Clueless Class

So, I have just finished calculating midterm grades (they are due at 9 a.m. on the Friday before spring break for some reason), and the results confirm my impression that one of my two comp classes is the Kingdom of the Clueless. Thirteen of them, out of twenty, have a grade in the C range or lower. One of those is a classic "ghost student" who showed up to the first day of class and then disappeared, but the rest have fully earned those grades. I don't think I'm that tough. There are three students in my other section of comp with Cs, and none with anything lower. They've had the same instructions, the same activities, mostly-the-same everything. This particular section simply ignores all directions, spoken or written, and all examples.

I can understand how visible bad habits, like arriving to class late or doing the bare minimum in peer workshops, spread among a given group of students. If you see other people doing something, it becomes normalized, and you figure you might as well do it too. It's a bad dynamic from the instructor's point of view, but at least I understand how it works and where it comes from. In this group, though, all but a handful of the students seem to have become identically clueless in ways that ought to be invisible to each other. For example, one of the assignments in this class is to read, summarize, and evaluate an academic journal article in your intended major field. I've been using some variation on this assignment for over fifteen years. They see multiple examples from previous students. There are some predictable places where most students have difficulty -- no freshmen are very good at the evaluating part, and lots of them struggle with identifying main ideas and central arguments -- and the occasional one-off error (there's always that one kid who decides an alternative-medicine website is a journal article). But mostly, they sort of do what they were asked.

This semester? An amazingly high percentage of students -- but only in this one section -- seem to have interpreted this assignment to mean "Write a personal essay about why you're interested in your major." I have literally no idea how they GOT this notion.

And why is the Clueless Class always the one that meets at 11:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Is that time slot jinxed?

The Conspiracy Theory

So, as many of you probably know, there is a moderately popular conspiracy theory that touches upon my field of study. Every now and then, students ask me about it, and I try to explain reasonably and neutrally that there isn't any evidence for it, and then move on. Less often, somebody makes a movie or TV show about it, or a complete stranger e-mails me out of the blue to Discuss Their Theories, both of which are situations that can be ignored.

Anyway, this particular conspiracy theory is relatively benign as such things go; that is, it doesn't involve denying historical atrocities, or accusing real people of fictional atrocities. (In its most common form, it does have a certain level of classist subtext, although there are a few variants that don't have the classism, and one or two that would be awesomely feminist if they weren't, you know, wrong.)

So why -- why -- do I always get Someone Is Wrong On The Internet Syndrome whenever I encounter it, such that I find it hard to concentrate on anything else? Aargh.

further grumpiness

This is surely one of the silliest, most grad-student-blaming things I've read in a while -- and I say this as someone who actually agrees that most scholarship in English isn't very interesting and that the really important, valuable work we do is teaching.

But, dude. "Research" doesn't actually mean "something that produces reproducible results, just like they do in the sciences." (There's glory for you.) Also, there might be some dissertations out there that follow the pattern “Concept X borrowed from theory Y is applied to works A, B and C that have something in common: time, author, country/group of origin, leading to this result: Z,” but this strikes me as a straw man that is about twenty years out of date, and in any case, you don't have to interview candidates with boring, formulaic dissertations. I guarantee you there's no shortage of applicants who don't. Some of them have even been adjuncts for years, and know exactly how to motivate a bunch of bored eighteen-year-olds with weak reading and writing skills.* Also, you don't have to require the candidate to do a research presentation if you aren't interested in their scholarship. (In fact, none of my campus interviews required any such thing; every single one of them required a teaching demonstration.) If you do ask candidates to give such a presentation, you're sending a clear signal that you are interested, and you have only yourself to blame if they choose to tell you about it.

Finally, if you want to see enlivening a classroom, try giving your students a bunch of cue-scripts for a scene in Shakespeare and asking them to put the scene together, early-modern-actor-rehearsal style -- which is something I wouldn't have known to do without all of the people doing research on early modern theatrical practices and uncovering facts about the objective world.

* Also, if you're at the Naval Academy and the average verbal SAT score among your entering class is 630, you've got no idea what a truly underprepared and unmotivated student population looks like. Just trust me on this one.

Sigh...

