Results tagged “sabbatical” from PEDABLOGUE

During my sabbatical, I had the opportunity to be a guest writer for a weekend at the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop -- an outstanding workshop for writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror literature, run each summer out of St. Anselm college in New Hampshire (a place you may recognize from the recent presidential primaries) by my former editor from Dell Books, Jeanne Cavelos.

Today, Odyssey posted their latest podcast: a recording of my guest lecture on "Humor in Fantasy Writing" from July 2007. Here's the full description of the event from their site:

Michael A. Arnzen was a guest lecturer at Odyssey 2007. Michael led the class in a wild exercise that revealed some of the qualities that make us laugh and discussed the fascinating connections between humor and horror. In this fun and illuminating podcast, Mike explores the characteristics of humor. What qualities are necessary for humor? When is the weird and gross funny? Mike reads his amazing story "Domestic Fowl" and discusses how you can develop a comic perspective, how to be funny without trying, and how to make humor arise organically out of your story. How is a funny story different than a joke? What joys does comedy provide the reader?

You can download this lecture on the Odyssey Podcast page, or even subscribe to all the Odyssey lecture podcasts on iTunes.

If any of your students is (or if you yourself are) a writer of fantasy stories, horrific tales, or science fiction odysseys, you ought to consider the Odyssey workshop. We get a number of Odyssey graduates in our Master's program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill, so I can attest that it is not only a well-run and fun program, but that it also produces great writers who are very savvy about the genre and publishing.
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I'll no doubt be writing a lot about horror genre writing workshops this term, since I'm running an undergrad course in Horror & Suspense this term. See also my horror writing blog, The Goreletter, for a post on this, Odyssey, and other Horror Writing Courses & Academics in 2008.

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

This year is the first time in years that I have not had a freshman composition class on my teaching load, as part of a one-time development and renewal release from the class. As a writer and an English professor, naturally this is a course I enjoy and would dare say I'm good at teaching (since I've been doing it almost annually since 1992!). But after over ten years of teaching basic writing skills, it's actually a very welcome -- and renewing -- release, as I'm freed up to teach other courses in my specialization instead. We've just wrapped up Final's Week as Seton Hill U, and I've really had a dream term: a course in Poetry Writing and a course in the Art of Film. Next term it's Fiction Writing, Literary Criticism, and a new course I'm designing as a "Publication Workshop." All of these subjects are dear to me and it should go without saying that though the workload is as high as ever, I'm a very happy teacher this year.

But I keep thinking about freshman comp. It's hard not to, when I see my colleagues, literally, hunched behind their desks surrounded by portfolios of writing or pushing a shopping cart filled with binders down the hallway like a sooty worker heading back into the mineshaft. But I've also been rethinking my composition course design for the past few weeks, looking over the textbook (which is going into a new edition) and even attending faculty meetings about the course that I am not required to attend.

I must be crazy, right?

Well, only a little bit. Freshman comp is, like it or not, a crucial component of who I am and what I do. I kind of miss my role as usher as students trasition from high school into adult education. I miss opening new eyes before they get exhausted and jaded by their college experience. And now, when teaching upperclass students who still don't know how to write a thesis statement, it makes me want to teach them how to do so all the more.

Besides, at Seton Hill full time English faculty do not have the luxury of only teaching upper division courses in the major -- all of us, virtually, teach the freshman "Seminar in Thinking and Writing." (And our school is REALLY in the minority in this regard. One source reports that only 7% of the freshman composition courses in this country are taught by full time faculty!) Although I sometimes wonder whether my PhD could be put to better use by teaching the more advanced courses, our students and our relatively small campus -- and ultimately, all of our upper division courses -- are probably better off for having full time faculty with an investment in the college teaching the new freshman how to not only write but how to become a college-minded scholar.

