The "Munch Piñata" pictured above was created by my wife, Renate Müller, as one of the "prizes" students could win in a live "writing contest" held in the final session of my fun "Horror & Suspense Writing" course this semester. She did a knockout job emulating Edvard Munch's "The Scream" -- a subject which we had discussed often in this particular class. Other prizes included a few of my horror books and fun little things I bought at a thrift store -- like vintage Halloween decorations and (my personal favorite find) an antique sausage grinder. It was very kind of my wife to hand paint the "Munch Piñata," which she built by modifying a strange decoration of what was supposed to be a referee shouting a touchdown call. She modeled the colors and lines off the expressionist's painting, but really crafted an amazing piece of sculpture on her own. I'm so very lucky to have such a supportive spouse and a great artist in my life. Everyone who saw this sculpture (which I had to share with my colleagues up and down the hall prior to class) was impressed, and I have to congratulate student Kevin Hinton on winning it -- and I hope he won't destroy the thing with a bat just for the cheap candy that I shoved inside its guts. (It's more fun to scoop that out with your fingers, Kevin!)

The writing contest today involved a 2 column list of "scary" adjectives (dark, bloody, etc.) down one side of a handout, and "scary" nouns (blood, obsession, etc.) down the other. Students had to make their favorite match and then use that as a fictional book title (like "Bloody Obsession"). Then they had to write the back cover copy -- the book description in all its hyperbole. This they read to the class, while a handful of studnt judges (who also won prizes for being the top of the class, as voted by their classmates) decided the criteria and then picked the winner. The process for making this 'game show' sequence of events work is rather complex, but it was a fun time for all. After the winners were chosen (who all got to pick their favorite prizes from the prize table), I spit out trivia questions to give away the remaining gifts to the first person to get the answer right. These were all based on class readings over the semester. The class had a fun end of term, I think. And though everyone didn't win a prize, everyone got candy.

Here's a photo of the class that I asked them to take before we got started on the contest. No, this isn't how they always received me when I walked into the room, and no, they're not all screaming from the stress of the end of term. They're all emulating the character, who you can see on the table in the center. They were a great group of students -- very induldgent of my whims all term -- and very open with their creativity and willingness to take creative and imaginative risks. This is how fun teaching can and should be. I'm proud to have shared the experience with them. And I like to see them scream....

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I've been reflecting on an approach I consciously employed last week in two different class scenarios -- an online chat with graduate students and in a discussion of a literary reading with advanced writing students -- just to see how it might stimulate the conversation.

I launched both by being contrary to student expectations. Students often inherently assume that because they have been assigned a topic or asked to read an essay, that the teacher inherently advocates for those topics or the points in those essays. This comes from reading information-centered textbooks, which often is delivered by the teacher as immutable truth. But ideas are issue-driven, and I think a good teacher models the good scholar in the field by showing how critical thinking circulates in that field. They risk raising issues about the assumptions that frame or underpin a statement of fact. They play devil's advocate and are receptive to student questions and challenges. So in my classes this week, I took this to the extreme and I started the discussions from a negative, even somewhat hostile, position. I denounced the very idea of having a conversation about the text or the topic in the first place.

"Hostile" is probably connotes anger; that's not what I mean. I have in mind antagonism and conflict rather than aggression. Let me explain what I did.

In the first instance, I was a "host" of a gathering of graduate Writing Popular Fiction students in an online discussion that was entitled "Work Habits for Writers." The chatroom had no controls -- it was a "free for all" conversation, with perpetually scrolling lines of input as students made their points or asked questions. But I worried that the topic threatened to bore them with dull dogmatic claims about the writing process and discipline, so I began the chat by tossing out a question, rather than making a claim. And I didn't ask them "What are bad work habits that writers have?" but rather said "So do writers really need work habits all? Aren't habits bad?"

To my happy surprise, it immediately summoned answers in defense of the topic, asserting why habitual work discipline is necessary and good. The students started listing all of their own habits, and explaining why they depended on them, and why these routines were productive for them. But more importanty, they immediately took OWNERSHIP of the topic, rather than just waiting for the teacher's wisdom to be handed down. It was as if they felt the duty to remind me that it was my chosen topic and that it was my duty to run the show, and -- dagnabit -- if I didn't take ownership of it, they would. It also worked as a preemptive strike that allowed those who wanted to be curmugeonly to get their say and get over with it. I was a little worried before the chat that if I took the negative position that everyone would say "I agree" and then we'd have nothing left to talk about. But instead, the novelty of the approach raised critical thought. The remainder of the chat -- an hour long -- really put me on the "question-raising" side of the conversation, probing and challenging student comments, pressing them to answer the question "why" as much as "how."

In my Publication Workshop course -- an undergraduate face-to-face class in the English major which usually involves full class critique of a writer's manuscript or a book chapter -- I put the students in a circle to discuss a chapter of Annie Dillard's great book, The Writing Life, which they'd read for homework. I'd taught this excerpt before, and anticipated that it would be a very divisive reading: the pragmatists in the class (the majority of them) would be overly critical of Dillard's whimsical musings and metaphor overload; the poets and philosophers would fawn over it, completely in love. Though I lean toward the latter of the two, neither reaction, I think, is justified because most undergraduates I've taught don't quite understand her phenomenological approach to writing, where form follows content.

