springtime-freshman-comp-exhaustion

I have had ENOUGH of my freshman comp class, with the exception of five students. Two of those five are perfectly ordinary freshmen who just didn't get around to taking English 101 until the spring for some reason; the other three are my three strongest Basic Comp veterans. Everybody else in the class has either flunked English 101 at least once before, or passed Basic with a C because I'm a soft touch. Believe me, I am now regretting being a soft touch.

One of my former Basic students still cannot be bothered to capitalize her own NAME (and no, she is not pulling an e.e. cummings or bell hooks; it's just straight-up carelessness). Another one just decided, in a spectacular act of academic dishonesty, to fabricate an entire annotated bibliography. (Because this student does not seem to read much, and thus has no idea what information actual books are likely to contain, she was fairly easy to catch. No, I don't believe that our campus's current parking policies, including the specific color codes for faculty/staff, student, and visitor spaces, are described in a book entitled Chaos: Parking that was supposedly published by Penguin in 1987. But I have to give her props for imagination.)

I swear, I think teaching English 101 in the spring should come with hazard pay. I have just commented on a pile of ten drafts, exactly two of which were doing more or less what the assignment asked the students to do. The others were all somewhere off in la-la land, despite the fact that the class had been given extremely straightforward instructions and a model. I have been using this assignment for eight years. 90% of the freshmen in my fall classes get it right as soon as they've seen an example. Spring freshmen end up being hopelessly, hopelessly confused.

I cut the research paper from my syllabus this semester, in favor of a "respond to a single source, including properly-documented quotations, paraphrase and summary" assignment (followed by a revision day in the computer lab to make sure they all got it right). I just couldn't face the research paper. I feel guilty, like I'm giving these students a watered-down version of the course, and I know it's not fair to the five who could learn how to write a perfectly decent research paper, but so be it. Sometimes, I think, you have to save your sanity.

weirdness you find out at conferences

Apparently, it is not the best idea to post career-related things to Blogger when you are not completely sober. Who knew?

a paradox

1) Students whose ACT scores are low enough place into Basic Writing, Basic Math, and / or Basic Reading. Students who are in two or more of the above also take a three-credit Learning Skills course. If they're in all three, that's full-time status right there.

2) None of these classes are considered "college level," so they do not count for credit toward graduation. For this reason, grades in these classes do not factor into the student's GPA.

3) Therefore, it is pretty much impossible for a student who never actually manages to PASS any of these classes to flunk out of college, or even to end up on academic probation.

Something is wrong with this picture, yes?

Secondhand

The Friends of the Library held their semi-annual book sale this weekend. I always like it when I get home with the books and discover traces of their previous lives:



David, I am sure, must have been a perfectly charming houseguest! Here are a few more of my favorite inscriptions:

The Old Dramatists: Webster, first printed 1857, picked up in a used book shop in University of Basketball town. Allan H. Gilbert, the meticulous annotator whose notes are at the left, was also the prior owner of my copy of James Shirley; a still older owner (John somebody?) has signed his name at the right:



The Diary of Mr. Pepys. I was also in grad school when I acquired this one, during the course of a delightful and impecunious summer wandering around the UK. Inscription at top left reads "HONOURS PRIZE SENIOR CAMBRIDGE (SCHOOL CERT.) 1930. Below Eric WR Warm's name is what appears to be his entire genealogy.



Sonnets from the Portuguese, bought at the Bruton Parish Church book sale in Williamsburg, VA, in 1997 or 1998. I find this one tantalizingly poignant, and have always wondered about the story behind it.



The Student's Catullus, bought secondhand at the Beloved Alma Mater's bookstore. (Unlike the others, I do in fact know the person who wrote this one. Ah, good times.)

