Academia: December 2003 Archive Page

I thought I was busy as a graduate student, and I was.... As long as I showed up at the right place -- the library, the classroom, the data-entry warehouse -- I got through. Being a faculty member lumps the hours and the tasks all together, and there is little immediate feedback on what's important to complete. Yes, you have to prepare for class, but how well? No, you don't have to write the article right away; there's no deadline on it. As for skipping the weekly meeting of a pointless committee well, who really knows it will matter? | Managing time as an assistant professor is something for which few new faculty members are fully prepared, but it's crucial to your long-term success. -- Lee Tobin McClain --Lessons in Time Management (Chronicle)

Note to self: print out this article and read it a week or two before every semester.

I tend to over-prepare for workshop classes, often coming in with stacks of handouts that I never pass out and overheads that I never use.

Teaching a literature course requires much less prep time on a week-to-week basis (reading a dozen short poems or a hundred pages in a novel) than teaching a writing course (where you have to mark student exercises, checking their revisions against what you wrote in the margins of their earlier drafts, taking note of recurring problems and constructing new handouts for next week or next year, etc.). As long as I've refreshed my memory on the assigned texts, I can "wing it" and lead a pretty good discussion of readings in a literature class. A few students did request more structure when discussing readings in my journalism and "Seminar in Thinking in Writing" class, so I'll have to keep that in mind as I plan my courses. (I haven't had the formal meeting to discuss official course evaluations with my division chair -- I'm referring now to what I learned from short end-of-term reflection papers.)

I've got a five-column spreadsheet, on which I'm listing all the assigned readings and due dates for the four courses I'm teaching and the production schedule of The Setonian. I should probably add a sixth column and add my research/professional goals.

And by the way, I started blogging this article before I noticed who wrote it! (Lee's office is two doors down from mine.)

Roland Barthes famously announced the death of the author. This weekend, as thousands of professors and their apprentices mill about the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Diego, one might ask: Has theory succumbed to the same fate? ... [T]heory's promised political liberation never happened. Cultural theory, he argues, instead mutated into a free-for-all, where students now use Derrida to deconstruct ''Friends,'' not to change the world - an outcome he calls ''politically catastrophic.'' --Matthew Price reviews Terry Eagelton's After Theory --The self-critic: The man who praised literary theory to thousands of students now wants them to bury it (The Boston Globe)

Hmm... if people really are using theory to critique "Friends," does that not mean that critical thinking and deconstruction as a skill has penetrated enough people's lives that theory has escaped the hallowed halls of academe and the dusty stacks of the library? And if so, is that a good thing? Eagelton is frustrated that graduate students who have the world-changing potential of Marxism at their fingertips are frittering their time away with playful language games, instead of doing something; they analyze the erotic body, but ignore the famished body.

I have always had difficulty with the moral relativism that reigned in my graduate seminars. In two short weeks I'll start teaching a course on "Media Aesthetics," so I'll be wrestling with such issues ("What is beautiful? What is good?") on a regular basis. (I've blogged about Richard Rorty's pragmatism before.) Aestheticism has its own set of problems, but a dogmatic devotion to literary theory can be just as isolating.

While many of my students are getting the hang of this, just as many aren't. I'm sure it's that some are simply more motivated than others, some feel more comfortable writing for an audience, others are more passionate about their topics, and some are just more confident in their abilities in general. But what those of us using Web logs are trying to articulate now are the strategies that will help students make the most of their blogging efforts while at the same time envision the ways in which they might be included in the curriculum. --Will R. --More Thinking on Student Blogging (Weblogg-Ed)

Bjorn Lomborg, the author of a controversial book attacking the environment movement, was cleared yesterday of "scientific dishonesty" by the Danish science ministry.

The ministry overturned a ruling in January by the Danish committee on scientific dishonesty (DCSD), part of the Danish Research Agency, that Mr Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist was "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice". --Houlder and MacCarthy --Danish writer cleared of 'scientific dishonesty' (Financial Times)

I've been following this one for a while. Well-meaning reporters and students often uncritically accept the statistics given by activists who misrepresent, misunderstand, or simply mis-emphasize scientific findings.