I've got all sorts of new ideas now for when I approach the seminar again. But one thing I think I can do -- as a media scholar -- is make better use of video media in the course. One element of the course I'm considering altering is the way I have students give oral reports. Our Freshman Seminar is a two-term sequence and usually I videotape a formal "presentation of your research" speech the students give to the class in the fall and a less formal "storytelling with a theme" presentation they give in the spring...and then they write a comparison contrast paper on the two taped speeches, among other things. But as I perused an article by S. Alan Silliker in the Journal of Excellence in Teaching this morning, I read of an interesting experiment a teacher tried in having students videotape their speeches OUTSIDE of class in small groups and then later playing the tape to the class as a whole. This seemed to generate positive energy among the students and decreased the fear of public speaking that some have. I think I might try to integrate this technique next year, when I return to the composition fold, while at the same time continuing to have students get acclimated to speaking to a "crowd" through traditional means. I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this technique before...I usually pride myself on creatively approaching the class (you have to be creative if you don't want to bore yourself to tears teaching the same principle material year after year). So I think this "release" from teaching the freshman seminar has benefited me in this manner, in addition to battling teacher burnout. I can only imagine what a sabbatical would do! ;-)

In my research of academic standards, I came across The Society for A Return to Academic Standards -- a fascinating collection of links and articles that seek to "peg the prof" and hold him/her accountable for the lowering standards of student performance among American undergrates.

I hope to return to this site often, because I have mixed emotions about all of this. On the one hand, I think it's a gross oversimplification to say that a professor is to blame for a student's academic failures. They might contribute to it, but they're probably not the direct cause. On the other hand, I recall my own days as a student, and there were times when I knew the teacher was just punching the clock or reading old notes or otherwise not wholly engaging in the act of teaching. It's one of the risks of liberal education, where the pursuit of knowledge is (or should be) free from the constraints of the workplace. Teaching is a job, and yet learning is not. And that's probably the crux of the problem.

One fallacy I see a lot of, however, is the assumption that if a teacher isn't standing at the front of the classroom, then they're not working. If you're not a teacher, you'd be surprised at how much writing, planning, reading, speaking, and administering we have to do. You'd have no clue about how accountable we really are, in terms of not only teaching our students well but also serving the campus and the community at large, in addition to engaging in scholarship and broadening the range of knowledge. And outsiders just don't realize how important course releases and sabbaticals are for faculty development and workload/life balance. People who don't understand the reality of academic work often cry for "accountability" without realizing what they're asking for.

In one outrageous essay I found at SFRTAS, called "Tenured Weasels" (from 2000), Patrick Moore claims that undergraduate educators "launder time" and thus do undergrads a disservice. "Professors don't steal money," he writes. "They steal time." In exemplum, he cites graduate programs at small institutions, which -- in his view -- teachers use to get time off to prepare new courses which aren't all that different than undergrad courses and often don't require much preparation. Or they often are cross-listed, as courses for BOTH undergrads and grads. Other "time laundering" operations include assigning class presentations where the students do all the lecturing, and so forth.

Moore contests the way profs seem to get time for their own pursuits, sacrificing the needs of their students for their own gains. But what Moore fails to understand is the notion of "faculty development" -- we must be students as well as teachers in this profession -- and every course benefits from time put into preparation in advance. Clearly, Moore's assumptions about graduate preparations are groundless: graduate-level courses require the professor to not only be as up-to-date on trends and new knowledge as their extra-brainy students, but also require reading longer researcher papers, leading more challenging discussions and seminars, proctoring dissertations (book length papers!), intensive mentoring and advising, and more.

Although I vehemently disagree with much of the logic of Moore's essay, it's still worth a read to understand the suspicion and skepticism folks have about the work that profs do and the case they might make against tenure. Also worth a read is a follow-up article at the Christian Science Monitor: "Pressuring professors to put in more face time" from 2001. [This article cites the book, Profscam, which I'm going to hunt down when I get the chance.]

Time isn't stolen; it's valued by professors because they don't have it and they clamor for "time releases" to do the work that they love to do. Time isn't "released" like a release from prison...it's simply shifted to something other than the standard contracted work. The fact is, most professors I know aren't "time laundering"...they barely have time to do their own laundry!