Raining Cats and Dogma

Imagine this quote was on the syllabus for the 200-level literature class you were taking:

“Please note: I am seriously troubled by students who fiddle with the physical appearance of the paper so as to achieve the illusion of length. This belief assumes that I cannot tell the difference between quantity and quality, and I find that personally offensive. A paper that is shorter than the assigned length but presented in an honest way will earn far more respect.”

Now imagine your paper was a page short of the minimum page length.

Would you make your right margins 1.5 inches? What kind of response would you expect?

Posted by at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In the freshman writing program in which I was trained, it was a well publicized commonplace that at some point in or immediately following the fifth week of classes, everyone hit a slump: The excitement of being back at school has worn off, freshmen in particular are beginning to abandon the away-at-camp mindset and are settling into the realities of this new life, midterms are setting in (or at least first-third grades), creating piles of work for students and teachers alike. Just about now, everyone is hitting a wall.

Ooof.

That's the sound of me hitting the wall. Papers to grade, heavy reading loads in both the undergrad and grad classes coming up, writing projects that are behind schedule, demanding committees just kicking into gear. Plus my body is revolting against me a little bit--what is probably a stress fracture in my foot, a strange cyst in my right wrist, and a big ol' pain in my neck from sleeping on it funny (there's more, but, really, TMI). And to add to the general suckitude, Hem just canceled their Morgantown date. phooey.

Another friend from grad school used to call this "the fat part of the semester": after the five week slump, but before the rush of finals and the promise of the end of the semester. What's worst is that it's the beginning of the fat part of the semester. I think I need to get outside some this week.

Posted by at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I would hazard a guess that most of us agree that grading (at least in the humanities) is our least favorite component of this job. It's boring, it's often disheartening, it's sometimes uncomfortable, it's so delicate (with dozens of egos on the line).

And yet it's so, so important. A friend of mine once said that she considered that her grading was the best one-on-one teaching that she could consitently do, and knowing how infrequently students come to office hours, I'm inclined to agree. Of course this means grading is worse for me.

Right now a tyipcal paper has three major comments on every page. Here's an example:

OK, to make this significant claim justified, you need to really present much more evidence to illustrate each of these. Without quote evidence, your claims are simply hypotheses.

I've taken that logic to the end comment as well, where I typically type a half to 3/4 of a page of end notes, and with particularly tricky papers, I'll type up a full page.

Here's the thing. I've been told, "Oh, you'll overwhelm them with comments," but that's never what my students themselves tell me. On the student evaluation question about the usefulness of feedback, my aggregate score over five sections was a 4.79 out of 5. And the best indicator of all: students use the feedback on this first paper...they read it, and they implement those suggestions in their future papers, admittedly to varying success, but they're reading.

This means for me that I spend more time commenting, and therefore more time procrastinating on the commenting...that's the kicker. I've had this batch of papers fo almost a week now, and I've graded two. It was a busy weekend, but still, I'm procrastinating, and it's only going to delay the response further. At least I can justify it by saying the trade-off is detailed feedback.

technorati tag: teaching-carnival

Posted by at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In response to my post about Mystery Readers, I got an email from Trystero about getting an error message that prohibits her from commenting on the page, one that I sort of knew about, but didn't think was that pervasive...and now it just got me, for a reason I cannot identify...So I'll be looking into this, perhaps by looking at my commenting preferences in Movable type--the problem is that I also get a lot of junk commenting on this blog that needs to be filtered...I'll look into it.

In the meantime, this was the comment I tried to post...

No, wait, now that comment is there...ack...OK, well, at least I'll try to fix the comments...

ugh.

Posted by at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the last few months, Collin's Lullaby CD has been a collection of songs from my own collection that sonically do the work of a lllaby, and perhaps (though not necessarily) have something to do with childhood or youth: Hem's "Halfacre," 10,000 Maniacs' "How You've Grown," Eva Cassidy's version of "Over the Rainbow," Tori Amos' "Winter," etc. Collin often now asks for his favorite "luvaby," "NIghtswimming."

I'm really happy I made this cd, and glad that Collin is responding to it, but I may not have needed to compile it in the first place if I had known about these. Radiohead, The Cure, Metallica, Tool, Led Zep, all on the glockenspiel and vibraphone...the result? Well-rested, but anxious, angry children. Make sure you click on individual albums to get MP3 clips of these gems: Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" is a winner.