So, thanks to a lot of hard work put in by some awesome people, we have a new Center For Teaching And Learning at Misnomer U., and there are some grants available for faculty. Last semester, I put in for a grant to buy theater tickets for the students in my various lit classes, because it turns out that there are some awesome educational benefits to live theater, and also because it's really kind of stupid to ask people to read a play when they have never actually BEEN to one.

So, totally free tickets available for students. And I'm doing the driving.

It turns out that it is hard as hell to actually get students to take a few hours off to see a play. Well, I kind of knew that because I'd done this before, but I was hoping things would change when they weren't responsible for buying their own tickets. Nope. They are not interested. Or they are interested, but they're too busy for there to be a time that will actually work for them. Or they bail at the last minute, after I've already bought them a ticket. It isn't the students' fault, most of the time. It's because they have complicated lives: they had kids way too young and their child-care arrangements fell though, or they're working full time while also taking a full load of classes and their boss keeps changing the schedule on them. I totally get it. But I wish things were otherwise. And the ones who DO show up often seem not to be the ones who would benefit the most; they tend to be the ones who actually HAVE seen a play before, and are maybe even theater majors, and the ones who are visibly engaged in class and basically getting it.

So I'm off to see some Tom Stoppard today, with two students out of the twenty enrolled in Brit Lit II. I hope neither of them bails. (At least this grant thing has made me a lot more Zen about people bailing, because I don't have the choice between getting stuck with the price of the ticket myself or trying to chase down the student and get them to pay for a show they didn't actually get to see.)

I was right around their age when I first saw this particular play. I might still have the program somewhere. My parents took me -- because it was the first US run and of course they were excited about seeing it, and of course they waited until I was home on spring break. It wasn't my first play by a long shot. It wasn't even my first Tom Stoppard. I want things to be that uncomplicated for my students. It turns out that it takes more than a bit of money to uncomplicate them -- and yet, money is surely at the core of why this is so hard.

How to comment on an online news article about higher education: a helpful list of rhetorical tropes

1) Refer to everything outside of higher education as "the real world," with the implication that colleges and universities are somehow unreal.

2) Refer to all students who express opinions you dislike as "coddled." As nobody ever uses the word "coddled" any more to describe anything except These Kids Today, this is a particularly useful way to create the impression that their ideas can be discounted automatically.

3) Describe all professors as left-wing Marxist tenured radicals. (Unless, of course, the news story you are commenting on is about the latest "disruptive" innovation or technology, in which case it should be taken as read that all professors are hide-bound conservatives who refuse to change anything ever. In either case, their opinions can safely be dismissed.)

4) Mention Saul Alinsky a lot. Nobody has the foggiest idea who this is, so he can be used as a convenient shorthand for All Things Vaguely Menacing, and you'll sound super-smart while you're doing it.

5) Pick a random arts-and-humanities course with a normal title, such as "Existentialist Philosophy" or "Eighteenth-Century Literature," and refer to it as a "major." Demand to know where all the jobs are for the eighteenth-century literature majors, and express your sincere concern that they need to be saved from themselves.

6) Pick a random arts-and-humanities course with a somewhat odd title, such as "Taco Literacy," and hold it up as an example of Everything Wrong With Every University Ever. Do this in the comment threads on stories that have nothing whatsoever to do with this particular course. (Or, in general, cherry-pick the strangest and most extreme example you can find of anything, treat it as a typical example, and shoehorn it into the comments on stories that have nothing to do with that thing.)

7) Refer to all fields of academic inquiry that focus on people other than white men as "Grievance Studies," and declare them to be intellectually and morally bankrupt by definition. If you do this often enough, and loudly enough, you will be excused from having to explain how you know this.

8) Ah, hell, you might as well declare all fields that end with "studies" to be intellectually and morally bankrupt by definition. If you are feeling particularly generous, you might make an exception for Religious Studies, Classical Studies, or International Studies ... no, on second thought, you've never seen any job ads with any of those fields in the title of the position, so it's safe to say they're all equally pointless.

9) Assume that liberal arts colleges, liberal arts majors, a liberal arts curriculum, and political liberalism are all exactly the same thing.

