Praxis

Entries about actual teaching strategies.

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As a creativity challenge, I recently signed up for THE FICTION PROJECT, sponsored by The Art House Co-op. Registrants (before Feb) will be mailed a Moleskine sketchbook in which to tell and show a story using words and art, based on a surprise random theme. Most participants scan and share their work-in-progress, with commenting available much like a weblog. The deadline is in April, when sketchbooks are returned to be put on permanent display in the Brooklyn Art Library.

The length of the experience nicely fits into a college semester-length calendar for the coming Spring, so I thought I would recommend it to others who are considering a creative class project for their art or writing courses. The "rules" are flexible enough to allow collaborative creations for the class as a whole, or to allow individual entries. The site offers an educational discount for groups over 10.

Visit my profile and feel free to friend me if you sign up. I don't know what I'll be doing for this project, or if I'll even succeed, but I know it will be very weird.

Thanks to the twitterverse, I was turned on to this video by author John Irving when asked about the future of the book:

The anxieties presently circulating about the marketplace for fiction certainly are causing a lot of changes in the publishing industry lately. In October, price wars among booksellers splashed on the headlines, causing many -- including the New York Times -- to worry about the economics of publishing and the resultant devaluation of the printed book itself. Some speculate that this is all due to the mainstream attention and interest that ebook hardware is finally getting, especially the Amazon Kindle.

Updike speaks to the impact of all this on young writers. I am starting to wonder how the role of creative writing programs and the teaching of creative writing professors will change as a result, since young writers are who we serve. Here are my thoughts -- a rapid fire of brainstorming, more than fully-composed thoughts -- about what, perhaps, creative writing teachers should be considering.

For one thing, we should neither give up on the book, nor hide from the realities of the trade by squatting behind a library shelf or the literary canon. We need to be engaged with the present AND the past, with a toe dipped into the future of our students, as well.

We should adapt to paradigm shifts not by teaching to the marketplace but by teaching to the long-view and by persistently putting publishing into historical context. Students need to be aware of current industry realities, and we need to be engaged in it to understand it completely as teachers. But there is wisdom in our experience and we need to share that experience, in order for students to recognize that publishing as an ever-changing process, and is never "stable" in any fixed way. It has always been historically-contingent, and always been in a state of flux across time. The "book" has always been an artifact of the marketplace of ideas -- a trace artifact of a cultural movement always in-process. This is as true of business trends as it is of artistic movements, and often one change is simply responding and/or adapting to the other.

We should discuss electronic publishing not as the "new" or the "best" but simply one medium for messaging which is as equally valid for expression as any other. When it comes to publishing contracts, ebooks are just one license among many that a writer can act on, and while one license may be more economically viable at any given time than another, all are equally legitimate ways to transfer intellectual property to an audience.

We should inform students about intellectual property law, and advise them to protect their property -- or to know what rights they're donating to the public domain when they unleash it free online or in free ebook giveaways.

We should encourage experimentation with format just as we encourage experimentation with the blank page to poets.

Too often writers glom on to one format or medium or genre and fixate on it (usually because they derived some success within it) -- and this includes everything from the Kindle of today to the illustrated manuscript in days of old. We need to engage new technologies while also understanding the book as a technology itself. But more than that, the key point for new writers to understand -- after they've learned the art of writing and become interested in pre-professional, career trajectories -- is that the products of their imagination and craftsmanship are also ultimately social texts once they become published. Writing, when all is said and done (and revised and marketed) is a form of property that can be traded, and graduates of writing programs rarely learn enough about this stage of the process.

Publishing needs to be considered a stage of the writing process. It is the end stage, but not necessarily the terminus of the process. Books get printed, but the life of the book does not end when the ink dries. There are dialogues that open up (such as in reviews) and books are often updated and revised, serialized and sequelized...and one book experience always informs the next book experience, for writers who survive it.

It is good to teach students "the book life." To think of writing as a way of life in a culture that is not inherently friendly to that way of living. Texts like Jeff Vandermeer's recent title, Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer are movements in the right direction. Courses like our own "Publication Workshop" at Seton Hill U, are others.

Sharing the end results of work produced in a classroom -- in end-of-term class readings, in class-generated anthologies, in online literary magazines -- are all forms of publication. Many teachers neglect to exploit this as an arena for learning the way. Because it's the messiest part of the process, and the part where "rejection" (beyond grading systems) looms. Bridging the conventional forms of classroom publishing (such as a reading of revised work to the classroom at the end of the term) with emergent formats (such as video recordings to be uploaded for public comments from youtube) will engage writing students with the marketplace of ideas today.

In addition to the "book life" and being aware of the status and reality of the economy of writing, there is also something simply called the "reader's life." We should remain role models for engaged readers as much as writers, with an interest in the output of the publishing world. We should advise students to take literature courses and spend time in the library. We should buy books, and practice what we preach by investing in the world that invests in us as authors. We should share and explore new technologies and trends in publishing and talk about these formats with our students. We should show that we are readers as much as writers -- we are bookish. Students need to see us reading, hear us reciting published works, spot us in the faculty break room reading a kindle, recognize us in the audience at a public poetry reading, see us browsing the shelves at the local Barnes and Noble, sit across from us at a table in the library. When they do so, they will see themselves reflected in the world of books as a real, lived experience.

Last week I bought a Kindle. I carried my ebook device around all week not to show off some new gaget, but to say Look...this might be what our future looks like. I'm interested in where this is heading...are you? I opened up a dialogue with readers on my horror writing weblog, about the ebook watershed. I uploaded documents for a Dean's Council meeting to my Kindle and brought it to the meeting instead of printing them out or using a laptop. I showed my Kindle to almost every student who came to my office for advising this past week, for both the "wow" factor and to say "hey, you might be getting your textbooks this way someday." Down the hall, my colleague ordered a Kindle DX for his journalism courses, and posted an interesting blog about the kindle's impact on academics. Teachers and writers open up conversations about books; books are portals into conversations about culture. Writers shouldn't be worried, but engaged and thoughtful; we need to be steeled up against the fluctuations inherent to the industry, but also willing and able to transcend it. That's the skill of the creative writer -- telling a good story transcends the medium and the economics of the exchange. But we also have to be creative in finding ways for getting our stories heard.

And we need to keep publishing our own writing, creative or not, as well. That's the only way to truly learn what it's like out there. To accumulate knowledge of the book world and bring it back to our classrooms, whether explicitly or obliquely. The skills and knowledge that we've always taught will never go out of fashion, but we need to recognize what is at stake in our students' lives when changes are on the horizon.

It seems almost criminal to advise a student to become a novelist without also arming them with some sort of knowledge and wisdom about the marketplace for fiction. The power of an educated writer is not simply to write well, but to join a community of like-minded thinkers and to participate smartly in the world in which they hope to operate, economically as well as discursively. We can react to changes in the industry with optimism or skepticism, but we should never abandon the one certain thing we have to give writers of the future: hope, balanced by wisdom and intelligence.

National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) launched today, sending millions of people "with a book in them" to the keyboard in an attempt to churn out a rough novel-length manuscript (minimum of 50,000 words to 'count') by the end of November. People engaged in this activity all bond on the nano website, encouraging each other and sharing tips, posting and boasting their latest word counts all the way to the end.

I've never done it, but I've always been intrigued by this collective endeavor of binge writing. I've signed up on the site and lurked, just to see what people are up to. It appeals to me, as a writer who works in manic, highly-caffeinated spurts, and as a teacher who believes in the collaborative learning inherent to a writer's workshop community. A number of our more productive Writing Popular Fiction students and even some faculty dare to "nano"...it's awfully difficult for a full-time faculty member to take on such an enormous task during the endgame of a Fall semester, when term papers come pouring in and advising for the next term is afoot, but it can be done.

Maybe college profs need a NaSchoWriMo for writing scholarship? Now is the perfect time to get to work on those conference papers you want to present next Spring, after all.

In any case, I noticed that teachers are actually beginning to use NaNoWriMo in the classroom, and that the site has a Young Writers Program that fosters an educational mission. The site includes some GREAT novel writing workbooks for young adults -- and the program can even lend out NEO word processing hardware to students in need.

It's a great idea. And it can be used creatively. From a class-collaborated story to simply a study of the novel itself, teachers are tapping into NaNoWriMo as a form of learning that reaches outside of the walls of the classroom and participates in the "outside world" even as it focuses the attention needed for cultivating the intimate and interior setting of the imagination.

Daniel Moulthrop shares his experience "Teaching NaNoWriMo" in a google doc, suggesting that the main benefit is "a month of unbridled creativity vs. school as we know it" which leads to increased writing fluency and -- after the initial hurdle of starting to climb what seems to be a very high mountain -- a reduction of fear about writing.

To any teachers out there doing this: GOOD LUCK!

I don't have much to offer, but over on my horror writing website, I have a section called "Instigation" that offers "twisted prompts" for creative writers that you can crib from to get your students working on a dastardly plot point.

You also might get your class involved in twitter.com for this project. There's a lot of activity on that site -- just search for the #nano hashtag or "follow" NaNoWriMo.

The slides for my "Teaching and Learning" presentation today on Improv and Teaching are here on google docs:

For related topics (including a two-part review of Impro by Keith Johnstone, click the improv tag below.

I watched this video this morning, as part of my preparation for a course in "The Teaching of Popular Fiction & Writing" next Spring. I liked the level of advocacy here for educational use of pop culture material in the classroom, as well as the emphasis on 'best practices.' You can download the full report from the Center for Social Media.

I share these professors' enthusiasm. But fair use can be a muddy area to define and the issue can get complicated. Even so, the essays available at EDUCAUSE on educational fair use are enlightening for those who are trying conscientously to sort out these matters. One essay from EQ that struck me was "Managing Intellectual Property for Distance Learning" by Liz Johnson, which offers a decision-making model for breaking down the numerous choices that a teacher could consider when sharing materials in an online course, for instance.

Most of what I know about copyright, I learned as a writer, not an educator, and the coverage in the Chicago Manual of Style stands at the foundation of what I know of the subject. I'm no lawyer (so please don't ask me any legal questions on this topic), and whenever I reseach the subject of copyright and fair use in online environments on the web, one of the things that trips me up are nagging questions about new laws: "am I reading the most recent law? does it cover new emergent technology and the latest digital copyright standards or is this an outdated article?"

Regardless, I think it is important to be clear with students about the 'situational ethics' of using copyrighted material in the classroom or in an online environment. I once had a student download an article I shared in an online course, only to turn around and post it to their blog to share with others...I had to inform them that this was a copyright violation, because when I shared it the first time, it was only for educational use and that the author's rights were protected because it was online downloadable behind the firewall/password-protected CMS service. Now I go out of my way to make sure students understand that the principle of fair use is in place in the classroom, and explain that it is a little bit different than how material is shared in the outside world. It might even make sense to make 'fair use' itself a topic for students to study, particularly in any course where the students are learning how to work in an area that produces intellectual property (the arts, writing, journalism, etc. etc.). If one thing is clear to me about fair use doctrine, it's that the context of any use is everything.

A few additional informal points that guide my own praxis on this subject (your mileage may vary):

+ Avoid using outside sources as "window dressing" -- they should be the lumber of the learning mill. Analyze, utilize, discuss, work with whatever you bring into the room.

+ It is wise to do a little research and contact an author if you wish to use their material in a classroom. I have never met a writer who said 'no' and having permissions gives you license to use the work in a way that might expand what 'fair use' dictates. Some will expand your permissions, or offer tips on how to acquire more material on the cheap/free (e.g. have their publisher send you an instructor's guide, or point you to a discount on a book); some will even offer to appear in an online chat or take interview questions. This also expands your network.

+ When in doubt, err on the side of conserving the copyright holder's rights, and be clear about the 'boundary lines'. Not only does this reduce your likelihood of violation, it teaches by example and will set a precedent for respect of property in your classes and with your own intellectual property.

+ Cite as you would like to be cited. Teach as you would like to be taught.

Good article by Josh Cohen on the Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook today, called "Teachers Take To Twitter." Along with giving some tips for twitter usage, the key point is that twitter is building a community of teachers. Cohen cites Bill Ferriter, a 6th grade social studies teacher, succinctly:

“Searching Twitter is searching the minds of teachers. It’s collective intelligence. When you can pick the brains of 200 highly accomplished teachers, you’ll get good success.”

I set up a separate account on twitter for my teaching-related work at http://twitter.com/arnzen. I enjoy the connection with that "collective intelligence" that Ferriter mentions. It's half faculty-lounge, half-development conference. The trick is to 'follow' other teachers...do searches for words like 'pedagogy' and connect with the most interesting 'tweeters' by following them. Your network will spread.

Of course, twitter can be used in the classroom, too (though I have yet to try this). Emerging Ed Tech gives six good examples. Academhack gives a great overview of its possible applications in "Twitter for Academia" (which was picked up by The Chronicle). H Songhai gives even more depth and anecdotes about it.

I can imagine setting up a specific account name on twitter for a class, with all students doing the same, and each 'following' each other on the site -- and using these short tweets for chats, or live (if everyon has the technology in a lab, or laptop situation) as something akin to 'clickers' in the classroom, but with many more options and critical thinking applications than simply polling quantitative reactions.

This morning I was pointed to an article on "The Five Mental Habits of Innovative People" that I found interesting, because it identifies the skillsets I would want to foster in my students, especially in a course related to creativity (like writing).

Drawing from research by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen at BYU, called "How Do Innovators Think?" [available at Harvard Business Publishing's neat "Creativity at Work" page, which is worth a look-see], Jessica Stillman isolates (and explains) these five "mental habits":

* Associating * Questioning * Observing * Experimenting * Networking

The researches suggest 'questioning' is really the engine that drives all of the above, yet "questioning on its own doesn’t have a direct effect without the others."

In my classes, I have been a big advocate for question-generation -- it is the trigger behind all "inquiry" -- creative and scholarly -- and it protects the teacher from doing all the thinking for the student (without thinking, no learning!). I run students through an activity I call 'question-storming'; I often give them prompts for writing that encourage them to raise their own questions-at-issue; I'll play devil's advocate to challenge them to question their own assumptions; etc.

When a writer approaches the blank page "questioning" rather than feeling as though they need to be the "authority" they are open to making discoveries through writing...and they never have block.

What would I add to the list? LISTENING.

By which I mean "Active Listening".

Although 'listening' (like 'reading') is related to 'observing', I don't think people think of 'listening' as a skill that leads to innovation and creativity. They think of it as a passive act, which it is not. Part of this assumption of passivity comes from the education system: we sit in desks our whole lives, listening, listening, listening...more than doing, creating, innovating. The invisible work of learning happens in our heads, if we are self-disciplined enough to pay attention and listen actively. But that skill is rarely cultivated or directly taught.

LISTENING is crucial to mastering the art of concentration, but it also factors into creativity. As a creative writer, I could never write dialogue if I didn't listen closely to how people actually speak -- and not just listening to the words, but also to the musicality of it. If I did not listen intensely I could not know what it means to be a reader, who mentally 'listens' to the author's voice as they read. Listening enables emulation and imitative learning, as well: when we listen, we see how others raise questions and discover the pathways available to us in an attempt to answer them. When we listen to an audience, we can test our own answers to questions by getting responses. So listening is a feedback loop into questioning. Listening fuels creativity. Not all creativity springs out from within us; sometimes it pools and settles in, before feeding into the outward flow.

If your teaching is in a rut, or if you want to try to do something innovative in your classroom to solve problems or enable excitement in the room, try listening to your students. You might learn something.

My quest for finding good books on creative writing pedagogy continues. A week or two ago, I decided to drop a chunk of my paycheck on titles I found on the cheap at half.com, and I've begun reading them with great abandon, as I prepare to teach a new online class on the teaching of writing for graduate students in our MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

This weekend I've been reading the late Wendy Bishop's book, Released Into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing (NCTE, 1990) -- a book that is, astonishingly, available digitally via ERIC, the wonderful Education Resources Information Center. Though a bit dated by this point in time, Bishop's text remains a quite solid study of the different ways that creative writing can be taught well in the undergraduate curriculum, arguing for a transactional and reflective approach that addresses where students really are, and how students really think, striking a pitch-perfect balance between praxis and theory.

While the classroom activities and approaches in the book are not necessarily new to me, what I'm enjoying most about reading this book is the way it articulates how the assumptions of graduate programs in creative writing don't always translate well into the teaching of undergraduate programs in the same field. This is helping me rethink my own assumptions, as someone who often teaches similar material in both venues...and as I read it, I'm recalling just how often I have drawn upon my teaching of composition in the creative writing classroom, and vice-versa. I recommend all writing teachers take a look, if only for inspiration.

The title comes from a passage by Adrienne Rich (from her classic, On Lies, Secrets and Silence), which I like so much I wanted to post it here so I can return to it again later:

At the bedrock level of my thinking about this is the sense that language is power, and that, as Simone Weil says, those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering; and that the silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them. But this notion hangs on a special conception of what it means to be released into language: not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, but learning that language can be used as a means of changing reality. What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it.... -- Adrienne Rich (emphasis added)

Empowerment. Social justice. Transformation. Discovery. It's all encapsulated here, in this brief passage about teaching and writing.

On the topic of the cross-overs between composition and creative writing pedagogy, I'm eager to study another book that I've ordered: (Re)Writing Craft by Timothy Mayers. I think it will prove quite useful to us at SHU, since we are presently considering "(re)writing" our undergraduate curriculum a little bit in the year ahead.

The blog run by Voicethread (which I've tested now with students in a current online class, and we adore it!) recently steered me to the American Association of School Librarians, which houses an excellent resource in their Best Websites for Teaching and Learning master list. Also recommended is their 2007 publication, "Standards for the 21st-Century Learner" which nicely outlines the standards for assessing information literacy today.

A few weeks ago I stumbled on VoiceThread and I keep mentally returning to it as a great model for hosting online discussions. It's an exciting format, and I am considering it for any online course I might offer in the future. Beyond the "sitting around the table" structure that is so smartly structured here, what I like most about it, I think, is the ability to add to the discussion from telephone and via text message, which solves the "I can't afford a webcam" problem to a degree.

Here's an instructor (Michelle Pacansky-Brock) talking about how she might use it in her art history courses:

And here's Brock's recent blog entry on Educause's 7 Things You Should Know About VoiceThread. Classroom 2.0 has a good Wiki collection of links to sources and examples on VoiceThread, including my first introduction to it: a google docs slideshow called "Seventeen Interesting Ways to Use VoiceThread in The Classroom."

I'd love to hear comments from folks who have used it.

This week I'll be teaching in our weeklong, intensive graduate creative writing workshops for the MA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill U. It's always a great experience, and I particularly enjoy getting to teach and work with students and colleagues in my favorite literary genre: horror. Indeed, I'm rather fortunate to be able to do this, since the majority of creative writing programs in this country not only eschew genre labels, but also would likely eschew horror even if they didn't. Genre, most assume, is too formulaic, too emotional, too popular (and therefore too oriented to the lowest common denominator).

Obviously, such hierarchical distinctions are usually an expression of "highbrow" class politics, or a culture which reifies the individual over the collective in the creative arts -- but I won't repeat the lessons of cultural studies here right now. Instead, I've been thinking a lot lately about how genre fiction -- and particularly horror fiction, as I recently argued in a pedagogical essay on "Horror and Responsibilities of the Liberal Educator" -- may actually be more "educational" than many literary academics realize.

Often "literary" fiction and canonical literature is considered of higher educational value because it has historical lessons to teach us about culture, or because it addresses universal issues pertinent to mankind. But this is no less true of genre fiction (and many genre stories are in the canon, actually). Genre fiction is castigated because it focuses more often on emotional payoffs than intellectual ones, but this is not all that genre fiction seeks. Horror stories, for instance, are often "cautionary" in nature, and therefore teach lessons. Readers of romances and children's fiction often turn to these books for models of behavior in human relationships. Science fiction rewards knowledge of the sciences and often teaches readers about emergent research; mystery, likewise, teaches readers about criminalistics and is predicated on the notion that reader and detective alike will be engage fully in critical thinking as crimes are solved.

Thus, I'm mulling over the notion that the writers who create these stories have to be "teacherly" in their approach to the reader, to some degree. I've often heard the notion that the bestsellers of any given period not only catch the interest of the masses, but often teach readers something new -- this draw to discover and learn is a large part of popular genre fiction. It assuages curiosity about "what everyone is talking about." Yet at the same time, writers who seek to educate (usually) cannot be didactic or preachy or dogmatic about some ideological belief. As with "literary" fiction, good authors of popular fiction should raise issues of import (and often they pull these issues from the headlines, which ties them to time at the cost of being 'timeless') while keeping their own biases out of the story and lead readers to think critically about these issues on their own. The characters in a story often are models for such ways of thinking.

For the writers, however, their models are often each other. They read each others' books, or find each other at conventions, or -- for the dedicated -- encounter each other in workshops like the program we host at SHU, or the less-academic-but-more-deeply-focused-on-genre groups like Odyssey, Clarion, Borderlands Boot Camp, Alpha, and the various workshops held in meeting rooms at genre conventions. I've taught at these, and they are not nearly as "amateur" or "commercial" as one might assume. Fan and genre communities are perhaps more critical and knowledgeable about their own genre than anyone else, as the work of Henry Jenkins and others have taught us.

I have the good fortune to appear in a new instructional book for writers in the horror genre, The Writer's Workshop of Horror (ed. Michael Knost, Woodland Press, Aug 2009). Like the Horror Writer's Association guidebook, On Writing Horror, this is an example of how the creative community of genre authors "teaches" within that community. What I like about these books is that they are not just written by a single author, but a gathering together of multiple views and voices in anthology form.

For those reading this who might have the opportunity to teach horror writing, and are looking for resources, you can order The Writer's Workshop of Horror early from Woodland Press; it will be out in August, just in time for school.

I'll end with a small excerpt from my contribution, called "Stripping Away the Mask: Scene and Structure in Horror Fiction," which deals with issues regarding the pleasures of the taboo in horror, and how these are embedded into the structure (not necessarily the content) of horror narratives:

...horror is a striptease of suspense. It is an inherently exhibitionist genre, as much as it is the genre of fear. And this may very well be why horror gets a bum rap from the literati: horror can make a reader feel dirty, because it refuses to obey the inner censor that tells us that such-and-such is morally wrong, that such-and-such is ugly or grotesque, that such-and-such is perverse or unhealthy, that such-and-such is unreasonable or irrational, that such-and-such is dangerous or inhumane. Horror writers seek truth in the darkness. They remove the mask, to peer unabashedly at what it hides, horrendous warts and all....

If you wish to write horror stories, it is imperative that you understand this aesthetic. There are no "rules," really, because readers only expect the unexpected when they pick up a work of horror. In place of rules, we just have a worldview that says: "Readers peek between their fingers. I refuse to look away." We remove the mask.

I got the idea for this essay from the late author Robert Bloch, who defined horror in passing during an interview once as "the removal of masks."

Is this not also the mission of liberal education?

The latest issue of DISSECTIONS: The Journal of Contemporary Horror just went live online. The theme this time around is "Teaching Horror" which emerged as part of a series of panels at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in March 2008. It includes a few spectacular articles from a panel I was on with Doug Ford and Frances Auld. My article from that panel ("The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory") went on to be published at a journal called Transformative Works & Cultures), but I wrote a new essay for Dissections in its place: "Horror and the Responsibilities of the Liberal Educator" . Here's a sample:

....Luckily, the teacher fully knows what the students want to ignore: that horror is inherently an educational genre. The very notion of a ‘cautionary’ tale is predicated on the notion of teaching someone a lesson. And while not all horror stories and films are cautionary in nature, they are always stimuli that aim at generating a dark emotional reaction which - when all the screaming stops - one inevitably attempts to manage with enlightened intellectual reasoning: whether it's in the mode of investigation (‘what's really lurking in the shadows?’) or metaphysical inquiry (‘do alternatives to God exist?’) or logic judgement (‘why did her baby have to die?’). Our rational minds are still at work when we contend with the most irrational of fictions. Indeed, even when a horror narrative - such as the work of Lovecraft - attempts to obliterate logical reasoning and symbolic systems altogether, it needs to construct them first.