This time I wanted to cut off those reactions from the very start. So I took a contrarian approach -- pretending at the start that Dilliard is not all she's cracked up to be. I began the conversation not by asking a question but by reading from a review of The Writing Life by Bruce Bawer called "Author-Suffering" that appeared in American Scholar. In my opinion, it is a very negative review, but one that offers critical reasons for its response. As I read the most negative sections from the review aloud to the class, students laughed and covered their mouths at the audacity. It liberated the conversation, because "anything goes" after something like that. But the students who liked Dillard's writing were immediately put on the defensive and came to the fore. Some saw the validity in Dillard's writing and argued those points, and some thought Bawer had gone too far. But -- truth be told -- most students tacitly agreed with Bawer's response. The review gave them permission to share their feelings, feelings which students in upper division courses are often hesitant to share because they don't want to feel contrary to the teacher. Here they very carefully worded their reactions, which weren't quite as hostile as Bawer's but still based in a negative evaluation. This allowed me to offer probing questions that tested the criteria behind their evaluative reactions (Why do you think she uses "too many metaphors"? How many are too many? Where exactly do you draw the line?).

Because Publication Workshop is a course in writing for a public audience, the specter of what happens when you get a bad review was also released in the room, allowing us to address author fears and anxieties (which followed up on our class conversation about the first half of Betsy Lerner's book The Forest for the Trees). Reading bits and pieces from Bawer's review aloud to the class -- and hearing the vocalized reactions from the class -- helped the more "literary" writers in the room to see the dangers, too, of being too literary. I raised the notion of epistemology -- and even read a definition of "phenomenology" to the class from a book of literary terms -- so they could better understand Dillard's approach, but they still weren't buying it.

To cap it off: for homework, I had asked all the students to write an extended metaphor for their own writing process to bring to class on the day we read Dillard. Going around the circle rapidly at the end of the hour, I asked everyone to report what they compared their writing process to ("writing is like fishing on a row boat..." etc.). After making the full round, I asked. "So was that too many metaphors?" Eyebrows lifted and heads nodded and I could see that -- from the perspective of the respondant -- the planned structure of the class itself helped make my point. Thus, beginning with negativity, and being contrary, I still had a position on the issue all along...but self-evidently, it was not the ONLY position possible, or even one that was articulated as the final one. They left class, still mulling it all over. That's a great way to end.

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I have stopped running a newsletter I used to keep for my journalism/writing students (and also freelance writers), called The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. This newsletter once offered me a place to write articles about some the issues I was teaching, as well as to connect with others in the writing profession, but mostly it was a huge dumping ground for weblinks I felt any graduating writing student or freelance writer -- including myself -- could ever need to begin the hunt. It was a collection of weblinks clustered by categories like "jobs for writers" and "writer's guidelines" and "calls for papers" and "internships" and so forth. Most of the articles I wrote for that newsletter went on to be reprinted in trade magazines or taught in some of my classes. It was a good newsletter.

I started that newsletter because I wanted an easy way to advise my students who might be thinking about careers in freelancing, or looking for markets to publish their work. I had them simply subscribe to it -- and that way I'd feel confident they'd continue to get that information even after they graduated. But there came a point about a year ago when I realized that the newsletter didn't have enough "new" material to justify sending out a new issue, and that my articles were more valuable if I didn't just give them away online like I was doing. The whole point of the newsletter was to find paying markets for writing -- yet I was giving my own specialized writing assignments away free in the process -- and slaving under my own deadlines, too, no less!

The links were really what mattered. So I began copying and pasting those links into our Course Management System at SHU -- called jweb (a jenzabar system akin to Blackboard...which we will soon affectionately call "Griffingate" at SHU). I copied them slowly and awkwardly, hoping my writing students would find the links useful. However, the links have to be copied from class to class in another slow and awkward fashion, involving a hidden copy-and-paste system they call a "bank" (but which I call a "pain"). I mean, why not offer faculty a central hub for repositing weblinks to share across the board with all the classes they teach? Why hide their links from other classes? Why use their laborious interface at all? I thought about going back to my newsletter...

But there's no need. There are plenty of other ways to centralize a page of links -- from building your own teaching website to using one of an array of bookmark-sharing ("social bookmarking" or "social networking") services. I chose the latter (and I already feel years behind the curve). I have moved those links to del.icio.us -- an ugly but useful site that is a little confusing at first in its architecture, but one that I have found more and more useful for sharing (and learning about new, related) weblinks. Here's my page:

Arnzen on del.icio.us

It has the added benefit of allowing TAGS to organize the links in intricate cross-referential ways (see Best Tagging Practices by Tagamac's Ian Beck for more information). I've informed the students in my current Publication Workshop class about my new page, but now that I've launched it, I need to start thinking about ways that I could -- possibly -- use the site in different and creative ways while integrating it more deeply into my teaching. (My reluctance is founded in the sloppy aesthetic weirdness of some of Web2.0).

So I've started looking around to see how other sites are using this weirdly-punctuated site in a productive manner for their classes, and I thought I'd share what I've found so far in case you're seeking info on this, too. In his blog post, "Del.icio.us and teaching", English professor Bradley Dilger gives a clear and articulate narrative about how he employs his del.icio.us page in his writing courses. He tags the links he wants to share with his students with the course number, which students are asked to browse. The other tags that are connected to links (by theme) give the student reader a pivot point that can spin them into further research on Dilger's course page or across the whole del.icio.us site. Neat.

One of the elements of del.icio.us that appeals to me is the ability for people to subscribe to specific tags in your profile, meaning that they will be alerted whenever you post a new link and mark it with that tag/keyword. Thus, del.icio.us could be used to assign weekly readings and alert students to updates (one educator's site I read calls this "Homeworkcasting" and invokes rss feeds to send new posts to a secondary del.icio.us page dedicated to a class). Kaye Sweester also recommends finding teachers in your same field and adding their profiles to your del.icio.us "network" in order to be alerted of what your colleagues are doing. One could easily, I think, also work in reverse and have the del.icio.us site be a repository for class research generated by the students themselves, building a network of profiles that interconnect between individual student profiles.

