the problems with textbooks--the stuff in them appears acontextually. If you want to read a Paolo Freire essay, better to pull it out of the book in which it actually appeared, instead of coming into contact with it in a textbook. Textbooks kind of sterilize learning. At the same time, there are good things about textbooks, too. If you're teaching a class for the first time, they give you ways of thinking about how to organize the material. They offer "assignments" and "activities" for students to do...but this is sort of evil, in a way, because, realistically, isn't that the job of a good teacher? But, I have learned SO much from reading the textbooks that I use while teaching. So, I don't want to go all nuts on textbooks, calling them evil. At the same time, I know that when I had to read them, I often found myself falling asleep. I don't anymore. But, I'm older and more patient and more practiced in reading difficult texts. There is something horrible, though, about facing the textbook--it's pages all look the same, the columns are all the same width, the book itself is heavy and awkward. These days, textbook publishers work to try to make them more accessible, adding marginal features and using different fonts, typefaces, organizational designs and layouts, etc. But a textbook is still a textbook--a how-to or a collection. I think I prefer primary sources and documents. I still love the metaphor, though, "textbook as banker."

3.

The blog as opportunity for identifying projects/assignments.
Student wrote:

My biggest weakness as a teacher is my terrible spelling skills. This is one of my biggest fears, that I will be in the front of the class and be unable to spell a word, or a student will notice a misspelled and point it out embarrassing me. There isn't spell check on a chalk board! This past week in my literature class we have been focusing on Phonics. I can read very well, but breaking down the sounds and spelling words is difficult for me. I am convinced that somewhere in my own education I missed this important skill.

To which I responded:

wow...interesting confession. I would like to propose a project (and you could do this for Ass. 3 in this class and I could help, if you like). In my field, the teaching of writing, people have studied this exact question: how do people learn how to spell (my own opinion is that it's a hard thing to learn, some people never get it, the more you read, the better you'll get at it). There is an entire body of literature on how to teach spelling. I'd love to have you look into this, if it appeals to you, for Ass. 3. We could talk more if you like, let me know. If this doesn't interest you, no worries.

If this entry was a little scattered, it's because it was written over the course of two days and I'm in a bit of a rush right now and didn't have time to make sure it all made sense. Hopefully, the gist of it makes sense.

mm

Music: Keane, "Hopes and Fears"

Okay, so I jumped the gun a bit with that last entry...I have more to write (I may be having too much fun). I think that I will write one more blog today, a sort of "greatest hits" from what I'm learning from reading my students blogs today. Here I am, blogging about their blogs. That, in itself, is interesting.

Surprises and connections. A student wrote about a connection she recently had between our Lit/Phil class and another class--human behavior, I think--and this surprised the $%#@! out of me! I was fascinated. Here is her post:

So I finished my paper on how the United States will become more sane. I wrote it on the Banking Concept of Education. While writing the paper, I began to realize how many things actually connect. I was shocked to see that ridding this concept actually would help the population to fulfill their human needs. From there, I started to think about how my classes are connecting. Many of the themes talked about in my core lit class correspond to the themes talked about in my human behavior class. This is probably because both are centered around the theme of who am I? What do I know? and given what I know, what can I know? I like to be able to use alternate examples to further produce arguments in the class.

In a previous blog entry, the student explained the assignment a bit more, and it was in this blog, I think that she began to come up with the idea for how she would draw on the Freire article to complete her "Sane society" paper.


2.

Another interesting moment. We've been talking in class about Freire's "banking concept of education"--here, I was able to connect it to one of the students' posts. Here's her words, first, followed by mine:

What is also different from highschool is the context of the reading. For the last ten years, when asked to read for homework, it was generally out of a textbook. Reading for college is completely different. You are given novels that hold some sort of underlying meaning which relates to the class. From this novel, you are challenged to make the connection as to what that is. I am actually enjoying this way of learning much better. Textbooks were never appealing, and at least with the novels, they hold stories and plots.

Here is the "comment" wrote to her post:

Also, you are right. Textbooks are a problem. One could write an entire essay on "the textbook as banking method"...I mean, think about it--it's like the way the chairs are set up in our room: they direct all attention at the professor and take the emphasis off you all, or us. The important person, the room set-up suggests, is the professor. Textbooks do the same thing, sort of (I'm just making this up as I go here, riffing). Textbooks organize students' entire learning experiences for them and tell them "everything they should know." They are written by those who, in theory, have all the "knowledge" already and its the job of the textbook to transmit that knowledge to the students. The textbook is the "vehicle" by which banking is accomplished, right? Wow, I never thought of this before.