Posted by at 9:11 AM | Permalink

Preppy Portrait
Originally uploaded by Ryan Claycomb.

Posted by at 9:47 PM | Permalink

With Movable Type down, and me composing on Word to post later, I've been poking around sitemeter too much...Thing is, most of the regular hits I can sort of figure out from locations and referrals, I don't always know their actual identity, but every once in a while I can say, "Oh, that's Bardiac."

Then there are those mystery hits...they usually come from .edu domains, and often times, they list no referrals, which means that I'm being typed in directly, or I'm bookmarked (which is flattering, really). Of these, I'm most intrigued by the Wellesley address. Ann (nee Boerner) is a Wellesley alum ('93), and Wellesley happens to be one of the most beautiful campuses in the world. It's one of the few institutions that I'd leave my current job for in a heartbeat (or so I assume...you, oh mystery reader, may know better).

I REAAALLLLLY want to know who you (and other regular readers whom I don't know IRL) are. Since for whatever reason this blog doesn't get many comments (I've whined about this before), I don't really know who my regular readers are. So maybe, just maybe, could you pleasepleaseplease de-lurk and tell me who you are? Or maybe just email me (see that address over there on the right?). I'm dying to know...As soon as MT is back up, that is....

Posted by at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You may or may not be able to imagine how excited I was to find this, third item down...

Hem, in town, here, in Just over two weeks. Yippee!!!! We don't live in a total cultural wasteland after all! (actually I knew we didn't but nothing had really yet inspired me enough to hire a babysitter).

Posted by at 8:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Welcome, Inside Higher Ed. readers

I’m about to collect the first batch of papers from my undergrads today. This is usually a process preceded by a fair amount of drama—panicked emails at 2am professing to have no idea what to do. This semester: very little of that. I’ve done a few things this semester that may have mitigated all that:
* My assignment sheet is more detailed than before.
* When passing out the assignment sheet, I also handed out a 6 page handout on "Writing Arguments about Literature," with a page on getting started, one on critical research questions, one on constructing sophisticated thesis statements, one on organization, and one on basic MLA format.
* Every class from the day the assignment was distributed to the last class, I actively encouraged students to come by office hours, send me draft thesis statements, or draft outlines. While no more than usual took me up on this, I wonder if the constant reminders at least meant students were thinking about the paper beforehand, so that their work last night at least wasn’t clueless.
*I’ve been modeling specific kinds of paper writing skills in our class discussions, and telling them that’s what I’m doing: Applying a theory to a close reading, developing claims that support the thesis, finding and sorting evidence, etc.
* I’ve been regularly doing quote ID quizzes that ask students to spend time thinking about the larger implications of specific passages of the readings, which hopefully helps them practice higher-order skills along with simple summary.

Of course, it’s also possible that some attrition (I’ve already lost about 7 of my initial 38 students) has sorted out the chaff, and that changing curricular requirements means that I have a higher concentration of majors in my classroom, which translates into fewer students clueless about the demands of writing papers about literature.

To learn more, and to keep them thinking about their processes, I will ask my students to answer questions to turn in with their paper:
* What was your writing process like? When did you start? Who did you discuss the paper with?
* What element of this paper are you most proud of?
* If you had world enough and time, what would continue working on with this paper?
* What was most helpful in writing this paper (Class discussions, handouts, office hours, help from friends, etc.)?

It’s also possible that I’ll collect a batch of papers that summarize poem after poem. Keep your fingers crossed.

Updated: Early returns suggest that the situation is mixed--With only 70% of precincts reporting (I'll either have a flurry of drops or a flurry of late papers), many papers seem to have at least compelling thesis statements, although initial feedback suggests that indeed, much of this writing was completed in the last 24 hours.

technorati tag: teaching-carnival

Posted by at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is a sneak peak of the Project Runway final collections...and by sneak peek, I mean pics of all of the final collections as they head down the runway.

Posted by at 8:52 AM | Permalink

Sprint to the finish
Originally uploaded by Ryan Claycomb.

Posted by at 5:36 PM | Permalink

A few weeks ago, I expressed early anxieties about the grad class I'm teaching this semester. The room issue came to a head a week or so a go when, during a discussion of "Mouth" in Beckett's Not I, we began to hear some loud "Sir, yes, Sir"s coming from the room next door. That's right, ROTC was next door to our alread terrible classroom. Well, I lobbied for a change, and this past class, we sat around the seminar table for the first time. And I sat at the head of the table, and ran a discussion, very much like my seminar professors did.