Quentin D’Souza -- who runs the great educational resource website Teaching Hacks -- has a good del.icio.us page for me to turn back to later, as I try to learn more about creative ways of using social bookmarking in my classes.

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"...however effectively one 'prepares' for a class, the realities of learning alter the original orientation in a number of creative and unpredictable ways. If the structure is too tight, or the scenario is too predictable, then we move towards a tightly organized outcomes-based approach to learning. We end up confusing the relationship between clear goals (set by the teacher), and an anticipation that the student will meet the expectations of the course, because they have replicated the core meaning of the content. This is, to some degree, summarized by the assumption that teachers need to envision what students should know at the end of a course. Yet, knowledge cannot be packaged in such a simplistic way. We gain an understanding of an idea, for example, through dialogue. The dialogue can lead in an untold number of different directions. The fundamental unpredictability of dialogue is that both interacting parties may have no sense of where they are headed and may, indeed, learn in ways that they had not anticipated. This should be a source of excitement, but it is often a source of anxiety. I believe the anxiety is partially situated in how we define teachers and students." Ron Burnett, in "The Radical Impossibility of Teaching"

I have not really processed this article as fully as I should yet, but Ron Burnett's "The Radical Impossibility of Teaching" was a fascinating read for me, because -- among many interesting ideas that question the assumptions we have about institutionalized learning -- the argument cited above encapsulates my occasional resistance to "outcomes based" assessment. I believe that having assessable goals and objectives gives a class a focus, a common ground, and a sense of direction. But by the same token, there's a degree to which these outcomes need to emerge organically from the class itself more collaboratively than they typically do. Burnett argues against the notion that objectives be prescribed by the teacher's hasty, generalized prediction about what students "need" that is handed down from above before the fact -- especially if "above" means not only the teacher, but some larger institutional group which the teacher is simply delivering like some enforcer or mediator between the institution and the student. Burnett invites us to think about some radical reconfigurations which cultivate creativity in the classroom. Like, what if the students were allowed to collaborate with the teacher, modifying and revising the learning objectives in the class? (The answer asks for more responsibility from the student than you might think).

In a system controlled universally through "outcome-based" assessment, where curricular administration risks becoming reduced to an act of enforcing policies rather than enhancing the development of teaching, such revision is virtually impossible. And yet at the same time, students do in their very particularity and individuality revise and adapt the learning objectives in their own ways. Assignments like "reflective essays" and "self-assessments" encourage students to gauge their own investment in course outcomes and to pursue them as they feel they need. And as long as teachers are working closely with students in interpersonal ways -- such as in individual office conferences -- the learning that happens can be guided and modulated to some degree in concert with the teacher.

While a teacher can use the course itself to "play" off the objectives, the syllabus remains the invariable law and point of accountability. The outcomes themselves are never really open to student revision in any way that can be filed, made permanent, or recognized publicly in the name of "accountability" or "assessment." Thus, I would suggest that the "radical impossibility" at work here is not one of teaching or of learning, per se, but of the very idea of a universal "outcome." Although grading and assessment have numerous modalities, a self-conscious teacher must recognize the virtual impossibility of measuring outcomes in any concrete way, beyond some abstract/numerical method (evaluations by ranking rather than providing qualitative comments) that reduces the significance of the experience and threatens to rob the quality of the course objective -- if not the course itself -- of meaningful substance.

Ah well...I'm still mulling these ideas over. Burnett's essay was originally delivered to the Federation Internationale des Sciences Sociales, in Milan Italy in 1999, and subsequently published in Critical Approaches to Culture, Communications + Hypermedia, his excellent weblog.

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Note: What you are about to read is more about the Donald Trump television show than any college-affiliated apprenticeship (well, unless you count Trump University, of course).

I recently employed a version of Trump's "The Apprentice" game show in my "Publication Workshop" classroom on the spur of the moment, and I thought I'd post about it here.

I frequently distribute a page of text -- ostensibly a page from a writer's "manuscript" or a mock "student paper" -- and ask students to edit it by hand for homework, or in class...and then I project the page onto a screen (using an overhead or document projector) and go through the passage with my pen, asking students what changes I should make along the way. It's workshopping -- or collaborative editing -- and it often helps students learn how they might more consciously proofread and edit their own work, in the process. I try to employ this method in every writing class I teach now, because it offers a great model for peer criticism and establishes an environment of critical reading.

For homework in my advanced creative writing class last Friday (called "Publication Workshop" -- a course in, essentially, how to be a freelance writer), students had been given a chart of typical proofreader marks that copyeditors will use, taken from the Chicago Manual of Style and were asked to apply them to a passage of mistakenly typset text I created with more gaffes, errors and blunders than you will ever see in the real world. Every line had a typo or an awkward construction or a misaligned character. Things were centered that shouldn't be; carriage returns were everywhere early. Every sentence needed to be corrected, often in multiple ways.

Instead of the usual "Arnzen standing at the projector" and vocally calling out for students to offer potential edits for me to make, I decided to mix it up off the cuff. I asked a student in the front row to start at the beginning of the passage and "walk us through" his edit step-by-step. I like having students take charge of the class like this, and I found a seat while he put his paper on the projector and adjusted it so everyone could see. Then he went through the first sentence, smartly spotting some blunders that demanded to be fixed.

I interrupted him before he could move to the next sentence. "Hold on..." I turned in my chair. "Are there any other changes anyone would make?"

People shook their head no. He had it right.

I twisted back to the front row, where the student smiled, eager to move on to the next line.

