Have started to clear out some of the great big piles of paper in the apartment. Threw away most of the old bank statements and car insurance policies. Could not bring myself to throw away the undergraduate term papers, or even the incredibly unwelcome letter from a former boyfriend that I'm glad I never answered.
Looking through my old academic work has confirmed something I've always suspected: I'm really a pretty lousy student. My class notes, such as they are, tend to consist of observations like "I NEVER EVER want to hear the phrase 'discourse of the body' again," and, in one case, a stick-man version of Hamlet; I seem to have recycled a bunch of paper topics from undergrad and used them again in grad school (one even ended up as a dissertation chapter); my papers were filled with snarky asides, random thoughts, and extended references to Monty Python and the Reduced Shakespeare Company; and I clearly hadn't mastered the finer points of MLA documentation by the time I was a senior in college. Most of my profs never called me on this stuff. This bothers me a little, because I do tend to call my own students on it, and I'm wondering if I'm being too harsh. I'm not sure I would have liked to have me as a professor. I liked the old guys with tenure and a perpetual attitude of amused tolerance. It's usually the young, female professors who are strict about such things, and while I liked a lot of them, too, and learned a great deal in their classes, they were never who I wanted to be.
I'm in two minds about what this means. On the one hand, nudging a student toward a more formal and less flippant writing style is a sign of respect -- it shows you're thinking of her not as a cute, precocious kid but a knowlegeable professional. We're toughest on students when we believe in them. On the other hand, I suspect that the underlying message -- and I do believe it is a message most often directed by female instructors towards female students -- is that successful academic writing involves suppressing humor and idiosyncrasy and character, and that isn't what I want to tell my students at all.
I don't really know which is the best way. I do think I want to change my classroom persona a bit now that I have a doctorate and a place to make a fresh start -- you know, joke around a bit more, put my hair up in a bun less often -- but I'm not sure how, or whether, I want to change my ways of commenting on written work. (As a side note, I was also struck by how much more I write on papers than most of my undergrad profs did -- granted, this is more true for comp than lit, and I never took comp. Do the comments do any good, I wonder, or do they just get glossed over and thrown away?)
So, yeah, random thoughts 'r' us.
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Heh. I _like_ the idea of Stick Figure Hamlet, and you probably know I love Monty Python and all permutations of zaniness! I would hate to see professors being too serious or attempting to squash zaniness in students. However.
I do agree that student papers should be serious, well-written investigations; beautiful writing should be respected by beautiful (well-written) criticism in return. I don't know how one would combine my approach with studying some of the hack writers who got paid by the word, but whatever.
And I think that it's entirely possible to have overkill on comments and just send students into a freakout or mental shutdown, but how much is enough/too much depends on where you are in the class and whether they're going to do revisions or another paper or not. So it all depends.
And I think that it's entirely possible to have overkill on comments and just send students into a freakout or mental shutdown, but how much is enough/too much depends on where you are in the class and whether they're going to do revisions or another paper or not.
Quite true. Of course, I always plan to do super-minimal comments on final papers, and then they end up getting longer and longer as I work my way towards the end of the stack. And then the students never pick them up.
Oh, I have my share of undergrad papers and notes that are just like the ones you described--although in my case I think it was the younger, tougher profs (both female and male) whom I admired who helped to break me of that. But probably nothing, as you note, is a surer cure than teaching: when you see zaniness-for-zaniness's sake in someone else's writing, you start to realize that it's usually annoying and counterproductive, and that one arch or amused remark goes a loooong way (& packs more of a punch).
At any rate, I don't think that being strict in certain matters at all prevents one from having a relaxed and wacky classroom persona--something else that I learned from my better, younger profs. My evals do indeed contain a certain number of statements like, "Dr. Fescue grades too hard" and "expects too much from a 200-level class," but at least as many talk about how amazingly fun and interesting the class and the texts turned out to be.
For what it's worth, I think I can get away with cracking a lot of jokes, working in pop-cultural references, and talking about the works we read in very colloquial terms precisely because a) I have a hard-ass syllabus, and periodically lay out my expectations and policies in very no-nonsense terms, and b) I dress extremely professionally (suits or suit separates, heels, lipstick & full makeup).
I hope that what I'm conveying is how accessible and fun this "old stuff" can be, and how cool (?) it is to be into it, while also communicating my high expectations to my students. It's a sign of respect, really, to have & believe they can meet certain standards.
... in my case I think it was the younger, tougher profs (both female and male) whom I admired who helped to break me of that.
Oh yeah, I think it's definitely a generational thing as well as a gender thing, and it's probably got a lot to do with the shifting realities of the job market.
For what it's worth, I think I can get away with cracking a lot of jokes, working in pop-cultural references, and talking about the works we read in very colloquial terms precisely because a) I have a hard-ass syllabus, and periodically lay out my expectations and policies in very no-nonsense terms, and b) I dress extremely professionally (suits or suit separates, heels, lipstick & full makeup).
Yeah, but nobody expects men to make that particular tradeoff to establish their authority. (Not that women really have to, either -- I'd be in a bit of trouble if we did, since I don't wear heels or makeup -- but there's a lot more pressure on women to have that ultra-polished, ultra-professional persona. And I think that expectation does hurt female students in subtle ways; I found that persona really intimidating when I was an undergrad, to the point where I was afraid to seek out most of my younger female profs for advice or recommendation letters -- but maybe I was an exception.)
Yeah, but nobody expects men to make that particular tradeoff to establish their authority. . . there's a lot more pressure on women to have that ultra-polished, ultra-professional persona. I think that expectation does hurt female students in subtle ways; I found that persona really intimidating when I was an undergrad.
I think that the first part of this is true, and yet the two young male profs I was thinking of were both jacket-and-tie types, and at least one of my young male colleagues wears a suit, every day (w/a brightly colored shirt, and no tie, but still a suit).
Personally, some of what I think I'm doing by dressing up and putting on that persona is conveying the message that I'm a professional, and that what we do in the classroom matters. Heck, in some ways I think I'm telling my students that female professionals, period, matter (and exist). It's not like my students are hicks or anything, but their mothers and aunts and sisters are less likely to be career women, and to the extent that I can embody the young professional woman who loves what she does, I think I'm conveying another useful message.
And as for lessening the intimidation factor? All I can do is tell my students over and over and OVER again to come to my office hours or to email me, and explain how much I want to help. Whether they take me up on it is up to them, but I push my availability at every opportunity.
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