What all this means is that, despite the naysayers, horror provides an excellent context for learning. It raises the serious questions that allow critical inquiry to transpire.

Go visit Dissections to read on, or to see other essays on issues related to integrating the horror genre into the classroom by Ford, Auld, Brock-Servais, Schnopp-Wyatt, Wisker, and more!

"More than any other profession...teaching is a confluence of opposites. Teaching draws on instinct, and it draws on acquired skills. Teaching involves routine, and it involves improvisation. Teaching is prose surprised by moments of poetry. Teaching is applied pedagogy, tested by trial and error. There is no better way to learn something than to teach it, and teaching itself is a continual learning process -- a methodology that changes every time new students walk in the door and sit down at their desks." -- Tim Lemire, I'm an English Major -- Now What?

This semester, my "Introduction to Literary Studies" course read Lemire's book as a way for students to start thinking realistically about their future careers. There was a great interest in teaching as a potential profession, which is common among English majors. In fact, it's sort of a "default" for many of them. Even if they don't know what they're getting into, it is still our job to provide them with models they might draw on in the future, when they scramble to understand what it really means to be responsible to both the field and their students' future.

I do always try to model good teaching practice, even when I'm only playing the goofball in the front of the room. But now that the term is almost over, I'm wondering: do I employ my own teaching in a way that not only models what it is that teachers actually do in a classroom, but also how they navigate this "confluence of opposites" that Lemire describes? Do they learn to intellectually and performatively cope with and manage the oppositions? Do they know how to synthesize the oppositions or how to separate them when required? Are they learning instincts as much as acquired skills. Improv as well routine? Poetry as much prose? Application and experiment? Flexibility to learn continually?

This quote above really spoke to me as a poetic truism about the impulses of the profession -- which often moves in opposite directions simultaneously. Even here in this blog, the two primary categories -- theory and praxis -- are at once separate in their purpose and yet brought together in any act of writing. But is such a "bringing together" going on in my classroom when I host a discussion or mark up a paper? How 'dialectical' is my teaching, really? I'll keep musing over it, but for now, I just liked that quotation so much that I wanted to share it... and encourage other English professionals to consider using Lemire's book in their classroom or in their advising. It is quite a practical and thoughtful guide to the various options our major affords.

In my "Introduction to Literary Studies" course, I tried a new assignment: a Group Dramatic Performance (via Pod- or Video-cast). The guidelines were very general, allowing maximum room for creative expression on behalf of the students. Essentially, I just asked for groups of 4-5 students to independently "record a 5-8 minute performance 'inspired by' the assigned readings in the class this term." Students were told they could use the text as a script, or be creative and try to communicate a point/theme that gives insight into the original text. I also tried to inspire the class by showing them adaptations of works they had read, especially an animated adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" (an impressive stop motion puppet film by George Higham), and we also screened Murnau's Nosferatu as the deadline approached (since, in my opinion, they could identify "home movie" making with the choices made by primitive cinema directors).

The results were almost entirely comedic, but some were very impressive given that I did not facilitate the productions at all with any instructional advice, cameras, microphones, or editing software! I believe we are at a point in college culture now where most students are already facile with such things as converting files to YouTube ready format and editing on a Mac, or finding a camera that will function well enough for the purpose.

Here are the videos that they managed to post to YouTube:

• Goblin Shoe Market (inspired by Christina Rosetti's "Goblin Market" and Nosferatu)
• The Goblin Market (A Lesson in Shopping) (inspired by Christina Rosetti's "Goblin Market")
• Alice B. Toklas Cooking Show (inspired by "Murder in the Kitchen" from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook)
• The Goblin Market Puppet Pals (inspired by Christina Rosetti's "Goblin Market")
• Annabel Lee Puppet Theater (inspired by Poe's "Annabel Lee")
• Nightmare at Tinker Creek (inspired by Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Rosetti's Goblin Market, Stoker's Dracula, Kafka's Hunger Artist, Arnzen's Domestic Fowl, Gresh's Snip My Suckers)

Students could opt out of video and do an audio recording instead. Here are the two that came in:

• Friends of Dracula radio play (inspired by Stoker's Dracula)

• "Unmasking of the Red Death" radio play (inspired by Poe's "Masque of the Red Death")

We're screening and listening to these one-a-day in my class, and the walls have been echoing with laughter.

Pretty impressive work, class!

I never would have had the courage to try such an ambitious assignment if I hadn't once visited a high school class run by Lawrence C. Connolly at Sewickely Prep Academy, who assigned student groups to all adapt a specific passage from Dante's Inferno in their own ways. They screened their videos and I was so impressed by the outcome that I left wanting to try something similar myself some day. The lesson? Trust student bonds outside of the classroom, and leave lots of wiggle room in your guidelines when giving a creativity assignment. When students have free license they usually will not disappoint.

Here's "Goblin Shoe Market" by Jessica Pilewski, Mike Poiarkoff, Theresa Conley, and Dianna Griffin -- notable for its emulation of a silent film:

The last time I gave a quiz to my Intro to Lit course, I tried a new variation on my collaborative quiz methods (see this blog's articles tagged with keyword "testing" for others)... and it seemed to work really well.

Have you ever posted a question on your quiz that you thought was important enough to test, but which you knew was likely to be one few students answered correctly? I had that sneaking suspicion myself, when I asked students to define "metonymy" in a multiple choice question. The term was not really covered very well in the book, but I did give a mini-lecture about the word and I thought it was important for them to understand...but when I was composing the quiz my back brain reminded me that I didn't see very many students taking notes at the time I lectured, and I knew it was brand new and difficult term to spell, let alone comprehend, so I suspected few would get it right on the quiz.

But I wasn't really sure. So I gave them a chance. After everyone had turned their quizzes over, I asked them to take a moment to circle the one single answer on they quiz they were least sure of. Then they passed the quiz to a neighbor (who, as in Quiz Taker/Note Maker, had to put their name under the quiz-taker's and would be held accountable for any cheating on their behalf). The neighbor then had to read the circled question and write their own answer to it down. If they felt the student got the question right already, they were told to write something supportive instead, like "way to go!" Then I collected the quizzes.

Once I had them all, I did a quick scan of the pile...and found my suspicions were correct. Most people had circled the "metonymy" question. There was another question often circled that came in "2nd place". I turned these two answers into brief discussions with the class, and since I became fully convinced by that point that "metonymy" hadn't really sunk in the first time we covered it, I announced that everyone would get the points for that answer, whether right or wrong. We discussed the second most-commonly circled answer and I felt that enough people already knew that one that it would not receive instant credit, unless the "corrector" of the quiz got it right. The same held true for the other answers that were circled which we hadn't covered in discussion: if the corrector got it correct, they "saved" the quiz-taker some points.

In the end, this didn't really skew the scale for the class or have any negative impacts. The only students it "hurt" were the ones who got the question they chose to be "saved" right to begin with but missed other questions on the quiz. But that isn't really my fault -- they had their chance.

So why do this, beyond hedging my own risk on quizzing the class on an "iffy" course topic (like "metonymy") that I wasn't confident I had taught well or that they would really know?

For the teacher, it saves time. I usually like to go over a quiz after we take it (often using them to structure a lecture/period), but in this instance drilling down to the top two answers which the majority of the students presume they got wrong helped me to know what answers were most pressing, and dispensed with the others, leaving me enough time to shift to another class matter.

The benefit for students, beyond possibly getting a few bonus points, is essentially two-fold: it fosters bonds between neighbors in the room, and, more importantly, it rewards collaboration. Not only did we get to have an open, collaborative dialogue about the most pressing material right after the quiz, but the "corrector" gets to be the quiz-taker's hero if they happen to save them some points. In this way, the student gets to see the value and significance in knowing answers beyond the scope of their own grades, and comes to understand that what they know might benefit others. They don't get punished for not knowing; they get to reward others for knowing! And many were proud of doing so in my class that day. These benevolent correctors were given a sense of power, in the form of academic philanthropy. I hope to cultivate that sort of "givingness" among those who have knowledge and skills.

One might contend that all I did was sanction an act akin to "cheating off" a fellow student, by turning it into a system for extra credit. I don't see quizzes as instruments of torture and panoptical surveillance. I see them as opportunities to make students accountable, yes, but if they are not integrated into the class period of the day, they feel like tools intended to police rather than instruments of learning.

Mano Singham at the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve University has published a great page of advice for faculty in Managing Time More Effectively. It kindly reprints a handout I produced for a Teaching and Learning Seminar a few years back (called "Faculty Time Savers" in teaching, scholarship and service, published here on Pedablogue) among other great resources for advice online.

I love reading tips and tactics like these; one little change can make a whopping difference in not simply productivity but keeping one's sanity!

I'm teaching an Introduction to Literary Studies course this term, and one of the early assignments in the class asked students to create a "collage that reflects your perspective on literary study". To explain the assignment, I developed a handout that explained what collage artists think they're doing and other requirements for the task. When I passed that around the room, I projected a graphic of a collage I'd made once on the No Child Left Behind Act, and explained my creative process...reporting how I discovered the theme along the way, and suggesting that the collage still meant more than what I intended it to mean.

I was thoroughly impressed by what the students came up with for this homework assignment. Many of the students went far beyond my expectations, and I asked a few if I could share their work here.

I liked Melissa Kaufold's collage entitled "How Do You See Me?" (above), because it interestingly represented the identity of an English student, with competing voices (mostly negative) surrounding the figure -- who herself is a multifaceted construct (the four-fold face) ostensibly holding an armload of books that obscure the rest of her body. A very colorful thought balloon reveals the value in her thoughts about literature, impervious to the onslaught of negativity espoused in the "external" world; the strength of these thoughts is reinforced by the thick black boundaries lines that protect these "thoughts" from interference and keep them relatively cohesive.

The collages of the class as a whole seemed to inherently lean toward conflicts like these. In her collage, "Transcendence" (below), Julia Leksell took an artful approach to semiotics, employing negative/white space in an intriguing way that differed from many of the other collages the students created. Here, she took control over the bricolage of symbols to add her own imagery to the piece, where she portrays a dove-like ascent or emergence from what seems like a pile of abandoned and contradictory signs and symbols:

The diagonal lines in Leksell's postmodernist piece make me imagine that the pictured bird is hefting a weighty net of language, struggling but succeeding to rise. I like the positive message here.

Attempts like these to come to some cogent "perspective" on literary studies opened up the floodgates of discussion in class, and allowed everyone -- whether creative writer, journalist, or literary scholar-in-training, to participate on a fairly equal plane.

I followed up the assignment by having students swap collages and write up analyses of them. We discussed this process as one inherent to both artistic production (crafting sense out of found language and fragments) and criticism (analyzing the whole by breaking down the structure into its parts). This two-pronged approach to the assignment created a dialogue between creativity and criticism in a really successful way, I think. It both raised the question, "What is literature?" and unveiled that it is, if anything, a conversation that meaning-making demands.

[POSTSCRIPT: After posting this entry, Dr. Davis from Teaching College English asked if I'd share the guidelines. They're relatively specific to the context of my class syllabus, but I'll gladly share it here, if it helps in any way:

A course I'm going to begin teaching later this week -- Introduction to Literary Studies -- is enrolled to capacity, which means I'll have ten or so more students in the room than I'm used to teaching. Even that little bit turns the course into the equivalent of two sections in one, and that means I'll have to employ more large classroom strategies and probably a bit more lecturing than I've done for awhile. I always worry that discussion will suffer in a large class, but I make up for it in group activities. And, luckily, the room they've moved me to has a great "smart podium" with an ELMO document projector in it, so my plan is to use this technology often.

Today I returned to a Pedablogue entry on Tickling the Elmo from way back in 2006. I'm reminded of how useful the document camera really is when teaching a large class and I hope to continue to use it in crafty ways. Last year I remember doing all sorts of fun things with it, from having my writing class interpret their textbook's cover graphics to working with graphic fiction as a writing prompt to projecting a student's laptop screen. My classes edited many of each other's essays on the screen, collaboratively workshopping and line editing the text. But even when it's use is somewhat frivolous, the ELMO can engage students. Turning to an illustration in a textbook and zooming in on a small detail can get students to look at things they take for granted more closely. One day I just put the contents of my pockets on display, as a placeholder (I often try to put something up on the wall as a "screen saver" so I'll have the projector on and ready for when I actually want to break out of an activity or lecture to project a document). A mini-discussion about the "germ killing" claims of my gum pack led to a conversation about "weasel words" -- which is something we later studied in the class. I also often had students use it to perform "show and tell" sorts of presentations. I fondly recall an activity in my Fiction Writing course, when I had workshop groups collaboratively choose the most descriptive passage from each other's stories, and then draw them on a sheet of paper. They then voted on the best, and the artist of it showed off their drawing while they read the passage. We analyzed them for how well they employed language to appeal to the reader's senses, and discussed whether the image in our minds matched what the artist had drawn.

Today I found eMints' collection of links, Teaching Tips: Classroom Use of ELMO Document Cameras and it led me to some good resources. One in particular, Tim Bedley's "Classroom Uses for a Document Camera: The Visual Learner in the Elementary School Classroom" lists all sorts of great ideas for teachers of young people that I hope to port into my new class this term. I like the notion of projecting a "backdrop" onto the screen that functions like a stage set (which students design)! There's also a tip for projecting blank ruled paper onto a whiteboard, to work as guidelines for students to practice blackboard penmanship. Interesting! What other ways could guidelines and backdrop shapes be used? I'll keep thinking about it.

Bedley also had the idea to use the projector as a giant timepiece:

Use the document camera to project a countdown timer. Sure you can buy an overhead timer for about $40. But when you have a document camera, the old kitchen timer works just fine. Use it to keep the kids focused on the task, knowing that the clock is ticking, and they will soon be out of time for that assignment.

I often have to set time limits on in-class writing, and brashly end up reciting the countdown ('ten. nine. eight...stop!'); this tip alone gave me a new way to approach the timing of activities. I'll likely set up the stopwatch on my PDA and zoom in on the spinning digits.

One plan on my syllabus that I'm looking forward to doing is asking students to make a "Literary Collage" -- a cut-and-paste exercise that I want them to use to encapsulate the field of English visually -- and have them present these using the ELMO. I might also bring the practice of mind-mapping back into my classroom on a more regular basis.

Mrs. Levin's Pre-K Pages has a number of tips for the early childhood classroom which might be modified to any classroom, with creativity. Her notion of "word walls" and projecting the "question of the day" are great ideas. Even just keeping a class outline on the screen while the hour passes is a good idea to help as a visual organizer for presentations and would prompt student notetaking.

See the entries tagged 'elmo' (below) for more on this topic, or share your own unique approaches in a comment.

Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project just posted a link to an interesting Reflection Flow Chart (authors Alan Chapman and Sharon Drew Morgan call it a 'diary tool') that might might be useful for teachers engaging in reflexive practice through journaling (I discussed this in a book review a few weeks ago). Here's an embedded version of it:

REFLECTIVE DIARY TOOL - Get more Business Plans

Martin's blog has some great tips on reducing mental clutter, too...somewhat related to my winter break decluttering mission (still in progress!).

***
Note: The pedablogue site design is down while the webmaster upgrades us to the latest version of Movable Type. Do not adjust your set.

I have to thank Marc Sheffner for turning me on to Ed Nuhfer's excellent Nutshell Notes -- a collection of tips for teachers hosted at Idaho State U (earlier copies are also gathered in a big .pdf file by CU Denver, where it used to be published). It's a wonderful resource!

Since we're fast approaching the New Year, I thought I'd celebrate by pointing readers to Nuhfer's article "Toward a New Year: Strengthening Syllabi". It was written in 2003, but that doesn't mean it's out of date: the essay spoke to me because I, too, am revising my syllabi over the Winter Break as I prepare for the new term. The article is brief, but I liked the section where the teacher is encouraged to "Tell something about yourself [on the syllabus] because you will be the most important person in this course to each student." Simple truth, followed by good advice and what personal things to divulge.

As I browsed through the various issues of Nutshell Notes, I bookmarked another one that really made me sit up and rethink a few things. It was Nuhfer's "Levels of Thinking and Educational Outcomes" piece, which features a great table of Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Domains in relation to the taxonomy of others (even DeBono's six thinking "hats"). Bloom becomes very dogmatic in educational circles, so it was nice to see this consideration of alternative frameworks for student development. Nuhfer organizes the various tables on his chart by four areas of a learner's emphasis: content-intensive emphases, process-intensive emphasis, self-reflection, and judgment from experience. The latter is the one least addressed by Bloom's Taxonomy, which gave me pause. Nuhfer negotiates these differences in terms of William Perry's treatment of the stages of intellectual growth with an emphasis on Lee Knefelkamp's discussion on "personalism" -- all this is a part of a series of essays spurred by a teacher's workshop related to Nutshell Notes that focused on Perry's book, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years. I'd like to read that book. I plan to think about my syllabi in relation to these issues, too, as I revise them. [I'm also updating Pedablogue's design a bit, particularly by adding tags to entries to ease navigation... if you have a recommended tag you'd like me to add, let me know in a comment.]

Happy New Year!

I stopped at a Half-Priced Books store in Monroeville this past October and found myself burrowing around in their really great section in the back of the store, for "Teaching." In it, I picked up some really great titles cheap, including a book I want to call attention to in this review, called Reflective Practice in Action: 80 Reflection Breaks for Busy Teachers by Thomas S.C. Farrell. But before I get to it, I wanted to first say that spontaneously browsing around in the "Teaching" or "Education" section of a bookstore is a really good idea once in awhile -- especially if you're not a pedagogy specialist or teacher trainer by profession -- and I encourage you to take a moment to do this if you're shopping in a bookstore for the holidays. You might be surprised by what gifts you might find for yourself.

It's also the case that those bookstore sections for Teaching and Education are rarely well-organized and become a catch-all for any title that smacks of school. Thus, you often find exercises for kindergarteners and home-schooler workbooks placed side by side with philosophical books and guitar instructional manuals. It's a mess. That's both good and bad (and perhaps says something about the coherency of our industry): you'll have to dig to find what you need, but you might find a hidden treasure.

Of course, that's true of all bookstore shelves to some degree. And the ENTIRE bookstore is really about learning, is it not?

In any case, one of those hidden treasures I recently found was Reflective Practice in Action by Thomas S.C. Farrell (Corwin Press, 2004). It seems like just the sort of book any teacher who blogs or keeps a journal would find of interest, because it is filled with questions, worksheets and discussions intended to prompt thinking and writing about one's mission and career as an instructor. Through reflective teaching, Farrell claims, "teachers can begin to locate themselves within their profession and start to take more responsibility for shaping their practice" (6).

I know a lot of teachers who struggle over writing their annual self-reports, development plans, and teaching portfolios. Sometimes this struggle is located in one's relationship to writing itself. At other times, these documents that we have to write in the name of development sometimes are seen as empty exercises in paper shuffling, bureaucratical nonsense, and just one more thing to do on top of a million others. One sometimes wonders what the point of it all is, when only one person or committee often reads it closely before it's filed away in some infinitely-receding drawer of bureaucratic paperwork, never to be seen again.

But I have always refused to see any project that involves writing as a waste of time. It makes me a better writer and often my writing leads me to new ways of seeing a topic, inspiring me to change my relationship to it. So rather than treating those "official" forms of reflection as dehumanizing forms of busy work, I have tried to use those documents as moments to write reflectively about my career (sometimes to the consternation of those who have to read them, because I write a lot). This book reminds me that reflection -- taking stock about where one has gone and where one is going -- is entirely the point of those documents to begin with.

Moreover, this slim, 100 page book makes reflecting on one's work easier, more pleasurable and, ultimately, more significant. Grounded in the principles of reflective practice, it aims at helping teachers see their work in a less technical and more organic fashion. While not every "guided reflection break" offered in the book is equally of value, the book does an excellent job identifying the diverse areas where one might direct their attention in thinking reflectively, and it utilizes research in a refreshingly clear and practical manner, by emphasizing activity and application of the principles it outlines in a systematic (but not overly formal) way.

The book opens by exploring the theories behind "reflective practice" by immediately engaging the reader in thinking that reexamines one's assumptions about teaching and how they have played out in our practical work. It is a transformative process founded on heightened self-awareness. "...Reflective practice is a systematic and structured process in which we look at concrete aspects of teaching and learning with the overall goal of personal change and more effective practice...we change as a result of the awareness brought about by engaging in reflection." (27).

Farrell seems to draw the bulk of his research from the work of Kenneth Zeichner and Daniel Liston, authors of Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, which delves into the pedagogical theory behind reflective practice in depth. The book brings more critics into the picture -- like Daniel Schon and Max Van Manen -- and the bibliography covers all the primary sources in this field of pedagogy. I think Farrell's book can be seen as a sort of practical workbook to go along with Zeichner and Liston's title, so the two could work hand in hand if assigned in a teacher development course. Some of Farrell's "prompts" would occur naturally to a reader of Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, but what makes Farrell's book useful is the systematic and proactive way in which he guides the application of its concepts.

The first four chapters of the book provide an array of models for reflective practice and explore methods for any teacher or group to put theory into action. It's a great concise overview, while being inspirational (covering the first 24 prompts of the 80 in the book). In the book's fifth chapter, the author outlines the "Farrell Model of Reflective Practice," which identifies a wide range of different ways in which the prompts in the book can be utilized, whether in isolation or in groups, while covering the principle modalities of reflection (37). This section opens up the numerous arenas in which reflection can occur -- from journals to teacher development workshops -- and readers might be surprised by the number of reflective practices happening all around us on campus all the time, and the myriad ways one can approach reflective thinking.

The latter chapters of Farrell's book are focused on specific means toward enhancing one's reflective practice. These processes are: group discussions, classroom observations, journal writing, and the teaching portfolio. The book ends by encouraging one to be a "reflective practitioner" and is the most involved and personal chapter for helping teachers come up with their own prompts for reflection. Here he draws upon and expands Zeichner and Liston's five principle elements of the reflective practitioner in a way worthy of citing fully:

A reflective teacher:

• Examines, frames, and attempts to solve dilemmas in classroom practice.
• Is aware of and questions the assumptions and values he or she brings to teaching
• Is attentive to the institutional and cultural contexts in which he or she teaches
• Takes part in curriculum development and is involved in school change efforts
• Takes responsibility for his or her own professional development

Farrell's book is a great assistant in making one a more reflective teacher, in general. But there are other things he brings to the table that got my interest. For example, he talks about using a method called the SCORE (Seating Chart Observation Record) to analyze how teachers interact with groups that seems very useful for, say, analyzing a videotape of one's class or observing a colleague's class. This would involve drawing a seating chart,and drawing lines between teacher and students when questions are asked or addressed, which I imagine could be revelatory of unconscious habits like favoring one side of the room or calling on the same set of students over and over again.

Overall, I'm glad I stumbled upon this book and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for something to prompt their writing about teaching (like bloggers) or help in writing their own self-assessments. I think administrators and faculty development coordinators who are looking for practical ways to help faculty energize their growth in an autonomous-yet-connected fashion would benefit greatly from this title.

See ItsLife's coverage of more issues in reflective practice.