10) Conflate "holding an unpopular opinion" with "being a member of a minority group," and, in general, fail to distinguish between categories-based-on-opinion-and-belief and categories-based-on-identity. This will allow you, for example, to accuse people who disagree with you of hate speech, or to call for affirmative action for people who do agree with you. If anybody calls you on this, mention look, a squirrel! Rachel Dolezal.

ETA: 11) When citing examples of wasteful university spending, be sure to mention climbing walls. Never any other sort of sports or recreational equipment. Always climbing walls.

... I need to stop reading the comments, don't I?

An observation

When the place where you were a VAP seven years ago and didn't get hired for a tenure-track job hits you up for donations, the experience is not unlike having your ex-who-married-someone-else hit you up for casual sex ...

... except, having had both of these experiences, I'm pretty sure I prefer the second one. Stay classy, fundraising department.

In praise of footnotes; or, more grumping about No Fear Shakespeare

I posted a shortened version of this on LJ after my last-but-one venture into the wilds of No Fear Shakespeare, but it's still bothering me, so I thought I'd post it as a follow-on to yesterday.

So I was looking at the No Fear As You Like It, because I am a masochist, and I found this.

Real Shakespeare:

Touchstone: I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths.

Jaques: O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatched house!

Touchstone: When a man's verses cannot be understood, or a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

No Fear Shakespeare

Touchstone: Well, I'm out here with you and your goats, in the same way that the witty poet Ovid was abandoned to the barbaric Goths.

Jaques: Oh, knowledge put to such bad use is worse than a god cooped up in a hut.

Touchstone: When a man's jokes fall that flat, it's as depressing as getting a large bill for a short stay in a little room.

Obviously, there is Very Much Wrong with the No Fear version, but what strikes me, especially, is how much "translating" the text into contemporary English fails to illuminate it. With the exception of the phrase "seconded with the forward child" and the single word "reckoning," there's nothing that's actually difficult about the language of this passage. What makes it difficult is content knowledge: in order to get it all, you have to know a little about Ovid's biography, and enough Latin to get the multilingual pun on "capricious," and enough about classical mythology to recognize the story of Jupiter, Philemon, and Baucis, and some stuff about Christopher Marlowe. You know, the kinds of things that are best explained in footnotes. And the No Fear version doesn't even attempt to convey any of this cultural knowledge; in fact, I'd go so far as to argue it actually conspires to hide this knowledge from students. The wordplay and allusions are either left unexplained, or completely erased, or watered down out of recognition ("Jove" becoming "a god"). Now, this isn't disastrous if your sole purpose is comprehensibility, because you don't NEED to know any of this stuff to understand the plot of As You Like It. It's lagniappe. Fluff. Part of the game of wit that Shakespeare's characters engage in, incessantly, while we busy modern people wish they would get back to the plot.

Except. Since this is a comedy, lagniappe and fluff and games and wit are sort of the entire point. And at least one of those allusions isn't a throwaway; if you do know about Jupiter and Philemon and Baucis, you're going to see little echoes all over this play, in old faithful Adam, and in the Duke's invitation to Orlando to share in their poor feast, and in the way a literal god shows up out of nowhere at the end (but maybe there have always been gods in the forest; we just didn't recognize them for what they were). It's a lovely little set of grace notes. And you can only learn to hear them if you spend some time learning early modern culture, not plots or lists of characters or Analysis of Major Themes. And the only way to learn that -- in the absence of time travel -- is by reading early modern texts. A lot. And paying attention to the footnotes.

It makes me sad that anyone would discourage students from trying.

No Fear Literature grumpery

I was poking around on the SparkNotes site today, which is something one should never do, except, like most of us, I need to go on there sometimes to verify that one of my students has been plagiarizing from it.*

Like most Shakespeare profs, I was all-too-aware of the existence of No Fear Shakespeare, but it seems that the No Fear series is branching out. There is a now a whole line of "No Fear Literature," marketed with the tag line "Read great texts in all their brilliance -- and actually understand what they mean." (I find this kind of baffling, as a marketing slogan, since it seems to imply that their target audience is stupid; wouldn't "You know you've got better things to do than read a stuffy old novel in Victorian English, so here's a crib sheet" be a little more flattering? But whatever.)