Thus we are pleased to announce the winners of The Chronicle's First Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative MLA Paper Titles (also known as the Provokies). All selections are cited as listed in the program for the 119th MLA Annual Convention, to be held this month in San Diego. (In other words, no paper titles were made up.)...[T]he judges quickly reached consensus on Most Provocative Panel Title: "Apertures and Orifices in Chaucer." As luck would have it, Most Provocative Paper Title went to a presentation to be delivered during that same session: "'The Entree Was Long and Streit, and Gastly for to See': Visual and Verbal Penetration in the Knight's Tale," by Disa Gambera of the University of Utah. --Scott McLemee --Signifyin' at the MLA (Chronicle)

One of my favorite MLA paper titles was "The Semiotics of Sinatra," presented by the former chair of the University of Toronto's English department. (Yes, that's Frank Sinatra.)

This bibliography was originally compiled by Scott Stebelman from 1996-2000. Scott, a librarian at Gelman Library at George Washington University from 1986 until 2000, retired recently. The page is currently being updated and enhanced by Dr. Seth Katz and Jim Bonnett at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. --Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Select Bibliography (Bradley University)

The pages I checked focus mainly on print resources published in the mid 90s, and the index page hasn't been updated since 2001, but it still looks very impressive. It led me to a site with much of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies online.

The word "grammar," Mr. Ellis writes, had an old vernacular usage, meaning "the ability to do magic." That overtone survives in "grimoire," the term for a book of spells, as well as the word "glamour," which was originally "an illusion of beauty created through black magic."

A sorcerer, then, is a kind of scholar, and vice versa. --Scott McLemee

--The Devil and Bill Ellis (Chronicle)

The fact that Google now "sucks" is in a large part not Google's fault: Google simply reflects what it can see, and most of the Web is simply invisible to Google, as it now lies behind closed doors. Google's aggressive, but essentially dumb robots can only get so far. We're painfully aware that Google's lack of specificity leaves its robots chomping through thin air, dead pages, or trackbacks, more often than not. --Andrew Orlowski --A Quantum Theory of Internet Value (The Register)

Orlowski ruminates on the impact of Google Print, a new feature from Google (see BBC's coverage) that searches the contents of selected print books, along with the Internet.

It's a sure bet that the scholarly books that don't have huge print runs or huge advertising budgets won't be the ones paying Google to "feature" their results, which means that Google will be even less valuable than it already is to students seeking credible scholarly information.

I get to add another detail to my list of "why you shouldn't rely on Google" freshman comp speech (which I have to repeat in every class, at every level. Many students, rewarded by their high school teachers for their ability to summarize plot or express their own personal opinion of a text, seem to write up their whole paper first, and only then look for sources.

I ask students to submit notes telling me what they would have done more of if they had the chance, and the activity of scholarly research is often described as "finding quotes that support my argument," rather than constructing an argument based on the reading you have already done.

A student who has already polished the sentences and paragraphs, and has a few hours before being overtaken by sleep (or, in some cases, the actual deadlie) tends not to be very descriminatory when Google returns a list of hits that "look good".

Note: I'd already blogged this article when Jim e-mailed to me a suggestion. Keep 'em coming, Jim.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not a sports fan. And here's one reason why.

"When I was (in school), we had a day when everyone who was receiving scholarships — academic or athletic — was called up at an assembly and honored. One guy who barely met NCAA requirements got a full athletic scholarship, while several other people who had almost straight As got $500 or $1,000.

"It is funny thinking back on it, because I was one of the athletic guys who got the big check for football," [social studies teacher] Whicker added. -- "Gold & Black Illustrated".

Things That Make Me WeepJerz's Literacy Weblog)

So, it's "funny," is it? I'm not laughing. This is sad.

(The article itself, about a spoof article that was picked up as true by sports journalists, is somewhat amusing.)

Gaming Culture and Theory -- Or; Will Somebody Please Pinch Me?Literacy Weblog)

About a half hour ago, I returned from a meeting with the dean of academic affairs, at which I was planning to pitch a new course that I'm calling "Gaming Culture and Theory." I brought a short stack of scholarly books along with me, intending to justify the academic value of such a course, particularly as Seton Hill University continues admitting more men.

But before I even made it to the chair, the dean said, "Just so you know, I'm going to ask you teach this course next January. Tell me, what will it be about?"

In return for teaching a course in the first few weeks of January (during Christmas break), I would get a lighter teaching load in the spring.

In order to accomodate the needs of students who want to go home for Christmas break, the dean wants me to teach the course online, and to commit to teaching it every other year (which is typical of electives at our small school).