I have always believed in running some kind of "closure" activity on the last day of my classes, as a way of reflecting on learning from the term and thinking about its applicability and/or importance in the future. It's a lot more rewarding than just collecting papers or tests (though they're usually doing that on their way out the door). For a closure activity, I typically just ask questions or host a dialogue of some kind. Sometimes I'll go over the learning objectives on the syllabus, or return to some topic/activity/text we did on the first day of the class. But this year I planned something new, and I think it was successful.

I had the students write haiku about the class.

I gave a quick mini-lesson in the haiku. Nothing too complicated. Using the overhead document projector, I showed the class a few samples (which I had stealthily written while they were doing their in class work at the beginning of the hour), counted out the syllable structure (three lines; 5-7-5) and then asked them to write their own haiku which encapsulated a lesson or experience from the course in a "pithy" way. I gave them about ten minutes, asking them to write as many as they possibly could in that time. "Counting on your fingers allowed and encouraged!"

Then, one by one, they each went to the front of the room and read their haiku -- or "STWaiku" as I called it, poorly punning on the acronym for the course (Seminar in Thinking and Writing) -- to the room. In retrospect, I probably should have called it "CompKu" or something of that ilk.

Here are two quick examples from my own (if I do this again, I'm going to collect them, because I don't have any student samples handy!):

A thesis statement:
Rereading America
needs to be re-read.

Peer critique helps me
to make a good enthymeme --
because, just because.

Those aren't very good (made 'em up off the cuff shortly before we did the exercise). But the activity itself was a blast. Lots of laughter, punctuated by "oh yeah" moments. Students enjoyed the chance to be creative; lots took the opportunity to make jokes about me ("Dr. Arnzen's Beard" -- yes a recurring theme!) or the content of the class. It was a good way to tie things up: a writing activity, almost entirely student-driven, and fun.

[postscript: Any students from the class reading this: please delurk and post your haiku in a comment, if you have it handy!]

In "The Bigger Bailout" -- the latest posting to Irascible Professor -- Peter Berger draws some interesting parallels between trends in education and the current economic crisis, claiming that "the sickness in our schools, like the sickness on Wall Street, is symptomatic of a national disease."

What is that disease? Surely Berger doesn't mean greed, though that would be my first answer when examining the trouble on Wall Street. I'm not sure I agree with Berger's position here, but it is persuasive when he suggests that there are no such things as shortcuts when it comes to both earning and learning. Although everything, it seems, takes funding, one can't throw money at a problem and expect it to solve itself; indeed, that can lead to an unhealthy dependency.

Berger mentions the promises of the presidential campaign as examples of the bankrupt agendas that set policies without genuinely understanding how students learn. He cites the educational policies in California and elsewhere, for instance, that mandate that all students take Algebra in the eighth grade, even when they might flunk out simply because they may not be intellectually ready for it. As an example of the "entitlement" mentality of kids today, he also cites policies in Washington DC and other cities where some middle school students are given a $100 a month paycheck if they show up to school and do their homework.

I'm not sure if these are inherently bad ideas for educational reform, and I still question whether or not they are really symptoms of any "disease." But it is true that changing the rules of the game to accommodate the losing players -- which has all the marks of a just and equitable policy -- can sometimes lead to problems in other areas that are working right, if it isn't done wisely. Berger makes a sobering comparison of such matters -- as well as grade inflation -- to the manipulation of mortgages that contributed to the country's economic mess:

Artificially declaring all kids algebra students isn't any different from contriving to turn all adults into homeowners or their shaky mortgages into sound investments. You can't get something for nothing, or from nothing. Legislating inflated grades doesn't make anybody smarter. Paying kids to receive the already free benefit of a public education substitutes the motivation of a little ready cash for self-discipline and the internalized desire for self-improvement and self-government that a free people require to prosper and survive.

The cash will run out. It's already running out.

Of course, Berger may be casting the blame rather quickly here. After all, schools can still teach "motivation" and other forms of disciplined autonomy, if the teachers of those classes have the drive to do so.

Berger in particular goes after the mandatory algebra laws, and cites a controversial Brookings Institute report by Tom Loveless that claims mandatory algebra fails many students. I'm an English prof, not a math whiz, and though I've heard about this legislation before, I haven't paid it much thought. So I set out to try to learn more, and looked up the Brookings Report. In it, Loveless takes issue with the way the problem is displaced in the curriculum (classes are merely 'renamed'; remedial courses don't seem to help; students aren't quite getting the college prep the mandate seemed to promise). But my reading of that report is that there are both positive and negative effects of such legislation. For example, it does help some students to learn these forms of math who wouldn't otherwise have been selected for "honors" or "advanced placement" courses. As the report puts it:

The push for universal eighth-grade algebra is based on an argument for equity, not on empirical evidence...From this point of view, expanding eighth-grade algebra to include all students opens up opportunities for advancement to students who previously had not been afforded them, in particular, students of color and from poor families. Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice.

Some call algebra learning a new Civil Right, particularly for marginalized people who have been denied access to a basic form of cultural literacy. And it stands to reason that if one can't understand the abstraction behind the algebraic expression "x < y" then one cannot understand the fundamental relationship known as "inequality."

Empiric evidence should drive policy, but often this evidence is not present before a reform can be made and if we are too fixed on demanding it, nothing will ever change. Instead, value-based goals are more fundamental motives for driving such reforms, and they can be studied or modulated as they are put into practice. "Equity" is still an important value that shouldn't be abandoned in the process. One can and should have equitable learning systems that lead toward changes that will not only teach successfully, but also teach fairly. "Equity," after all, is also a financial term. If you blame "social justice" for the injustices of the economic downturn, then you're probably blaming confusing democracy with capitalism, concepts that, perhaps, also need to be taught more often. Public and liberal arts education is supposed to be democratizing. It is intended to promote social justice. Education liberates us; that is how it enriches us. When done right, it does not make any of us poorer. It may, in fact, be the key to solving the economic crisis itself.

I like how the Irascible Professor himself (Mark Shapiro) responds to Berger, in a comment appended to the article:

...The economic crisis of 2008, in part, speaks to the weakness of our education system when it comes to educating the populace about economic issues -- both at the personal level and at the policy level. Very few students graduate from high school with even a basic understanding of compound interest, and relatively few graduate from college understanding the dangers of excess consumption based on easy credit.

If the recommendations from alums I know are empiric evidence, then college students today yearn for this kind of "personal finance" learning. And what's more: perhaps we all should learn about an advanced math concept early in our educations: the imaginary number!

Educating students to be better, smarter consumers -- as well as better and smarter business professionals -- is the obvious solution. It takes time for an investment like that to pay off, but very little risk, save to those who profit from the ignorance of the masses.

Peter Schmidt contributes an article to the Chronicle on the problem with the rising reliance on adjunct faculty across academe, called "Use of Part-Time Instructors Tied to Lower Student Success." I found this section interesting:

Of particular concern to some education researchers is the tendency of colleges to use part-timers to teach lower-level courses, as well as courses offered at night, when part-time students are most likely to be coming to campus.

"The reality is that both part-time faculty and part-time students are less engaged with the college," said Kay M. McClenney, director of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.

In night classes, she said, "those realities collide," undermining students' chances of succeeding. She expects the situation to get worse in the current economic downturn, as people who cannot find jobs enroll at public colleges to learn new skills, and the colleges, facing tight budgets, turn to part-time instructors to meet rising demand.

Too often adjuncts get a bum rap. The issue, always, is "investment," and I do understand the logic. But too often, I think, we confuse being invested in an institution with being invested in a student's learning, or in a culture at large's education. Moreover, when an instructor has a deep investment in their field, probably through their scholarship, it is contagious -- even jaded students who don't feel a part of the campus life can catch the spark of intellectual curiosity from a teacher truly committed to his or her scholarship -- and that's all it takes to transform a class from a collision of apathy into a wellspring of collaborative inspiration. Those who hire adjuncts often emphasize teaching experience over scholarship; this could be a mistake. New teachers -- like ABDs -- sometimes have the passion for their field that can make all the difference in a student's life.

Schmidt's essay concludes with an interesting sidebar on "innovative contracts" for building a greater sense of investment and reward for adjunct faculty. Worth a look-see.

Good food for thought: Clancy Ratliff posts a wonderful "Collection of Good and Not-So-Good Reasons for Assigning a Personal Narrative as the First Essay in a Composition Course" on the CultureCat weblog.

If I understand it correctly, Ratliff is responding to a lecture by Bruce Horner that suggested that the motivations for assigning personal essays often contradict or muddle up the rhetorical task. I haven't heard Horner's argument, but I'd suggest that the multiplicity of rationales is actually a sign that the assignment is a rich one, operating on multiple levels and therefore meeting multiple student needs.

I assign personal narratives often at the beginning of a term. I see my motives in virtually all of the reasons Ratliff posts...the only motive not mentioned that I can think of is that it serves a "de-icing" function by humanizing the institution, inviting students to self-express to thaw out the chill of fear early in the term. It just seems like the most honest way to begin. It also can encourage a habit of critical journal writing, if that's a method used in the course. One of the difficulties I have is not assigning or assessing these papers; its weaning some students from writing too informally later in the term, when formal research papers are due. The struggle with academic voice victimizes the style and makes a mess out of things. But it's a good struggle, I think, ultimately.

In "Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students" (Campus Technology, Oct 2008), Dr. Ruth Reynard talks about the mistakes she's made using weblogs with her grad students. It's a fantastic, enlightening essay, revealing how to not only avoid errors but how to utilize weblog technology well. In a nutshell, here are the problems Reynard outlines:

• Ineffective Contextualization


• Unclear Learning Outcomes


• Misuse of the environment


• Illusive grading practices


• Inadequate time allocation

I don't use blogs as a teaching tool nearly as much as my English colleague at SHU, Dennis Jerz, does (see our campus blog portal for a peek at all that he administers). But I do routinely ask my student authors in the Writing Popular Fiction graduate program to keep a blog as a reading journal. Reading Reynard's article, I feel that "illusive grading practices" may be something I still need to work on: often, I just append evaluative comments on a student's blog entries without giving much thought into the >kind< of entries I'm evaluating. Reynard recommends making a rubric that outlines various "statement types" that students can bring to their blogging, such as: "Reflection statements (self positioning within the course concepts); Commentary statements (effective use of the course content in discussion and analysis); New idea statements (synthesis of ideas to a higher level); and Application statements (direct use of the new ideas in a real life setting)." I may borrow from this idea and design a handout for students that asks them to approach their journal entries -- which essentially are reading responses -- as different "types" of statements -- possibly asking them to do one of each. Another good idea, naturally, is to request students to tag entries along these lines, as warranted.

I also like Dennis Jerz' structured RRRR sequence -- a method for routinizing student blogging assignments in his Writing for the Internet course. It encourages students to interact with each other and class alike, and functions to support his challenging "Just in Time" teaching method.

My essay on the teaching of horror fiction -- "The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" -- just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. Here's the abstract:

"The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" by Michael A. Arnzen

Abstract:

Building on the foundational concepts of transformative learning theory, I argue that horror fiction strongly encourages perspective transformation by challenging student assumptions about both genre writing and educational experience. I informally describe a specific creative writing class period focusing on the motif of the scream in diverse horror texts, and I illustrate how students learn to transform what they already bring to the classroom by employing a variety of particular in-class writing exercises and literary discussions. Among these, transformative writing exercises—such as the revision of an existing text by Stephen King—are highlighted as instructional techniques. As cautionary literature, horror especially dramatizes strategies of fight versus flight. I reveal how students can learn by transforming their knowledge through disorientation that is particular to reading and writing in the horror genre.

I started thinking about the ideas in this article after writing a blog entry back in 2005 called "Shifting the Paradigm: Transformative Learning Theory" -- a response to an essay I read by Kelly McGonigal called "Teaching for Transformation."

McGonigal's article got me to rethink the role of the reflective essay assignments in my classes, and I soon found myself in the library, catching up on transformative learning theory by reading the works of Jack Mezirow and others who seek to change the worldviews of adult learners. The key role of the "activating event" in transformation got me thinking about how "cautionary" tales and other works in the horror genre often trigger anticipatory thinking that requires a revision of what one initially assumed to be true. After applying these lessons to a course I taught in horror fiction writing last year, I captured some of these ideas in a conference paper in March 2008 at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts...an early draft of this now-published version. I invite comments here or at the journal, which includes a number of good articles on fan studies and popular culture.

I tried something new in my introductory-level fiction writing course this term: using a page of graphic fiction to show students how structure and the other elements of fiction (character, setting, viewpoint, etc.) work in tandem to make a story. I think it worked well, so I'm sharing the exercise here.

The idea was actually derived by the work itself (and I wouldn't be surprised if others have used the source material in the same way): 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, by artist Matt Madden (who maintains a related weblog, as well). The goal of Madden's 99 Ways, which was inspired by French writer Raymond Queneau's prose experiment, Exercises in Style, was to provide "as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story."

This is the template he provides on page one, which is followed by 98 graphic variations of the same sequence:

Madden calls this a "non-story" but it does have all the elements of a story, and these elements come to light when he draws and presents variations on the template: for example, one page (called "Subjective") has identical frames drawn from the point-of-view of the male character as he makes his way to the fridge; another (called "Upstairs"), depicts the same event in time, but shifts the viewpoint to the character above the spiral staircase who is responsible for calling down about the time. Many of the variations are radical and eye-poppingly ingenious, like the "Underground Comic" and the "Map" versions of the same template.

On the first day of class, I used this book in class by showing students a variety of these variations using the document/overhead projector, and simply asking them what exactly made each page different and unique. It allowed me to briefly touch on core elements of the craft, like character (in one variation, everything is the same except for the man, who is drawn like a cartoon skunk), viewpoint (there's a lot of these in the book, including a monologue where the male character sits behind a desk and talks about what we see in the template), setting (a la "upstairs"), and conflict. The point that I think was successfully made in class was that every single choice a writer makes can radically change the story as a whole, and that a virtual infinity of choices are available to the writer, constrained only by a core structure of sequence that readers need to make sense of a series of events.

What perhaps was most difficult to show here was the "plot" of the template. While I did ask the class "What's the conflict here? What is the core problem, or struggle that the character goes through?" they were slow to respond. They deduced that the man was hungry and needed something from the fridge, but was frustratingly interrupted on his way. I asked them about that interruption: "We don't see who the source of the voice is... is it a live-in lover? A housewife? Who?" They seemed to agree it was his significant other. But then I asked them if it might very well be God. This question -- while perhaps stretching into absurdity -- allowed me to suggest that this story might be saying something universally human and profound, or epiphanic, even if that "theme" wasn't on the surface at all.

But all of this was a precursor to an actual writing assignment, which was really my intention. I asked students to take Madden's template (I photocopied it for educational use) and write a short-short story of significance based on it. I did NOT give them any more specifics than that, and a few students sent me curious e-mails about how far they could change things. I told them their imaginations were the only limit, but that any reader in class ought to be able to tell that this was a variation that might have "fit" in the same book as the one I showed them in class.

The following class period I asked a few students to share some of their stories orally with the class as a whole. A lot of fun was had. I noticed that many of them added something new on to the end of the comic strip, as if it were all a precursor to something else, or as if "revision" only meant "adding." But it was a fruitful and productive exercise, I think, and I think most creative writing exercises try to do something similar: to posit a prompt or template idea that students later can share, to reveal the variety of choices (stylistic and beyond) which reveal the variety of choices that are available to a writer, and the repetition-with-a-difference that compels our fascination with storytelling.

Writing about this reminds me of other classes I've taught that have used comix in similar ways. It's been a long time since I've done so, but I recall once using a Garfield comic strip in my basic writing course. I photocopied a 3 panel strip of Garfield doing a monologue while looking at -- and then away -- from a sunflower in a pot. I don't even remember what wry commentary Garfield was making -- all that mattered to me was the structure. I blotted out all the words in the thought balloons and then photocopied (and enlarged) the strip before distributing the strip to students. I asked them to "fill in the blanks" of the thought balloons with the main ideas of their paragraphs. I was trying to illustrate the way that paragraphs don't simply chain together a list, but move a thesis through a process of thought that changes as the paper progresses. I'm not sure how successful that was, but I remember that the students enjoyed working with the handout and were excited to share the results in small groups.

I hope to look into Raymond Queneau's work for more ideas. But at this point I am convinced that making structure visual is always a good idea. This is why we diagram sentences and outline essays and use organizational charts. The structures of graphic fiction can make this process both entertaining and educational, while appealing to visual learners. I intend to keep looking for more ways to integrate such matters into the classroom. Your own experiences are welcome -- leave a comment.

The article is a couple of years old, but it's worth noting: "College, My Way" by Kate Zernike, published in the NY Times in 2006, notes the rising transfer rates among college students is becoming the new normal -- claiming that "about 60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution, a number that has risen steadily over at least the last two decades."

Though this number is higher nationally than it is on my own campus, I still don't find this rate of transfer surprising at all, because I've seen the increase in transferring firsthand. The NY Times article suggests that today's "Millennial" generation approach their curriculum just like they do their iPods, selecting courses like singles that they're loading up into their playlists, making increasingly granular choices regardless of "brand affiliation" (eg. a lack of commitment to one's "alma mater.") Admissions offices call the high churn rate of transfer courses "swirling" -- a term I associate with toilet bowl flushes rather than academics, but it's still an apt term. Swirling is what helicopter wings do and it can leave you dizzy and disoriented.

I often staff the "transfer orientation" that our campus hosts during the summer, when incoming transfer students sign up for their first courses... and I have to tell you, as much as I enjoy transfer students (because they usually bring fresh perspectives into the classroom), it's often a nightmarish webwork of complexity trying to figure out what courses a student still "needs" to graduate, despite the useful and helpful audits of our registrars. The sum (diploma) always means more to these students than the variables (courses) that add up to it, and -- coupled with financial pressures that are only rising over the years -- for too many students a "survivalist" mindset drives their learning: many students just want to cobble together a schedule so they can finish their long-suffering and have a degree. Perhaps the way colleges sell themselves contributes to the problem. If a degree is something that can be acquired if enough "stamps" are earned, then it doesn't matter where you get those stamps.

But it is a bit out of the ordinary to earn a degree from one college -- an institutional endorsement of one's educational status -- while still having a transcript that quilts together several different colleges that made their imprint on the student in some fashion outside of the penumbra of the college giving the degree. Do these students feel attachment to their degree-granting institution as "alums" as much as traditional four year students do? Institutional identity evaporates beneath this to some degree, rending the early colleges that the student transferred out of as functionaries toward the final degree. I can imagine some minor forms of blowback that students wouldn't anticipate (e.g., imagine an employer who is a Yale alum reviewing a student's transcripts during the hiring process: Would they see the transfer out of Yale as troubling? Do they see a high "swirl" rate as a sign that a potential employee lacks commitment?)

There are also ways in which "swirling" renders a college's self-assessment problematic. If a school is surveying student attitudes or performance at various grade levels, comparing and contrasting and looking for statistical growth from freshman to senior year, what do the numbers mean if such a high percentage of those seniors have only been in residence for a year or two? Or that the freshman won't be around very long? How do retention committees and officers understand these numbers and marshal policies based on them? Even within any given academic major, swirling problematizes program review and if upper division courses have prerequisites that are built on assumptions about how those prereqs are taught locally, rather than universally, then most assumptions regarding progressive learning are essentially undermined.

Indeed, although it is nothing new (and often common among Adult and non-traditional learners) swirling requires a reformulation of not only what we mean by "traditional students" but what we mean by "progressive learning" across any given student's career. I think teachers concerned with such issues may find a review of Transformative Learning theory a worthwhile endeavor in this regard.

I sit on the Academic Technologies Committee at SHU, and we often talk about trends on our campus and others, to see how we might better employ computers, software and technological devices in the classroom. Recently, the provost sent us a link to a NY Times article, "Welcome, Freshman. Have an iPod." by Johnathan D. Glater, which talks about how some schools are giving away (not iPods but) iPhones to their students. The motive of these schools, if it isn't obvious, is that gizmos like these are perceived as "cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation."

They also might enhance or catalyze learning. Making decisions about campus technology always means trying to weigh symbolic value against actual use value. We have to predict whether students and faculty will actually use the technology we budget for, and whether it really will benefit the learner or the learning environment. Obviously, we have to be careful how money is spent, but also a little skeptical of whiz-bang pop trends, because they are quickly surmounted by new technologies as it so rapidly evolves. Today's clickers are tomorrow's eight track tapes. And as teachers and administrators age, they try to leap across the generation gap and sometimes land in the wrong place, alienating students despite their good intentions.

In the margins of the NY Times article, a reader opinion from "Paul" is pulled out that cries, "Are we training thinkers in our colleges or gadget users?" I understand the feeling behind this. But I think this false dualism is beyond the point, because our thinkers in the classroom are already gadget users; our gadget users already are thinkers. The challenge of the modern teacher is to synthesize these tools with the way people think (just as we might teach penmanship in early education, so that students can use the technology of the ink pen). These are tools that students use in their everyday lives, and they'll be expected to use them well in the workplace after college.

I received this article as I was revising my syllabi for the term (that begins on Monday), and it caused me to reflect a little bit on how I treat portable electronic devices in the classroom. We're not giving away iPhones at our college, and I'm not changing my classroom into a "gizmo training" place, but the campus is evolving into a more wireless-friendly space. Between classes, I see virtually every student in the hallway working on their cell phones or portable game systems. The culture has shifted, but education and much of the subject matter we teach remains timeless.

It's easy to be reactionary or even live in denial. I'm as guilty as anyone. I have been brash about not allowing these elements to become distractions in my classroom, often demanding students to focus on the class and not their gizmos. In the past, I've order students to turn their cell phones to silent ring mode, and I have almost always told any students I see working with devices to shut them off. I have never really articulated my policies about this, other than orally when I spot an offense (say, a student starts texting during another student's presentation), simply because it seemed like common sense and common courtesy for people not to interrupt or ignore one another during a classroom activity or lecture.

The rules of common courtesy have changed. I've decided that things have changed so much that the time has come to put a policy in writing in my syllabus, so students understand where I'm coming from. My motive is not to punish, but to highlight the propriety of social communication. I want to recognize and support student use of technology as a tool for learning, while also combating the rising problem of blaring ring tones during lectures/discussions, or the distracted student who can't stop playing with his game or web browser during class time.

In some ways, there's no difference between a student texting and a student flipping through a magazine in the back row of a class, but there are times when we use technology to multitask and this is where the issue gets thorny and complex. What if we're discussing Foucault's "Panopticism" in the classroom and a student wants to quickly do some web research on a referenced person in the article, like Jeremy Bentham? I wouldn't want to ban such ambitious impulses to learn more, so long as it pertained to the subject at hand or contributed to the collaborative learning of the class.

What I'm really concerned about is multitasking that puts personal interest above the class interest, and the fetishism of technology that reinforces gizmo play for its own sake. My hope is that I can help students consciously rethink their gizmos as tools for learning and research and communication, and to respect the social space and dynamic of the classroom.

My new policy is an attempt to prevent what is known as "backgrounding" in the classroom while respecting the existence and purpose of these portable devices. I'd be interested to hear what readers of this blog think about this policy statement, whether in the form of editorial suggestions or by mentioning problems I might not foresee.

Policy on Personal Electronic Devices

Our classroom is a haven from the distractions of everyday life, giving us a place to focus attentively, in collaboration, on learning. Listening to each other is imperative and enables focused concentration. "Multitasking" inhibits learning and disrupts communication; unexpected beeps and surprising ring tones distract us all. Thus, while you are permitted to bring personal devices (cell phones, PDAs, laptops, sound recorders, and other electronic devices) to class, they must only serve class needs (e.g., typing on a laptop for an in-class writing assignment; using an iPhone to record lectures). My policy on this matter can be summed up in one phrase: "class in the foreground." If you ever appear to be "backgrounding" the class you will receive an absence for the day, and may be expelled from the room and not permitted to make up missed in-class work. Examples of "backgrounding" the class in a punishable way include: answering or making a cell phone call; texting or IMing; checking or writing e-mail; surfing the web; wearing headphones; logging into MySpace, Facebook, your SHU blog, or other social network; reading an ebook or any printed matter not related to class content (e.g. a magazine); and handheld gaming. Please set your cell phones to "silent" mode before class begins. I reserve the right to ban electronic devices entirely if I feel they are distracting you or your classmates from proper study.