Now, I abhor No Fear Shakespeare, but I understand why it exists. I haven't got the foggiest idea why No Fear Heart of Darkness exists. (Helpfully, No Fear Heart of Darkness informs us that "Marlow said suddenly" is Ye Olde Englishe for "Marlow said out of nowhere," and that "the worst that could be said of him" means "the worst thing you could say about him.") Seriously, this is a twentieth-century text. Since when does it require translation?

And then there's No Fear Beowulf. There are, of course, plenty of very good reasons to translate Beowulf into modern English; I have nothing to say against such a project. There are fewer good reasons to translate Beowulf FROM modern English into modern English, however, and the text that SparkNotes is labeling as the "original text" very clearly is nothing of the sort. It's a fairly stodgy and old-fashioned translation of Beowulf, one that I can't imagine gets assigned very often nowadays, but it is definitely translated already. The cynic in me suspects that SparkNotes probably picked this particular text in order to manufacture a need for their product; I mean, if they'd used Seamus Heaney's version, which I suspect is the one that usually does get assigned, even high school students would probably realize that it is, in fact, perfectly readable already.

But this is what frustrates me about SparkNotes, in general; their entire business model seems to revolve around cultivating a feeling of learned helplessness in students, rather than actually teaching them how to read and think for themselves. (As much as I dislike the chirrupy, faux-hip tone of Shmoop.com, they are at least a little better at trying to show students HOW to get from the text to an interpretation.)

Aarghh. I have ranted long enough, I suspect, so I will leave you with a brief excerpt from A No Fear Tale of Two Cities. Because apparently, rhetoric and parallelism and cadence and grace in language are scary, and must be eliminated.

It was one of the best and worst times in history. It was a time of great intelligence and ignorance, belief and disbelief, good and evil, hope and hopelessness. We had everything to live for, and we had nothing to live for. Everyone was going straight to Heaven and straight to hell. Basically, it was just like the present, with experts of the time insisting on seeing its events only in terms of contrasting extremes.

I can't wait for No Fear 1984. My irony-meter will probably explode.

* As a side note, WHY do plagiarists always plagiarize from SparkNotes? Don't they realize that it's completely Google-able, and that it is the first place most of us are going to check?

Late-mid-semester grumpiness

I was going to do a proper post of Thinky Thoughts about the UNC athletics scandal, but at the moment this semester is kicking my ass six ways to Sunday, and I am too exhausted even to think. (Seriously, SHOOT me if I ever sign on to teach the one-credit Intro to College Life class again. $1,000 extra is SO not enough for a thirteenth hour of class time every week, and you have to spend SO much time herding freshmen: nagging them to do the online journal posts, arranging community service opportunities and hoping some of them show up, explaining the concept of comments on a paper -- which I wouldn't think would be that foreign, but two of them looked at me in utter confusion and seemed to think I wanted them to rewrite the paper. Dear God, do their high school teachers not comment at all on their work when they grade it? No wonder nobody can write.)

This particular crop of freshmen seems particularly flaky; there are about three in the entire class who are consistently completing all the assignments, and two of them are international students. Of the others, there are one or two who are consistently bright, friendly, and participatory in class, but who are well on their way to failing because they aren't completing ANY of the quizzes and journal assignments; several more who are obviously sullen and resentful but are at least making a gesture towards doing the work, and a bunch in the middle I haven't really got a read on yet. Are freshmen always like this, and I just blot it out from year to year? Or has NCLB finally ruined us forever?

I have also been having a lot of Weird Shit going on in my not-actually-freshman comp class (it's second-semester comp in the fall, so it's a motley mix of sophomores through seniors, with one true freshman who had early college credit, and one who started in the spring last year.) The latest incident, which will probably be making me cringe for years to come, involved a student who had been trying hard and doing poorly in idiosyncratic ways that suggested, to my untrained eye, that there might be disability issues involved, whether diagnosed or not. I submitted a report through the online-early-warning-reporting system, which the administration has been pushing hard for us to use, describing the student's issues in the candid and unvarnished terms one uses when talking confidentially to a colleague, suggesting he certainly needed tutoring and might need disability services...