"Um...how do you spell ____________?"

He furrowed his eyebrows and bent over the projector. "Um...I think...um..."

Time ticked by and he looked up at his classmates for possible help.

I made a stupid "Dragnet" sound (dummmm-da-dumpdum) and then pointed at him like Donald Trump in the boardroom: "You're fired."

"What?"

Students laughed. He smiled, looking confused. "I don't..."

I chuckled. "Come on...You're fired. Sit down." He shrugged and picked up his paper.

I called on the person who was sitting next to him. "Why don't you show us how you fixed the next sentence?"

She apparently was a fan of The Apprentice, and was eager to play along. But eventually she was fired. As were the next batch of students. And a few who hadn't done the work, who I "fired in place" before they even were invited to go to the front of the class. One student had drawn doodles in the margin of his copyedited manuscript that made the whole class laugh when he displayed them on screen. I can't recall if I fired him for that, or just for his oversights on the manuscript, but he too was fired.

The students were playing along with me and didn't take my massive layoff of the whole classroom as a hostile act. One crucial element that made it fun for them was that I handed them the power to fire. I made it a group activity. I didn't just judge their editing skills, I would turn around and ask the class if they spotted any problems, and if they did, I would say: "You're right -- tell him he's fired." And they loved it.

In fact, we went through the entire single paged document, and the fun escalated as we went, because it was a little surprising how quickly the turnaround was as students got up and then sat back down. And because everyone's critical lenses were in focus, every single student was fired, missing some pesky little thing or another, save for the last person, who did the last sentence.

Now, I have to say in my defense that there are many problems with this method. I don't necessarily subscribe to the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" worldview of the Trump boardroom -- and in many ways I feel a college classroom should be a sanctuary from such cutthroat nonsense. I'm a big fan of collaborative, not competitive, learning. But there was something fun about the students competing to stand up in front of the room and "survive" the editing drill for the longest period of time without getting fired. And it was something of a thrill for the class to try to "catch" a student oversight just so that they could say "You're fired." Perhaps it was somehow empowering.

I could go on and explain how the event may have underlined the entrepreneurial skills that this particular class hopes to engender in the student writers, since an editor who rejects a manuscript is perhaps doing the equivalent "firing" of a Donald Trump to a game show contestant. And Trump himself might even have something to say about the relationship between art and business. But the truth be told, I just had my class do this exercise for kicks -- to get them out of their seats and a little more engaged in the daily grind of manuscript proofing -- and the whole "firing" business just made for an efficient way to speed up the process and get multiple students to take the stage.

I was surprised when I did a quick web search to see if others have used The Apprentice in the classroom. It's very popular, apparently. (I should confess here that I never watched the show until the most recent Celebrity Apprentice series, just to see what KISS bassist Gene Simmons would do on the show (and he got fired quickly!)).

Obviously, the Trump show is attracting the attention of media culture critics and business theory scholars. The Wall St Journal and CNN have run in-depth articles on how some MBA programs are actually integrating the structure of The Apprentice into their curriculum, which are borrowing the show's model as a way to grade student performance ("You're flunked!"). The show, these programs argue, not only teaches entrepeneurial skills, but also the arts of negotiation, the work ethic, and interpersonal business communications. (Scholarly work has been done on the latter, see David Urban's "Deconstructing the Trumpster" or "What the Apprentice Teaches About Communication Skills" by Katherine N. Kinnick and Sabrina R. Parton).

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This afternoon I attended a great Teaching & Learning Forum on our campus on the topic of teaching with technology. Mary Spataro -- our campus technology-enhanced learning guru and Instructional Design pro -- ran a healthy discussion on implementing technology in a way that supports the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education outlined by Chickering and Gamson for the American Assn for Higher Ed. This work was done in 1987, and though I have heard these principles in various guises throughout the years, the citation was new to me, so I thought I'd briefly blog about it.

In a nutshell, Chickering and Gamson argue that it is good practice for a teacher to employ these seven principles in their courses...

1. encourages contact between students and faculty,


2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,


3. encourages active learning,


4. gives prompt feedback,


5. emphasizes time on task,


6. communicates high expectations, and


7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

In our development session, Spataro broke the faculty into small groups, assigning one principle to each group to unearth ways that they are using technology in their courses to support such practices. My group discussed "gives prompt feedback" -- such as using e-mail to respond to student theses or topic proposals before they actually write their papers, or having some stock "comments" to copy and paste into a response to student writing. Spataro also added that recording oral notes is another way that is gaining popularity (though, as I have argued with my SHU colleague in New Media, Dennis Jerz, there are instances where too much play with this may not be fair to the student writer because it does not, for example, teach direct editing skills by example... on the other hand, such text-to-speech technology can be liberating as Norman Coombs has explained).

In their 1996 article, "Technology as a Lever," Chickering and Ehrmann similarly illustrated how these principles can be achieved with technology (and the website that this article appears on -- hosted by the Teaching Learning and Technology Group -- gives a host of good sources on the topic). They mention Coombs (again) and his use of e-mail as an example of how online discussions can get quiet students to raise issues in a more equalizing and honest setting (in this case, Coombs reports that he had taught for many years, but it wasn't until he began to use e-mail to teach his course that a student finally had the gumption to ask, “What’s a white guy doing teaching black history?” -- see Ehrmann's "Grand Challenges" for more on using e-mail as an educational tool). The article is a great I like how they conclude with the argument that "technology is not enough" and that students need to take action to learn on their own (or to make the instructor aware when they are not "respecting" the diverse ways that students learn).