I had already roughed up a syallabus that had us meeting in virtural environments for all of the second week and using blogs throughout the term, so I didn't have to think very much about that. She also asked whether the course would meet the university's "artistic expression" area requirement, and I said that I thought it would -- graphic designers could produce storyboards, English majors could write branching dialogue trees, programmers could produce their own Elizas, etc.

I decided to go with a cultural focus, rather than a heavy theoretical focus, because one of my goals would be to get students to begin thinking critically about the games they play (and about the rhetoric of gaming as it is represented by the mainstream media). Perhaps after I've taught more upper-class SHU students, I'll have a clearer idea of what kind of theoretical concepts to attempt, but something tells me a three-week intensive course offered during the January break is going to have to have a lot of hands-on game time. Since three weeks is probably not long enough for students to become fully invested in an epic MMORPG, I don't think I'll be able to work with EverQuest in class. And I want to include an exploring/socializing game, such as There.com, SimsOnline (neither of which I've played). I'm thinking of assignments such as asking students to use their avatars for cross-gendered role-play, to discuss such issues as sexual harrasment or body image in virtural environments. I'm not sure I could teach stand a course on the mathematical algorithms for generating the shadow for a stream of spurting blood, but the course will have to appeal to the gaming geeks in order for it to attract enough enrollment.

My parting shot was a request that I be given a budget to fund my own exploratory research on the pedagogical uses of virtual environments. Sure, she said, put it in the proposal. (Which is easy enough to say, but still... she didn't burst out laughing, which is a good sign.)

Where to start... EverQuest is probably out (though maybe I should investigate a little further before deciding...). Star Wars Galaxies? Deus X 2? Grand Theft Auto?

(Somebody, pinch me!)

Okay, okay, back to my long-enough list of short-term goals.

Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer ReviewLiteracy Weblog)

Vannevar Bush, writing in 1945, lamented that the volume of scientific knowledge being published each year forced researchers to spend unprecedented time and energy searching for relevant information (and choosing what to ignore). His solution, the Memex, was a photocopier crossed with a microfilm storage and access device. A Memex user would theoretically create links between documents, annotating those links, add those annotations to the filing system, and share the resulting "trails" with other researchers. In some sense, what Vannevar Bush was trying to accomplish with his annotated "trails" has been implemented through the weblog genre (specifically, the research blog or "edublog").

Traditional textual scholarship aims to construct a specific, ideal, "correct" text. But computer science -- the discipline that generates the technology that drives (or hampers) information literacy -- aims instead for abstraction. In the open source software development model, particularly as described by Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," individual programmers contribute their labor freely to a common project made available to the general public for free.

Given the financial pressures publishers of journals exert upon libraries, and the brewing rebellion against what some activists characterize as a cabal of print publishers, some emerging electronic forms have radically altered the dynamics of the scholar-publisher relationship, without necessarily reducing the filtering value provided by peer-review. Electronic journals such as First Monday offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship on a timeline of weeks. Even more radical is the Wiki, a form of electronic authorship that decentralizes authority and encourages all readers to annotate, expand, edit, or completely revise a common text.

In such genres, peer-review (in the form of inbound links, e-mailed or posted corrections/refutations, revision, or even deletion) is expected to happen after a text is published, thus making the process of peer review visible, instead of simply the product. Popularly-edited texts online typically summarize general knowledge, rather than offer a forum for the presentation of new knowledge or controversial opinion; further, emerging electronic genres also typically over-represent particular opinions espoused by technorati who manipulate the system (an effect which inspired the term "Googlewashing," and illustrated by the recent online prank that now causes a Google search for "miserable failure" to point first to George Bush's official biography on the White House web site). Developing strategies to compensate for these anomalous effects is a vital skill for 21st Century information literacy.

Considering how little return American students get on their books during "Book Buyback" at the end of the semester, I wondered if Iraqi students could use these donations instead? --Mike Arnzen --Gun and Pencil: Book Buyback for Baghdad? (Pedablogue)

A reflection on the CS Monitor's report on the state of higher education in Iraq. Now there are some professors whose problems really make me feel like a whiner.

Me: Okay, okay, Jerz...enough procrastinating, and get back to those papers.

Me: Just one more blog entry? Pleeease?

Me: No!

Me: Then can I at least run that errand to the business office?

Me: Okay... but no stopping off at the cafeteria.

Me: Aw.....