... And by mistake, they forwarded the report to the student by e-mail. Word for word. I suppose I should be grateful that he doesn't actually seem to be bearing a grudge, and that it WASN'T a report complaining about the student's behavior, but THAT level of incompetence really does not make me inclined to trust the early-reporting system ever again.

So yeah, that's what it's been like for the last few weeks. This is the point in the semester when I find myself getting irrationally angry about stupid stuff, like students using the word "mechanicals" to refer to Bottom and colleagues in a paper on MND. (I'm never sure whether, or how, to correct this, since some professional literary critics do it, and they probably picked it up from their earlier teachers -- but seriously, would anybody think it was appropriate to call Shylock "the infidel" or Othello "the thick-lips" just because other characters do it? Why do class-based pejoratives get a pass?)

Shakespeare journalism grumpage

I really try not to get grumpy about other people's takes on Shakespeare. First of all, there is too much of that sort of thing in the world already; and secondly, I'm of the opinion that the more people there are thinking and talking about Shakespeare, the better, especially if they're doing it outside of traditional academic channels. (Well, OK, not if they're talking about authorship conspiracy theories, but that isn't really talking about Shakespeare.)

That said, this is a seriously dumb, reductive reading by an author who appears not to get the concept of drama. The whole point of Shakespeare is that he's writing characters, for God's sake, and that those characters are complex and flawed, and, moreover, that he has a peculiar gift for expressing multiple perspectives compellingly! For every ringing set-piece speech, there is a "Yes, but...", usually within a scene or two. Anybody who claims to be able to infer from the plays what Shakespeare's politics were is not only deluding themselves, but missing the reason why we read Shakespeare in the first place. (I think one of the reasons why pronouncements like Berlatsky's get under my skin is that teaching students to value and embrace ambiguity is perhaps the single most valuable thing we do in literary studies, and it drives me crazy when people don't get this.)

Full disclosure: I have my sneaking suspicions, and the answer I'd come up with is almost the polar reverse of Berlatsky's -- and I'd point to a lot of moments in its defense, from Isabella's courageous defiance of Angelo to Michael Williams's searching questions on the eve of Agincourt. And at least one of those moments, the Argument of The Rape of Lucrece, has the advantage of being one of those rare bits of text that Shakespeare seems to have written in his own person and from his own perspective. But I'd never be so arrogant as to claim that "my" Shakespeare is the only possible Shakespeare, or that we know for sure what he thought about anything.

(Also, if you're seriously going to argue that the Henry IV plays are a warning against rulers consorting with people who are beneath them, you've pretty much missed everything that Hal takes away from his time in the tavern. There's a reason why he ends up being a more effective leader than good old Dad, who never really gets what his son is doing in the Boar's Head, even though he did that sort of thing himself once upon a time. Granted, the plays work a bit better as a warning to the people on the lower end of the social scale against consorting too much with their rulers. God send the companions a better prince.)

Harrumph.

Idle observations of mid-semester

-- Doing a class read-through of the Pardoner's Tale is not as much fun as the Nun's Priest's Tale, as it has Death instead of chickens. (But skipping the NPT did allow me to shave a day off the syllabus, so that's something.)

-- People who don't do organization and planning very well (such as me) probably shouldn't try to have field trips in their classes.

-- In particular, they shouldn't have field trips in their classes four days before SAA papers are due, and then commit to traveling two hours to the state capital for a fancy awards-banquet thingy the next day after the field trip. AARGHH. (It is, for the record, not me who is getting the award.)

-- Why are this year's SAA seminar topics always perfect for last year's paper, anyway?

-- I was going to try and see if I could go a whole three weeks without getting Thai takeaway, but it is SO not happening. (What did I ever do before the Thai restaurant came to Deep South Town? I can't remember.)

