The Course Weblog will be going through some redesign in preparation for the literature course I will be teaching in the summer and for the Fall semester. Some pages have been prepped, but they’re not really what I want them to be. Lots of cool reading there, though. How does one design a weblog to handle information for multiple courses without the writer falling into a grave?

The New Media Weblog may see light traffic till September. Now some steam.

Another semester is done. It was an interesting one. Shakespeare was fabulous, reminding me that the dramatist has lots of relevance left in his old bones. Good writing, thankfully, never gets old, and students coming at Shakespeare with a fresh eye or for the first time will experience compelling newness and interesting questions. The students rose to the ability-based occasion, a method of evaluating student performance that avoids the traditional give and take of grade distributions, worthless curves, vague averages, and guesswork over what grades may or may not mean. They performed well and showed that they could learn. The writing course, on the other hand, was odd. Students in that course arrived in shifts and missed lots of critical involvement, which leaves gaps in work. I will not force adults to incline to a subject, nor force people to learn what they may not feel inclined to struggle with at this point in their lives. It’s the students’ job to study and learn and to apply what they learn about argumentation and rhetoric in carefully prepared work. If they don’t want my offering, they can certainly try another opportunity elsewhere.

New Media was also a gem, with good participation, interesting content, and the students who came to the course were good sports. It’s a team-taught course, with John Timmons, and this approach keeps the class fresh and honest. The fiction writing course was fun, lively, and produced some interesting writing, although some students in this course never seem to understand how much work it takes to set a good scene, revise for clarity, and to grind out language that will keep an audience interested, whatever that may mean.

I note that in lots of work that I read this semester, much of it lacked self-awareness (I’m writing now and not talking), a strong critical sense (I need evidence for this point and need to come and strengthen this other argument before I develop paragraph 5), an awareness of the codes, habits, structures, and complexities of writing, speaking, listening, and analyzing in an academic or professional context (should I use this word? combine these sentences), and compulsion to improve for a purpose (I really need to get a handle on complex relationships and understand the difference between an inference and a fact). In some cases, instilling curiosity is enough to compel the above; in others, habits of disaffection or disawareness are pretty ingrained. Some of the people I work with simply haven’t thought through why they are doing what they’re doing. Purposefulness cannot be taught but it can be nurtured. Those students who wanted something of the content, added to the experience, and contributed to the subject, did well or satisfactorily (which means they can be trusted with the forklift).

I’ve met no incapable people. But there were plenty of lost opportunities. Plenty of opportunities taken. In this way, the semester has been typical. I was stunned by how many did not work yet they still expected something meaningful from under performance. In this sense, the semester was strange because more and more people are simply not taking the time.

From the NYT (requires login):

The two-year colleges most committed to funneling students into four-year colleges tend to have some or all of the following: learning communities (in which students attend classes with the same small cohort of classmates), honors programs (noted for curriculum that crosses disciplines, teachers who hold advanced degrees and smaller classes taken with similarly talented peers) and articulation agreements with four-year institutions in the state (typically synchronizing basic courses with a university’s requirements and guaranteeing admittance to transfer students who have kept their grades up).

These colleges focus on liberal arts and the sciences, responding to increasing demand for math and science teachers, health professionals and high-tech experts. The best community colleges also have what experts call “a culture of evidence,” meaning they extensively assess students’ academic performance and adjust teaching practices accordingly, says Kay M. McClenney, director of the annual Community College Survey of Student Engagement, based at the University of Texas, Austin.

I wonder about the “learning community” part, but this section of the article makes sense at engaging obvious criteria: solid assessment practice, transfer responsibilities, and providing opportunity to changing demographics. At heart, flexibility and systems that innovate.

Then there’s this from our friends to the north east:

“It’s well known that there are many other colleges where students are much more satisfied with their academic experience,” said Paul Buttenwieser, a psychiatrist and author who is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and who favors the report. “Amherst is always pointed to. Harvard should be as great at teaching as Amherst.”

As Professor Skocpol put it, “People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.”

The effort here comes as the federal government and state accrediting agencies, as well as students and parents, press universities nationwide to provide more accountability for how well their faculties are teaching. “If we don’t do it ourselves,” President Bok said of the government pressure, “they’re going to make us do it their way.”

Something’s been bothering me of late. It has to do with college student responsibility. Why is it bothering me? A couple of reasons. I find more students not observing the time and date of my meetings with them. I did not determine these dates and times, though I agreed with them in consultation with my wonderful English Department chair. I entered class a few weeks back and found 4 students waiting for me. 4 out of fifteen, more if I count the roster.

