Ahead of the hearings for Sotomayor's nomination, The New York Times Magazine previews an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Really interesting stuff...
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Assessing the summer
I'm at about the mid-way point of my summer break. And I suspect that in many ways it's a typical academic's summer -- and much of that is what I like about this profession. What's been particularly nice about this summer is that though I'm on a 9-month contract, the paycheck comes on a 12-month schedule. I was planning on teaching classes this summer, but our program is presently small and I only had one student sign up. Bradley had 5 students, so he's been teaching. (Hopefully we'll be able to muster up more interest next summer ... but we're not necessarily counting on that. Anyway, I'll at least teach the course that he's currently teaching -- we're pretty sure that will have enough students.) So, instead of teaching, I've been doing all sorts of work. And we're buying a house, which constitutes a different sort of work.
The other day, I mentioned on my Facebook page that I was avoiding packing by creating a rubric for grading student papers. In response, a faculty member from my PhD institution pointed out that I have truly moved to the realm of being an academic: avoiding one kind of work with another kind of work. And that I have been doing. I wish in some ways that I could be more disciplined and systematic about the work that I'm doing, but at the same time, I'm hoping that the freedom to drift between projects will inspire a bit more creativity and energy. Or something like that. I'll get it all done before late August, when we return to the classroom.
But I haven't been blogging much -- or at least blogging much of substance here. I've certainly been reading, but I've been having trouble coming up with much to say about a great deal of it. I'm also reading an enormous book on European History (I'm on page 850 of 1200. It's sort of slow-going). I've read Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates and have been reading works in the latest issue of The Normal School. I've also got Laurie Ellinghausen's book, Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567-1667 on my pile of things to read (I'm very excited about that one).
And I've been reading a lot of books about assessment. When I checked out a handful of books from the professional development, the librarian sort of laughed at my fun summer reading. And I did too, for that matter. But it's been remarkably helpful. The book that I've found most useful is Introduction to Rubrics by Dannelle Stevens and Antonia J. Levi. Much like my experience with the workshops about Critical Thinking, this book has gotten me to think about things in ways I didn't expect. My goal in checking out books on assessment was to understand some of the language of assessment as we continue to work on it institutionally.
In the past I've never really spent a lot of time thinking about rubrics -- I've used a holistic rubric to some success, but have never really put a lot of effort into figuring out how to rethink it or to truly use it as a way to teach students. In part, it was an effort to explain to students why they got the grade they did on the paper. My end comments were always fairly detailed, but I often repeated things across several papers.
But now I'm working on a more functional rubric that will save some grading time and will be more effective in showing students what they need to do to improve their work. In many ways, I don't like the idea of using the type of rubric that I'm going to use -- it takes away the type of individual attention each student needs. But with the number of composition students that I have, I can't really do things the way that I've always done them (which has, in the past been successful in improving student writing). I'm hoping that I can teach students how to use the rubric to understand what they need to do in the revision process and that they'll then become more independent revisers of their own work.
Anyway, that's what I've been doing. It's none too exciting for other people, but I'm hoping that this work is going to make me more efficient in what I'm doing in the fall (with my very large number of students in writing classes). Grading papers is an enormous time commitment -- particularly to do it right. Even though teaching writing since 2002 means I'm fairly efficient, I still grade for hours and hours the weeks that student papers come in. That's not really a complaint, since it is part of my job, but that's the part that takes a disproportionate amount of my time, when I want to be using it to plan classes more effectively -- and experiment more with the in-class teaching, rather than fall back on various lesson types that I've already got under my belt.
The other day, I mentioned on my Facebook page that I was avoiding packing by creating a rubric for grading student papers. In response, a faculty member from my PhD institution pointed out that I have truly moved to the realm of being an academic: avoiding one kind of work with another kind of work. And that I have been doing. I wish in some ways that I could be more disciplined and systematic about the work that I'm doing, but at the same time, I'm hoping that the freedom to drift between projects will inspire a bit more creativity and energy. Or something like that. I'll get it all done before late August, when we return to the classroom.
But I haven't been blogging much -- or at least blogging much of substance here. I've certainly been reading, but I've been having trouble coming up with much to say about a great deal of it. I'm also reading an enormous book on European History (I'm on page 850 of 1200. It's sort of slow-going). I've read Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates and have been reading works in the latest issue of The Normal School. I've also got Laurie Ellinghausen's book, Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567-1667 on my pile of things to read (I'm very excited about that one).