-- The new Norton Anthologies came yesterday. I got the package versions with the three smaller paperback volumes banded together, and the new covers are extremely pretty. There is something very nice about getting free books in the mail, even if one remains deeply skeptical about whether the world actually needs a new edition of the Norton Anthology

-- As You Like It this week. It is about right, I think, for the season when red buds are starting to come out on the trees, and the first blossoms are showing on the Bradford pear outside my office window.

musings on the new comp textbook

We're getting a new textbook in Comp next semester. This means overhauling the Basic Comp course, which might not be a bad thing because I don't think what I'm doing now is working very well. (I think I will have them write actual essays and business letters and stuff from the beginning of the class, instead of starting with paragraphs. Because really, who writes a paragraph in isolation? I also think I might scrap most of the rhetorical-analysis stuff, since I'm starting to feel like I don't even know why I emphasize it so much, except that it was what we did in Basic Comp at the University of Basketball. And the students have trouble analyzing how a newspaper op-ed piece works; half of them are at the point where they're still trying to make sense of what it says, and none of them are used to going that meta.)

But anyway: the new book. It's ... different. I'm used to teaching with a no-nonsense handbook, the sort of text that explains what thesis statements are, gives examples of every conceivable citation style, and has a handful of sample essays by strong student writers, but pretty much leaves professors and students on their own as to content. But this new book is kind of a semi-handbook and semi-reader; it has all of these essays on assorted topics by professional writers, everyone from Dave Barry to Amy Tan, and I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with the essays. Presumably they are not meant to be used as models, since the writing is too polished to be a reachable model for most students, and neither the style nor the subject matter resembles a typical college paper. Are the students supposed to be writing about them, then? What are they supposed to be saying about them?

Also, I find myself vaguely distrusting the new book because it has too many colored pictures, the typeface is too big, and there are footnotes defining words like "literal," "ambiguous," "Rubik's Cube," and "horrific." It feels, in short, like a K-12 text and not a college-level one. (This isn't actually a problem in Basic Comp, which pretty much is a K-12-level course, but I feel like it would be vaguely insulting to spring this text on regular freshman comp students. But then, I was the sort of kid who habitually took offense at notes explaining the meaning or pronunciation of words, even when I was in elementary school, and I don't know that this is necessarily a normal reaction.)

Growf. I think I have a hard time coping with change.

How it went...

Wow, time is passing quickly this semester. We just had our last small-group meeting in Intro to College life. They have one more session in the Big Auditorium, and then final grades are due, and we're done.

It was OK. I'm not sure whether I'm going to do it again. The students were fine, all five of them friendly and participatory. They did most of the extra reading I assigned even though it wasn't tied to any quizzes or papers (although I think I will ask them to respond to it in their journals if I teach this course again -- I don't think they really got that a reflective journal for a class is supposed to be different from a personal diary). They had a bit of a tendency to talk about their personal lives a lot and go off on random tangents, but I think there's supposed to be room for that sort of thing in a course like this, so no worries.

The large-group sessions were ... bleah. I guess the kindest way to put it is "varied," since there were some speakers who were genuinely informative about useful topics, and one or two who managed to be informative and entertaining. But there were also some speakers who were patently disorganized, inept at communicating, or just plain off the rails (as in, presenting as fact a pop-psychology "personality test" with about as much as scientific validation as astrology, and pretending that this was somehow educating students about diversity).

More generally, I'm concerned that the whole slate of presentations seemed to emphasize student life at the expense of saying anything about the university's intellectual mission. I mean, it is important for students to know where to find the counseling center, and how to get their financial aid checks, and what to do if they think one of their friends has alcohol poisoning. No question. But shouldn't someone, at the very least, also be telling them that they should plan to spend a couple of hours outside of class for each hour in class, and that those required gen ed courses can illuminate one another in surprising ways, and that they shouldn't be afraid of going to a professor's office hours? I want someone to tell them, too, that words and ideas matter, that slow reading and deep thinking have value, that skepticism and critical inquiry are necessary tools for living in the world, and that if universities were really ivory towers closed off from the real world, people wouldn't get so damn angry at them.

(I think I may have told my little cohort some of these things. I think I do want to teach this class again.)

Oh yeah, and we talked about the university's common reading book, which was both enjoyable and a little weird. I have a whole different set of reservations about campus-wide common reading programs, but those probably belong in an entirely different post.

Announcement

Attention, students. This section of English 100, Basic Writing, is currently in an oversold situation. We are looking for twenty volunteers willing to take a later section of the course. You will receive a voucher that will entitle you to sleep in three days a week. If your educational plans today are flexible, please speak with a gate agent professor at once.