This was freaky, because it underscored for me the way that my positionality in this classroom is imbued with authority, and I need to think hard about how to challenge that de facto assumption without compromising my job, which is to teach not only the material, but to a large degree, the expectations of the profession. Commenters? Any thoughts?

That said, the level of discussion has improved dramatically each week. There are fewer blank silences, and the distribution of discussion, while not precisely perfect, is getting closer to what I'd hoped for. Our last night on Beckett (ROTC notwithstanding) was spot-on, I think...

Posted by at 10:02 AM | Permalink

OK, so while I resisted the reality television through the whole flourishing of Survivor (with its imperialist, and now racist overtones) and Big Brother, and even American Idol, I've gotten hooked in the past year on two reality shows, Project Runway and, to a lesser degree, Rock Star: Supernova.

The first I adore unabashedly, and even more so now that I've found this blog , which, besides being utterly fabulous, seems to be rooting the same way I do. Basically, I want Michael and Laura to start a line together. Or at least blow one-note Uli, and that cocksure llittle Jeffrey out of the water.

The second I'm more ambivalent about, mostly because of the unabashedly porcine behavior of Dave Navarro and Tommy Lee (as if I should be surprised). They announced the winner of that competition this week, and my two favorites (Magni and Dilana) didn't make the cut. That said, Ann got me hooked on the show primarily based on the fact that the judges and contestants regularly seemed overtaken by their enthusiasm for the material and their relationships, rather than by the competition. And I loved how much of a Music dork Jason Newstead (formerly of Metallica) is.

In a few weeks, the second go-round of Top Chef begins. I've already expressed my reservations about how the first season turned out, so we'll be watching closely. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that they've switched hosts from Billy Joel's model-wife Katie Lee Joel to Salman Rushdie's actress/wife Padma Lakshmi.

So does this balance out my stereotypical-guy sports fandom? Maybe not...By the way, did anyone see my current school's team demolish my alma mater's team last night? Talk about divided loyalties!

Posted by at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've just been reading a paper by one of my colleagues, wherein she locates the impulse in the work of Elizabeth Grosz "to put the body back into philosophical writing," in her words. This impulse is resonant for me, intellectually as someone who is (at the moment) looking at the the links between performance and writing, but also more personally as someone who has chosen writing as a field over the more obviously bodied field of theatrical performance.

It's been over ten years since I've taken on a role in a play, and although I use my body in fairly conscious ways in my classroom performances, I still don't think of my teaching as craft in quite the same way I might about theatre, or about writing, the latter of which is the craft I actually do endeavor to polish.

But I miss the body in the craft, the attention to tactile data, the way the senses are attuned to the body in space and the space around the body. More to the point, I am brought to mind of the idea that academic discourse typically shuns this awareness in our own writing...

Even here in this space, I can point to posts that bear the markings of a more embodied writing style, one more alive to metaphorical richness and descriptive language about sensory (sensual) experience. Those posts are not about my academic work. Sometimes they're about teaching, but more often, they're about the times I spend at home, playing with my kids, or eating some delectable meal.

I'm re-reading some Pinter for class, and I am wondering if I might not use the opportunity to create an exercise for myself, to do some writing about Pinter (even if only brainstorming for the lesson plan) that invokes the body, my writing body, even as it engages the theoretical and intellectual axes that I automatically revert to when writing criticism...

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Permalink

To do today:

8:30: Drop off kids
9:00: Arrive on campus; Prep class, including quiz, begin work on two rec letters due this week.
10:30: Brit Lit II (but first! run to car to get umbrella, 'cause it's gonna being pouring by the time class is over...
11:30: Office Hours: meet with students who are beginning to spaz about their paper, also meet with Group 3 about their project.
12:30: Individual student appointment; grab some lunch, work on Rec letters, finish re-reading play for tonight's class
1:30: Big important committee meeting
3:00: finish up whatever work I can finish up in 30 minutes
4:00: Squash game (thank goodness I've got something built in here to get me off my tuchus)
5:00: Home to shower and eat dinner with Ann and the kids
6:30: get to campus to get stuff together for the grad class
7:00: Teach grad class...on Pinter...
10:00 Rush home to watch Project Runway
11:20 Crash

Sadly, this is the schedule for every Wednesday...See you tomorrow!