Count your ideas. Be careful not to have too many. | And if a student dares to have four ideas, instead of three? . . . Toss one out. Only three ideas allowed. I've seen students fail assignments because they had the wrong numbers. | And they can't stop writing that way. Many have told me, even in tears, that they try to write differently, but they can't. | Brainwashing does that. Now, imagine the future." --Lynn Stratton --Taught to Remove all Thought (Floridian)

Is it really this bad? The hated "five paragraph essay" is a device we teach our students so that their biology and economics teachers will be able to find the answers they want the students to produce on essay tests; these professors typically don't want to see a student's rough drafts, and typically aren't intersted in helping the student discover knowledge and take ownership of its expression. (Of course, there are teachers who are exceptions.) Seton Hill University is going through a plan to identify certain courses as "writing intensive," and restrict the enrollment so that the instrutor will have more time to work with writing. (My colleague Mike Arnzen rather gutsily pointed out that, based on the administration's guidelines, all English courses should be designated "writing intensive," and we should therefore reduce the enrollment in all the courses we teach; but I doubt that his suggestion caused more than a passing chuckle from the administration.)

I don't think there is anything wrong in teaching students to write in a manner that their professors who are not writing experts will appreciate. But I spend a lot of time teaching students who have already mastered the five-paragraph essay to unlearn that form and adapt to the requirements of a news article, a memo, or a web site. Sometimes it's easier to teach students who don't have to unlearn their knowledge of the traditional English essay. I'll have to revisit this whole discussion in January.

Link found via a comment by "cgb" on Kairosnews.

Mike says that the five-paragraph format is a shortcut, and "short-cuts -- whether a five-paragraph theme or a preemptive military strike -- seldom offer lasting solutions." Amanda says that "[w]hat it generates is more a list than an essay." I agree with what Amanda says when she argues (implicitly) that it's not so much the number of paragraphs as it is that the format doesn't encourage connection-making, critical thinking, or innovative ways to write introductions and conclusions--ugh, especially conclusions... --Clancy Ratliff --On the Five-Paragraph Essay (KairosNews)

A good introduction to the flurry of bloggers responding to a recent NYT article.

Early, link-heavy blogs were, for the most part, a method of sharing links. They usually contained entries that consisted of one or two hyperlinks, the blogger's commentary on the link's content, and a place for other bloggers to make comments about the entry. These early blogs often focused on what Blood calls "the dissemination and interpretation of the news." By linking to news articles from "lesser-known sources" that might be otherwise overlooked by the "typical web user," weblog authors supply "additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary" that is often unavailable from large news sources (10/01/03). See Appendix A.

As blogging became more popular, many weblogs shifted from the original, link-heavy forms that dominated early blogs, to a free-form on-line journal where authors have begun to write more freely and frequently. Many blog entries now contain no links at all, as the new generation of bloggers share "notes about the weekend, [or] a quick reflection on some subject or another" (Blood 10/01/03). Many bloggers write bi-daily in these journals, which serve as more of an ?Update-in-the-life-of?,? than a source for news. See Appendix B.

Although weblog journals have gained immense popularity over the past four years, the original link-heavy style is still respected by many current weblogs. --Kirsten Schubert, a former student of mine, in her senior capstone paper at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. --Blurring the Borders of Rhetoric and Hypertextuality in Weblogs (The Hypertext Project)

Kirsten's blog truncated my (long) comment, so I'll post my reaction to her paper below.

To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education. --Open Access Journals in the Field of Education (AERA-SIG)

Here's to open-access online journals. I hope Google notices this link and adds my PageRank value to the value of this page. (Via the original Pedablogue.)

Works Cited

"Susan" (smgct1@comcast.net). "Oddly enough..." [Weblog comment.] N.d. "More Questionable Use of My Work." Dennis G. Jerz. Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Seton Hill University. 10 Dec 2003. (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=1998)

Poster's Lastname, Firstname, I. (or screen ID) "Title of comment, or first few words." [Weblog comment.] Date comment was posted. Title of blog entry. Author of blog entry. Name of Weblog. Sponsoring organization -- if any. Date blog entry was posted. (URL that displays the comments in context, if possible.) Date you accessed the comment.

Note: See also "Citing a Weblog Entry in MLA Style".Citing a Weblog Comment in MLA StyleJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I couldn't immediately find Susan's full name when I looked at her website, so for the above example I treated "Susan" like a nickname; the quotation marks indicate that I haven't simply forgotten to type her last name.