Attention, students. This section of English 100, Basic Writing, is currently in an oversold situation. You might have noticed that there are forty students in this room and ONLY THIRTY-TWO FUCKING CHAIRS. We are looking for twenty volunteers willing to take a later section of the course. You will receive a voucher that will entitle you to sleep in three days a week, as well as your own desk and chair. We'll even fill out all the add / drop paperwork for you. If your educational plans today are flexible, please speak with a gate agent professor at once. Also, please note that the word "Basic" in the title of this course is a euphemism. It means "remedial." If your ACT English score is over 18, or if you have already successfully completed English 101, YOU ARE NOT REMEDIAL. Please get out of the way so people who actually need this course can take it.

Attention, students. This section of English 100, Basic Writing, is currently in an oversold situation. Meanwhile, the section of Intro to College Life for prospective humanities majors has only FIVE students. No, I don't know why the admissions office thought we needed forty remedial writing students and only five freshmen interested in majoring in the humanities. Maybe that was all they could find. Anyway, it isn't your fault, but it depresses me. Meanwhile, we are still looking for twenty volunteers. If your educational plans today are flexible, please speak with a gate agent professor at once...

Sigh...

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.

Dude, are you TRYING to shoot yourself in the foot?

Dear Ostrich Student,

Sticking your head in the sand so you can't see the deadlines DOESN'T MAKE THEM GO AWAY. The fact that you failed my class last spring, after submitting none of the three papers and not turning up for the final, should have given you a clue that this isn't a successful strategy. So why -- WHY -- have you vanished, nowhere to be seen, on your assigned presentation date for the second semester running?

And what was up with the way you conspicuously failed to hand in the second paper, anyway? First you e-mailed me two days after it was due to ask if you could submit it electronically. Grudgingly, I said OK even though I hate it when students don't give me a hard copy, since it was over the weekend and the late penalty would continue to accrue until you handed it in. Come Monday, you hadn't sent me anything. I asked you about it. You said, "Oh, I thought it would be too late to hand it in." I pointed out that, as the syllabus indicates, you can still get some credit for a five-day-late paper if the grade without the late penalty would have been a C+ or higher. You said OK, you would turn it in immediately. Nada.

Work with me, for God's sake. I want you to get your C- and go away. The presentations are super-informal. If you had shown up and done a half-assed job, you would still have earned partial credit for it. If you show up for the final and make a reasonable attempt to answer the questions, you'll probably earn some credit. But if you pull another disappearing act, I don't have any choice but to flunk you.

Dude.

With me grading papers, I have a pet peeve.

AUUGHHH. What is UP with all the unnecessarily roundabout constructions? And why are some students apparently allergic to the word "because"?

"Being that I'm wearing the pope hat, you have to do what I say."

"With me being the one wearing the pope hat, you have to do what I say."

Nonononono. Because I'm wearing the pope hat, you have to do what I say*. Or: I'm wearing the pope hat, so you have to do what I say. What is so difficult about this?

ALSO, why do students always want to write "In the article, they say..." instead of "The article says..."?

* Yes, I'm aware that some K-12 teachers, for some inscrutable reason, tell students that they must never ever begin a sentence with the word "because." Dudes, that's a bogus, made-up rule, but if you MUST follow every silly instruction your high school teacher ever gave you while totally ignoring mine, what's wrong with "You have to do what I say because I'm wearing the pope hat"?

Mysteries of freshman comp

1) When one is teaching two identical sections of freshman composition, and taking care to teach them the same information in identical ways, why is there always a good class and a bad class, and often a dramatic difference between the two? More puzzlingly, why are my bad classes always the ones that meet later in the day? Shouldn't I be better at this when I've already had a trial run in the morning?

2) What's up with students who get busted for plagiarism on an assignment worth a whopping 5% of their grade, plead that they didn't know any better, and then proceed to skip the next week of classes, ensuring that they will get no credit for the course? If I were trying to convince the prof that I was a good student who had made one unfortunate mistake out of ignorance, you can bet my ass would be in that chair. Indeed, why is it ALWAYS the ones who are already struggling who choose to skip? Do they somehow think it's better to ensure that they'll fail instead of spending the rest of the semester worrying about it?