And I've been reading a lot of books about assessment. When I checked out a handful of books from the professional development, the librarian sort of laughed at my fun summer reading. And I did too, for that matter. But it's been remarkably helpful. The book that I've found most useful is Introduction to Rubrics by Dannelle Stevens and Antonia J. Levi. Much like my experience with the workshops about Critical Thinking, this book has gotten me to think about things in ways I didn't expect. My goal in checking out books on assessment was to understand some of the language of assessment as we continue to work on it institutionally.
In the past I've never really spent a lot of time thinking about rubrics -- I've used a holistic rubric to some success, but have never really put a lot of effort into figuring out how to rethink it or to truly use it as a way to teach students. In part, it was an effort to explain to students why they got the grade they did on the paper. My end comments were always fairly detailed, but I often repeated things across several papers.
But now I'm working on a more functional rubric that will save some grading time and will be more effective in showing students what they need to do to improve their work. In many ways, I don't like the idea of using the type of rubric that I'm going to use -- it takes away the type of individual attention each student needs. But with the number of composition students that I have, I can't really do things the way that I've always done them (which has, in the past been successful in improving student writing). I'm hoping that I can teach students how to use the rubric to understand what they need to do in the revision process and that they'll then become more independent revisers of their own work.
Anyway, that's what I've been doing. It's none too exciting for other people, but I'm hoping that this work is going to make me more efficient in what I'm doing in the fall (with my very large number of students in writing classes). Grading papers is an enormous time commitment -- particularly to do it right. Even though teaching writing since 2002 means I'm fairly efficient, I still grade for hours and hours the weeks that student papers come in. That's not really a complaint, since it is part of my job, but that's the part that takes a disproportionate amount of my time, when I want to be using it to plan classes more effectively -- and experiment more with the in-class teaching, rather than fall back on various lesson types that I've already got under my belt.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Liz Coleman on the Liberal Arts
Coleman, president of Bennington College, speaks at the 2009 TED conference.
Excepts from the speech are highlighted at The Chronicle.
Excepts from the speech are highlighted at The Chronicle.
Fun with Fads and Literature
Of course it had to happen. Twitterature. A couple of University of Chicago students are rewriting literary classics in 20 tweets or less. I love it. It's ridiculous. And this sort of parody of great books is nothing new.
But man, some people are really quite serious about this. Or at least about Twitter. I saw this news piece at The Chronicle's Wired Campus Blog. The third commenter insists that this exercise is useless and that the twittering of the Iranian unrest proves the real value of the site. Fortunately, someone shortly thereafter in the comments calls that person out, suggesting that things can have multiple uses.
But still, Twitterature.
But man, some people are really quite serious about this. Or at least about Twitter. I saw this news piece at The Chronicle's Wired Campus Blog. The third commenter insists that this exercise is useless and that the twittering of the Iranian unrest proves the real value of the site. Fortunately, someone shortly thereafter in the comments calls that person out, suggesting that things can have multiple uses.
But still, Twitterature.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Interesting reads at The Chronicle
A couple of really thoughtful columns this week:
James M. Lang's "How Do We Inspire Them?", which approaches a number of teaching challenges that I'm facing these days.
and Papatya Bucak's "What Tenure Feels Like," which talks about both the liberating effects of tenure and the mixed feelings that come while other people are having less financial/career success due to the economy. (I know Papatya and I'm very happy to hear that she did indeed get tenure.)
James M. Lang's "How Do We Inspire Them?", which approaches a number of teaching challenges that I'm facing these days.
and Papatya Bucak's "What Tenure Feels Like," which talks about both the liberating effects of tenure and the mixed feelings that come while other people are having less financial/career success due to the economy. (I know Papatya and I'm very happy to hear that she did indeed get tenure.)
Monday, May 18, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Teaching concepts
As part of the end of the semester-business, I attended a workshop on the new Critical Thinking program our institution will begin in the fall. (This is all in an effort to enact changes after our most recent accreditation review. The Critical Thinking program is our Quality Enhancement Program. Or something like that. Anyway.) In the fall I’m going to be teaching a 2-credit course – Critical Thinking 101 – that combines the ideas of the Critical Thinking program with the basics of what used to be our Freshman Seminar (welcome to college; here’s how to be a student!).
Part of the workshop required that we meet with faculty members in our own departments to think about the basic logic of our disciplines. This meant, of course, that I worked with Bradley (he’s teaching the subject-specific CT 102 course in the spring. This is where they practice habits of intellectual inquiry). The basic premise that the dean gave us is that we should think of our “academic discipline as a logical system.” We had a list of elements of thought to walk through in order to discuss the logic of being, well, whatever it is that people in English departments are.