Posted by at 10:36 PM | Permalink

I write that title as if I had actually gone to London last Spring, but alas, that trip never materialized, because we didn't get the necessary 9 students by the registration deadline to get the group rate...the 9th and 10th studetns materialized sometime in the ext two weeks...too late.

But today, I met with International Programs to begin planning the trip again, and now the bureaucracy is even more deeply entrenched. One of the upshots of this is that I have to set an unchanging program cost. This would initially seem to make sense, but because we are a small group, and our numbers are uncertain, the actual cost of the trip...the money due to the travel agency...could end up being significantly lower...

That is, I have to set a program cost using the estimate based on the minimum number of students--9--, but if we happen to get, say, 15 students, we get the next best discount, and the cost of my trip is distributed more lightly over the higher number of students. The problem is, we have to set the program cost before we recruit students, and yet we have to know how many students will enroll before we know actual costs...

The current plan is to advertise at the highest rate (thus enabling the fewest number of students to make the trip happen), and if we overshoot, the money goes into a program fund, which might be accessible for incidental costs in London, but it might just go towards next year's trip, which seems a little tricky to me...The whole thing makes me feel a little uneasy, especially given that the cost of the trip may be a stretch for most of these students.

In some ways, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the lower number of students, so at least that way, the trip will cost what they're actually paying....

Posted by at 5:08 PM | Permalink

Things have been quiet around here (the cyberspace here) because things have decidedly NOT been quiet here (the material here). It's funny though...it's been busy, sort of, but not overwhelmingly so...It's just that it's going to get much busier in the next couple of months, and I'm sort of freaking out about how busy I'm going to be that I'm not really making good use of my time preparing...

That is, I'm prepping week-by-week for the grad course (which is chugging along smoothly), and almost coasting in the Brit II course (another post about that later, maybe). I've got some big writing deadlines looming, and I'm not making much progress on them, and I've got some major service commitments (how major, I can't be sure, honestly...just intimations and ominous condolences for my time from colleagues) that will be gearing up any day now.

Plus we've got the usual fall company coming into town (which we're looking forward to, honestly), and leaves to rake, the lawn to mow, etc. etc...

So what am I going to do tonight? Read ahead, or plunk down in front of Monday Night Football? Knowing me, I'll try to do both, and end the evening fighting of a vague sense of dissatisfaction...

Posted by at 4:32 PM | Permalink

I usually do not profess to fandom...I was never one to stand in long lines to see my favorite band, and I hardly ever proselytize about my favorite actors, musicians, or sports teams...

But this week is a remarkable syzygy of the few things I do profess to be a fan of, and boy it couldn't have come at a better time...

• Hem; Funnel Cloud: My darling sweetheart, somehow knowing the release of this album before I did, had it delivered to me (surprise) today...I've only listened to it once, but the early results are promising, and suggest that the satifying but not thrilling b-sides No Word From Tom this past winter wasn't a fluke. Check out the track "Not California" here.
• The U.S. Open: Yesterday may have been the best day of tennis in recent memory, but as a somewhat reticent fan of American head case Andy Roddick, I am really looking forward to the fair likelihood of a Roddick/Federer final. Federer is the obvious favorite, but Roddick actually looks like he ahs a shot the way he's plaing right now. Of course Federer looks pretty invincible himself, so much so that I think tonight's match with James Blake (whom I really like) seems a foregone conclusion. Don't get me talking about about tennis though. I could go on for hours...

  Almost as long as I could go on about

• The Pittsburgh Steelers: With a bit of a rough offseason, and Big Ben out with appendicitis (The motorcycle didn't get him, but the appendix did), The Steelers (though defending Super Bowl Champs) are underdogs to the upstart Dolphins in tonight's NFL kickoff....

So tonight's prospects? Listening to Hem while prepping Wordsworth sonnets, and flipping back and forth between the NFL and the US Open on TV. How can I make this picture a little more incongruous? Maybe I'll drink some port...

Posted by at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Geroge will be posting the first Teaching Carnival of the academic year later on today. Be sure to check it out--I know that there's been plenty to look at around the blogosphere lately!

Posted by at 12:05 PM | Permalink

Volunteering without being asked.

Before I made my resolutions to say no once in a while (and, in my defense, before I was added to this search committee), I volunteered for the college-wide Scholarship Commiittee.

Guess I've got my 20% service component covered for the year.

And, by that measure, for the next year too.

(gulp)

Posted by at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)