I'll post an update if warranted. If you have comments or want to share your own experiences of such issues, please post.

I just discovered Marc Bousquet's excellent blog based around his eye-raising book, How the University Works (from NYU Press). Two sample chapters are available on his site -- I read the Intoduction (.pdf) -- a sobering examination of the consequences of the corporatization of academia -- and discovered that my pangs of anxiety about this issue were justified and that things are a lot worse than I suspected.

But reading the sample chapter on students and labor, "Students are Already Workers," (.pdf file) really got me thinking about my students, as I plan for the classes in the year ahead:

The reality of the undergraduate workforce is very different from the representation of teen partiers on a perpetual spring break, as popularized by television (Girls Gone Wild), UPS propaganda (“they’re staying up until dawn anyway”), and Time: “Meet the ‘twixters,’ [twenty-somethings] who live off their parents, bounce from job to job and hop from mate to mate. They’re not lazy—they just won’t grow up” (Grossman; for more, see Bartlett).

There are more than 15 million students currently enrolled in higher ed (with an average age of around twenty-six). Tens of millions of persons have recently left higher education, nearly as many without degrees as with them. Like graduate employees, undergraduates now work longer hours in school, spend more years in school, and can take several years to find stable employment after obtaining their degrees. Undergraduates and recent school leavers, whether degree holders or not, now commonly live with their parents well beyond the age of legal adulthood, often into their late twenties. Like graduate employees, undergraduates increasingly find that their period of “study” is, in fact, a period of employment as cheap labor. The production of cheap workers is facilitated by an ever-expanding notion of “youth.” A University of Chicago survey conducted in 2003 found that the majority of Americans now think that adulthood begins around twenty-six, an age not coincidentally identical with the average age of the undergraduate student population (Tom Smith).

The idea that college instructors are teaching students to be "pre-professionals" before they enter the workforce is becoming an anachronism. Students are working more and more...whether in work study or in jobs to support their degree. More and more they come to my office door, asking for extensions or accommodations that can work around their employer's schedules. More and more, I see students in campus offices, doing much of the grunt work. I go out to a local restaurant or a downtown bar, I see my students...but they're not eating or partying; they're taking my orders or pouring my drinks.

So what? one might wonder. What's the harm? Students work, just like everyone else. I have conflicting feelings. For one thing, college can and maybe should be a temporary sanctuary away from the work world. But as someone who also worked in a "real world" job throughout college (and who signed up for the GI Bill and spent a few years in military service just to afford to attend college to begin with), I've always felt that these struggles are beneficial, ultimately, because they can teach a person the ethics required to survive in the workforce, like disciplined time management and the art of delayed gratification (e.g. work now, pay later). We "pay to work" when we go to college, in the interest of not only learning skills and information, but also earning the social capital it takes to raise one's status.

But clearly economic benefits should not be the sole outcome of a college degree. Everyone recognizes -- students most of all -- that there's a bit of exploitation that goes on in the minimum wage labor class, but its treated like a natural form of paying one's dues to raise oneself up economically -- and this is the "script" that parents and culture-at-large often hand students. I hadn't really considered how this script might be a symptom of a larger form of class exploitation, or a symptom of a rising "age of adulthood" that for the most part (as Bousquet argues) serves the interest of corporate employers. As teachers, when we see student workers through the lens of our own similar past work experiences, and treat it as "paying one's dues," then, as Bousquet suggests, we might also be guilty of "reinforc[ing] commitments to inequality" systemically, even as we assume that we might be liberating students via their education.

But even beyond the political economy of all this, the increase in student commitment to working for survival (let alone experience) results in a reprioritization of the role of learning in a life-well-lived. Too often, the classroom is an atomized part of a "workweek" schedule that is understood to be, simply, more work just like everything else that is not overtly part of leisure culture. It's up to teachers to transform that workspace, but it can be difficult.

The problem isn't just that students are overburdened with work and oppressed by the class system -- they also tend to deprioritize learning in order to just survive through the grind of the day. When students arrive in the classroom wearing their work or athletic uniforms, it always signals to me that their outside lives are competing for their time and attention. They are overscheduled. The agenda for the day becomes marching orders, and the mind can only process so much. And some students are not shy at all about reminding everyone in the room that that this class meeting is just a brief pit-stop on the race from point A to point B. It is my job to make that pit-stop a meaningful place that doesn't just fuel them up with knowledge and send them back on the track; instead, the pit-stop needs to be a temporary but FULL stop -- a place where both the track and the rules of the race are better understood -- if not revised altogether. Sometimes school can be a place where maps are discovered that leads one into the more exciting and rewarding territories off-road altogether.

Metaphorical ideals aside, I hope to overtly raise issues of economic class in my courses in the year ahead, if only to heighten student awareness about their cultural identity and to learn how I can better accomodate student needs while remaining committed to a liberal arts mission and not some other economic interest. In creative writing courses, I have assigned the theme of work broadly and have always been amazed with what students have to say about it when given free reign to explore their relationship to the workforce. Perhaps I'll even assign this chapter from Bousquet's book for a discussion or research. For me, one of the main goals as a teacher is consciousness-raising. Bousquet frames the questions at issue in this debate in a way that might lead to some productive discussions:

For me, the basis of solidarity and hope will always be the collective experience of workplace exploitation and the widespread desire to be productive for society rather than for capital. So when we ask, "Why has higher education gotten more expensive?" we need to bypass the technocratic and "necessitarian" account of events, in which all answers at least implicitly bring the concept of necessity beyond human agency to bear ("costs 'had to' rise because..."). Instead, we need to identify the agencies of inequality and ask, "To whom is the arrangement of student debt and student labor most useful?"

The answer to that final question, unsuprisingly, is never "to the student."

My essay, "When the Professor Wrote the Textbook," just went live on the Text and Academic Authors Association website so I thought I'd give the TAA a plug.

The TAA site has a free preview, but the complete site is only open to paying members. However, if you plan to write, edit, or publish textbooks, this should be an organization you consider joining. Services include special newsletters, writing help, access to information about publishers, agents and markets, and an annual conference on the industry. There is copious publishing advice in their newsletter and in their online archives.

You can find an early draft of my article on Pedablogue.

[p.s. Our server's blogging software has recently been updated, so there are kinks in the system here and there (for commenting, searching, etc.) that I keep stumbling upon... apologies for the bumps in the road as I try to solve these...but do e-mail me if you find something horrendously frustrating. -- Mike Arnzen]

Teacher Magazine has a fun list of Six Word Memoirs by teachers. It's a sort of homage to the pop mini-memoir book, Not Quite What I was Planning (click through that: apparently you can submit to the sequel!).

Although such things are terribly reductive, they're pithy. A few quick examples from "The Short Happy Lives of Teachers":

Cheerleader aspirations. I teach. Same thing. (Cindi)
Teachers wanted, patience mandatory, sanity optional. (Renee)
Hoped to make difference. Was transformed. (Laura)

My own off the cuff:

After tests, I never said "pencils down."
DId I ask the right questions?
Sold soul to the Devil's Advocate.

Hmmm...harder than it looks! (I prefer this kind of minimalist stuff when you can add a clever title to it: as-is, these read more like dumb tombstone epigraphs!)

Note: AN EXERCISE LIKE THIS WOULD WORK GREAT IN A CLASSROOM.

For now, post your own on the Teacher Magazine site, or here if you like, in a comment. You get SIX words!

I'm trying to compile a bibliography of books on the art of teaching creative writing. There are a wealth of titles on how to write for publication, and a lesser-but-still-rich number of books on how to teach writing -- but the latter are predominantly about teaching composition skills or scholarly argumentation. When I search for pedagogy for fiction teachers, I only find a paltry few -- and so many of them seem targeted at elementary ed teachers, rather than higher education. Nothing wrong with that, but I'm looking for help in developing teaching skills for adjuncts and graduate students attached to our Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill U.

Even the Association for Writing Programs has little to offer, from what I can tell (though I did find a free .pdf on their site for Program Directors).

If you know any titles, or have any recommendations, please post a comment below or e-mail me.

The forums over at Teacher Magazine have a great conversation going on right now about the advantages and disadvantages of reading text aloud to students in the classroom. Apparently a high school teacher was given a hard time by his administrators, who overheard him and felt he was talking down to the students by treating them like they were in elementary school.

This surprised me, because every literature professor I ever had when I was an English major would recite passages of text to the class and myself have been doing if for years. I had never considered that it might be a "bad" way to teach, because utterance brings a printed text to life in a way that silence usually does not. Some students may very well be "aural" learners. And in my experience students seem to respond well when I read text aloud to the class, because I am -- to be unabashedly cocky -- probably the best reader in the room. All teachers probably are. Why be shy? We usually know the text we're reading to the class inside-and-out, so we can probably do a good job it. As an English prof, I am an experienced reader who has been visited by many fictional voices across a lifetime, and I know how to inflect and read prose and poetry with a dramatic cadence. I even have the audacity to read my own writing to the class sometimes, because this is what creative writers do professionally. I'm not saying I'm the best oral interpreter on the planet, but in my classroom, chances are very good that I am the most qualified person in the room to do it. And so is any teacher.

The counter-argument, of course, is based on the assumption that students who are already literate don't want to be "talked down" to. It harkens back to the parent-child relationship, infantalizing students. It reduces the adult classroom to something akin to a preschool-level children's library, and participates in what critics call "the crayola curriculum," contributing to the "dumbing down" of American students. It impedes the flow of speedy learning that people who can read for themselves might experience. And if a teacher is a boring, turgid reader, it risks killing the class dynamic -- or can lead to student mockery, disappointment or other tomfoolery.

But all things considered, it depends on how you do it, and what your motives really are. Sometimes the "Crayola Curriculum" can be employed in productive, reflective, or simply tension-relieving ways (as my SHU colleague Dennis Jerz attempts to do when he reads a children's book to his English majors at the end of a stressful term). I would say that, on balance, reading aloud is a good strategy. As Candy Blessing points out in "Reading to Students Who Are Old Enough to Shave", research supports the argument that "reading to kids boosts their reading comprehension, increases their vocabularies, and helps them become better writers. In fact, students who are read to are more motivated to read themselves—increasing the likelihood that they will one day become independent, lifelong readers." Clearly knowing how printed words and sentences and poetic lines and so forth should "sound" in our heads when we read them can only help us comprehend them, and teachers can and should model these sounds for students. This is something that Language teachers have employed forever.

Moreover, we're not just modeling how to read that particular text. We're modeling how to read in public, how to recite in general, and also teaching communication and listening skills. Listening to a teacher recite has its analogue in many civic functions: hearing politicans speak, or priests and preachers, and so forth. Students can learn what we might call "audience literacy": how to be a good, attentive, ethical listener.

I would toss in, however, that the method can create a teacher-centered environment in the classroom, and that one shouldn't dominate the class or treat it as their own private rehersal hall. A lector's reading aloud should be counter-balanced by having the students read -- in fact, they should read more often than the teacher. Having students read aloud is often better because not only does everyone get to practice, but everyone also gets the "stage" for a moment. Everyone has a voice and students always benefit from participating fully in the class. When they listen to each other, they engage with one another. (I have even seen students correct each other and offer advice to each other, workshopping their recitation without any input from me!). You can see it in their eyes. Reading is not just absorbing through the eyes or ears -- it is reacting, responding, voicing, and more.

I would also add that not only should teachers be wary of producing a teacher-centered environment, but also that the textbook-dominated one. Even in a literature course, it might be good to have students read aloud from their own writing. Or, optionally, to have the teacher read student writing to the class. I do this quite often. In classes where I collect daily journals, I will often begin the hour by reading one of my favorite entries. It not only rewards the students who put their energy into the journal writing, but it also provides a great transition from the previous class into the next one.

Another trick, of course, is to bring in an audio CD or DVD, or to bring in the writer as a guest, so that students can hear authors read their own work aloud. They're often surprised by how the author sounds -- how different they sound than they expected -- and sometimes even how much better it sounded in their own heads when they read it off the page themselves.

I suppose all of these tactics are relatively obvious, and that there are myriad other strategies for employing oral recitiation in the classroom. I've really only scratched the surface. But I think just hearing that some administrators think this is a bad idea makes me realize that we need to talk about these things we take for granted more often...so that others won't take their own assumptions -- usually ones that originate in their own experiences in the classroom as a kid and carried forward into adulthood -- for granted, too.

Visit the forum at Teacher Magazine to find more methods, arguments, and research about this topic.

I adored reading Christian Long's recent article, "Mapping Literary Highlights, Highlighting Literary Maps" at think:lab yesterday. In it, he talks about adopting a class rule that students write in the margins of their books:

Nothing says, "Yes, English class rocks!", than the early-in-the-year lesson on highlighting our books. Like a good family Bible passed down through the generations, books we read should show highlighter scar tissue on every page. Every page.

Long goes on to mention how he plans to spot-check student books (turn to page 83!) for highlighting and marginal scribbles, and then cites some really fascinating "etch-a-sketch" research about tracking stylistics and patterns in classic novels. Great stuff.

I definitely agree with his notion that writing in a book while you read it is the best way to "process" the ideas and to find them later. I'll never forget the first time I saw marginal notes in one of my mother's old college textbooks. I was just a kid, curious about the things on my parents bookshelf, and I started pulling titles off the shelf, browsing around for something that would be as fun to read as the stuff I was reading at the local children's library. I don't recall what book it was -- possibly a lit anthology -- but I found scribbling in the margins. This was contrary to all the times I'd been told not to write in library books, so I thought a sin had been committed and I ran to my mom to let her know what I'd found. When she told me it was HER writing, and that it helped her to learn, I was dumbstruck.

I saw it again, when I was in the Army. I caught a fellow PFC reading Newsweek magazine when he was on a break, underlining things over and over again. I asked him why he did this, because I never fancied the guy was a big reader, let alone scholar, and I noticed he was reading the business pages -- something I presumed only a business person would find worth underlining. He said he was teaching himself new words. He explained to me that he underlined all the words he didn't know, then -- after reading the article -- copied them into a little book he carried with him -- and looked them up later. "Words, my friend," he said in his Brooklyn accent, "are like money."

I didn't adopt his method of vocabulary-building, but I did start marking up magazines more and more. (Though I do highlight vocab sometimes: whether book or magazine, when I read something I'm preparing to teach, I'll put a box around terms I think I may need to define for the class when we discuss a particular passage.) My method throughout college was to photocopy anything I found in the library that I thought I might possibly want to cite in a paper of my own...and then write ALL OVER them. I have boxes filled with file folders stuffed with these marked up articles from journals and chapters from books in my field, and I have returned to them often for my own research. And my textbooks from college? Fuhgeddaboudit. I could wring pink and yellow and blue ink from the pages. As I tell my students nowadays, reading with a pen in your hand means you're writing as much as reading -- it's the most natural way to engage in a 'conversation' with the text. (For me, it's more like arguments than conversations... see my article "Question-storming!" for more on my methods).

Now, thirty years after I first discovered my mother's marginalia, I find myself reorganizing my home library (I'm scanning barcodes from my books into a database on my computer, too, using Readerware!) and I'm seeing just how many books and articles I myself have so sinfully marred up. Paging through these books, I see so many traces of learning...places where I came to new realizations. And lots of questions I raised in the margins that spun me down avenues of research and argument that I'd probably never have taken otherwise. And you know what else? I remember more from those books than I do from the ones I just gently read. I also notice that the books most marked up are the ones I've cited the most often in my scholarship.

It's the "scar tissue" of learning.

All of us who are full-time scholars and writers probably do similar things. My point is that I'm taking to heart Long's commitment to teaching this process in his classes. I've taught marginal notation systems before in my freshman composition courses, and I plan to do it again in the Fall. Students often resist the call to write in books -- either because they feel its a sin that the great librarian in the sky will punish, or because they don't want to ruin the resale value of their books for book-buy-back at the campus store -- but I think it's a learning strategy that they need to be exposed to -- just like I was when I stumbled upon that book my mother had scribbled in when I was a kid. Just seeing that it CAN be done, and just TRYING it once can be a transformative moment in a student's life. It's hard to convince people to deface a book they paid for, but it's perfectly sensible. Another copy can always be bought for posterity, if a person genuinely treasures it.

I'd put this one right up there with the time in high school when a teacher told my class once (and I'm paraphrasing): Don't be afraid to use more than one piece of paper! It's never a waste to write. And the trees will survive if you recycle... for now, you bought that paper to use it, so quit being so timid with your writing ... it's a tool, so USE IT!

I started filling legal pad after legal pad with course notes, once I was given "permission" to do such a simple thing. Class exercises like Long's use of marginalia in class can be breakthrough moments for students, moments where a student is given permission to take charge of their own studies, and to actively learn.

First up...

Neha Bawa, Seton Hill U class of 2006

Start with a brief bio that tells us first where you are now, then what your status was in college (e.g. "Creative Writing major, Volleyball player, Tetris fan, whatever.) Let your personality show.

I am an eternal English major who keeps moving from one aspect of dissecting the language to another. I’ve completed my undergrad as an English Literature major, and currently, I am teaching English writing to college freshmen and I’m about to begin graduate classes in Communications.

Tell us where you thought you'd be now, back when you were a college freshman.

As a college freshman, my worldview was very convoluted, and I had no idea of how to picture myself in the future. When I first took Introduction to Literature in sophomore year, I knew I wanted to teach college students, so I’m exactly where I thought I would be.

Describe your college experience in one word. Then elaborate in no more than five sentences.

Eclectic. My college experiences have shaped my life and my thinking tremendously and have made a hard core liberal out of me. From the good to the bad and the ugly, the only year I would relive would be my Senior year, for both, academic and personal reasons.

Describe one very specific lesson from the college classroom that you'll never forget. Give us concrete details. Tell us not only what it taught you, but also how and why it worked.

It was a class with you, in fact, that taught me a very valuable lesson in classroom management. I remember, I had started explaining something to a classmate about poetry, and you stopped teaching and asked me if I had started teaching the class at some point. It’s always stayed with me because I use it in my own classroom every time my students start talking in the middle of my sentences. Sometimes, respect has to be commanded.

What do you know now that you wish someone would have taught you in school? How might that lesson best be taught?

I have always wished that, beginning with freshman year, universities made it mandatory for students to learn about post-college savings and retirement options. Terms like “Tax Deferred Annuities” and “Individual Retirement Accounts” hold no meaning for college students and new college grads, which means that the time they spend with philandering away their earnings could have been spent building a nest egg. Also, I’ve always wanted universities to spend more time and resources on career advice and counseling, especially at Seton Hill, where the resources exist, but are not advertised well enough for the students to be completely aware of them.

What teaching method(s) were you subjected to that never made a dent on your learning?

Reading responses based on emotions, instead of literary techniques used in a text. Being inundated with homework doesn’t necessarily mean that the class work is being understood. That just means that there’s more on the plate as “busy” work.

What college experience did you find most displeasing at the time, but now recognize as an important contribution to your learning?

Writing research papers. I have never had the patience to sit in a library for hours and research a subject into the wee hours of the morning, but now that I’m teaching, I realize the importance of understanding research methods, especially when time management is involved.

What habits -- good and bad -- did you pick up in school, that you still continue to apply?

Constant reading. Constant. Whether I read fiction or non-fiction, a newspaper article, or even the back of a tube of toothpaste, I make it a point to read something new every day.

What do you miss about the college classroom, if anything?

The personal and social touches to teaching and learning.

If there was one suggestion you would make to college teachers everywhere, what would it be?

Please don’t ever let yourselves forget, that at the end of the day, after the tenure has been earned, after the papers have been published, after the book deals have been signed, that our profession is about making a difference in our students’ lives and not always our own.

THANK YOU, Neha!

***
Read more "Student Outcomes"!

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....

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.

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.

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).

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!

[UPDATE Sept. 2008: This class was featured in my article, "The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" published this month in the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures.]

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.

[COMMENTS CLOSED ON THIS POST.]

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

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!

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.

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.

As I mentioned in my first entry after returning from hiatus, RateMyProfessors.com has grown since I first looked at it a few years ago, particularly in the ways in which professors can interact and respond to the student comments. Inspired by the video responses from teachers, I decided to join the site as a professorial member, and since I'm guessing other profs out there rarely join it (or probably only access it anonymously once in awhile to read their own ratings or those of their colleagues), I thought I'd open the curtain a little bit so you can see what it's like there once you sign up. Consider this a website review, rather than any endorsement or direct encouragement to join them.

IN FACT...
In fact, you might not want to encourage the site by giving it a hit to begin with. If you haven't seen Rate My Professors, it is an independent website where college students can post comments anonymously (virtually without responsibility, save for community enforcement of the rules). These students fill out forms that "rank" their professors on such criteria as level of difficulty...and "hotness." Indeed, beside a "highest ranked" chart for schools and teachers, the site sports a master chart of the "50 hottest professors" on their front page, which probably tells you all you need to know about the academic legitimacy of the site.

If it doesn't, a good overview of this issue appeared in Christine Lagorio's article, Hot for Teacher, which appeared in the Village Voice in January 2006 -- a highly recommended read which brilliantly compared RMP and other websites of its ilk to "the slosh of a giant virtual spitball smacking the ivory tower" while at the same time reminding us that there may be some merit in the site's purpose.

Terry Ceasar, in his lucid IHE article on the significance of the site on the landscape of higher ed, also gives much enlightenment, comparing it to American Idol and musing over the consequences.

Although in my reading of the site, students tend to use this site to recommend their favorite teachers and advisors (often with hyperbolic-yet-kind praise) more than anything else, a great number of professors have railed against the anonymous postings of students, who seem free to virtually libel a professor (or at least bias others from taking their classes and soiling their reputations) without accountability, and to post their comments and ratings completely outside the context of the usual "course evaluation" where such things might actually help the teacher review and alter the class. In other words, it seems geared more toward personality and popularity points than anything related to learning. Some profs have gone so far as to retaliate by rating their students in a like fashion, as the fascinating blog rateyourstudents makes clear. It's true that this may be going too far (or maybe even sinking to the sophomoric level of the students on RMP) because the Rate My Prof site does allow visitors to "flag" inappropriate postings...and now allows profs to "rebut" them, generally...but by the same token, unless a professor visits the site and does these things herself, it is probably unlikely that a student will police any professor's profile.

So whether you're a tenured college teacher, grad student instructor, or adjunct, you might want to join the site anyway and keep an eye on what people are saying about you, after all.

Indeed, as Towsen U professors James Otto, Douglas A. Sanford Jr., and Douglas N. Ross pointed out in "Does Ratemyprofessor.com Really Rate My Professor?" -- a thorough empiric analysis of the site that appeared in the Oct 2007 journal of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education -- the numbers on this site might actually have statistical correlation to teaching performance, despite the occasional flames of student outburst that call them into question.

So perhaps RMP and others of its ilk -- Professorperformance.com, Pickaprof.com, or Studentsreview.com -- might have some merit. If you're interested in joining, what follows is a preview of what you'll find. I'll share my opinions and warnings along the way, and conclude with some passing ideas about how this might be turned into something teachable or work for faculty self-development.