(This is really based on the premise that we should worry less about simply giving our students content, and more about teaching them to think like a biologist, theologian, historian, etc. This always raises the problem of terminology for English departments. Or at least raises the problem for people outside the discipline. We’re not English-ians of English-ologists. We’re literary critics and writers.)
The exercise that we did – to answer a series of questions that get at the basic logic of what we do – was quite timely, since I’ve been having this sort of daily existential crisis about what it is that we’re doing and why we’re doing it. (Okay, existential crisis is probably overstating it, but I’ve been thinking through the justification of what we do with regularity – and for a whole host or reasons.)
The first thing that we realized as we worked on this is that the basic premise of what I do – literary criticism/scholarship – is actually distinct from what Bradley does – creative writing. They dovetail at the point of literature, but the goals and the basic information of each does strike me as quite different. I’m beginning to understand why some larger schools have split the writing department from the literature department. But that’s another topic.
To make this clearer, perhaps I should outline the questions that we had to answer (and the workshop info was based on work at the Foundation for Critical Thinking in Oakland):
1. What is the main purpose [goal] of ____________?
2. What questions [problems, issues] do ____________ ask?
3. What information [data, facts, experiences] is most useful to ___________?
4. What possible conclusions [interpretations, inferences] do _____________ draw?
5. What concepts [theories, principles, models] are used by __________________?
6. What assumptions do _____________________ make?
7. What are some of the consequences [implications] of the work of ____________?
8. What is the point of view of the ______________________?
This is a lot harder than I thought I would be – and thus it was a very useful exercise. What we were really trying to reach was a basis for the logic of the field. What are the basic components of literary analysis that we need to teach students? How can we categorize them?
And that’s where I’ve really been thinking – and I’ve been having trouble with this idea for some time. When I was in Preparing Future Faculty, we had a similar discussion. We had to determine what the basic concepts of our field were and use those to come up with a way to approach the discipline.
It’s odd to think about because in many ways, much of the standard practice of teaching literature is already doing this – group discussions, writing a literary analysis, etc. Many of us are already teaching students how to think like a literary critic by having them do their own interpretation.
But what is the fundamental information of the discipline? What are the fundamental intellectual tools that we need? That’s where I’m running into more of a problem. Is it the basic concepts of literary terminology? But how do we determine what’s the most significant of those? And aren’t concepts (in their terminology – theories, principles, models) really the same basic thing as information (facts, data, experiences)? And isn’t that something that’s fundamentally dictated by the theoretical persuasion of the professor?
And I want to note that I don’t teach a whole lot of theory to students – though I might suggest different lenses through which we can look. I bring this last question up, because I think that I may fundamentally read and interpret differently from my most senior colleagues, who work in more formalist traditions or reader-response traditions. My fundamental expectation of the work of the text within culture is different – and that’s where I’m running into problems. Or perhaps I’m over thinking. It could really go either way.
Bradley and I came up with three basic elements of the logical structure of what we do – or at least, three basic things that are necessary to being able to both write critically and creatively: genre, imagination, and clarity.
Genre is fairly obvious – but is pretty essential in terms of understanding the information of the field. Generic expectations dictate the basic literary terminology that’s necessary, and the basic type of reading that a critic needs to look for (i.e. there’s not really a narrative arc to certain types of poetry – or at least the narrative arc of a shorter poem doesn’t “look” the same as that of a piece of fiction).
Imagination is something that we can divide into several subtopics, but most especially divides in the ideas of interpretation (what I do), creativity (what Bradley does), and empathy (what we both do). There’s an element of all three of those in any piece of critical writing and creative writing, but the emphasis is different for each.
We subdivided clarity into two major areas: clarity of logic and written clarity. Both are essential to what we do in the discipline.
Anyway, I’ve got more to think about. I’ve got some ideas for approaching literature courses – though I have been doing a great deal of this all along. It’s just good to occasionally have to sit down and put it on paper. It seems like the big question about the humanities lately is what we actually teach. I think that we can outline these sorts of things – and really bolster our claim that we’re important, without resorting to “it will help you be better at your job” or whatever.
Part of the workshop required that we meet with faculty members in our own departments to think about the basic logic of our disciplines. This meant, of course, that I worked with Bradley (he’s teaching the subject-specific CT 102 course in the spring. This is where they practice habits of intellectual inquiry). The basic premise that the dean gave us is that we should think of our “academic discipline as a logical system.” We had a list of elements of thought to walk through in order to discuss the logic of being, well, whatever it is that people in English departments are.
(This is really based on the premise that we should worry less about simply giving our students content, and more about teaching them to think like a biologist, theologian, historian, etc. This always raises the problem of terminology for English departments. Or at least raises the problem for people outside the discipline. We’re not English-ians of English-ologists. We’re literary critics and writers.)