I think the bracketed label "[Weblog comment]" is probably necessary for clarification.

The URL for the citation should display the comments in context, rather than a link that opens a pop-up window with the comments inside (and no easy way to see the entry that prompted the comments).

As with any MLA citation, if the information is lacking, keep a placeholder there. Thus, since my system doesn't at the moment display the date when a comment was posted, I added "N.d." (for "no date") in the slot where the date should be.

Works Cited

Jerz, Dennis G. "Citing a Weblog in MLA Style." [Weblog entry.] Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Seton Hill University. 11 Dec 2003. (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=2000). 11 Dec 2003.

Lastname, Firstname, I. "Title of individual blog entry." [Weblog entry.] Name of Weblog. Sponsoring organization -- if any. Date posted. (URL to permalink.) Date accessed.

Note: See also "Citing a Weblog Comment in MLA Style".Citing a Weblog Entry in MLA StyleJerz's Literacy Weblog)

The MLA handbook doesn't, in my opinion, do a very good job differentiating between a static personal home page and other kinds of self-published websites (such as an annotated bibliography or an anthology of short autobiographical essays). Citing a weblog isn't much different from citing any web page, but students may appreciate a clear example.

I would prefer to put angle brackets around the URL, but my blogging software chokes when I try that. And I was working on a hanging indent, but couldn't get my stylesheet to display it properly. Some other day. I think I've got it now.

I thought it was necessary to put the "[Curricular weblog.]" statement there because, while my blog has the word "Weblog" in it, not all do. Possible values to fill this slot could include "Group weblog," "Professional weblog," "Personal weblog," etc. [I've actually changed that around a bit now...] Should it simply be "Weblog," and should it be there only if the blog doesn't include "blog" or "weblog" in the title? I can see particular value in "Group weblog," so that citing a post that I make to Kairosnews or New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University does not make me look like I own the blog (since many people can and do post on these sites.)

Comments or suggestions?

In response to a request by Susan. Which makes me realize I ought to do a separate blog entry for citing comments...

More Questionable Use of My Work

While surfing the web today, I was surprised to find, in an OpenWiki installation on a web page published by the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management (University of California, Santa Barbara), a document containing a subtantial amout of my own work. The OpenWiki document in question states that it has been reproduced with my permission, but that text refers to the (belated) permission I gave when I discovered the first copy that Bren School made.

• Current version of my FrontPage Handout
• Copied and altered once without first getting permission
• Once again, copied, altered and this time released in an open source format without my permission

When I initially found the first copy, I saw that references to me and my institution had been removed, and the site was republished under the Bren School banner. I did give belated permission, provided that my name and institutional affiliation be restored to the document, and that a prominent link direct readers to my current version.

I did not, however, give permission for yet another copy to be made, and neither was I asked my opinion about releasing the document in an open format (which would permit multiple authors to modify and change the text even further).

The latest copy on the Bren site still offers my name, but now neither version contains a link to the current version. Life is too short to get mad, and I am a supporter of both the wiki genre and the open source movement, but this is the second time somebody at the Bren School has misappropriated my work for its instructional purposes.

Update, 11 Dec: A few minutes after midnight, about six hours after I contacted the Bren School, I received an e-mail apology, stating that the material had been removed. I'm grateful for the speedy reaction.

Think about it -- do you really believe that person who says they couldn't do something because "something came up?" That they couldn't do their homework because the printer broke? Lame.... These lies will work as excuses because no one believes excuses anyway! And to think, if they are outrageous lies, they will become more believable because they are just that inventive!

Some examples:

• "A plane crashed off the coast of Madagascar."
  
• "I was stranded on a desert island."
  
• "I had an unfortunate run-in with an overhead projector, and now must wear goggles until my wound heals."
  
• "The sun didn't come up this morning at my house, and I rely on roosters to wake me."

--Julie Young --Spam and excuses (Work in Progress)

Julie's comments about Spam are fine, but it's the excuses that made me want to blog this. I'm not sure the two observations really go together, but it's still blogworthy. I like particularly the goggles and the roosters.

OK, that's enough fun for today. I've really got to get to my grading now.