If it isn't self-evident from this weblog, I am in favor of technology-enhanced learning and I do try to follow the above principles, though I am always skeptical of pedagogical AND technological dogma. I use technology in many of my courses and in advising, but I would add that there are times when technology can actually get in the way of achieving these principles. Sometimes there are simply "technical difficulties" but at other times there are "faculty difficulties" with the technology, or it is utilized in unconsciously (or even fetishistically) poor ways. If a teacher is not modulating their employment of technology in the classroom with other methods, and aren't engaging with the course technology to the same degree their students are, then, for example, these tools can only get in the way, lead to passive learning, or discourage other forms of student-faculty contact. Being receptive to student feedback on the medium for communication is crucial.

Simply put, sometimes we use the wrong tools for the job without knowing it; this does not necessarily mean one has to throw out the tool if it isn't working, but instead try another guage (swap an inch-based wrench for a metric-sized one). As Spataro urged us today, it's best to start small...you'll find the right amount of technology to use along the way.

Chickering and Gamson actually mention something similar to this final point in their original article, when they discuss the classroom as an environment that a teacher develops. Here's how they see the ideal environment for teaching the principles:

• A strong sense of shared purposes.


• Concrete support from administrators and faculty leaders for those purposes.


• Adequate funding appropriate for the purposes.


• Policies and procedures consistent with the purposes.


• Continuing examination of how well the purposes are being achieved.

All of this, I would say, obviously pertains to teaching with technology, as well. Technology is not just a tool; it is an element of a learning environment that needs just as much planning, planting, grooming, and trimming as a tree in a backyard.

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...one question we might ask is: "Do we always know when we are teaching?" I do not think we do. The single most important thing I learned as an undergraduate may have been that I was capable of graduate study. I learned this from a professor who had no idea he taught it to me. Brief remarks that seem innocuous to us may have a lasting impact on our students. Hopefully, the influence is positive. I do not mean to give us more importance or power as teachers than we actually possess. However, a different but equally significant error may be to ignore the potential impact we can have at moments when we are least aware of what we are saying. -- Peter J. Giordano, Teaching and Learning When We Least Expect It

I had a similar experience, when an American Literature teacher named Beth Ann Bassein answered one of my annoying questions by saying, "Oh, you'll learn all about that when you get your Masters." It floored me. She just continued on in her lectures, not missing a beat. I barely even knew what graduate school was, let alone felt I'd be able to get into one, and here this professor was, assuming I would get my master's degree...heck, she didn't even bother trying to talk me into it! Beth Ann Bassein taught me many things when I took her classes, especially her poetry writing courses (because she's a knockout poet herself), but she was one of the toughest teachers on campus and that one passing comment -- with all its unexpected acceptance and faith in my ability -- alone gave me courage to try. (I had another moment like this when, during my Masters, a Medieval lit professor wrote in the margins of a critical essay: "Oh, shut up and go get your PhD already!") These little para-educational things mean nothing -- and yet they mean everything.

So what a wonderful essay Giordano's "Teaching and Learning When We Least Expect It" is. He reminds us that we are not always in control, that learning often happens between the cracks of the syllabus, and that what we say and do informally with (or around) our students can often teach them far more than we realize.

In his essay, he raises a very pithy question: "Do we always know when we are teaching?" And the answer is, of course not. All we really have is faith and speculation and a whole lot of intuition. Sure, good teaching is mentored, learned, and practiced, grounded in deep, lifelong study and professional development. It's based in what people call "best practices"...but I think we often draw on our unconscious well when we are teaching -- modeling our strategies and challenges off of how we ourselves learned best, and refining our techniques and personal style in a series of never-ending encores of successful teaching strategies we've employed in the past. New teachers really do make it up as they go along -- and might be surprised to learn that older teachers (usually the ones who are still engaged and excited about teaching) are making it up even still.

One of the joys of teaching, for me, is coming up with a really good discussion question off the cuff, or dreaming up an impromptu writing prompt, and watching what happens when students get inspired by it. It's magic. I'll sometimes run back to my office and make sure I write down what I did, so I'll remember to do it again in the future. But sometimes we'll run a really great exercise or discussion prompt one year and it'll come as a surprise to us just how good it can be, but when we repeat it the following year, it doesn't click and we wonder what we did wrong. The idea is only half of it; it's the fuel -- but the classroom dynamic provide the fire.

Giordano mulls over metaphors for teaching, and how none of them are quite right, though "midwife" comes closest. I like his idea that teachers need to be "good company" to students. We have to let go of control fantasies for that to happen. Giordano's essay reminded me of the basic principle of learning: it can happen any time. The best thing a teacher can do is try to create an environment where there's lots of flint that might spark fire. But it's up to the student -- and an infinite number of variables beyond anyone's control -- to strike it.

I think it's crucially important to remember these lessons during times of (what Carolyn Segal has termed) Assessmentdelirium.

***
I found this article on a site I often mention here on Pedablogue: the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list run by Rick Reis out of the Standford CTL program. Their mailing list is worth subscribing to. I'm currently researching "Transormation Theory" for a pedagogy paper I'm delivering next weekend at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and I found Giordano's essay very useful.

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Last week in my Horror Writing course (one of my favorite Topics in Creative Writing classes to teach), we looked at the role of the "scream" in horror. I decided this would be a great way to put the "Friday Shout-Out" exercise -- an idea culled from Coyotebanjo's music teaching weblog and discussed here at Pedablogue in February -- to the test.