I’ve been teaching in various capacities for about fourteen years, more if I count student teaching as TA and GA. I have, therefore, a span of time to work with in terms of tracking how my experience of the classroom has changed. It’s changed dramatically. At UT El Paso, I began teaching Composition courses. I would typically start out with courses full of students and end semesters with about the same amount of people. These days, writing courses start out pretty much loaded and I end semesters with less than half of students submitting portfolios. Not all of them will meet the requirements for success. Attitudes have not changed; behavior has.

One reason for diminished student success has to do with the amount of stress students lay on themselves during the course of a semester. I find that many more people are not participating in course work in addition to their lack of attendance. Lack of attendance and missed meetings stresses a student’s experience. Here’s a scenario. A student misses a class where I go over how to organize and deal with counterargument or I provide examples of analysis in a section of an argument. The object here is to provide practice. If a student misses this discussion, they miss the subject entirely or won’t pick up on its variations later on.

This is fine to a point. People can’t always attend. Stuff happens, and we work with students who have other responsibilities to balance.

Nevertheless, I find that behavior is affecting my own attitude and and my own ability to teach. If a few students miss, I can catch them up and see them to the next level inside the course. If many students miss, I have to move to the next level and hope the students somehow catch up. I have to rely on several students staying alert with the readings. If not, I’m essentially teaching to an empty room and speaking to people who really don’t know what I’m driving at. My main technique is the Socratic method. I enter, ask questions, play with the responses, and build to deeper questions that leave students wanting to find out more. But this method–lecture, debate, discussion–needs a variety of opinion and a variety of response. If the majority of students don’t read on the subject, questions about the topic have no context.

Most faculty, I would argue, put a lot of preparation into what they do day to day. Their time between teaching–what some people call breaks–is taken up with prep, catch-up, field work, and revision. The good teachers I know never stop what they do. They’re also adding to their approaches with weblogs, wikis, xml technology, database use, new emphases to teaching approaches, and the ubiquitous upgrades to equipment. Councilors and other support staff hold long hot hours, bolstering systems, and working with students to get them where they want to go. Throughout the year, most faculty fulfill their responsibilities; many I know break their backs on behalf of students.

We have our duds, too, people who give colleges and universities a black eye, who take advantage, who ruin. We always will have them. I have my own horror stories about the faculty member who fucked up by forgetting to challenge. And I can still see the eyes rolling in the room when Dr. Whatshisface opened the book and started reading from it. I also remember meeting up with other students to make up for the loss.

It’s my belief that liberal education at college should remain a choice. Literature courses should be offered at colleges and universities. Hopefully students will want to take them, or, if they have to take then, as directed by their degree requirements, they should channel their best efforts towards learning what a course has to offer because that costs nothing. It is also my belief that students who do not want to take a literature course should not do so, even if their degree requires it. To extend that logic, people who don’t really want to attend college, should try something else out for a while, or find success on another life track (college isn’t the only game going). However, if a student, regardless of reason, choses to attend, then they must understand that certain expectations come with that choice.

The Fallacy of Subjugation

People often have odd reactions to form in essay writing. They see a 12 point font or MLA requirement as somehow taking away from their creativity or from some other area of their time. My answer to the typical “Why do we have to do it this way?” is, “You don’t.”

“What is the MLA’s reasoning” is an entirely different question.

Fact is:

1. Form can be learned.
2. It doesn’t require much time.
3. It can add to depth of study.

“Why in CSS is border:none non compliant?”

Everyone must deal with form: in law, politics, engineering, and architecture. The larger point here is that we all must learn to negotiate with a variety of forces external to us. Citation requirements, reading lists, and academic demands are simply three examples of such learned negotiation. But if a person doesn’t want to comply with simple forms or read, then they don’t have to comply.

Intellectual Bootcamp

What follows is a list of ethical position I think students should take in a college environment. Each one of them embeds a related ethic for college and university personnel.

1. They should take on an aggressive urge to learn things. This one is key because it costs nothing. There are 24 hours to the day. It can be taken up with work, worry, study, or any other activity. Over a three month period, a person can study and get a lot out of a design course or not attend and get nothing from it, all within the same time span.
2. They should demand a rigorous curriculum. Carpentry is not easy.
3. They should seek out opportunities to apply learning and to question what we think we know.
4. They should try to beat the learning environment at its own game. All the good teachers I know want their students to challenge them and their discipline, to push them and it forward. I want people to provide different readings and reflections of Othello, to acquire and use their growing knowledge in meaningful and new ways.
5. They should expect to earn the right to a hearing. This ethic can’t be purchased.
6. They should seek out complexity. Not because atomic structures are complex, but because people are.

This is a duplicate post.