I love this idea of the textbook as the vehicle of banking or the means of banking. I really never had thought of this. I mean, I have often thought about the problems with textbooks--the stuff in them appears acontextually. If you want to read a Paolo Freire essay, better to pull it out of the book in which it actually appeared, instead of coming into contact with it in a textbook. Textbooks kind of sterilize learning. At the same time, there are good things about textbooks, too. If you're teaching a class for the first time, they give you ways of thinking about how to organize the material. They offer "assignments" and "activities" for students to do...but this is sort of evil, in a way, because, realistically, isn't that the job of a good teacher? But, I have learned SO much from reading the textbooks that I use while teaching. So, I don't want to go all nuts on textbooks, calling them evil. At the same time, I know that when I had to read them, I often found myself falling asleep. I don't anymore. But, I'm older and more patient and more practiced in reading difficult texts. There is something horrible, though, about facing the textbook--it's pages all look the same, the columns are all the same width, the book itself is heavy and awkward. These days, textbook publishers work to try to make them more accessible, adding marginal features and using different fonts, typefaces, organizational designs and layouts, etc. But a textbook is still a textbook--a how-to or a collection. I think I prefer primary sources and documents. I still love the metaphor, though, "textbook as banker."

3.

The blog as opportunity for identifying projects/assignments.
Student wrote:

My biggest weakness as a teacher is my terrible spelling skills. This is one of my biggest fears, that I will be in the front of the class and be unable to spell a word, or a student will notice a misspelled and point it out embarrassing me. There isn't spell check on a chalk board! This past week in my literature class we have been focusing on Phonics. I can read very well, but breaking down the sounds and spelling words is difficult for me. I am convinced that somewhere in my own education I missed this important skill.

To which I responded:

wow...interesting confession. I would like to propose a project (and you could do this for Ass. 3 in this class and I could help, if you like). In my field, the teaching of writing, people have studied this exact question: how do people learn how to spell (my own opinion is that it's a hard thing to learn, some people never get it, the more you read, the better you'll get at it). There is an entire body of literature on how to teach spelling. I'd love to have you look into this, if it appeals to you, for Ass. 3. We could talk more if you like, let me know. If this doesn't interest you, no worries.

Music: Amos Lee, "Supply and Demand"

I have a bunch of stuff I want to write about today. I'm reading over student blogs. I really am enjoying this assignment. There are a lot of students, and so, a lot to read and I can't read everything. But I really look forward to the time, at the end of the week, when I can sit down and read what is going on in students' lives and hear their stories about school. And I love doing it via blogs. I love that I can read what they are writing and I can comment (I can type TWICE as fast as I can write with a pen!). I love the interactiveness of this assignment. In some ways, what I've done is taken the old "keep a journal" assignment and updated it for a new time. But, I'm wondering if there is anything else going on here, other than just switching an age-old practice (journaling) from analog to digital. I should think about this a bit more.

I learned something really interesting from one of the students this afternoon. The student is a tutor and she was writing about her experience working as a peer tutor. This is the passage that really made me stop and think:

Professors can be intimidating, but tutoring and learning from your peers is so much less intimidating. Sometimes, its easier when hearing the lesson from another perspective, and peers are in many ways much more approachable. Peer to Peer, Tutor to Tutee. Which is which? Am i the tutor or the tutee?...

Over the years, I have often thought how important it is for people who teach things to continue trying to learn new things. I teach writing and I teach tennis. Right now, there is not much new that I am trying to learn, other than how to be a good dad. A few years back, though, I tried to take up piano. I took lessons for about two years. I even performed at two recitals where I was the only adult present with a whole slew of kids! I'll never forget sitting at the piano in this recital hall in Boston and realizing I had NO IDEA how to begin the piece I was supposed to perform. That moment was INCREDIBLY powerful...I haven't thought of it in some time. I sat there for a good minute or so just COMPLETELY unable to recall how the piece was supposed to begin. So, I went on and played the second piece first and prayed to god that the first piece would come to me while I was doing the second piece.

Sorry for that diversion...anyway, I was saying...how important it is for people who teach stuff to keep learning new stuff and to keep putting themselves in the position of being the novice, the learner, the student.

What the student made me think about, in her posting, above, is the importance of the other side to this coin. It may be just as important for students to have moments where they get to be teachers as it is for teachers to have moments where they get to be students. Why? Well, if you are helping someone else, you learn A) a heck about the subject you are teaching (some people say you don't really know a subject or a skill until you have to teach it to someone else) B) a heck of a lot about how learning works (or doesn't work)...when you are responsible for helping someone, you have to get creative about doing it. You learn how difficult teaching is and you gain an appreciation for the good teachers that you might not have otherwise had. YOu gain an appreciation as someone who also teaches. C) When you teach someone else, it's hard not to end up having that mirrored back to you and causing you to think about who you are as a learner and how you learn. You learn about yourself. D) When you have played the role of teaching, I think you may take learning, in general, more seriously. But I'm not sure about this one.