"The technology is simple," said Microsoft Office Research Division Head, Richard Greenwood, "students have been doing it for years. Thanks to the power of Microsoft Word 2004, anybody can turn a five-hundred-word report into a ten-thousand-word masterpiece." --Word 2004 to Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature (BB Spot)

Not the best spoof news site, but this article isn't bad.

I'm marking blogging portfolios for my Writing for the Internet course. Here are a few gems:

• "I don't get any leftovers at school, and I miss that twice-heated home cooked goodness." -- Amy Slade
• "I'm willing to wager that writing for an online medium is letting me take the easy way out." -- Julie Young
• "The clothes are donated to the YWCA. The owners help dress you from head to toe and even does make-up and hair if needed." -- Tiffany Graham
• "I hate this feeling of stress and nothing getting done." -- Lindsay Dzurko
• "It seems that when something goes wrong here at SHU the baseball team is the first to blame." -- Brandon Whitfield
• "It is all so funny that people are still relying on these 'journalists' to report sex news, when, in actuality they are creating it." -- Amanda Cochran
• "Many cases in the news recently have exhibited the lack of consequences faced by those who commit murder." -- Jess Prokop

Student Blogging Gems (EL 230: Writing for the Internet)

Note to self... next time, have student bloggers blog at least part of their reflection paper on blogging. I'm reading some really excellent observations that I'd like to link to, but I can't because the students have submitted them the old-fashioned way, on paper.

Of course, some students are being honestly self-critical in a way that might be squelched if they were forced to blog their reflections online.

One recurring thread in their reflections is time -- they either don't have enough time to blog as they feel they should, or they are conscious that blogging is a great way to fritter away time while managing to convince one's self that one is being productive. One student reported that blogging feels like an extracurricular activity, like it is nothing at all in the same realm as reading a chapter of math. I say hurrah to that statement, though unfortuantely I can't link to it because the student didn't blog it.

Two more blog portfolios to go from this class.... but it's time for me to head home.

I hear of and see teachers who write comments on student drafts, sniffily, ?You have reached the maximum number of errors. Rewrite? or ?You don't have a conclusion here. You need to add one.? The message here is clear as a bell: Your ideas don't matter. To Hell with your ideas. Your obedience matters, or it should if you want recognition that you?re educable, that you?re part of society, that you?re productive and upstanding and Good. | It'sno wonder, then, that students talk about their education being a cycle of irrelevant and boring courses, and no wonder that the only thing that keeps them in school is the very instrumental goal of getting a degree. Instrumentality in education is neither new nor a problem as such?goals are good. That the notion of interrogating the world around them, the realities they face on a daily basis, or the ways in which they might become the authors of their goals and lives is so foreign is what leaves me despairing. --A Writing Assignment (Mister B.S.)

Fortunately, I'm not quite this disillusioned yet. Or maybe I have been in the past, but learned to adjust my teaching style so that I can focus on progress rather than the gap between the work that students do and the work that they could do (and that at least some of them do do.)

Yes, incoming students have a lot to learn about their own education, but, isn't that the point, and isn't that why I have a job?

"I worked hard in high school, but they could have worked me harder," said Belisle, now a sophomore. "Not only was I adjusting to new people, a new place to live and a new city, but I was adjusting to a new way of learning." | From the U.S. Department of Education to the company that designs the Advanced Placement (AP) program, experts have described a growing problem: High-school and college expectations rarely connect. Most high-school graduates are not prepared to enter college, studies show. And when they do enroll, many are not prepared to succeed. --Cara Solomon --College-prep expectations don't mesh with realities  (Seattle Times)

I have great sympathy for students who have been told all along that they are bright, but who have never been asked to work hard until they get to college. In fact, I think it's a tragedy that students like Miss Belisle (quoted above) weren't challenged to reach their full potential.

I remember that some idealistic part of me died when, a few years ago at my previous job, I was teaching a freshman composition course and made a reference to "when you used to do homework for high school," and the class burst out laughing. When I asked them why, they said they never did homework beyond cramming the night before an exam (or more likely the lunch period before an exam). They watched movies during English class instead of discussing books that they read outside of class, and their English papers were summaries of the plot that they remembered from the movie (or that they got from Spark Notes). The very idea that an instructor would read their essays and check them for logical consistency and critial content, rather than simply for grammatical correctness, floored them.

Last year, National Geographic published an article about dorm life, and one college student reported spending eight hours a day entertaining himself with games, TV, or the Interent, three hours a day in class, and an hour or two a day on homework. I don't care how "bright" this kid is, or how much time and effort he puts into charming his teachers -- he's not going to succeed in college for long.