Essentially, I began class by calling roll with the requirement that the student had to scream "Here!" to be marked as present. The first few names called were timid in their replies -- they kept looking at the door as if expecting an angry dean or concerned prof to show up at our doorstep. So I shouted at them: "Come on! Belt it out!" showing them that if it was okay for me to cry out, it was okay for them. After a few risky shouts, rewarded by laughter and my own shouts in reply, their cries became louder and louder. "That's more like it! Come on, make my blood-curdle! This is a horror class!" The barks of "Here!" and "Present!" became as thunderous as a Marine's drill team, as shrill and glass-shattering as an audition session for a horror movie 'scream queen.'

It was a lot of fun, and though I did risk annoying some classrooms down the hall (our room is relatively isolated, off in a corner past a stairwell) I could tell it gave the students a sort of purging relief (it had been a deadline day, after all). I dare say that the loudest and best screamer in the class was one of the most quiet students in the class, usually -- she erupted with a cry of the banshee that visibly surprised everyone to great glee.

Mission accomplished.

I feel such expressions can be helpful in teaching "artistic" expression, once the aura of permissibility has been opened up. And because the course was in horror fiction writing, it had relevance. We openly discussed why screams are so prevalent in horror films, and whether or not they generate fear or simply signify it. We discussed how they operate symbolically. We looked into the strategy of representing screams in fiction, noting that people rarely, if ever, actually scream while reading a book. We looked at a story we had read in Stephen King's Night Shift (a text I have taught before to great success) called "The Man Who Loved Flowers," which features a passage regarding the screams that the titular lover tries to quell with his hammer. And near the end of the hour, I read an entire article aloud to the class called "Screams from Somewhere Else" by Roger Rosenblatt -- an eloquent short essay that addresses the primal relevance of the scream in today's modern world:

Civilization is tested by its screams. One has the choice to hear or not to hear; to detect location or not to detect location; to discover cause; to help or not to help. Along the many lines of choice, excuses and mistakes are possible, even reasonable. One is left with oneself and the screams, like two opponents.

I could tell just from their rapt attention that the students were fascinated by the ideas this was raising. I let them absorb the ideas in silence for a moment. Then I asked them to write a fictional scene in which a character is walking at night, and overhears a scream from a dark alleyway nearby. ("What happens next? Go.") It was very productive.

This is but one example, I think, of how it can be beneficial to introduce a little Dionysian fun into the otherwise Appolonian hallways of academe. I'll continue to discuss activities in my horror writing class in the future.

Related reading...

• Teacher's Guide to Stephen King's NIGHT SHIFT


• "Scream Musings": a series of aphorisms I wrote in the premiere issue of my newsletter, The Goreletter.


• Things that Make Us Want to Scream: a kindergarten art project using Edward Munch's famous painting (not just for kids!)


• Flash forward to: The Munch Pinata!

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I received a message recently from a teacher who hadn't received her order from Who's Who Among America's Teachers, and wondered if I knew how to help.

I did a quick search and discovered that ECI -- Educational Communications, Inc. -- ceased all operations in 2007! This came as a surprise to me. I'm not sure if another company has already stepped into their place, but the post on their main page, honoring.com, reports:

Educational Communications, Inc. has ceased all operations, including discontinuation of its publications for Who's Who Among American High School Students, Who's Who Among America's Teachers, and The National Dean's List.

Please note - All students who have already been named as previous scholarships winners through The Educational Communications Scholarships Foundation will remain eligible to collect their funds at anytime during their pursuit of higher education.

If you have any questions about the status of any order, you can call 877-843-9946.

A post I made back in 2005 about this 'who's who' recognition has to my great surprise continued to be one of the most popular entries on Pedablogue. I think that recognition for students -- like The Nat'l Dean's List -- can potentialy be a strong motivator for some students, but my position on these awards for professional instructors hasn't changed since I first mulled over the significance of this award. Perhaps many agree.

I haven't learned yet why the company has ceased operations (it's been in business since the late 1960s), but I did a little research to see if I could find out more. I discovered that ECI is currently listed as part of the American Achievement Corporation, which also has subsidiaries that sell class rings, make yearbooks, and more. This Austin based company might be contacted if you're a teacher or student trying to hunt down the status of your order or award.

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Sigh. I guess it's almost time to file taxes again. You with me?

College-level educators make expenses and sometimes generate income in ways that are different than other professions. Usually a good tax tip book can come in handy for this, especially when you first take on a new tenure-track job, shift into a research/grant project, or substantially change your workload in some way. Tax guides for academics can be quite helpful, but I find they are often not published annually, even though they should be. Those that are professional and current, often aren't discovered by academics. So I'm updating this perennial topic with a list of publications that might help with your taxes, if you're in higher ed.

Here are the ones I've found that seem to be most current. I haven't seen them yet, so I cannot endorse them fully, but the first one -- from NTSAA -- has been very helpful for me in the past:

• 2008 Educator's Tax Guide
• Teachers Tax Service
• Teacher's Pocket Tax Guide 2008

If you know of others, please leave a comment about them. Others that I've recommended on this site before seem, sadly, to be unavailable or out of print -- and I am longing especially for a new edition of the the THICK and highly useful AIS book, "Tax and Financial Guide for College Teachers and Other College Personnel". They might be available used on ebay or elsewhere. Useful for guidance if you are new to figuring your taxes as an academic professional, but rely on them only with the knowledge that their specific legal references are probably falling out of date.

***
Here's some elated reading on Pedablogue from the past that might help (though they may include dead links that take you to crazy places):

• Leave No Teacher Behind
• Taxes for Teachers
• Tax Time!

Recommendations appreciated in the comments. -- Mike Arnzen

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I have decided to begin reviewing software, web services, and other technical tools for educators on Pedablogue. Books that focus on teaching strategies/advice and/or educational theory will be considered, as well.