VERIFYING YOUR STATUS
I was happy to learn that the site offers a verification process to make sure that someone who says they're a prof is actually employed by an institution before allowing them to join the site. This gives ratemyprofessors.com a modicum of credibility. They asked for my phone number and warned that it might take a few days for them to verify me; perhaps they heard my voice mail, I'm not sure. I'm not sure how they verified my identity, exactly, but my info is up online on this page as well as in the faculty directory on the Seton Hill University website, so I'm sure it wasn't too hard to confirm. Regardless, it took a few days so I'm assuming it was a real verification, either by phone or online. I was ultimately confirmed via an e-mail message that asked me to sign in from my campus e-mail account, which is the same way many e-mail lists will verify their subscribers to prevent spam. So the free enrollment process seems to function well to prevent anonymous students posing as teachers -- something other social networking pages probably could work harder do.

SIGNING IN
After joining, and being verified as a prof, and signing in for the first time -- the site then asks you to fill in the typical "personal profile" questionnaire that asks a few questions that seem almost too personal for the purposes of this site. The professor's sign-in page is really the same as the student sign-in page, so perhaps that accounts for the personality questions. I had to hunt for a button that said "I'm a Professor" to bypass some of these opening screens. But, clearly there's more going on here than just evaluating teachers. Like most social networking sites, there's clearly a degree of demographic harvesting at work. I kept my answers pared down to bare minimums and a few outright falsehoods. (I don't think students need to know my birthday, for example...but I'm sure it helps MTVu's marketers understand the age of their aggregate users. Still: isn't it clear that most users of RMP are likely 18-24 -- i.e. college-aged?! That demographic is built in to the very concept of the site! No matter: as far as they're concerned, I am a 94 year old professor who's birthday falls on Xmas day. If I start getting geriatric foot powder spam or gift cards to senior discount drug stores, I'll know something's amiss!)

RATING A PROF
We all know that websites collect information and have their own privacy policies that anyone signing up for them should read and review before signing up, and RMP has one worth reviewing before you enroll. But I raise this matter because when I browsed around the site, I noticed something interesting: even when students rate professors, they input a lot more information about the class then what you see on the main list when you look at a teacher's profile. For example, students are asked to enter whether attendance was mandatory and what sort of grade they got in the course. Where does this info go? How is it used? You don't see it on the public page of the site. We know whether students think teachers are "hot" but we don't know if they took attendance? That's odd. In any case, this info may go into a screen that no one besides the student sees -- I'm not sure, because I didn't actually rate anyone, I just went to the first page that opens up when you do so. In any case, I think maybe that course info should be reported out to the public, not kept private, because it might help readers interpret the student ratings.

One part of the rating/evaluation form that raised my eyebrow was the question about textbooks, which asked students to rank "Textbook Use" on a scale from 1 to 5 -- and then it also asked for an ISBN. Hmmm... are they sharing this information with book publishers or online booksellers? I'm not sure, because, again, this isn't reported on the public screens along with the course ratings, and it isn't clear why they're asking for it. Regardless, I seriously doubt many students look up the ISBNs of their books when rating and commenting on professor's classes, so maybe it's a moot point.

There's also a place to mark whether a prof is "still teaching" or "retired" in this rating screen. I find this odd and wonder why it's there. Because I also question how many students know this employment status if they're writing ratings about past classes with nostalgia or long-term grudges. Instead, it should ask for "year taken" or something like that.

I really don't know where all this info goes or what it signifies, but there's more going on in the ratings then meets the public eye. And given the advertising everywhere on the site (from credit cards banners on your left to deceptive text-only sponsored links on the bottom of the page) it's fair to assess a commercial interest in some of this information.

POLICING YOURSELF, TOO
Though it didn't work for me for some reason, the site promises that you can subscribe to your own page on ratemyprofessors.com as an rss feed. This might be the best way to go if you want to keep up with new postings on your work, but don't want to succumb to the lure to check your ratings as obsessively as some writers I know who check their amazon.com sales rankings. Plus it will keep you away from browsing your college on the site, where the temptation to read your colleagues' rankings is really quite strong. You probably shouldn't do this, especially if a time may come when you are in a position to evaluate the teacher for promotion or tenure. A little empathy can go a long way here: just as you probably wish your own rankings and comments had more context, if you read your colleague's info, you are doing so out of context, and shouldn't be quick to leap to any particular conclusions. Sometimes the best teachers get the worst ratings, simply because they are challenging. Any given sampling of students on RMP entry is probably not representative of the entire class -- it is simply a collection of rankings by those who use RMP -- which is not necessarily a properly random population sampling.

FINAL SCORECARD
With over 6,000 schools from five different nations, a total of 1 million profs and 6 million opinions listed about them, RMP clearly is a "hot" site with a lot of content and data. The student opinions are often genuinely felt, even if they are sometimes irresponsible or hostile or rife with empty praise. On their own criteria, and using a 4.0 grading scale, I give RMP a 3.5 for ease-of-use, a 2.5 for helpfulness, a 3 for clarity and a 3 for rater interest. Teaching is not a popularity contest, but if you are interested in student feedback on your own teaching, this is but one of many ways to look for it. I caution you against rebutting, because this could encourage future student raters to bear bait just to see what you'll say next.

Of course, you can and should still get "anonymous" feedback from your students by passing out a handout or doing your own evaluations in class, and that's a better way to go, because such evaluations occur within a specific context, and along a direct line of communication between teacher and student, rather than student and student. You could easily borrow the criteria from RMP and make your own in-class handout and -- something I would think is best -- have a class discussion about these things. In the classroom, I think it is important to separate evaluation from the politics of judgment whenever possible, and instead to turn evaluation into a method of inquiry -- an inquiry into both the subject being evaluated and the criteria used to evaluate it -- instead. In our "American Idol" culture, this understanding and skill might be more imperative than ever to teach.

We can only learn from engaging in such evaluative inquiry; rating is about snapping to judge.

This morning I read about an interesting classroom activity called the "Friday Shout-Out" on music professor Coyotebanjo's great edublog series called In the Trenches, which chronicles the reality of his work in the classroom. The Friday Shout-Out technique addresses the student exhaustion over a week of tough classes and their eagerness to get on with the weekend. If I read his description correctly, this is not so much a chance for students to share annoucements. No, instead, the technique seems relatively simple: to let students scream at the top of their lungs at the beginning of class!

Cool idea, if the physical plant can handle it. And Banjo's can (as you'll see below). But what makes this entry so compelling is how Coyotebanjo muses over some interesting psychology regarding why this works so well for his students (and it's not simply because screaming provides a purging catharsis, but because students depend on different teaching approaches from High School as a template for college learning -- this is an artfully written point).

Coyotebanjo's most recent blog entry sports a photograph of the parking lot outside of his office window: it has the hash marks of a football field painted on the tarmac. This is the practice field for the marching band, right below his window. Worse than car engines, it apparently produces a lot of background noise when he's trying to work. Coyoteprof claims to have become desensitized to this noise, but the photo affected me. I tend to have difficulties writing and thinking when there is music playing; hearing a marching band run over the same drills over and over again while I'm trying to write would drive me to madness (should I have said "park me to madness"?).

So I will try to remember this snapshot whenever I feel that the hallway is getting too noisy with student conferencing, whenever I feel like the athletics dept has overstepped its boundaries on our own campus, or whenever I groan about the parking lots being so far away from my office building.

Otherwise, in the mean time I will continue to write my crazy stories -- I've already started, imagining a world where cars played football, and humans are advertised during their Super Bowl. "22MPG, 15MPG...hut, hut...brake!"

Visit Coyotebanjo's weblog for some great edublogging.

And...scene!

I'm back. Have been returned to campus after sabbatical, actually, for about six months so far -- I just haven't been blogging, and I apologize, but I've been rather busy. I will likely talk more about sabbatical and such later on. But for now, here's something fun that I found: professor's responding to ratemyprofessor.com comments on video for MTVu.

I found this immensely entertaining for some reason, and spent hours watching profs react, respond and vent about the open-to-the-public online teacher evaluation service. It gives a lot of insight into how teachers see themselves, their profession, and (some of) their students.

Here's an example, from a science fiction writer/professor I admire, Paul Levinson:

I actually like the responses and comments I've received on RatemyProfessor.com -- and on the myspace.com equivalent -- and while I don't actually thing RateMyProf is the best avenue for student feedback, it opens up to us another way of understanding our students, whether via their praise or their protest.

[Is it just me, or are students not using this service as much as they used to? Maybe I've just been away too long....]

POSTSCRIPT: Browsing around, I discovered that ratemyprofessors.com has become a little more proactive about allowing professorial rebuttals across the board. I decided to join up and register, despite my better judgment, simply because I support this move on their part... I don't think I have any rebuttals to file with them, but there you have it.

I am going on sabbatical for the full 2006-7 academic year, in order to secure time to develop my next novel.

While I intend to keep researching and reflecting on teaching during that time, I've decided to put Pedablogue on hiatus until August 2007, when I return to full-time teaching. If I write about teaching before then, I will likely do it for traditional publication, and if anything appears in print I will alert you through a comment appended to this post.

If you're a regular viewer of this site, or if you want to be alerted when it relaunches (because, believe me, you will forget), please enter your e-mail address in the "subscribe" box on your right. This will add you to an announcement list, which will automatically send you a message whenever a new post is made to Pedablogue. Alternately, you could simply add the site as an RSS feed to your aggregrator, if you have one (if not, I recommend FeedDemon).

I want to thank everyone for visiting, reading, and referencing Pedablogue since 2003. I don't consider this page a dead site by any means -- I've simply "gone fishing" at the Isle of Sabbitcus for a year -- and I look forward to returning to this place to exchange ideas. Since I'll be focusing mostly on creative writing for the year to come, I will continue to post regularly to my other blog dedicated to horror writing, The Goreletter. If you like offbeat humor or bizarre horror, please subscribe!

It's been a great year for me: my second novel was published, tenure was approved, my classes were wonderful experiences, sabbatical was awarded, and I've got a poetry book presently on the final ballot for the the Bram Stoker Award (decided in June). I've also learned a LOT about teaching by maintaining this site and reading pedagogy and edublogs across the net. I will still be out there, reading along with you. As a final post, I will simply share some good links about sabbatical (which is often misconstrued as simply a "paid vacation")....

• "And on the Seventh Year..." by Mark Shainblum is an excellent explanation of what taking a sabbatical really means.
  
• My colleague at Seton Hill University, Lee Tobin-McClain, has written a fantastic series of "first person advice" columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the sabbatical experience.
  
• The Teaching and Learning Center at Truman State University offers a good compilation of Tips for Writing a Sabbatical Proposal
  
• Inside Higher Ed's running column on What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School by David E. Drew and Paul Gray is chock full of hard-knocks advice that you could probably use, generally; they offer a few tips on taking sabbatical, as well.
  
• Sabbitcal Overview Basics at Hays Recruitment
  

Keep teaching well. No matter how hard it might seem, or how little you feel you're accomplishing, remember that it always matters. -- Mike Arnzen

Next week, April 24-30th, is TV-Turnoff Week. Take a look at Adbusters' audacious coverage of the event and, if you agree with the cause, spread the word.

My honor's seminar in Thinking and Writing at Seton Hill University is using this week to perform an assigned "activism" project which asks student groups to advocate for a change of some kind in the local and campus communities. Since their final research paper will discuss the role of media in relation to any of the subjects we've studied all term, it's a fitting exercise, bringing their research together with their actions.

I've had students do media fasting as a class project before, and it's a real eye-opener for both me and the students. For one thing, I'm always surprised at how little television college students claim to watch -- and how media-dependent they really still are, despite being full-time scholars with active campus lives. While it's certainly true that they are not watching as much television, and perhaps don't even have a television in their rooms, most lounge facilities on a college campus (like cafeterias) and many dorm floors do have a television set running most of the time. Moreover, I suspect today's students are watching television programs asynchronously, through downloadable clips online, or through DVDs, which now sell the archives of almost every TV series a college kid might find appealling.

Neilsen reports say that college students watch an average of 24.3 hours of television per week. That's TWICE the amount of time the average full-time student sits in a class. Another source finds an average of 3.41 hours a day, which is an hour less than the national average for TV consumption, but not very heartening. College students favor nighttime television, from 8pm-1am, and the most popular networks are ESPN, MTV and Comedy Central -- which indicate the most popular genres for students would be sports, music, and comedy entertainment, rather than the typical sitcoms and reality shows. I have a suspicion, too, just based on observation, that the Cartoon Network is also surging in popularity.

While college students might be watching an hour less than the national norm, I can see why that difference feels like they are being media deprived. I would never make a sweeping generalization about all students -- and television viewing, or any media consumption, is not inherently bad. In fact, it is educational and gives us a way to keep our fingers on the pulse of culture. But the media often asks us to turn off our critical faculties and passively consume its messages, and the statistics on this effect on social relations are pretty astounding.

I actually think there's a degree to which the networked computer monitor has become the "boob tube" in today's college dorms, as students normalize music and video streaming and multiplayer gaming. Although these activities can often be beneficial, socially engaging, and far less passive than television consumption, they do not follow a structured time pattern (a la the TV schedule) and therefore sometimes obliterate all temporal boundaries altogether -- leading a minority of students to game all night and subsequently flunk out of school. Heck, sometimes even I surf the web for hours on end, as I forget the clock. But when they're not chatting on the computer, or watching TV, or playing games on the TV, then they're yapping on the cell phone or plugged into a PSP or other mobile toy. When I've asked students to go just a day without any media, they just haven't been able to do it. But a day without television, maybe even a week, IS doable. I'm hoping my class can make a difference. I might ask them to post here, or I'll otherwise report the results of their projects at the end of next week.

At Seton Hill University, our "smart classrooms" are equipped with these wonderful document projectors, called ELMOs. "ELMO" is the name of the company that makes these "visual presenters," but on our campus we use the term affectionately as a pet name for these two armed wonders. They work by using a digital camera instead of a mirrored lens like the usual overhead projector -- ELMO projects anything a camera would: documents, book pages, photographs, and even 3D objects that you place under the lens onto the big screen. They're GREAT!

Like most of the faculty on my campus, I typically just use the ELMO as an overhead projector to show handouts, but without having to go through the trouble of making a transparency, since it will project anything you put on it. In my mind, it's even easier to operate than a PowerPoint presentation, and I'll sometimes print out a quick outline for any lecture or class plan (in large font) and just project it, moving as we go through the class outline, keeping the hour organized. But I also like to experiment with the ELMO and see what other things it is capable of doing. After all, people's eyes are naturally drawn to a big screen spectacle and there is a way to tap into this for educational purposes and to reach out to visual learners. These devices are fantastic for visual aids, but I haven't seen professors using them very creatively, let alone with much expertise. It's something worth taking advantage of to not only project information, but to put into action to keep a class' attention (without, of course, using it as a DISTRACTION).

The ELMO (and I really should be calling it the HV-5000XG, since that's the model we're using) can zoom in, zoom out, auto-focus, and more, by pressing buttons on the "stage" at the base. The "stage" can be backlit from underneath or use the two large arms to cast light on the front of the page. But tonight I decided -- after four years of using it -- to actually read the technical manual (online pdf). And though there are some buttons on the machine that I've never used, I was surprised to learn it can do even more than I imagined.

For example, there's apparently a remote control for adjusting the focus and so forth, hidden in a compartment on the stage. So I can walk around the room and zoom in on something if I need to (though the infrared sensor might be shielded by the lecturn). I notice quite often that lecturers will neglect to "enlarge" whatever it is they're projecting, but one should remember to zoom in so that one line of text on the handout will occupy the entire width of the screen and make it easier to read. Students really appreciate this, even though you sacrifice height for width (i.e., you won't be able to see the whole paragraph or passage of text -- or the whole outline...but paper can be slid up and down to accommodate this as you need it). I like to try to use the frame of the screen to both focus and block out things as I go; sometimes the mystery of what's still to come as we make our way through an overhead keeps students alert and taking notes.

I also learned that the lens on the camera can pop off and reveal another lens inside the camera. That means that what we're using as the default lens is actually a secondary "close-up" lens! I had no idea. But I have often played around with the camera by swiveling the camera head around to project the class itself up on the screen (among other things), and now I know how to make the image less fuzzy. There's also an "iris" function on the remote, which might be useful for my film class, when I teach the idea of the "iris" and also might make for some interesting transitions (since we have a switch to turn from the ELMO to a computer monitor and back again). The ELMO has an option to include a small LCD monitor (which we don't have equipped on ours and I wish we did...so I wouldn't have to turn to look at the screen behind me everytime I use it)...perhaps I could use a laptop or the computer monitor in its stay?

The fact is, because the ELMO is a digital capturing device, with enough ingenuity (and the right cables), one could use it as a camcorder or still capture camera for a variety of pedagogical reasons. One could point it at huge maps on the wall and thereby project them onto the screen to make them even larger, or one could zoom in to, say, one region to expand it so everyone can see it from a distance. Or lectures and student speeches in large lecture halls could be simultaneously "shot" and projected onto the larger theater screen, concert style. Student exhibits, speeches, and more could possibly even be recorded using the ELMO and a cable routed back to the computer or a laptop. I'm wondering if my PDA could work with it somehow. Indeed, now that I've read the manual, I see that there are numerous types of connections that could be made on the fly.

I do like to tickle the ELMO. I will often, as I said above, twist the camera head to point at the students en masse, showing them what the class looks like from my perspective. When I'm not directly talking about a handout, but want to keep the ELMO warmed up for when I will, I put objects that are interesting to look at on the stage. A bottle of water, shot from above, makes an interesting spiral pattern. An extreme closeup of a small element of the textbook cover reveals a nuance previously ignored. It's handy to have artwork or a comic at the ready for filler. But anything will do. If I'm showing a film later in class, I project the DVD cover on the wall, or a still from the movie (or image from the textbook) that I want to analyze. Sometimes I'll put objects in motion, lifting them off the stage and bringing them closer to the camera lens, creating my own zoom effect without relying on the awkward push-button technology.

Any document editing can be shown well using an Elmo, so it's a great device for a writing classroom. I'll often have students walk the class through their writing intentions using these devices on their manuscripts -- or we'll workshop a piece as a class and collaboratively edit it by hand that way. It can be used for off-the-cuff show-and-tell, too -- in poetry class, for example, I'll often show "concrete poetry" that isn't in our book using the device, so students can analyze the shape in addition to the words themselves. I could imagine a biology teacher using it to show how to dissect a real frog live, or a sign language teacher using it to project images of hand signals.

When I project using the ELMO, I sometimes get self-conscious because my hands are projected as uncanny looking body parts onto the screen. I notice the dirt under a fingernail, the odd coloration of my skintone through the projector, the inkstains on my thumb. So I might use a pen or some other device as a pointer, or use a laser pointer on the screen.

For more tips on using the ELMO, I refer to Ray Moses' advice for lawyers on how to present evidence in the courtroom using a document camera... (he talks, for example, on how to use a ruler to show scale or what color marker works best for hilighting). More can be found using Google.

Hi Michael,
I found your website by putting the phrase "recommendation letter appreciation gift" into Google. After reading your blog on writing recommendation letters I felt compelled to email you and ask you my question. A former professor of mine wrote a recommendation letter on my behalf for a graduate scholarship application. I want to send a gift of appreciation with my thank you note. We are both members of the same financial association; would their logo on a mug be an appropriate gift? (Incidentally, it is not the organization giving the scholarship.)

Thanks for your help!
Warm regards, Jessica Smith, CFP

Hi Jessica!

Thanks for writing...and posing such an interesting question! I think the truth is that a former professor will be happy to receive almost any gift you send, because they rarely receive such things from their students (it's true!), and because the kindness of the gesture -- along that thank you letter you mentioned -- will often mean more to them than anything else. Teachers are often rewarded simply by teaching and having their students achieve success. But a personal touch in a gift is icing on the cake and you shouldn't hold back. The mug sounds fine; especially if you think it will bring a smile and a memory of you to the prof's face when they drink their morning coffee or while they're sitting in a boring staff meeting. Heck, if you are close with your prof, you could even buy matching mugs -- one for you, one for them -- to signify your newly forged professional bond as colleagues in that financial association you mentioned.

I've received some interesting gifts in my day, for a variety of reasons (graduation, rec letters, end-of-term goodbyes). The typical gift is a book or a pen, because I teach English. But I really treasure the creative gifts the most. I've had students give me paintings or other pieces of art they've made, and I display them proudly in my office. I've received DVDs from films I've mentioned in class, or actual music by the student, like a mix tape, of songs related to a piece of their writing. Office-based gifts are great choices, but they don't have to be so corporate or official as, say, a paperweight or picture frame. A student once got me a Xmas tree ornament that reminded her of a Leonard Trawick poem called "At the Flying School" that I taught in our class together. Another student gave me one of those glass mannequin heads that often display hats, just because they thought I would enjoy the weirdness of it. (I did). I've got lots of Halloween decorations (my favorite, a gargoyled door knocker that screams in pain when you knock it), stuffed animals in the shape of flesh-eating viruses (not joking!), and even action figures from horror movies, like The Thing. A pair of graduate students put their money together and bought me a lamp that realistically looks like a human skull. As a horror writer, I appreciate these offbeat tokens of affection and though you'll never see me playing with an action figure, I do enjoy the fact that the students gave me something personal (and my house is starting to look like an abattoir!)

I'm not big on decorating trees, but I put that Xmas ornament I mentioned on my tree every year and it reminds me that my teaching does matter in the world outside of the hallways of the school. And I use that glass head as a prop for a poetry writing exercise in my writing class ("Write an extended metaphor for this glass head, being as descriptive as possible."). I'm not sure if a corporate-styled mug (even if that logo is for the school itself) will inspire such creative uses, but I appreciated these personal touches a great deal. If a gift inspires me to be more creative in the classroom, or actually provides me with a prop I can use in a future class, I'm overjoyed. But I'm just as happy to just receive a handshake, thank you note, kind word on an evaluation, a recommendation letter for my files, or even just a knowing smile.

-- Mike Arnzen

p.s. for readers of Pedablogue....
Thank you cards are always a good idea when a prof does work for you that they aren't paid to do. Obviously, gifts should never be traded for grades or used to ply a prof for favoritism. They should usually be given only during sanctioned events (like, say a club Xmas party), a holiday, or a goodbye present after grades have been turned in. A good time to exchange gifts is immediately following a thesis defense or somewhere in the auditorium/grounds (or even at a graduation party) immediately following graduation.

You Gotta Teach this Essay! is a new weblog (from the editors of Brevity), which allows teacher to recommend short, creative non-fiction and interesting memoirs for the classroom (especially, I'd imagine, the college writing classroom). A good resource with lots of good reads:

this blog exists to share information on those essays that teachers find particularly useful in teaching the art and craft of literary nonfiction writing. Interested creative nonfiction teachers are welcome to post their own capsule descriptions.

I'll definitely return to this site, especially if/when I teach Memoir Writing again!

You Gotta Teach this Essay! is a new weblog (from the editors of Brevity), which allows teacher to recommend short, creative non-fiction and interesting memoirs for the classroom (especially, I'd imagine, the college writing classroom). A good resource with lots of good reads:

this blog exists to share information on those essays that teachers find particularly useful in teaching the art and craft of literary nonfiction writing. Interested creative nonfiction teachers are welcome to post their own capsule descriptions.

I'll definitely return to this site, especially if/when I teach Memoir Writing again!

Edutopia magazine -- published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation -- publishes a neat regular department called, "Sage Advice": a collection of tips from teachers in answer to a posed question. The latest issue's question is:

How do you challenge and motivate gifted students?

You can read my answer in the magazine, something I sent in when I was reflecting on how I try to approach a classroom of Honor's students a little differently than others.

Feel free to share your own 'sage advice' by leaving a comment.

Hot on the heels of my posting about how to make lectures more permeable and interactive, Richard Reis' wonderful resource, Tomorrow's Professor, has posted a very helpful essay advocating the use of "Activity Breaks" to enhance and increase class participation.