The exercise that we did – to answer a series of questions that get at the basic logic of what we do – was quite timely, since I’ve been having this sort of daily existential crisis about what it is that we’re doing and why we’re doing it. (Okay, existential crisis is probably overstating it, but I’ve been thinking through the justification of what we do with regularity – and for a whole host or reasons.)
The first thing that we realized as we worked on this is that the basic premise of what I do – literary criticism/scholarship – is actually distinct from what Bradley does – creative writing. They dovetail at the point of literature, but the goals and the basic information of each does strike me as quite different. I’m beginning to understand why some larger schools have split the writing department from the literature department. But that’s another topic.
To make this clearer, perhaps I should outline the questions that we had to answer (and the workshop info was based on work at the Foundation for Critical Thinking in Oakland):
1. What is the main purpose [goal] of ____________?
2. What questions [problems, issues] do ____________ ask?
3. What information [data, facts, experiences] is most useful to ___________?
4. What possible conclusions [interpretations, inferences] do _____________ draw?
5. What concepts [theories, principles, models] are used by __________________?
6. What assumptions do _____________________ make?
7. What are some of the consequences [implications] of the work of ____________?
8. What is the point of view of the ______________________?
This is a lot harder than I thought I would be – and thus it was a very useful exercise. What we were really trying to reach was a basis for the logic of the field. What are the basic components of literary analysis that we need to teach students? How can we categorize them?
And that’s where I’ve really been thinking – and I’ve been having trouble with this idea for some time. When I was in Preparing Future Faculty, we had a similar discussion. We had to determine what the basic concepts of our field were and use those to come up with a way to approach the discipline.
It’s odd to think about because in many ways, much of the standard practice of teaching literature is already doing this – group discussions, writing a literary analysis, etc. Many of us are already teaching students how to think like a literary critic by having them do their own interpretation.
But what is the fundamental information of the discipline? What are the fundamental intellectual tools that we need? That’s where I’m running into more of a problem. Is it the basic concepts of literary terminology? But how do we determine what’s the most significant of those? And aren’t concepts (in their terminology – theories, principles, models) really the same basic thing as information (facts, data, experiences)? And isn’t that something that’s fundamentally dictated by the theoretical persuasion of the professor?
And I want to note that I don’t teach a whole lot of theory to students – though I might suggest different lenses through which we can look. I bring this last question up, because I think that I may fundamentally read and interpret differently from my most senior colleagues, who work in more formalist traditions or reader-response traditions. My fundamental expectation of the work of the text within culture is different – and that’s where I’m running into problems. Or perhaps I’m over thinking. It could really go either way.
Bradley and I came up with three basic elements of the logical structure of what we do – or at least, three basic things that are necessary to being able to both write critically and creatively: genre, imagination, and clarity.
Genre is fairly obvious – but is pretty essential in terms of understanding the information of the field. Generic expectations dictate the basic literary terminology that’s necessary, and the basic type of reading that a critic needs to look for (i.e. there’s not really a narrative arc to certain types of poetry – or at least the narrative arc of a shorter poem doesn’t “look” the same as that of a piece of fiction).
Imagination is something that we can divide into several subtopics, but most especially divides in the ideas of interpretation (what I do), creativity (what Bradley does), and empathy (what we both do). There’s an element of all three of those in any piece of critical writing and creative writing, but the emphasis is different for each.
We subdivided clarity into two major areas: clarity of logic and written clarity. Both are essential to what we do in the discipline.
Anyway, I’ve got more to think about. I’ve got some ideas for approaching literature courses – though I have been doing a great deal of this all along. It’s just good to occasionally have to sit down and put it on paper. It seems like the big question about the humanities lately is what we actually teach. I think that we can outline these sorts of things – and really bolster our claim that we’re important, without resorting to “it will help you be better at your job” or whatever.
End of semester chaos
My first year on the tenure track is done. I am tired. And behind.
I am mulling a summer reading list, and I'll have more on that later. I'm also mulling over the information that we got at a meeting last week. And I hope to have big thoughts on that soon, too.
But there will be more later.
Most importantly, I need to remind myself once again, I just finished my first year on the tenure track. Maybe that isn't all that much of an accomplishment to other people, but I'm feeling more and more like I really do this for a living.
I am mulling a summer reading list, and I'll have more on that later. I'm also mulling over the information that we got at a meeting last week. And I hope to have big thoughts on that soon, too.
But there will be more later.
Most importantly, I need to remind myself once again, I just finished my first year on the tenure track. Maybe that isn't all that much of an accomplishment to other people, but I'm feeling more and more like I really do this for a living.
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