I don't mean to presume that every student who isn't doing well is wasting their college tuition in this manner. Seton Hill University has numerous resources, ranging from tutors to in-class note-takers to financial aid to counseling of all sorts, to help students who are struggling. Yet I am stunned to see that some students react instead by simply not showing up in class.

"Good job!" doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK.... This doesn’t mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions of delight are harmful. We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our reactions helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life -- or to constantly look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited about what she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head? --Alfie Kohn --Five Reasons to Stop Saying 'Good Job!' (AlfieKohn.org)

Kohn suggests that, instead of praising a child for drawing a picture ("Good drawing!") we instead respond more neutrally, focusing our attention on what the child accomplished. ("You drew a big mountain! You sure used a lot of purple!")

This makes a lot of sense to me, though I'd have to read more of Kohn's work to decide how I feel it applies to my own teaching. Students who are used to being praised for effort can be flustered in college, where (most of the time, or at least in my classes anyway) simply expending effort is not good enough.

Found via Pedablogue. (Good job, Mike!)

Oh the snow outside's delightful.
My stacks of papers to mark are frightful.
For the students who want to know:

Days to go, days to go, days to go...Stacks and Stacks of Papers to GradeJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Dear Students,

The last week of classes is always an emotional time for me. I love you all, and miss you already. I hope you are enjoying the snow.

Above is a picture of the stacks of papers I have to mark before I will have your final grades calculated. I received most of these Thursday and Friday morning, and only brought home for the weekend what I could fit in one shoulder bag.

I can understand your enthusiasm for knowing what your grades will be going into the final exam, but no, I don't have your grades ready yet.

Dr. Michael Whitlatch, professor of speech and drama, has a review published in the November issue of Choice. His review of "Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950 Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine," by Dennis Jerz has just been sent to college and university libraries. --Whitlatch Publication (Buena Vista U)

Gulp! As I prepare to mark term papers and final projects, it's probably a good thing that I am suddenly reminded of what it feels like to be judged. I wasn't able to find any online information on the periodical "Choice" -- it's just too common a word to Google; based on the context and the title, I'm guessing it's a librarian trade magazine. I'll have to wait a bit to learn what his verdict is. (On a side note... I like the BVU concept of the BVU information page.)

Whitlatch is a prolific reviewer with decades of specialized experience in the subject matter and time period I studied in grad school. He has plenty of publications under his own belt, so I'm bracing myself for some serious criticism.

A few hours ago I got my hands on Nick's book on interactive fiction ("Twisty Little Passages"), and of course I flipped it open to the works cited list looking for my name, and there it was. I feel like a real academic now. Of course, the URLs are all broken, since they point to my UWEC website, but I'm going to set up a redirect now.

And, while I'm on the subject of academic books, I wrote a long comment in response to SHU student Brian McCollum's blogged rant against literary anthologies. (By the way, I'm not the teacher he's referring to.)

Update: Rosemary Frezza writes, "I found the review of your book - it is short but very positive!" That's a relief. I'll ask the author if I can post it.

His voice was calm, but I could tell by his furrowed brow that what he truly wanted to say was, "Graduate school is a slow and unrelenting descent into hell. Save yourself while you still can." | I felt the earth move under my feet. Grad school had been my last great hope. For most of my life, I tried to hide the fact that I liked to learn because it cut down on the amount of after-school beatings from my less enthusiastic classmates. Even in college, where students pay to learn, I discovered to my dismay that many of my peers cared more about beer bongs and frat parties than Shakespeare and Yeats. But despite my disappointment, I remained optimistic because I was holding out for grad school -- the nerd Utopia -- a place where thoughtful people gathered to discuss ideas that really mattered. --Jane Bast --Ignoring Good Advice (Chronicle)

The author compares learning the truth about grad school to learning the truth about Santa Claus. I personally didn't find grad school all that terrible, especially compared to my experience as a buttoned-down scholarly nerd at party-friendly U.Va. And, in response to the article's last point, grad students at the University of Toronto did very little teaching; it was difficult getting experience in front of a classroom.