So, there may really be something to this. Perhaps all education should contain both of these kinds of moments for those engaged:

teachers to become students
students to become teachers

Thanks R. for teaching me that.

Putting my money where my mouth is...

This entry launches my new teaching blog. Today, my students and I had a wonderful discussion about what we want our class to be and how we want to proceed with our semester's work. First, I asked students to freewrite and to think about the kinds of things they would like to change or set into motion in regard to our class. All of this has been spurred by a reading from Paola Freire, from his book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."

I was fascinated to see what the students would come up, so, first they wrote, and then I asked them to get into groups to chat about their ideas. I wanted the groups to elect a spokesperson who would summarize the conversation, this way, students who had gripes or criticisms wouldn't feel as though they couldn't speak their mind (or so I hoped--let's be real, there is no way to completely neutralize the power relationship between the students and I, nor should one try to).

After the groups had some time to talk, I asked the spokespeople to share some of the ideas or criticisms. I was pleased to find that a number of the students had good things to say about the class (or perhaps they just felt as though they couldn't be truthful, that the situation was too contrived). One of the ideas that came up, and this was, by far, my favorite moment in the class today, was when a quieter student, serving as his group's spokesperson, suggested that, if students were going to be required to keep a blog on their college experiences as students, I, too, should consider keeping a blog on mine as a teacher. So, here is that blog.

What I appreciated or enjoyed about the class today was the feeling that we were in the process of creating something new, different, and interesting. Well, we have the potential to create something new, different, and interesting, who knows what we will actually create. Judging my some of the comments, it seemed as though some students weren't really looking for that much change--more discussions, they said. More student-to-student discussions, too. They wanted me to continue my role as a facilitator, perhaps not wanting to have all responsibility for class discussions placed on their shoulders. This, especially, I found interesting. One student said something along the lines of wanting me to continue guiding discussions so that "things wouldn't get to awkward." Next to the suggestion/request that I keep a blog, I found this to be among the most interesting moments of the class. What did she mean by this, exactly? "Too awkward"?

It's funny, in discussion-based classes, there's always this tension--how much should the professor lead, how much should the class take the lead. And during those moments when the professor tries to hand off the responsibility for keeping the conversation going, it can sometimes get really quiet. I think that's what this student meant by "awkward." Whenever this happens, inevitably, the most outgoing and gregarious students (and there are always a few) will pipe up and help everyone out by trying to kick start the conversation. But, generally, I think that quiet in the classroom is often perceived as a bad thing, as uncomfortable, as awkward. And this can be true for students and professors.

It took me a long time to get used to and comfortable with quiet. When I first started teaching, I felt as though I had to fill the entire class session with talk. I sometimes tell the story, and I'm embarrassed to tell it here, but when I first taught a college course, previous to the first day of the semester, I mapped out the first 5-7 weeks of class periods in 5 and 10 minute increments. I was THAT concerned that we were going to run out of things to talk about! I look back on that now and laugh. But at the time, there was this real fear of...what if no one says anything? What if we run out of things to say to each other? What if the activities I planned fall apart? As things turned out, the students had plenty to say and classes flew by. By the end of the first week, I had thrown my five weeks of scripts in the trash.

Today, it's often the same thing--time goes by. I don't have to find ways to fill it. I have to find ways to get to the things I want to get to. Today's class was a good example--we spent 5 minutes writing, 10 minutes in small groups, discussing, and and hour and five minutes talking about our plans going forward. We never even got to the two activities I had planned for the class--a discussion of the Preface and first chapter of My Freshmen Year, by Rebekkah Nathan and a writing activity where students brainstorm on people to interview for their second writing assigment.

As for the silence, I have come to see that it can serve a good purpose. Sometimes, you want students to feel that awkwardness--if no one is saying something, or, if what you're talking about is, itself, confusing or complex or just not at all black-and-white. Perhaps more importantly, people need quiet time to think. New teachers will pose questions, allow a few seconds for someone to respond, and if no one does, they'll answer the question themselves. In this situation, it's often not that students don't have anything to say, it's that they weren't given enough time to think about the question and think how to formulate a response. Silence can be useful, but it takes a while to find out how.

In the meantime, I'm happy to continue to faciliate discussions and feel as though this is my responsibility. I've been trained to do it, have practiced it for some time, and have come to feel that I am good at it. And I enjoy it. So, why not?


Well, I think that's about it for now. Thanks to the group who suggested this. I'm having fun already.