Since the attention span of almost all students is between 10 and 20 minutes, you can expect to lose most of your students if you lecture for 50 minutes straight. Even professionals fall victim to the "my eyes glaze over" syndrome. Not only do students tune out once that "dead" period is reached, the energy level of the class also flags. The solution might be to structure a 50-minute class something like this: a mini-lecture including an introduction, an activity break, a second mini-lecture, an activity break and finally a third mini-lecture, including a wrap-up. The mini-lectures contain an introduction, a body and a closing, similar to a straight lecture except they are shorter.

Great advice! Using mini-lecture methods to "bookend" an activity is a great way to think about how to structure a class. I often intuitively do this in writing classes, but I'm going to try to more actively apply this method to my content-based courses in literature, as well.

Breaks -- whether for activities or just to break up a multi-hour course -- are imperative, I think. Even plays have intermissions. Sometimes I'll ask students to do something clever during a break and give them a longer break to accomplish it (like in my poetry classes, I'll say -- "take your break outdoors today, and write down every smell you encounter" -- or "go write a poem that describes a 'secret place' you find on campus, but don't mention it by name; then come back to class and read your poem and we'll see if we can guess where it is"). Students really get a charge out of the change of pace and the moment of "escape" from not only the classroom but the monotony of routine.

And by a "charge" I don't just mean having fun. Let's call it a learning "recharge" instead.

I subscribe to the Tomorrow's Professor newsletter; now they are delivering in BLOG FORMAT! I highly recommend it.

In one of my classes this morning, I caught one student repeatedly turning to another and talking. I couldn't tell what they were talking about -- the weekend? the weather? or was it related to my discussion point? -- but I interrupted anyway, as I usually do, to remind the student that if they're going to speak, they should speak to the whole class.

It turned out she was answering questions that the woman beside her had asked about some terminology I was using.

I thanked her for helping, but suggested that the student could have just as easily raised her hand and asked me to clarify.

I notice this sort of sideline commentary behavior a lot. Not because I'm using strange jargon, but -- I'd speculate -- because college students often are either "too polite" to interrupt the lecture, or "too embarrassed" to expose their lack of understanding to their classmates. But what they don't realize is that there's a degree to which such sideline comments not only interrupt the focus of the conversation with distracting sounds (people turn to see what they're talking about, etc.), but that it also takes TWO students away from the focus rather than just one. I'm pretty hard-headed about this -- if I'm pursuing an idea, I want to make sure that everyone stays with me, and I also want to make sure that everyone understands it. Sometimes one student might misinform the other.

But there is something else lurking behind today's event. Our class has had a series of open class discussions -- several, in fact, led by student presentations -- so the students in question may not have realized that I thought I was lecturing. There was a shift in mode from student-centered to teacher-centered delivery that I assumed was obvious, but it wasn't as self-evident as I'd assumed. I neglected to "signpost" that I was going to take center stage.

I've been reflecting on my approach to the lecture and the ways in which I try to retain focus on the ideas while at the same time keeping the conversation open for dialogue, dissent, exploration and other forms of interactive discourse with the students. My lecturing style is very porous; I expect interruptions and sideline discussions. And I will ask questions that aren't only hypotheticals, but also solicit answers to them. And I will always try to get students to argue with me or test examples that I toss out -- often playing devil's advocate -- primarily in order to catalyze active learning and critical thinking rather than the rote taking of notes.

This often takes a lot of energy and concentration. In his weblog, my colleague Dennis Jerz speculates about the relative energy it takes to lecture about literature (versus leading a discussion of a text)...a lesson culled from an experience of teaching a class while feeling under the weather. His contention is that it requires less energy to lecture than to facilitate a discussion -- and this puzzled me, because I didn't see how they were really so different. An hour's worth of teaching is an hour's worth of teaching, no? But then I realized what he was raising an inquiry into the performative activity of the teacher and the amount of energy it takes to pull off a successful performance. One way to think of the lecture, in conventional terms, is that lecturing is to running discussion as monologue is to dialogue. Jerz's revelation is that dialogue can be tougher than monologue, even though the "weight" of the conversation is ostensibly evenly distributed in a discussion. Monologues can be prepared and don't require much "off the cuff" processing even if the onus of the communication is on the teacher, whereas a dialogue requires spontaneity, impassioned interest, quick thinking on the feet, and a vim for interpersonal exchange.

Understandably, when a teacher is ill, as Jerz was, it's hard to drum up that vim. Personally, if I'm really ill, I'll quickly move some of the "work" into group tasks to give myself a little recuperative break. The students usually are understanding in this regard.

But I'm still trying to figure out if I, personally, would feel any difference in the energy required to run a discussion as opposed to a lecture. I tend to approach virtually all of my lectures as a form of dialogue to begin with, even when addressing a large crowd in a formal setting. Perhaps this is because I teach English courses, where interpretation of a text is usually open to dispute, and where I solicit multiple viewpoints in order to enhance collaborative learning. Or maybe I do this because I fear boring an audience. But if pushed to define the difference in my own methods, I would probably say that I define a discussion as student-centered process of discovery from the bottom-up, whereas a lecture is a content-centered discussion of material the teacher delivers from the top-down. From my view, neither is a monologue. What I'm saying is that, pedagogically, both are interactive processes, with different levels of "call and response" activity and numerous dialogic demands that attempt to reach people with different learning intelligences (such as visual, auditory, etc.). So even when I prepare what might amount to a "speech" to present to the class, I think of my lectures as open discussions to some degree. If they're not, I see students eyes get droopy, and it troubles me. So I try to keep them on their toes. I may be authoritative, but I will often declaim being the sole authority, citing not only the sources I'm drawing on but also student work from the past or student comments in the now.

Let's call this approach the "permeable lecture": one that is pre-organized to cover certain information that the teacher knows is essential to deliver, but which is at the same time open to interruption, dialogue, debate, questions, and micro-conversations. Order that makes room for chaos. The teacher is still center-stage, but the students are solicited to participate as fully as possible; it is not only the expectation that they remain attentive listeners, but that they also genuinely prove it. I suspect all teachers are open to interactive discussion, but I bet such interactivity is usually reserved for Q&A time after the lecture is over. However, there's always a degree to which lecturing can be receptive to discussion during its delivery, and it can even foment a collaborative process of "working" the ideas together in a decentered way.

Although the techniques that follow are probably nothing new to you, here are some strategies I personally use to try to keep my lectures permeable (if possible -- granted, not all content should be open to dispute or philosophical musing, but it's preferable to groom interest in the audience, rather than ignore disinterest). The trick to the "permeable" lecture is to keep the potential for chaos, diversions, and other interruptions at a minimum, while still keeping the conversation "on task":

• I'll put an outline of my lecture on the board, usually before class begins, and leave it there for the entire hour. This keeps us all on track. Maybe just three bullet points is enough. Students will usually write these down, and then fill in notes during the discussion. I might model this by also taking notes and putting the key words or concepts that I would expect them to know (for, say, a test) on the board, as well. If we don't get to the latter points on the board, this is a visible reminder that the lecture isn't over yet, and we'll get to it next time. Or I'll think on my feet and generate an assignment about those points for homework.
  
• Alternatively, I'll prepare an overhead that uses questions rather than "talking points" and ask audience to answer the questions. This method generates lots of interest. Then, after the answers have been exhausted, I'll reveal parts of the overhead that I've covered up which have my prepared answers on them. If there are any subpoints that haven't been addressed yet, I'll give a mini-lecture on those. Having the overhead shows that my lecture is prepared, but also open to student contributions to the issues that the questions raise. Sometimes I'll write their answers on the overhead alongside my own. [Alternatively, I've used handouts of outlines with very large blank spaces or columns to invite students to put their notes in the margins or fill out the form as I lecture.]
  
• I will physically point at the bullet points on the board and use "tugging" hand gestures to remind students to draw the connections between their points and mine. The idea is to keep coming back to the lecture, keep on track, allow the rest of the class to keep focused on the issue at hand.
  
• I try to remember to ask for questions routinely after each main idea that I have to communicate, not just at the end of the hour. But I also will pause midway through a "talking point" to raise my own questions. This approach does not just espouse the Socratic method. I'll actually call on students who might seem to be drifting off and see what they think about what I'm saying, as I'm saying it. If they've been daydreaming, I'll even give them the chance to recalibrate their attentiveness by restating a point I've just made, but I still demand that they answer the question. I want them to test my ideas, to think of them as claims or hypotheses rather than simply authoritative truth passed down from the oracle. The burden of teaching is on me, but the burden of learning is always on them.
  
• Naturally, knowing you could be called on at any time to answer a question can keep you attentive. But some students get caught off guard or, otherwise, genuinely aren't sure how to respond. My students are perfectly free to say "I don't know," and I'll assume that I haven't worded my question well, so I'll rephrase it and give them a second chance. Or I'll ask if others do know and wait for the hands to pop up.
  
• If someone blurts out something highly irrelevant, I either ignore it, laugh it aside (if it's a wisecrack), or, in a humorous way, actually say "irrelevant!" using a faux European accent. If it's a joke that tries to disrupt the class, I might start asking that student hard questions, maybe even work with the material of the joke itself, if I can directly push the student to connect it to the content of my lecture.
  
• I will use student names in hypothetical examples or imaginary test cases. ("Let's say Charlie is on a dinner date with Jane...... is it sexist for Charlie to pay the check without asking if she'd like to split it?"). I'll also often use second person plural to discuss topics, while making direct eye contact with student after student. ("When you pay for the check, what are you communicating about gender relations? When you let the other person pay, what are you assenting to, passively?"). Then I'll pause. Sometimes students will think I've asked a direct question rather than a hypothetical. That's okay. That means they're actually playing out the line of thought. If they answer the hypothetical example in a "real" way, I'll work with them on their turns, but get back to the point at hand as soon as I'm able.
  
• If students raise their hands while I'm speaking, I will call on them. If I have to get through my point and can't sacrifice the time to enter into dialogue, I will either ask them to "hold that thought" for later, or give a subtle, "I see you but we don't have time for it," non-verbal gesture (perhaps a subtle head shake or a hand signal that signs "put it down"). When I finish my point, I'll ask "Did that answer your question, Horatio?"
  
• I pay attention to student habits in my classroom. If a student has always been argumentative about every point raised in previous discussions, or if their comments are often superficial or ego-centric, I will be less likely to invite his or her comments during a lecture; if a student rarely volunteers a conversation point but they want to do so during lecture, I'll leap at the chance to get them to participate.
  
• In a class that is usually discussion oriented and highly student-centered, students sometimes are slow to recognize that I'm lecturing, not facilitating open conversation. So I use subtle non-verbal claims for "the floor" when lecturing, so that students know that this isn't a WIDE open discussion. I might dress more formally, use the podium more stiffly, adopt all the cues of the presentational mode of speech delivery. Sometimes I'll use direct "recentering" language like "listen up" or "okay, let's begin."
  

These techniques don't always come into play at once. The circumstance determines the approach. But I do try to keep the class student-oriented, even when it is teacher-centered. Although some lectures demand less permeability than others, I often prefer the open lecture style to the closed lecture style -- because the more invested I am in my listener's attentiveness, the more they're invested in the topic at hand. Plus it gives me a way to gauge their level of knowledge about the topic at hand and adjust to take it up or down a notch, or, for instance, to apply a different element of Bloom's taxonomy to the matter at hand.

I'm teaching an advanced creative writing course this semester, and for the past few weeks we've been having full-class workshops of short fiction. The teacher's role here is to facilitate collaborative learning across the class, by having students share their editorial assessment of stories with an eye toward helping a particular writer revise.

The process for running the workshop is simple: we go around the room, one student at a time for precisely two minutes, presenting our feedback to the writer. The teacher goes last, bringing up any significant issues that haven't been raised, or summarizing the key revision strategies he feels need reinforcing. The writer whose manuscript is on the table must remain silent, listening carefully and taking notes until the end, when he or she can respond or ask follow-up questions. This structure encourages fairness and equity; everyone gets to speak and -- ideally -- everyone learns from listening to each other.

When you do this for class after class, the process gets stiff. Things get a little too habitual for comfort. Some students read blithely from their written comments or go page by page through the manuscript, just punching their clock. Others say the same thing each time, having found their niche. Class begins to seem stale, repetitive, mundane. Our class has been pretty good at keeping the energy alive and I think it's fair to say that everyone is still interested and active. But I began to worry about the routine -- and wanted to make sure that students were paying attention to each other and not going through the motions. So earlier this week I broke the routine by adding two new twists.

First, I refused to just play timekeeper and notetaker, and insisted on asking questions to each critic as she presented her ideas. "What do you mean you don't like the character?" I'd ask. "Is it the things the character does, or the type of person the character is?" I'd press critics to give examples, reference the ideas in the book, and generally defend their arguments. This threw many of them off -- after all, they thought they were the ones doing the critiquing, not the other way around! But I wanted to remind them to be critical thinkers, generally -- and to use the writer's manuscript as a subject of discussion and dialogue, not simply dismemberment.

The second wrench I tossed into the works was allowing students to affirm or disagree with critics as they delivered their feedback. This is a method that's common in some writer's workshops, where members of the group -- who are usually required to silently listen -- can politely say "ditto" or "dissent" if they very strongly agree or disagree with a critic's comment. (And I mentioned that when I was in a workshop that did this once, I would often bark out "Dissent-o!" because I didn't agree with this method at all). The idea here is that if a lot of people say "ditto" then the comment is particularly significant and the writer better listen (or, with dissent, vice-versa). It also helps to save time, since the primary points that have been "ditto'd" are ostensibly already clear, and there's no need to repeat that point when it becomes your turn to offer feedback.

The class seemed to enjoy the more vocal and active workshop method on the surface, but some were uncomfortable being challenged by me when they presented their feedback. One significant drawback was that the writer whose manuscript was on the table obviously wasn't prepared for this turn of events or necessarily willing to be treated different than others, and found it difficult to concentrate on what was being said to her about the manuscript. Naturally, the student will still have the written feedback from her peers to review and can always seek follow-up advice from them after class. But I can understand how frustrating it must have been to have been treated differently.

At the beginning of today's class, I asked the students to write a brief reflection on whether or not they felt the "ditto/dissent & questioning" method worked, and why. I was surprised by their reaction: 62% of the class preferred the new method! "It added some spunk to the class," a student wrote. "It was nice to learn how others felt about a point you made," said another. "It helped the writers get a broad sense of their audience's response, and it enabled everyone to feel more actively engaged," said another. "It broke the monotony of the single voice," one student said, adding "the 'bursting' of voices adds to a relaxed atmosphere and lessens tension." Indeed, the spirit was rather convivial during the workshop and one student even confessed, "My husband and I have already implimented this technique into our everyday speech and it's provided good comic relief."

However, some did see the new method as a rupture of civility, which "opened the floor to a lot of chaos and rude interruptions" and that "it may not be a good idea for [the] first round...maybe later in the semester". One student compared it to Communism and said it not only "broke their train of thought" but that it "definitely made the critiquing process take longer." One felt "most people say whether they disagree in their own critique anyway" and that the interruptions forced students "to lose their train of though and often spend more time with 'un' and 'uh' than on comments for the writer."

All valid points, on both sides of the equation. As a whole, I think the process was a success for everyone except the writer -- ostensibly the person who stands to gain the most from the workshopping process in the first place.

Out of fairness, if I do this again I will do it for everyone, right from the start...maybe even later in the term, as one student recommended. But I honestly don't think I will do it again with this particular class. It's not a good idea to invite open "dissent-o" too often, if you want workshops to run on time and avoid "herd mentality" agreement. I also think people sometimes get too caught up in looking for an opportunity to blurt out their assent/dissent, rather than learning from one another through active listening (which is the ideal, I think).

But I do like mixing (shaking?) things up once in a while just to keep students actively participating and on their toes -- and it's good to expose them to alternative models should they ever want to run their own writing workshops in the future.

[ For those interested in managing the interpersonal quirks of writing workshops, I turn you to an article in my newsletter, The Handy Job Hunter for Writers, called "Working the Workshop". ]

For the past -- what? -- seven years or so, I've been spoiled. Virtually all my classes have been either hour-and-a-halfers (i.e., a "Tuesday/Thursday" schedule) or 3 hour night classes. But this term I've got a pair of one hour (Mon/Wed/Fri) writing classes. Make that 50 minutes each, with 10 shaved off so folks can make it across campus from one class to the next.

It's common, really. I've taught one hour courses before. But this term, I'm really feeling the difference. Part of my problem is that the classes I'm teaching were all originally designed for 1.5 hour meetings, and these are redesigned calendars covering the same amount of material. I may not have planned well for the shorter hours. But that's not entirely responsible for the difference. As a teacher used to having a good 80 minutes to work with, a period with enough elbow room to pursue student questions and comments in depth, the time now zips by in the proverbial blink of an eye.

Everything's rushed. Take roll. Get everyone on topic. Move chairs, if necessary. Stick to the plan. Begrudgingly cut people off or close a conversation to move forward -- or table a point until the next meeting (and mourn whatever I'll have to sacrifice to accommodate it). Scramble to cover things they need to know for homework. Return papers as quick as I can before the next teacher comes in the room weilding a machete.

I firmly believe it is impossible to have a satisfying class discussion in 50 mins, let alone to fit in a group assignment and/or mini-lecture. In one class -- an upper division writing workshop -- we barely have enough time to discuss the assigned reading before we start critiquing manuscripts. In another class, freshman comp, the students like to talk...a LOT...and because it's a class in critical thinking as much as writing, I encourage open dialogue. But we veer chaotically off-topic quite a bit, because of competing desires for the floor.

We're meeting course objectives, sure, but it feels like we're only touching them with the very tiny tip of our fingers before people start packing their books and moving toward the door.

I'm trying to be proactive about this. Time management needs to become a bigger concern. I'm going to start crunching the one hour class. Here's some things I'm trying or considering:

• pass around a sheet for roll, so I don't chew up time ticking off names
  
• alternatively use roll call taking to have every student answer a question that's on the class topic for the day
  
• use a student to distribute handouts while I lecture/facilitate discussion
  
• use group work to allow more students to discuss while taking up less time
  
• embrace student-centeredness even more than I already do; less me time, more them time
  
• starting right on the top of the hour with an exercise that quickly gets us on track, like a one paragraph writing exercise
  
• dedicating the last five minutes of class to having students do a writing exercise or get a head start on the assigned homework...and using that time to return papers or jot down notes on what we need to do next time while they write
  
• enforce hand-raising during full class, open discussions
  
• look forward on the calendar to see if there's anything I can move out of the classroom and into homework or to drop altogether
  
• spend less time giving directions by distributing printed guidelines and asking students to read them for homework (and to come to class with questions next period)
  
• minimize transitional time-wasters, like pushing desks into a circle. I will still have a circle, but one technique I'll try is to arrive to class early and invite students to set it up before the period actually begins.
  
• show up early and put directive material on the board at the beginning of the hour; make the class outline "visible" and the homework assignment unecessary to speak aloud
  
• try to free up a few class periods for looser discussion so we can catch our breath and do some reflecting (i.e., possibly screen a film outside of class instead of in it; possibly assign peer editing outside of class as homework)
  
• rethink and reprioritize the reading selections with an eye toward cutting content that can be sacrificed; emphasize depth over breadth; possibly spread one reading out over several periods to allow deep/close reading
  

[Things I'm thinking about in the mean time (and I invite comments). Why do we assume that MWF meetings should mostly consist of 1 hour classes in the first place? I've read that the average attention span is 20 mins... perhaps there is merit in the phrase "less is more"? Does meeting thrice work better at reinforcing course content? How free are teachers to influence the calendar, when the students' lives are organized by so many other extra-curricular elements, from sports to jobs?]

I recently contributed a chapter to a forthcoming 2nd edition of a book called Writing Horror which could, ostensibly, become a textbook I assign some day. I've been thinking, too, about writing an outright writing instruction text in the near future. The longer I do this, the more closely aligned what I write and what I teach become.

This is what most scholars do: produce scholarship, in the form of books and other publications. The benefits to students of taking a course by the prof who "wrote the book" on the subject would seem self-evident. The author is an authority on the subject and knows the book so well that she'd be the best person to teach from it.

But is there a conflict of interest when a teacher assigns a text of their own authorship to a class, earning royalties from the sales?

The American Association of University Professors' statement "On Professors Assigning Their Own Texts to Students" provides a great overview of the ethical issues this matter raises. As they put it, there is a risk of abusing their "captive audience":

Because professors are encouraged to publish the results of their research, they should certainly be free to require their own students to read what they have written. At the same time, however, students in a classroom can be a captive audience if they must purchase an assigned text.... Because professors sometimes realize profits from sales to their students (although, more often than not, the profits are trivial or nonexistent), professors may seem to be inappropriately enriching themselves at the expense of their students.

The AAUP article goes on to show some model ways in which some campus policies have dealt with the issue: from requiring committee (or supervisory) approval of required course texts to the school picking up the tab to distribute a professor's texts for free. All good ideas, but, as the AAUP also reminds us, it is ultimitely best for faculty themselves to have the freedom to determine which texts are the best to teach a subject -- so long as they do not take advantage of students by the authority inherent in the instructional role.

Of course, this doesn't just pertain to assigning one's own titles in a class just to make a few dimes in royalties. I've seen (and had) profs who have required texts written by friends, colleagues, spouses, and advisors; I've seen them require books that can only be purchased at specific bookstores or copy services downtown; some have students buy them through their website, with a hidden referral fee (aka "kickback") built into the web code. While many probably have the best intentions, and probably teach these books well, there are probably alternative avenues of delivery that they should have considered.

In fact, faculty who do assign their own books can take the initiative and sometimes help students SAVE money. They could put extra copies on reserve in the library or make electronic editions of the manuscript available free of charge. Or they could buy books at their contracted author discounts and pass the savings on to the students. Another idea might be to have course fees or a departmental budget pay for buying enough texts to cover a section, and then loan them to the students each term the course is taught, retreiving them at the end. In the very least, they could encourage students to sell them as used editions at the end of the term. And when money-saving measures are unrealistic (say, with a brand new title), one could promise -- in the syllabus, in writing -- to donate the personal royalties earned from class purchases to a course-related charity.

According to testimony in an article at Yale Daily News on this issue, students are often more comfortable buying a professor-authored book for a class than the professor is selling them. Often, having the author of the book in the classroom is a bonus and it can enhance the learning. One problem the article mentions, however, is that sometimes the professor risks repeating the book verbetim, and the use of the book creates much redundancy.

It may be better, in fact, to have a class help with the creation of a textbook rather than deliver the material to them post-facto. This issue of "illuminating the process" is the best way, I believe, to think about it. This is why it might actually make more sense to bring students into the inside of a work-in-progress rather sharing the end results of a work of scholarship in the shape of an already-finished and published book. I once had a sociology teacher who assigned a few of the books he had read as a precursor to the book he was currently working on, and he shared his book outline with the class in the form of lectures, soliciting feedback, questions, and inviting us to share our own ideas. Although it was a little too teacher-centered for my tastes, I found this collaborative process very enriching. If he would have published the book (he sadly died before he could), I'm sure he would have credited our class in the acknowledgments.

If a professor-authored book is assigned (or even an article, poem, or play, for that matter), then the teacher should be open to criticism and even invite suggestions for expansion and revision. As a teacher, I have assigned both my own creative writing and my own criticism in my courses. While I've never put my books in the bookstore as mandatory buys, I have freely shared my writing in oral form (performing a fiction/poetry reading to my classes), in handouts I pass around (having students critique my own short-short fiction and poetry), and in assigned readings put on reserve in the library (articles I've written on books or films we've studied in the class). The only disadvantage I see with doing this is that sometimes students are reluctant to critique me honestly; but I do a lot of self-critique so they can see that I am open to it, and I do actively solicit feedback and ideas.