I write fair, and extensively analytical, reviews; I expect the average length of reviews to be between 1500 and 2000 words. My bias will lean towards teaching tools and similar products that are useful for college-level instruction, but any educational gadget, text, or gizmo will be considered.

I will also be biased toward products that are more useful in the Humanities and in English/Writing/Literature than other disciplines (simply because these are my fields!). Special interest will be paid to items related to:

+ classroom technology (from chalk to computers)
+ word processing
+ magazine editing
+ film and video screening
+ literary analysis and research
+ writers workshops and critiquing

For books, I am hoping to receive titles that are mostly pragmatic and multidisciplinary -- aimed at teachers of any profession, usually at the college level. Books that provide specific teaching strategies for college professors (like McKeachie's Teaching Tips or Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do) or pedagogical books that look at general educational principles will most likely get reviewed

I will only post reviews of products that I find favorable. If I hate a product or don't feel the product is in the best interest of other educators, I will simply not endorse it with any press whatsoever -- however, I may contrast it against more favorable items under review. My choice to only run mostly positive reviews should not be interpreted to mean I will be a shill for any corporate entity. I will still evaluate products fairly, honestly, and accurately, carefully noting where I feel products have failings, if any.

If you are in the education business and have a product you'd like reviewed, get in touch with me at arnzen@setonhill.edu or send products to me directly at:

Michael A. Arnzen, Ph.D.
Division of Humanities
1 Seton Hill Lane
Seton Hill University
Greensburg, PA 15601

Sending me review materials does not guarantee a review. No materials sent to me will ever be returned. Full, consumer-level products will be chosen for review over excerpts, samplers, limited demos, and crippleware. Only hard copy ARCs or actual printed books will be reviewed; no e-books or pdf galleys. For personal reasons, it is also highly unlikely that I will review books published by vanity presses or self-publishing outfits that rely on print-on-demand technology. DO NOT e-mail me any attachments (including .pdfs, graphics, or software) that are larger than 1mb without contacting me first.
Know that I am a one-man operation (and a full-time teacher); review writing is not the main intention of Pedablogue and if I receive more items than I can review, I will simply be very selective. My mission here is to assist other teachers, so if you do have a product or book that you genuinely think will help other college teachers, please do send it along, with any information you feel is needed beyond basic ordering information -- especially any educator's discounts or special/exclusive discount codes you would like to provide to the readers of Pedablogue. However, please do not shower me in press releases; let your product speak for itself.

I will e-mail a copy of my review to the review material provider. Providers are permitted to quote my reviews in whole (as a reprint) or in part (as a blurb), so long as authorship is attributed to Pedablogue (the courtesy of a link that points back to this website is appreciated).

I have already received some items for review and will be posting them shortly. Thanks!

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"Half my job is asking questions of those who can’t generate questions, in order to model the will to curiosity." -- from "Creative Writers in the Academy," by Orante Churm

Churm got me musing over this great line in his otherwise provocatively subversive essay. As a creative writing instructor, I see my role as very similar to Churm's, particularly when it comes to raising questions, because this is at the core of creative writing, literary interpretation and, well, all forms of critical inquiry. When I teach using the "permeable lecture" method, I am modelling this will to curiosity.

A short while ago, I was asked to guest blog about "critical reading" for author (and SHU WPF alum) Kaye Dacus' weblog. In response, I wrote a short article called "Questionstorming" that looks at the sort of questions that writers should ask when they read a story -- but mostly, I assert, they should ask the question why:

Every drop of ink that you see on a page is a choice that a writer has made. That choice has a motive. A reason. A rationale. Thus, critical reading is — at its base — a search for that reason. It simply involves ASKING THE QUESTION WHY.

What Churm calls "the will to curiosity" is often not merely a desire to raise this question, but also the courage to find the answers, no matter how much work it might require, how complex those answers might be, how radically life-altering they might be.

Why ask why? Because there's a thrill in the risk, and a satisfaction in knowing that you've moved one step closer -- but never all the way -- toward the cliff-sharp edge of the truth.

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Last year I signed up for LibraryThing -- a social networking site where book lovers share their personal libraries online. They call it the "largest bookclub in the world." It's actually an intriguing bibliography system, tapping into libraries and bookstores around the globe to pull in information about any given book title that you can claim you own on your own virtual shelves. I know librarians and booksellers who love it, but anyone who loves to collect or hoard books should find it a great place to get lost in. If in everyday life you like browsing your friends' bookshelves when you visit them, or if you compulsively scan displayed titles at a bookstore (or, like me, even when you're at a supermarket or convenience store), if you like to know what others are reading so you can know what you should be reading too, or even if you judge people by the literary company they keep (shame on you) then this is the site for you!

[You might want to read "A Cozy Book Club in a Virtual Reading Room" from last year's New York Times, if you haven't heard of LibraryThing before.]

As a fiction writer, I find LT a useful way to stay in touch with some of my readers and I enjoy seeing what books my friends are reading. I am listed as an official "LibraryThing Author." I also actually get some practical use out of keeping a record of my book collection online (albeit a loose one -- I own WAAAAY more books than I've listed in my online catalog, and I still plan to use the barcode scanning luxury of Readerware to compile a database of them all someday, too). There are times when I am in my campus office, and I want to know if I have a particular book at home, or if I'll need to make a trip to the campus library -- so I can easily load up librarything.com on my computer and check. It's practical.