Key to the technique is comparing news sources that cover the same events but employ slightly different styles. Because they are writing about the same events they contain the same facts, or arguments, said Barzilay. "This gives us patterns which are kind of the same -- and this is the core of the paraphrasing technique.".... [T]he system learned incorrectly that "Palestinian suicide bomber" and "suicide bomber" were the same, and that "killing 20 people" is the same as "killing 20 Israelis", said Barzilay. These mistakes made by the system are "due to how reporters are reporting," she said. "In some sense... the teacher here is what the reporter writes," she said. Kimberly Patch --Software paraphrases sentences (TRN)

The Palestine/Israel detail is presented as an example of pro-Israel reporter bias, but I'm not so sure. If, according to the sample of news reportage being examined, more Israelis were killed than Palestinians, and if the ways in which Israelis were killed (civilians killed in marketplaces by suicide bombers, and also soldiers killed by armed combatants) was more newsworthy than the ways in which Palestinians were killed (armed combatants killed by soldiers and some innocent bystanders killed by soldiers) then the computer's "mistake" might be understandable. But I'm not informed enough about the research involved to be able to make any reliable statement; of course the computer isn't responding to what really happened in the world, it's responding to the way a certain group of reporters described what their research tells them happened in the world. Of course, the results are going to reflect human biases, but the sample fed into the computer is affected by such things as how likely a news source that reflects a particular worldview will publish an online English edition.

On a lighter note...

Speaking at a press conference, researchers shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and coughed into their hands before insisting, "Of course this software won't be marketed to students intending to fool turnitit.com. Whatever gave you that idea?"

...Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph "persuasive essays" for the state exam, she was stumped by her first [college] writing assignment.... "I had good grades in high school, so I thought I could do well in college," Ms. Arevelo said. "I thought I was getting a good education. I was shocked." --Diana Jean Schmeo and Ford Fessenden --Gains in Houston Schools: How Real Are They? (NY Times (will expire))

The article critiques the Texas school system's techniques for measuring student success. Teachers who tailored their lessons to helping students ace a standardized test did their students a disservice, because all the effort placed on mastering a single test did not give the student critical thinking skills, information filtering skills, etc.

Santa Claus needed Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius, and during the show's climactic blizzard, the outcasts negotiated a place within the North Pole's hegemonic power structure... | One can only imagine the looks on the faces of the children who unwrapped the misfit toys. Did they laugh and cheer for the squirt gun that sprayed jelly and the cowboy who rode an ostrich? The polka-dotted elephant might have been fun, but I have a feeling that the poor kid who received the choo-choo with square wheels cursed Santa for caving into Rudolph's demands. | That's the flaw in the moral universe I share with Rankin and Bass's animagic creations. The program refuses to deal with the consequences of dropping special-needs toys into unprepared homes. --Jon T. Coleman --The Trouble with Misfits (Chronicle)

It's only fair to note that the references to the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are only part of an extended metaphor that introduces a point about Ph.D. hiring committees. Yes, it's overdone, but that's probably the point. Even professors can have fun on the holidays.

Merry Christmas!

America's higher education system is facing a crisis. Decades of dramatically increasing costs, in both good economic times and bad, are threatening to push the dream of college out of reach for millions of students and families. --College Cost Central: A Resource for Parents, Students, & Taxpayers Fed Up With the High Cost of Higher Education  (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce)

Boy, these guv'ment folks like long titles.

The key to understanding this flashy website is in the long subtitle -- it is not a fair and balanced resource, it is only for those who want to cut government spending on colleges. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish illustrates the persuasive, rather than informative, purpose of this site:

Only three of the questions are real; that is, only three of the questions are framed with the objective of finding out something the researchers don't already know or think they know. The others are designed to elicit -- no coerce -- responses that can then be used to support the conclusions that McKeon and Boehner have reached in advance of doing any research at all.

Here, for example, is the first question: "Can colleges and universities be doing more to control their spending and avoid large tuition hikes that hurt parents and students?" Although this has the form of a question, its core content is four unsubstantiated assertions: colleges and universities do not control their spending; uncontrolled spending is the sole cause of tuition hikes; those hikes are large (in relation to what norms or practices is never specified); and they hurt parents and students.

The real question then is, "Do you think that colleges and universities should stop doing these horrible things?" and of course anyone who understands it that way (and what other way is there to understand it?) will answer "yes" and thus provide Boehner and McKeon with one more piece of "evidence" with which to convict higher education of multiple offenses.

I'm going to have to save this example for the next time I teach about critiquing academic resources.