Creative writing books are a bit different than, say, a biology textbook. I read an article in a student paper online (Southern Nevada's Coyote Press), where the student writer felt profs shouldn't assign novels at all. She smartly reminds us that "writing THE book" and "writing A book" are two very different things. And with creative works, ego is often involved. It's bad enough that the students might perceive the assigned book as a sort of highway robbery -- they might even consider it professorial narcissism.

Personally, when I share my own creative writing with students, one of my purposes is to model what it's like to be an "artist as thinker" -- that is, someone who is thoughtful about what they are doing and not just writing blindly under the auspices of "entertainment." And as a literary critic, I am trying to practice what I preach about writing for a "discourse community"...because, in my opinion, good writing always raises issues for discussion. Ultimately, when I assign my own texts for a class I do so not because I am "the authority" but because it gives me an opportunity to show what it means for a writer/scholar to be open to criticism. When I put one of my own texts on the table, I solicit the same sort of critical probing and editorial inquiry I would like to see happening when they discuss any text, particularly in their own writing workshops and peer editing sessions (which are usually mandatory in my classes, particularly for end-of-term papers).

What I'm suggesting is that the teacher who assigns his or her own books has to be a particular kind of teacher and a particular kind of author. At bottom, they have to be a very humble or courageous one, I would imagine. One who doesn't limit interpretation of the book to "what he intended." One who is extremely receptive to criticism from students and not afraid to admit errors. One who is as open to hearing about the flaws of the text as he should be skeptical when told about the strengths. In other words, a writer who models how writers learn from listening to their readers rather than a writer who weilds the text like a cop might flash his shiny new badge -- as some sort of evidence of authority over the students. Being teacher is already authority -- and ego-boo -- enough.

In my research for a presentation on "Teaching with Film" this week, I came across Richard H. Dery's excellent article, "Digital Gumbo" (available at the thoughtful and often humorous webzine for teachers, Faculty Shack). In it, Dery talks about his design of an online tutorial in literary "character" that utilizes Bloom's taxonomy in what I would call a "model" way. (And I'm not just saying that because it uses a clip from Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear, which I have written about and taught often.)

Pop quiz (for extra credit points):

"What group invaded the British Isles from France about a thousand years ago (one point), and in what year (one point)?"

For the (in)correct and (sad but) true answers, see Tenser, said the Tensor.

***
Hilarious, but I felt a little guilty laughing at the jokes about visual learning and what not. I wonder if Tensor shared the results of this exam with his or her class? I would guess so. When the majority of students miss a question -- extra credit or not -- I always spend time on it during the following meeting, and I might even share some of the funnier answers people gave (after all, creativity and deductive reasoning can and should be rewarded!). But if such questions appear in a final exam, there often is no opportunity.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I made a small series of new handouts on the topic of source citation for my Composition class and, among them, attached a page of a sampling of cited sources from an older handout to the batch. As I looked over the sources, I realized that all of the samples were from the 90's...and I wondered: at what point do these examples become self-evidently outdated? While it's true that a good old source is still a good source, and that "dated" research is not a necessary condition for poor research, there will soon come a time -- if it hasn't come already -- when the post-Millenial generation will see EVERY reference that begins 19xx as foreign, alien and other. I wonder if we're there yet. And I wonder if I need to update my handout just to keep it contemporary and invisibly relevant to today's world.

I used to think that the handouts I made in preparation for a course were valuable because I would have them done -- and ready to pull out as preformulated tools for the next time I taught the class (and thereby also saving me prep time). But now I'm starting to realize that revising a handout is like revising an article: it not only improves the original, but also renews its pertinence to the mind. Working on these same handouts over and over again, refining them each time I utilize them, is a way to keep me integrated in the present class and in tune with the students' developmental process, rather than tethered to the content alone. I never want to become one of those crusty old professors who lecture off of even crustier yellowed notepaper. Updating (literally, bringing them up to date) handouts helps keep the teaching vital, even though it sounds like 'extra' work; running a class is a lot like composing a long essay and revision is a necessary part of the process.

This is why it may actually be a bad idea to, say, ask a workstudy student or a teaching assistant to update the handouts for you. A handout isn't just a matter of administrative work; it's a way of processing a body of knowledge. However, sharing a handout with an assistant or even a colleague in your department might allow you to catch things you've missed. They can function as editors do. Students often do this anyway -- I know that I've had students catch mistakes in handouts "live" in class, and I appreciate it, but I've forgotten to make the changes they recommended because I get so caught up in the moment that I neglect to jot down a note or memo.

One frequent update I have to make in my handouts is in page numbers that reference the course textbook. I often try, for example, to point students to the page in the book where I am getting a quiz question, by appending the page number to the question in the quiz itself. When I reformat the quiz, I have to remember to look up the new page numbers if the book has gone into a new edition.

Naturally, this is also one of the benefits of integrating electronic handouts into your curriculum. You can make updates and edits "on the fly" to keep a handout current at any given time. But I've found that sometimes this can lead to problems, because students will print out handouts to bring to class, and if I've made many changes, they will all have different handouts. It's important to mark the date of the update somewhere on the document when going this route.

I was interviewed by Kendra Hamilton for the just-published article, "Getting Off the Burn-Out Track" -- part of a series about important faculty career trends in the latest issue of Diverse magazine. In the article, Hamilton sheds light on the ramifications of the waning of the tenure-track for academics seeking work. She raises the central question: "How do they strike the balance between the job they need right now and the job that will fulfill the aspirations they came into the field with?" Talking about everything from "freeway faculty" to professors-of-practice in the new academic landscape, the essay gives a sobering snapshot of the realities most grad students will have to face and a realistic reminder of how privileged those of us with tenured positions really are.

See Erin O'Connor's blog entry on "Phasing Out The Tenure System" for more context on this issue in relation to Academic Freedom.

Edutopia this month published "NCLB Confidential" -- an interesting article by Roberta Furger that explores a few elements of the No Child Left Behind Act that are often ignored because so much of the debates surrounding this act focus solely on the issue of testing and student accountability. I've written here before about one of these neglected areas (the NCLB Act's relationship with military recruitment). Furger's essay takes a look at two components of the Act that are starting to raise problems: how the Act mandates both "parental involvement" in the school and the employment of "highly qualified teachers."

The latter phrase -- "highly qualified" -- is semantically deconstructed by the article. The NCLB makes clear what the standards are for qualification and they are apparently flexible in this criterion, accepting alternative forms of certification. But to be "highly qualified" does not equate with being "high quality" though that's what people initially assume. Some are arguing that this could lead to hiring low quality teachers or generally lower the standards regarding what it means to teach well. Furger cites Barnett Berry, from the Center from Teacher Quality, who challenges the specious way that NCLB defines "qualified" teacher, as simply having a basic teaching preparation and baseline education:

"...someone with a degree in biology, with no knowledge of how to teach second-language learners, no knowledge of how to find the right resources to engage kids, no knowledge of technology applications in school, no knowledge of how to work with parents or children whose culture is different from their own, is 'highly qualified.'"

In other words, being "minimally" qualified is elided by supervisors and administrators as meaning "highly" qualified. Interesting point.

Does certification alone qualify a teacher? Barry also participated in research that asked, "Does Teaching Certification Matter?" -- which challenges research that claims that having a teaching certificate did not make a student more or less prepared to teach than others who had a college degree. His group found that they were indeed still good teachers, but could be better ones, and generally, that preparation is really the issue, not certification.

[Note: Barnett Berry has started an interesting new weblog, Building the Teaching Profession.]

I was invited to give a talk with a colleague's small class yesterday. When I entered the room, I was taken aback by the way the students were seated: all were against the walls, spread around the room. I felt this was bizarre and so I immediately took a seat in the middle and with the encouragement of my colleague, pulled them into a tighter circle so we could talk. But that image of the students -- spread as far away from the lecturn as physically possible -- really struck me as an anomoly.

I'm very conscious of spatial dynamics in the classroom. I don't mind students sitting in the back, but when I lead a conversation, I'll walk the rows and often speak right next to them. I want it to be clear that everyone is expected to participate and pay attention -- often because my classes are highly interactive spaces where participation matters.

Currently I work a very WIDE room for my freshman composition class. I'd estimate it's about four seats deep and ten seats wide. When I lead a standard class discussion, I have to march the length of the room -- from the door to the window at the far end -- and project my voice rather loudly when I'm on one side or the other. But that doesn't bother me. What's troubling is that it spreads the students far apart from each other. It divides them; and there is a sort of "faction" mentality that seems evident to me when debates get hot: one side argues against the other, from the comfortable distance of the double-wide trailer sized room.

You don't have to be a communications theorist to recognize that students tend to territorialize their space in a learning environment. If you teach, you see the same students in the same seats virtually every day -- as though some invisible seating chart were put in place even though you didn't assign it. It's predictable: students sit in the same seat each class, claiming it as their own. Some consciously choose to sit where they can better hear, better see, better learn. Others consciously choose places where they can better hide, better doodle, better sleep. Some have stock preferences -- conscious or not -- that they carry with them throughout their college careers, built long before they ever stake a claim to a chair in the room: the back row slacker, the teacher's pet in the front row, the loner who prefers not to have anyone in a three seat radius. There are myriad motives behind a student's choice of seat (one source (.pdf) even suggests that students sit based on whether they're left- or right-brain dominated). And I think that it's fine to allow students to choose their locations, actually, so that they can find a "home" site where they can feel comfortable in the classroom. It's human nature to return to the same place, time and time again. It reduces the anxiety-producing stimuli that an unfamiliar position can generate. This is, perhaps, why no one likes to have their seat taken (and everyone's heard of students getting into fights, even, about "taking my seat" -- in fact, some might claim specific seats time and again out of a fear of intruding on another student's turf).

But I wanted to mix things up a bit today. I like to try to get students to break out of their habits and to more consciously make choices about their own learning. Calling attention to a student's "situatedenss" can really open their eyes, and I like to use the classroom as a means toward that end. In the past, I've done things like rearrange the desks before the students arrive, or asked everyone to turn their desks around so I could lecture from the opposite wall of the room. This can have a "renewing" effect, sometimes.

Today I tried an experiment to consciously raise the class' awareness of their seating habits and to point out the limitations of the overly "wide" classroom. Borrowing an exercise called "The Dynamics of Sitting" (from John Suler's site for Teaching Clinical Psychology), I reported to the students what their seating preference might suggest about them ("people who sit by the window are daydreamers, like the 'freedom' of having wide-open space next to them (but often pay the price of being far from the door") and asked them to think about the subtle messages that such structures send to their teachers and classmates. Then I asked them to all pick up their books and coats and stand up by the blackboard. I gave them the opportunity to pick a new seat, just to try it out...and stipulated that, a) they could sit wherever they like next time; this wasn't necessarily permanent, and b) that they couldn't sit on the sides of the class (so that the center columns would be filled and I wouldn't have to march the length of the room anymore). It was like playing musical chairs, because many raced to grab the chair they had their eyes on. And when the dust settled, the dynamic instantly shifted: some seemed relieved that they could get a "better" seat, closer to the board or closer to their friends...while others were visibly uncomfortable and even a little upset by the changes. I asked them to talk a little bit about what was different, what was unfamiliar, what was upsetting. Then, sadly, before we really got anywhere, it was time to end class. I recommended they perform an experiment and for a day try to consciously sit in a new chair in each of their classes, just to see what kind of difference it made.

We'll see what happens...whether they'll have interesting conclusions to report about these experiments, or whether they'll choose to go back to their trusty territorialized chairs when we return on Monday. For now, I feel like this broke some students out of a comfort zone that was actually a blockage to open dialogue and I'm hopeful that they've learned something new about their "situatedness" in the classroom. There's an old line that's become something of a mantra for me as a teacher: sometimes you have to take a fish out of water to make it see the water.

I'm going to try to change the seating in my film studies class next week, as well. In that course, which is located in a very large media room, students almost HAVE to sit in the front row if they want to see the subtitles on a foreign film. But inevitably, a large number of them choose to keep their distance (which is odd to me, since half the seats aren't filled). For some students, I think it's hurting their grades. Time to grab another fish by its tail....

In my entry "Remembering the Objective of Learning Objectives" two years ago, I wrote about Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and how it gives teachers a great way to think about course design -- from syllabus construction to assignments. This term, our campus is hosting "Teaching and Learning Forums" which will specifically focus on Bloom's taxonomy. A group of instructors at SHU will be workshopping their syllabi with it in mind, led by Dr. Terrance DePasquale. We've only just begun these forums, but I'm confident that doing this with colleagues will be a great way to reflect on and retool my/our courses.

In fact, I've become something of a taxonomic terror this past week: my Freshman Composition course is writing their first major essays on issues in Education, and -- thanks to the suggestion of my colleague Laura Patterson (who is expertly steering our campus toward a Writing Across the Curriculum model) -- I actually used the taxonomy itself as a focal point for class discussion. I put the cognitive processes (knowledge, comprehension, analysis, etc.) on the board and asked students to tell me what they thought these words meant -- and whether they thought they were equally good at all of them. The students got very interested in this, once they started sharing stories about their high school experiences and the majority agreed that most classes never go much deeper than teaching "knowledge."

Then I asked them if the taxonomy was a hierarchy -- with "knowledge" at the bottom and "evaluation" at the top -- or if they were all equally important. One student interestingly posited that "knowledge" is like the hub of a wheel, with spokes leading to all the other cognitive skills. Another suggested that people who don't know very much are still often good at "evaluation" from their gut instincts.

The discussion of "evaluation" was most productive. Out of the blue, I suggested we evaluate something we all know a thing or two about, like "chicken strips." The class laughed at this idea, but then I pointed to one student and said: "Seriously, what do you like about a chicken strip?" She shrugged and replied, "I dunno...I like them crunchy, I guess." Immediately everyone started spitting out things they liked or hated about them: greasiness, dipping sauces, batter, meatiness, etc. I transcribed all these on the board. Then we set to wittling the list down to isolate the most important "criteria" for evaluation. I think I was successful at getting across the idea that there's a difference between a snap value judgment and true evaluation, which requires a set of socially agreed-upon criteria.

Then I opened up the proverbial can of worms: "So how do your teachers evaluate you? How should I grade your writing?"

That, as the cliche goes, is the question.

It circled right back to Bloom's taxonomy...and some grading criteria I listed on the syllabus distributed on the first day of class. I think my attempt at making students conscious of the assumptions of the teaching situation was a productive and positive move. And I hope they'll continue to think about these issues as they become more reflexive thinkers.

The problem with taxonomies, obviously, is that they become monolithic abstractions that can lose their meanings entirely, reduced to meaningless buzzwords. Bloom's taxonomy is wonderful, but I still think I prefer Lorin Anderson's revision of Bloom's taxonomy, which changes some of Bloom's terms from nouns to verbs (e.g. "knowledge" is "remembering"; "comprehension" is "understanding"). Perhaps I'll bring this up with the class later on. The point I want them to recognize is that not only does evaluation require social justification, but also that the criteria shift and change as social groups evolve.

Shari Wilson does it again for Inside Higher Ed with an excellent essay on the attitudinal issues that teachers sometimes project in their classrooms, called "A Poor Desk-Side Manner." It's a very smart piece on how teachers sometimes slip into modes that are either too tyrannical or too softie. She takes the side of the learner, and suggests that teachers need to find a "voice" (just like writer's do) that balances the desire to be liked or respected against the desire to lead and educate.

For more about the power-relations inherent to this subject, you might be interested in my review of Keith Johnstone's book Impro, regarding the "status exchanges" that play out on the classroom floor.

In my Composition course this semester, I'm going to assign something called a "Difficulty Paper" -- a task in writing about the things students find difficult to understand when reading an essay, ranging from vocabulary to turns in an argument to theoretical references -- in response to an essay they'll be reading by Michel Foucault (on the "Panopticon"). My former colleague at SHU, Beth Matway, often mentioned using this approach in her writing classes whenever she assigned a complex reading, and I like the idea. Though I've always tried to use open discussions to help students wrestle with reading difficulties (and I have taught Foucault successfully before), I want to give students a guided experience in writing about their struggles, as well. Indeed, because I am talking about an "Honor's" course, where students may not be comfortable revealing the chink in their academic armor, I think it might be all the more useful to do so.

The "Difficulty Paper" is an assignment espoused by composition theorists Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahoe in their book, The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. It comes out of the idea that by grappling with intimidating readings, students can master their anxieties about (and become more confident reading) academic texts, and that -- through writing out their thoughts (e.g., taking a metacognitive approach) they can identify what they already know and what they still need to find out. This not only trains students in ways of reading in the future, but it also, in turn, can lead to more thoughtful and honest paper assignments. Peter Elbow calls this process "text-wrestling" -- an approach to writing that struggles-yet-embraces difficult discourse, while avoiding the superficial and distant approaches to writing that a student may have picked up in school. It's really a transcript of critical reading and I'm hoping it will not only help students to understand Foucault's article, but also isolate their own ideas in relation to it, and construct arguments wisely.

As a form of teaching scholarship, Amy Haddad posted her use of this sort of assignment for an ethics course at Creighton University Medical Center, which even includes guidelines I might emulate. What I like about this approach is the emphasis on group discussion, which seems crucial to developing student reading and thinking skills.

I still need to hunt down the book, Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which includes Mariolina Salvatori's article, "Difficulty: The Great Educational Divide."

Fall classes began today at SHU. On this morning's docket: an Honor's section of Freshman Composition. The first day is always an exciting one, since you start off class with a "clean slate" and get to meet brand new people that you're going to get to know rather well in the year to come. It's especially fun when, for most of the students in the room, it is their first college class ever. Things went fairly well today, though I ran out of time and didn't get to cover everything I'd planned. At the end of class, after all the students filtered out, the class tutor (at Seton Hill, we're given a junior/senior who assists with class management -- this time around I have one who was actually in my Freshman Comp course four years ago) came up to me and confessed he had a hard time holding back laughter during the whole hour. "I get it now," he said. "I see all those things that the Freshman don't realize you're doing."

I laughed along with him, pleased that he could see the methods at work from the teacher's side of the desk. But the class may have been genuinely funny on its own accord. I generally throw out questions and solicit discussion on the first day, just to get people participating and to let them know the spirit of exchange I hope to generate in the classroom. But sometimes it gets silly. Here are some of the somewhat sillier things I recall that transpired, though my memories might be a little skewed:

While discussing the question, "What is critical thinking?"
Student: "It's when you go deeper into something."
Me: "So criticial thinking only happens underwater?"
Student: "Har-har...no, it's when you get inside of an idea and start asking questions about it."
Me: "Very good! And I would say the most important question is the question "Why?"
Another student raises her hand.
Me: "Yes?"
Student: "Well isn't that the whole reason for writing?"
Me: "I think so...wait...Isn't what the whole reason?"
Student: "To find out why?"
Me: "Yes, perhaps it is. But explain that a little more. Why would we want to do that?"
Student: "I don't know... to know more...?"
Me: "Yes, naturally, but why do it through writing?"
Student: "Umm...uhh..."
Me: "I mean why not just look things up? Why bother writing?"
Student: "...um, because that's what my teachers always taught me?"
Other students start nodding.
Me: "And why did they do that?"
Students start frowning.
Student: "Hey, wait....you just keep asking why!"
Me: "Precisely! And why do you think I'm doing that?"
Student (laughing): "Stop it!"
Me (laughing): "I know, I'm like the little kid who keeps asking why. Why is it bright out, daddy? But why does the sun rise, daddy? But why does it do that? Blah, blah, blah. Listen, I love what you're saying, but if we just want to know things, we can look them up. The world is more complicated than any dictionary or encyclopedia suggests. And you really shouldn't just ask why because a teacher told you. Including me. You should want to know for yourself. Writing gives us a way to 'submerge' into a concept and explore the reasons why on our own."

After introducing a future media critique assignment:
"You all probably agree that the media is bad for you. Everyone knows that. A lot of people say so. But, ironically, most of those people are on TV."

While discussing "What is persuasion?"
Student: "It's when you make a point and knock down your opponent's ideas, or anyone else who disagrees."
Me: "Whoa! That's mighty aggressive!"
Student: "Yes, it is!"
Me: "Well, I'm going to argue that you're wrong. But don't hurt me. Can I try to persuade you that you're wrong?"
Student smiles: "Go ahead and try."
Me: "Okay, by 'point' I think you mean a 'viewpoint,' but there's never just one point-of-view. Agreed?"
Student: "Of course. Why argue in the first place. Go on."
Me: "Okay, so there are multiple viewpoints. If there weren't, we wouldn't need lawyers and courtrooms. There'd just be the law and that would be that. A police state. But we need lawyers on both sides of a case to interpret the language of the law. But even beyond that, there are multiple truths. One man's truth is another man's lie. That's why there's religious disputes. I guess all we have, really, if we want to get along, is persuasion. In persuasion, you're simply trying to convince an audience that your position is the most reasonable one. Am I right?"
Student: "That works for me. I can see that."
Me: "Muahaha! So I win!"
Student frowns.
Class laughs.
Me: "Wait -- oh, shoot! No, I don't win. I lose, because I just knocked down your ideas, thereby proving your point, not mine!"
Student laughs.
I preen my beard profoundly, in order to cover the contradiction and move on: "You can win an argument by being most reasonable and yet still lose it. Hmm....maybe persuasion isn't about winning anything at all..."

While asking students about their majors...
Student: "I'm a poli-sci major."
Me: "Oh, a scientist of politics. Excellent!"
Student: "Yes."
Me: "Sounds kind of scary... [putting on a Peter Lorre voice] 'I'm a scientist of politics...a MAD scientist!'"
[Later, after asking if anyone in the classroom had a video camera for a later assignment]
Same Student: "I do!"
Me: "A political scientist with surveillance equipment! Now you're really starting to scare me!"

Most of this stuff is delivered very tongue-in-cheek and the students know I'm playing it up for the sake of interest. (I'm taking lessons from Johnstone's Impro.) They were all good sports and eager to talk. I was impressed by how engaged they already are with the main ideas of the course. I can tell this is going to be a great class dynamic. I'm excited about going "deeper" with them in the term to come.

Today I submitted my tenure package: a three binder set of documents about my teaching, scholarship, and service over the past seven years at Seton Hill University. Though the process is difficult, it feels liberating to have it out of my hands...and the process of assembling the portfolios and reflecting on my work was much more rewarding than I thought it would be.

A lot of advice about getting ready for tenure is aimed at keeping good records and developing your career early in the game, so that you'll "survive the tenure track" and have excellent material ready for the tenure package when the time comes around to submit it. But little help is available out there on preparing the package itself. Obviously, one should turn to colleagues and administrators on campus for assistance and mentoring every step of the way. But I did find a very good article to recommend. In "Making Your Case: Strategies for an Effective Tenure Package," Kirk Martini compares a professor's career to "building a city" and the tenure package as a series of "maps and guidebooks" that escort the evaluator through it. That's a great analogy. Organization is everything. I spent a lot of time not only composing a narrative overview of my work, but also added brief narrative cover pages to function as introductions to each section of the portfolio (for example, I included a brief bio for the section where the letter from my "external reviewer" will go; for the "course materials" section (aka teaching portfolio), I described why I chose the classes I chose to represent). These mini-intros also cross-reference different parts of the portfolio if I felt it prudent, so that the committee will be invited to draw connections. I also used construction paper with labels to subdivide different sections to make the organization of material clearer (e.g., for the "scholarship" binder, I tab-divided the material by genre (articles, presentations, fiction, poetry, and new media) and then subdivided those with black separator pages (e.g., "articles" is subdivided with pages labeled "instructional essays" and "book reviews").