Joining LibraryThing is as easy as logging in once with a username...and it's also free. Enter 200 books into their database at no cost. Once you hit that threshold, if you want to keep entering titles, you'll need to kick in $10 per year -- or do as I did, feeling the cause was worthy paying a paltry $25 for a lifetime membership. That's pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of librarythings. The social networking with other bookhounds is a natural benefit and a no-brainer (you'll quickly get "friends" who share similar interests -- from librarians, to teachers, to students; you can enter conversations about books and genres and more; you can even swap books with people you trust (though I deplore this act because writers don't get their royalties); and so on). You can tag books, to categorize things and find them in clusters later on, or to find other books related to them that you don't own yet. You can incorporate gizmos onto your blog that tell others what you're reading. You can use the site to connect with authors or bookstores. You can get book suggestions (or, cleverly, unsuggestions!). You can enter contests. And as their blog (and their deeper and geekier thingology web) makes clear, they're super-intelligent, constantly growing, and really evolving in relation to how their members utilize the site. It's a pretty cool place for the bookworm to burrow around.

I haven't been considering the pedagogical uses of the site -- or even how I might best utilize it as a teacher -- until recently. Today I dug around in LibraryThing's "suggester" pages and found a way to search for books that use the same tags as I do. Thus, a search for other member's books tagged "pedagogy" turned up a host of titles I hadn't heard of before (96 of them, in fact)...and I learned of other classics I own that have come out in new editions. Just going through this process gave me an incentive to pick up my pedagogical research again -- to seek out unique titles like Donna Duffy's Teaching Within the Rhythms of the Semester or Stephen Brookfield's Discussion as a Way of Teaching.

But the fun didn't stop there. By clicking on the names of members of LibraryThing who already own these books, I discovered the librarything profiles of other educators and even teacher's reading groups and -- coolest of all -- the libraries for college centers for teaching and learning, like Stone Hill College's CTL -- just by surfing the site. I did searches for "teach" in the member list and found more titles than I could ever possibly read, but lots of inspiration. I was pleased to also stumble on the Women's Studies library at University of Oregon, my alma mater...which proves that LibraryThing serves various disciplines and fields, as well. I know that my own campus librarians are aware of it, and that many others are experimenting.

All of this makes for an intriguing form of personal research -- LT is a place I'm turning to more and more when I want to seek out a new book to read. I'm wondering now how it might also be useful for working with students. For example, I found a graduate student who specializes in "Chick Lit" on the site recently; clicking through her own personal library, I learned about new research titles in the field which I promptly ordered for our campus library. It made me wonder if I could use the site as a sort of "graduate research" laboratory. Perhaps I could even ask students to sign up for free accounts, and develop annotated bibliographies on the site.

I've spotted "classroom libraries" on the site (like this one from a Children's lit teacher who wants to build an in-class library better than what her school has). Others, like BlogDay, are mulling over the ways that the info sharing can be used for students online. I'll have to keep thinking of creative uses for this with English majors in collegiate environment. The best tips and advice I've found so far are mentioned on Classroom Learning 2.0, which seems like a great place to start.

I've decided, though, that I will continue to update my profile on LibraryThing with education-related texts as I acquire or rediscover them. I have also recently joined a very similar, yet decidedly more chatty and interactively social site -- goodreads.com -- where I will try to post entries not based on my home library, per se, but on the books I am currently teaching (tagged "currently-teaching"!) each term, with micro-reviews. I've already begun; drop by, sign up, and waive hello! And if you have ideas for integraing LT or GoodReads into the classroom, let me know by leaving a comment!

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Just learned about Edublogs magazine -- a new online journal that promises to be useful for teachers who blog or who use blogs in the classroom. It's tied in with edublogs.org and looks to be a good network for this kind of thing, based on the experience people who are running the show. [Thanks, incorporated subversion, for the link!]

I like their list of the "Top Edubloggers" -- lots to chew on by clicking through their links.

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I saw myself reflected in the frustrations posted by high school math tacher Amber Arizpe in a recent 43Folders post: "Teacher's Productivity Hampered by Technology.". Arizpe (aka salindger) describes an interesting process:

During class, I write out notes on the Elmo. Plain ol’ paper and pen on a notepad. I can then cart it home and scan it into Acrobat, into a pdf, use planbook to upload a copy to the day of the lesson and yay! print it out when a student needs notes. I’m a nice math teacher, I provide online copies.

Problem? I have to do all this at home. Let’s face it, the last thing I want to do when I get home is to immediately go back to work on paperwork that can be done in the classroom. I would rather be able to do it in my classroom the moment after class is done. Scan, pdf, post, done.

I love the idea of using the Elmo (document camera) as a sort of virtual blackboard, then scanning the results into a .pdf file for archiving and/or sharing with students. But I empathize with Azirpe: I, too, have a Mac for work and a PC at home and no scanner at all to work with. I did buy DevonThink Pro in a special deal on something they call an "infoworker's bundle" -- and I recommend it highly to people who have Macs. Devon's system seems to promise a way to go "paperless" (armed with their very expensive "pro office" version and a pricey SnapScan scanner) in the way that Azirpe seems to fantasize about. But getting there is not easy, especially given conflicts between home PC and work Mac, let alone the expense. Her larger thesis -- that it is difficult for teachers to keep up with all this, and for IT to really facilitate it -- is really at the root.

One of the issues I've personally been struggling with is making the calandering system on my work machine jibe with my cell phone pda, and home pc (uncannily, another issue I just spotted on 43Folders!). It seems like an impossible hurdle to me right now. I've had to recheck the calendar weekly and I keep finding mistakes (like this week, for example, I neglected to note on one machine that a class is canceled for an MLK-related event, even though I have that noted on another... leading to confusion...and erasure and redundancy when I cross-sync the systems). Frustrating! Ah well. Technology is a tool. So is paper, and that might be the best way to keep things clear. Still, I'll sort it out soon enough. The answer lies -- as it almost always does -- in decluttering, simplifying, and staying consistent in a new routine.

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