3) Why does there seem to be an upswing, this year, in students who want the university to police their behavior? I swear, I am getting so sick of reading argumentative papers about how smoking should be banned on campus, and alcohol should be banned on campus, and all campuses should be gated communities where visitors have to get a permit from the campus police, and colleges should return to the principle of in loco parentis*, and faculty members should conduct monthly searches of dorm rooms to make sure none of the students have alcohol, drugs, weapons, matches, or candles (!) Is it a deep South thing? A post-Virginia-Tech thing? A reflection of the fact that Misnomer U. already has rather overprotective policies, so students of a libertarian bent tend to end up somewhere else? Whatever, back in the last millennium we would SO not have stood for any of this. I feel old.

4) Why is the end of the semester so close and yet so far away?

* Yes, the student used the phrase in loco parentis. At least she genuinely learned something from her research!

end-of-the-beginning-of-the-semester blahs

Brain feels fuzzy. I think grading 43 freshman comp essays has a bad effect on the intellect. I have been watching, in bits and pieces, the BBC first tetralogy as a reward for grading the essays, but tonight I'm too tired. Actually, the Henry VI plays work quite well as a soap opera, and I think it would be cool if someone remade them as one.

The essays were almost universally blah with two or three bright spots, all of them from the morning class. No really hilariously, head-clearingly bad ones, but most of them not very good. On Monday, I will receive 43 more drafts; on Tuesday, I have an insane number of conferences, like 21 or so. Oh yeah, and I will be teaching Titus Andronicus for the first time (though not, obviously, in freshman comp). Help.

So despite being a first-year faculty member, apparently I'm sorta-chair of this not-quite-committee thing. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I suppose it will look good in the tenure file, but I'm at the point where I feel like my head will explode if I even think about the tenure file. Anyway, I have been writing up a draft proposal describing what the not-quite-committee will do, which is rather challenging since I haven't worked out what not-quite-committees do in general, but at least it's only a draft. Right?

Is it fall break yet? I need it to be fall break. I think my students need it to be fall break; five weeks into the semester, the novelty has worn off, and the freshmen are hitting the grousing-chattering-heads-down-on-desks stage. Hell, I feel like having my head down on the desk sometimes. I was having one of my periodic fits of anxiety about the whole grading-and-credentials system, so I asked the afternoon class today how they would handle matters if they could be in charge of the university. The only answer that I got was "No offense, Ms. Porpentine, but I wouldn't have any English classes. [Pause.] Or math. Or science." Well, I'm, um, glad that the math and science profs don't seem to be doing any better with the Student Engagement thing?

It has been cool and pleasant these last few days, cool enough to keep the door to the patio open in the evenings, only I hope the big slugs don't come in. Ew, slugs.

On that note, I think my brain has officially turned to mush. Good night.

right, so why did I let myself in for this?

My plan for the summer:

Today - June 3: Finish writing article and send it off. Finish syllabus for summer class. Clean out office. Box up ENTIRE APARTMENT. Possibly, put stuff into storage; possibly just leave it in the apartment, depending on whether the landlord will let me get away with not paying rent for July.

June 4-12: Go to Louisville to grade AP exams.

June 13-17: Drive to Parentland. Fill out paperwork for summer class. Finish prep for summer class, which is not precisely in my field and covers some material I haven't read since undergrad, and has three-and-a-half-hour class sessions.

June 23 - July 30: Teach summer class in Parentland. At some point, go to Deep South Town for a long weekend to scout out apartments. At another point, possibly go to a wedding. At yet another point, possibly return to New SLAC Town to let the movers in, if stuff is not already in storage.

July 31 - August 6: Drive to Deep South Town.

August 7 - New faculty orientation.

Now, the AP grading and the summer course are both things that I signed on for before I got the job offer at Misnomer U., and can't back out of now. By and large, it's just as well that I have a few sources of income for the summer, since the new place doesn't pay moving expenses, and the summer teaching will involve a lit class with a current enrollment of six students, which is the best kind of teaching. But still, aarghh.