There's a lot of curiosity about how weblogs relate to tenure; since blogs aren't "peer reviewed," many scholars are skittish about incorporating blogs into their package. At the same time, faculty who blog claim that it's a form of "open effort academics" where the formative process of scholarship is shared among a discourse community. I tend to agree with the latter, obviously (otherwise Pedablogue wouldn't exist!). And since I am loosely attached to our New Media Journalism program at Seton Hill, it's part of my work and I didn't bat an eye about including websites in my binder. I included a section of "new media" under scholarship, and included screen captures of Pedablogue and other websites I've designed; otherwise, a few selected entries from Pedablogue went under a subdivision called "Scholarship of Teaching," alongside some articles I've published about pedagogy.

I think the best part of the process was sorting through my old teaching files and realizing how much some of my routine courses (like composition and literary criticism) have evolved over the years. It's hard to communicate that evolution in the tenure package, but I've come to realize that a lot of these "hoops" that academics are asked to jump through are really opportunities for reflection and self-discovery that prompt renewal. As far as the outcome of what lies on the other side of the proverbial hoop, wish me luck -- decisions won't be final until the Winter.

Dennis Jerz' great Literacy Weblog alerted me to a new article up at Inside Higher Ed by Shari Wilson about the problems attached to night classes that meet for three hours, once a week, called "Once a Week is Not Enough". Wilson laments the lack of learning that happens in these longer, less-frequently-meeting classes. The crux of her argument is that there are "not enough practice-and-feedback loops to help students absorb, retain and apply information" in a class that meets once a week. Conversely, in more traditional courses, "students have a chance to replay the information in their heads and practice. With the guiding hand of the instructor, they can get even more direction and be assured that they are 'getting it.'"

At Seton Hill, we offer a large number of these courses, and our facilities often seem to be running at full steam 24 hours a day. Part of the need for these one-shot classes stems from scheduling conflicts that I would call "displacement effects": art students, for example, take studios that last all afternoon long, displacing their available time for "traditional" courses to the morning and evening slots. Other displacing effects would include athletics and activities held in the afternoon, nine-to-five jobs held by more and more of our traditional-aged students (in addition to the returning adults), and certification program conflicts (almost half our students at Seton Hill, for example, are enrolled in an Education Certification program, which functions like a double-major, forcing students to take overloads and pack those classes into their schedule whenever they can if they hope to graduate in four years). On top of the displacement effects that give rise to a need for these courses are some of the other motives Wilson mentions, such as acquiring adjuncts who can only teach at night, or adopting a consumerist model of accessibility, that markets a quick and easy education to the workforce by hosting classes during what is ostensibly their "time off."

It's also a way to maximize the use of the physical plant, since classes would otherwise lie dormant in the evening. Once night courses populate a calendar, only an extremely radical revision of the schedule could change the system, and it would require adding a lot more full-time faculty to a campus' roster and perhaps even building new classrooms -- an expensive proposition. So I think most campuses that have these systems are stuck with them, to some degree.

I inevitably teach one of these three hour long night courses a term. I acknowledge that the difficulties that Wilson points to are very real -- and that it takes a certain stamina from student and teacher alike to succeed in them -- but there are also many benefits to teaching these classes and a host of strategies a teacher can adopt to make them work as best as possible.

The primary benefit of teaching a once-a-week, three-hour course is mostly evident in the amount of time you are given to work with. Having three hours allows both more flexibility and greater focus. Obviously, you have more flexibility in a class with three hours, rather than fifty minutes; if a class discussion is going well and you want to extend it, you can do so. You can commit larger blocks of time to group work, writing exercises, than you normally would, and even screen films or enact skits, and still have time for discussion afterward. It's great for writer's workshops or seminars where entire books are being discussed. I find having all that time quite useful; nothing frustrates me more in a traditional class than having to cut something productive off because of the (virtual) "bell."

As a writer, I find that teaching a once-per-week class benefits me by opening up my schedule so I have more time to write early in the day all week. I'm a morning writer -- using the first few hours of the day to focus on my own writing (the secret to my success in this regard was the realization that developing my own writing is just as important as my students', and so I try to spend as much time working on my scholarship as I do grading student papers -- and I find it easier to write in the morning (and who wants to start their day grading papers, anyway?)). Luckily, my campus usually allows me the freedom to not have any classes until 11am for this purpose. I also can spend those three extra "workday" hours on errands or class prep. Jerz and Wilson rightly note that teaching a night class often means that you get students who can't attend normal office hours, and demand extra "night" time from a teacher, since they work during the week. But I find that office hours can be adjusted tactically: hosting one office hour a week in the late afternoon (circa 4:30 or 5) can often accommodate these students as well as other traditional students who have classes during the "banking hours" when most faculty hold their usual office hours. The only drawback, really, is that fewer colleagues, staff and campus services are available at that time. But I have "regular" office hours for those needs, too. Teachers can also host "virtual" office hours and help these 9-to-5ers via e-mail or online chats.

When you first design a once-a-week class, one problem immediately arises in regards to organizing the content. Because the class meets once a week, it seems like you will have to cram what would normally be three meetings worth of material into one session. Some teachers even rotely divvy the three hours up into three lockstep units. Inevitably, as Wilson notes, teachers wind up dropping readings and assignments along the way and "shortchanging" the class, compared to what students in a thrice-per-week classroom are getting. Teaching a process-based course can suffer, if, say, drafting and revision happens in class -- if you only have 10 to 15 meetings a term, it's hard to plan serial learning. But if one adjusts by trying to teach depth rather than breadth, these problems fade away. When I teach a night class once a week, I shape it so that a lot of the reading, screening, peer-editing, and information-gathering/-digesting happens outside of class. I've used mandatory discussion board work outside of class to keep students interacting during the week (though this doesn't always work). I might set up "study groups" that encourage the students to do group work on their own combined schedules. Students come to the meeting prepared to discuss, with questions written down or a reading journal and an already-read book in their packs. When I teach film, I often assign screenings outside of the class and schedule a time slot outside of class where work study students can show the films. The idea is to "displace" as much as you can into homework without compromising the course. That means making the night class less focused on information and in-class application and more focused on process and reflection. I design the class so that individuals are doing stuff outside of class that they can't wait to share with others when we meet to pow-wow about it weekly. This approach also might mean retooling some of the course content so that it can be applied to the world outside the classroom, where students might be asked to do more homework "out in the world" rather than book learning. I might assign a paper that has students write about an observation they make in their workplace, rather than write about an article I have them read about work.

And I adjust my own work schedule accordingly, too: I often have paper deadlines later in the week, so that I can collect them and comment or grade them before the following class session. I might e-mail a handout or reading to the entire class in one batch. And I make heavy use of the reserve room, for distributing reading material I might otherwise pass out in the classroom. Sometimes, if students need more hands-on direction, I might cancel a regular class session and instead host individual or "study group" conferences spread out at different times across the week.

Teaching a three hour session can be "exhausting" for teacher and student alike, but it's important to schedule breaks (one at the midpoint, minimum) during these classes. Aside from providing intellectual and physical relief, I find these breaks helpful to mentally shift gears and move to a new topic, and I usually plan my courses around the break. Even so, sometimes it's difficult. After a full day of classes and faculty meetings and office hours, it can be almost surreal when you leave campus at ten at night, under the moonshine and the sound of crickets. I try to schedule my day so I'm not in from 8am till 10pm, but when those days have to happen, I'm sure to take it as easy as I can the following day. It's often more difficult to teach a morning class the day after a night class than it is to teach the night classes themselves. I make sure my weekly grading is done with as much discipline as I can muster, so that I'm not madly prepping or racing to grade papers to return the next morning. As with all teaching tasks, time management is crucial to organizing your life around a night class. That's something that students, too, need to learn and I do spend class time talking about study strategies for taking a night class, particularly if I have freshman taking one for the first time. I also make sure that I remain just as demanding and challenging of students in my night classes as I am in the "traditional" daily classroom. Sometimes it's not the neophyte freshman, but the student who has had a number of night classes in the past that were mismanaged (often, unfortunately, by new adjuncts that come and go in the dead of night) or treated as "education light" who are the ones that carry the wrong expectations when they enter the room, and it takes a little work to get them to respect our time together as a meaningful educational experience. If a student is having problems staying alert for three hours, or keeping up with homework, I take pains to conference with them privately early in the term to try to coach them a little in the skills it takes to succeed in a once-a-week course. I might compare it to going to church, or other rituals that often only happen once a week, but which can also be life-altering.

I'm the sort of person who likes to learn new tips and tricks for using my word processor. As both a writer and a teacher, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, so I find macros, shortcuts, and templates an invaluable resource for saving time and increasing efficiency. As a writing teacher, I like to pass along word processing strategies to students (like, for example, how to turn off the "smart quotes" or turning off those annoying auto-underlined hyperlinks in Word) so they can create professionally formatted manuscripts.

So I frequently visit webpages like Office's download page or the wonderful resources at Word Tips. I read books on MS Office (like Word Hacks or Windows XP Annoyances and I surf any number of Office-related weblogs (see The Office Zealot or The Office Weblog for good ones) and I even subscribe to newsletters (like The Office Letter and The Editorium). I install add-in programs like the wonderful WordToys macro set. All of these things help improve my efficiency, make me more comfortable using Office, working on edits, and helping others with the software. And some of these things are even fun.

Today The Office Letter included a neat link that I felt other teachers might benefit from: Internet4Classrooms. This site has an informative page on "Using Excel in the Classroom" -- something that's always been a weakness of mine, because I always opt to use Word whenever I can. Sure, most teachers are familiar with using Excel to track grades, but unless they're teachers of math or accounting, they probably don't use it for anything else. The Internet4Classrooms page on Excel has an EXCELLENT guide on how to make "concept maps" and flow charts in Excel (along with samples you can download and edit), something that has always baffled me in Word. If you ever use diagrams in your handouts, it's worth a look-see.

There's plenty of software for teachers available on the internet, but I like to find programs that enhance what I already use...for free.

Who's there?

Summer. I think.

It's summertime, and while I'm still keeping busy with prep work for a summer residency for our Writing Popular Fiction graduate program, I've started wearing shorts again and doing some creative writing and generally trying to relax. On my agenda: finding ephemeral DVDs and watching obscure films with an eye toward adding something new to my Art of Film course next Fall.

One lucky find the other day was a copy of Short Cinema Journal #10: Chaos in the bargain bin at a local used media place. It includes Electronic Labrynth, George Lucas' student film precursor to THX 1138 (which I've never seen, but now want to). It reminded me of Chris Marker's work. But an even better discovery on this disk was Po Mo Knock Knock by Greg Pak -- a wonderfully comedic spin on Derrida that borrows heavily from Bergman's Persona (a film which is permanently on my syllabus for the film course). While I might not use it for film studies, I'm definitely going to use it in Literary Criticism, to complement the screening of the Derrida biopic and lighten things up a little bit. After all, "play" is a fundamental part of deconstruction.

I love using short films for the class. One of the troubles with teaching film studies is handling screenings, since most films have a running time of 2 hours, and even in a 3-hour course session, it's hard to organize the time. I typically have two screenings of full length features hosted outside of class (often proctored by a work study) -- treating the films themselves as "texts" which must be read as "homework" before we analyze them together in the classroom during regular meetings. Analysis is usually clustered around clips. Since my course is a once-a-week, three hour session, that also gives me time to regularly fit in a short film to study and discuss "live" and these can be the most rewarding experiences of the course since the "short film" genre is rarely known by students going in -- and they're often experimental uses of the medium, playing with camera technique or lighting...or historical documents from before the studio hegemony commodified the viewing experience into two hours.

Here's a list of my favorites (most of which seem to be either humorous or surrealist): Autobiography of a Jeep, Black Ice, An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge, Un Chien Andalou, Food & Dimensions of Dialogue, Fall of the House of Usher, La Jetee, Meshes of the Afternoon, etc.

There's something thrilling about sharing these movies with students, particularly those who only know film through Hollywood. I'm getting eager to teach this course and summer has barely begun.

Ever assign a creative writing exercise, and have a student go "too far"?

I have. In fact, my personae as horror author seems to invite it.

In my article, "Grossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom" -- just published in the latest issue of The Broadsheet -- I share some pretty scary anecdotes about students who have tried to appeal to my affinity for the grotesque. I explore the bind it puts me in and how I've tried my best to make the "gross-out" a teachable moment.

It ain't easy.

Please take a look and share your feedback by leaving a comment below!

We held commencement exercises at Seton Hill yesterday. That means "summer break" is here, though there's still a little grading to be done, graduate modules to teach, five or six freshman orientation sessions to attend as advisor this summer (!), and other things I've been tasked to do as interim division chair of the Humanities this past semester.

One thing our campus does every summer is give a free book to all incoming freshmen during those aforementioned orientations, and early in the first semester we host a large book discussion en masse with all the students, faculty, and staff who want to participate. Generally speaking, it's a good bonding experience, and a great introduction to the sort of literate college life we hope to foster at Seton Hill.

LOTS of colleges have similar programs, too. I notice that schools in our region, like Slippery Rock University, are running them too. Even our "nemesis" out east, Seton Hall University, is hosting a Freshman Reading Project. I say "nemesis" only because people PERPETUALLY confuse their school's name with ours. And ironically, I notice the book selection at the Other SHU this year is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon...the exact same choice as ours!

Since I teach freshman composition I've participated in this program every year, and I generally enjoy it even though it seems like many of the incoming students don't bother to read the assigned title. I think it's good for them anyway to be exposed to the college as a "discourse community" where people get together and talk about texts (and facilitating such a process is essentially all that I do for a living!) But it's also important to try to encourage the students to read the book and actively learn from the experience. I try to accomplish this on my own by integrating the book into my course as much as I can, and at minimum I usually have a "post-discussion" discussion in the classroom, where the students can, at least, share their thoughts about the reading program.

I like to use the web to enhance my preparation for this project, and given what I see online at other schools, I think our campus could better use the web to promote the project. Discussion questions for most mainstream books are almost always available from their publishers anymore, and I easily found the discussion group page for Vintage Contemporaries (which includes questions specific to Curious Incident) since it's listed right on the back cover of the book itself. I notice that a number of colleges that host Freshman Reading Projects have websites dedicated to the project that explain the motives, the processes, and the books themselves online so students can prepare. I really like the design of Temple University's page, which is so well-done it makes me want to rush out and read the book they're using this summer, West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary.

I notice that Temple enhances their selection by inviting the author to be a guest speaker on campus. This is one of many tactics that can really enhance the experience for the students and encourage reading. We were lucky enough to do a similar thing last year, with author James McBride, who talked with students about his book, The Color of Water, to much success...and I'm sure it got people reading if they hadn't read it beforehand. Duke University hosts a reflective panel discussion that includes the author and faculty. The University of Texas at Austin hosts a "reader roundup" which gives the Freshman a LIST of books that they can choose from, each one proposed by a different faculty member, and then the faculty who put the book on the list hosts an intimate discussion with all the freshman who chose that title.

Our college usually has "break out" small groups that discuss a list of questions that are handed out, and then we gather together in one large hall to "report" from the groups and have a large shared dialogue. We've talked about switching this order, and moving from large group to small, in order to give the students who hadn't read some issues they can discuss even if they're not directly emergent from the book. We've also discussed possibly hosting the small groups a week or so AFTER the mass discussion, to give students more time to read, in hopes that the mass discussion sparks interest. And I hope I'm not giving away anything here by saying we've also bandied about Dennis Jerz's concept of using weblogs as a way for students to discuss the title before classes begin, though such a method would pose challenges.

I have a feeling that ultimately the selection itself makes a big difference. Curious Incident is a literate bestseller, but it's also a sort of children's book with lots of pictures. I bet we'll get a good response. Reading is worthy no matter what, but as I learned in my graduate teaching experiences, you cannot rely on the assumption that a book will teach itself. It's important to have a good series of questions that raise issues in the book since freshman -- many of whom may never have a read an entire novel on their own -- might not notice the issues or read very closely the first time through. Likewise, those freshman that are avid readers already will feel a sense of community when they come to campus. Critical reading is a skill that takes time to master, so I think it's important to re-read books, too, and I'm glad to see that some of my colleagues in the English program have integrated the summer reading titles into their lit classes, as well.

Don't ask me how I stumbled upon this website for training cellists in mastering their instruments, but stumble I did...and my mind began to wander. Wouldn't it be fun to teach a class using activities like these?

The Puppet: Pretend to pull a student's head up with an imaginary string.

Cello Song: While hugging their instruments and swaying back and forth, the students sing "I love my cello very much. I play it every day. I love to watch the spinning strings, as my hands fly away." At this point the students extend their arms away plucking the strings.

Charlie Brown's Teacher: By sliding the hand up and down the fingerboard, have the students carry on a conversation with each other.

Hide The Keys: A student is asked to leave the room while another student hides a set of keys. When the first student returns, the class plays a piece, playing louder as the student nears the hidden keys.

Creative activities from courses outside of my discipline (or even those that target age groups other than the traditional college-aged student) always inspire me to borrow and steal and try something unique in my own classes.

Here's how I process it. Once I see the pleasure attached to an activity from another discipline, I start to think about the subtle ways that the course content might intersect. Training students to "sound out" in a music class must be a lot like teaching sound-sensitivity in poetry, for example. So I could get my poetry writing students to have non-sensical conversations using sound alone, like the "Charlie Brown's Teacher" exercise above. Another approach might be to reframe the very exercises themselves through the lens of my discipline. I could, for example, invent a creative writing prompt that asks students to set a story in an imaginary but amusing posture training class. Or sometimes the applicability of outside activities lies in their unique technique. Could I create a "hide the keys" sort of game, asking students to hum louder and louder as I move a pointer around on a projected map or other image, I wonder?

This is why it's great to sit in on other people's classes, too. Teaching is just one of those arts where you unconsciously adapt and borrow structures from other teachers, but there's nothing stopping a teacher from doing it consciously and creatively, too.

I'll have to ponder that "puppet" trick for awhile.

TV TurnOff Week (April 25-May 1, 2005) has officially begun. Do you have the guts to turn your television off for an entire week? Can you and the people you live with stand to miss an episode of your favorite show? Are you able to shun the television news and opt for the printed paper or an internet site instead? What would you do without your Simpsons fix?

I believe that television media should be studied, not blindly consumed or, alternately, snobishly scoffed at by scholars. But I love the idea behind TV Turn Off Week. One of its many aims is to try to get people off the couch and more active in their communities, their families, and their own lives. It also aims at raising literacy by showing kids the alternatives to the so-called "idiot box" or "boob tube."

I taught a course in Media & Society a few years ago, and integrated TV Turn-Off Week into the curriculum. I distributed the scary "tv facts and figures" handouts from the Turn-off Network's home page to students on the first day of class, had them read a book on Culture Jamming and later had students make posters (like those at Adbusters) and spread the word on campus, under the auspices of "service learning" and literacy activism. They did a good job. I think my favorite poster was a photoshop trick one of the students used, pointing a smoking pistol at a smashed up television screen. The campaign was only moderately successful, however, because the students could find no way to measure its effectiveness, and many of them put up the posters too late in the term. If I did this again, I'd launch the class with a more agressive campaign.

[Adbusters really takes the campaign into radical territory. Check out their advocacy campaign for TV Turnoff and be sure to check out their "TVBeGone" remote control zapper!]

TV Turnoff had mixed results, but a related and more-successful experiment we performed in that Media & Society course was a "Media Deprivation Assignment" (guidelines in Word format) which asked students to consciously "unplug" from all the technological media they use for an entire day, keeping a log about their "media fasting" and writing a reflection on the experience. I got the idea for of this assignment from a course listing I found online by Karen Cristiano which sounded like a thrilling thing to try.

They all HATED it, but learned just how saturated they are with media and how reliant they have habitually become on it. Students wrote about the sheer terror of actually hearing their car engines while they drove, or the frustrating horrors of not being able to play with their X-Boxes or the haunting sounds of other people's media that they couldn't escape from. Several admitted failure and gobbling up as much IM'ing and CD playing as they could after going half a day without them, like a smoker caving in to the cravings of a nicotine fix. I wouldn't say it changed their lives, but it really opened their eyes.

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4/21/2005 - #21192 Foucault Philosophy Term Paper ...Article/News/Press Release Writing/Editing I need a writer to write a 25-page term paper (double-spaced) on Foucault''s philosophy. I have an article that contains all the ideas that are needed to write this paper. However, those ideas need to be re-written so this term-paper is original. Please provide quote me a flat-fee to for this service.

I subscribe to a fairly good Yahoo group called Work For Writers that sends out job opportunities for freelance writers, as a way of both finding new markets for my work and maintaining my own newsletter for writers and journalism students looking for work, The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. But this week there's been a spate of job listings coming in from student plagiarists looking to hire professionals to write their papers for them, like the listing above.

Subscribers to this list have been expressing their outrage and strongly recommending that others don't take those jobs. But some are defending the practice as legitimate "Work-for-Hire." "Work-for-Hire" is common in the freelance writing game -- it's what you do when you are contracted to write a single document for a company, who generally tells you what to write, claims all rights to what you've written, and almost always removes the writer's byline (replacing it with their own). It's the lowest job on the food chain for the freelancer, but for many it is unfortunately a necessary way to supplement income so they can pay their bills.

In most cases "Work-for-Hire" is legitimate, but being hired to commit a fraud in the classroom is obviously unethical (and illegal, though I've yet to hear of a school convicting a student with "fraud" for plagiarism). But it appears to be a widely growing trend. I recall seeing an interview with a person who makes a VERY good living writing papers for college students on the ABC special report, Cheating Crisis in America's Schools...and that writer was netting more money for a single term paper than most writers get for writing a department for a magazine. Nate Kushner's weblog got a lot of attention recently, when he "outed" a student who approached him via instant messaging, trying to negotiate rates for writing a paper on Hindu religion. And, obviously, term paper mills are still thriving businesses.

I've written here before about how teachers can try to prevent plagiarism in the classroom, but today I'm marvelling over the irony that I am BOTH a teacher who gets papers from students AND a freelance writer who is receiving solicitations for writing them for students. (If I were truly entrepreneurial, I would design a paper so difficult that students would be likely to turn to professionals for "work for hire," then take their job offers under a pseudonym, and write the papers myself -- which would not only net me some easy $ but also make them oh so very easy to grade. Hah!)

But seriously: this reminds me of the importance of teaching ethics when training students in the "business side" of writing. Whereas most college classes only focus on the aesthetics of creative writing, the various formats of business documents, or the effective methods of research, the ethical application of these skills needs to be emphasized just as much. Not just in terms of source citation -- but also distribution and publication of one's work. I have seen a number of advanced courses in creative writing and "how to" articles which emphasize the goal of making money -- and with good reason, because there are a lot of markets for writers out there that pay a pittance or nothing at all, preying on the writer's ego and the desire to see one's name in print. But they tend to go over the top in their advocacy for "guerilla marketing" and trading on your skills in a quest for a buck.

Oh, and what would Foucault say about that job listing at the top of this entry? He'd probably chuckle at the way a commercial worldview has blinded all who are a party to the exchange, and point back to his article on the "Author-Function" (aka "What is an Author?"). I'd like to imagine that the student writer who is soliciting a freelancer's "work-for-hire" is doing so as a sly and canny form of research about Foucault's essay on literature as property -- as proof positive that an author's name is a social construct that is necessary only to make the creator accountable for acts of discursive transgression -- but I somehow doubt it.

[UPDATE ON 2/2008: Honoring.com reportst that Who's Who Among American Teachers has ceased publication, along with the National Deans List and other books of this sort. See www.honoring.com for details].

Along with about 100,000 other teachers out there, I received a letter from Who's Who Among American Teachers(r), informing me