RBOStill not dead yet

-- Haven't heard back about Intro to College Life. I'm definitely interested, but I have a feeling I may have blown the quasi-interview with the administrator in charge of the program by saying that a session on the Honor Code should be part of the course. Admin seems to think that all mentions of the Honor Code are automatically punitive. I think that the only way to get students to take it seriously is to introduce it in a context where it's not punitive, where you can reinforce the idea that it's their code and something to be proud of. But I am just an idealistic hippie chick, and the Beloved Alma Mater is almost a thousand miles from here.

-- SAA paper: nearly done. Kzoo paper: SO not started. (Any of y'all going to either or both, by the way?)

-- Misnomer U. is making its first tenure-track hire in the humanities in three years. It's odd seeing the process from the other side; I am not actually on the search committee, but I got to tag along for dinner with the candidates, and it was hard to remember that "dinner with a friend and an interesting new person" for me is "nerve-wracking potentially life-changing event" for them. Anyway, I am SO glad I don't have to be the one choosing between them, because they are both excellent, and I think I would feel painfully guilty about making the call. I hope whichever one we don't hire finds something good.

-- New York was awesome. Loved it. Need to do this kind of thing mid-semester more often.

-- It is short-sleeve weather in Deep South Town; for good, I hope. The trees are coming out in buds that look like fine red mist from a distance.

"Intro to College Life"-type courses

I think I may have been roped into teaching Intro to College Life next fall. Well, I sort of volunteered, but I haven't absolutely committed myself yet. This is a one-credit, pass / fail course that meets once a week, and a good number of the sessions seem to be taken up with mandatory presentations on Study Tips and Stress Management and that sort of thing. There's also a (tiny) community service component and a requirement that students attend a couple of cultural experience on campus, and I think there's also a discussion of the common reading book somewhere in there.

I'm trying to make up my mind. On the one hand, I like teaching freshmen; I like talking with them about the purpose of college and the idea of a liberal arts education, and I'm not teaching freshman comp next semester, so I won't get to do that in my regular classes. On the other hand, it sounds like the sort of course that would involve a lot of record-keeping (which I am not good at), and at worst, might also involve really bored students who resent having to take what amounts to a semester-long freshman orientation (I have some sympathy for this position). I'm not sure what to expect, never having taught such a course before.

Have any of the rest of you taught a course like this? How was it?

on the luxury of small classes

I am SO loving my classes this semester! Well, maybe not freshman comp, because freshman comp in the spring is always a painful slog, made more painful by the fact that about half my students this semester were in my Basic Comp class last semester. They imprint on professors, it seems, and it is like being followed around by a particularly clueless flock of ducklings. (Actually, about half of the Basic veterans seem like they're swimming tolerably well on their own, even if they tend to wobble a bit more than the others, which makes me feel good. The other half, however, are doing the freshman-English equivalent of trying to swim upside down and getting duckweed wrapped around their necks.)

But! The other three classes are a delight, and this includes Basic. I have only five students, and two of them flunked for nonattendance / missing assignments last semester and do not seem to have learned anything from the experience. So in practical terms, I think I'm going to end up with three. In the fall there were 21, and I had no time to give any of them the kind of help they needed. I think I actually like teaching remedial comp when I have only a handful of students. It's different in kind, not just degree, and it becomes much more about mentoring these students and rooting for them and much less about crowd control. I have more patience. And more creativity.

In Brit Lit II, I have eleven students on the class rolls (down from 26 in the fall). Ten, really, since one of then never showed up. And they are a delightful, talkative bunch (and mostly pretty insightful in the stuff they say). I don't understand why it is that you get dead silence when you throw a question out to a class of 26, and everyone talking at once when you have a class of 10, but I'm not gonna question it.

The Shakespeare class feels similarly charged, and even more on the ball in terms of saying smart stuff. Fifteen in that class, including one totally fabulous auditor. Freshman comp is my big class, with an enrollment of eighteen.

I am loving this so much (and feeling a bit guilty for loving it, because I know it's not sustainable and maybe not good news for my long-term survival in this job). But it's how education should be, God knows, and I'm so glad that for right now, this semester, it is.