Education: April 2005 Archive Page

In the minority are those teachers who have setup their blog/cms as the main home page for their site, integrated into their blog or CMS or at least provide obvious links to their CV, teaching experience, etc, off of the main page of their blog. The blog/CMS is thus positioned as the main public face for establishing professional ethos, an inseparable part of the teacher/researcher's identity. I was actually surprised at how few I have been able to find; it seems a large number of those in the field don't provide direct links to their professional CV or teaching philosophy from the front page of their blog or only a brief mention of their professional affiliation thus making it obvious to me that they would not share their blog as the singular main portal into their professional identity in a cover letter or resume submitted to a hiring committee.

Here's the list I have so far where teachers are building their professional identity into their blog/cms site, or at least featuring the blog as their home page with direct links back to CV, bio, etc.

• Matt Barton
• Johndan Johnson-Eilola
• Dennis Jerz
• Charles Lowe
• Clancy Ratliff
• Rich Rice
• Clay Spinuzzi

Anyone have suggestions for other sites in rhetoric and composition with these characteristics? I'm sure there must be some more out there and I'd like a few more examples. --Teachers Who Position Their Blog or CMS as their Professional Home Page (KairosNews)

Professors, in general, have the luxury of appearing moderate and open to competing ideas, but insecure students often research the opinions of faculty members to ensure that they will be on the correct side of any apparently open dialogue. The powerless seize on small expressions of political opinion from the powerful and embrace these views even more radically in order to prove their loyalty and worthiness.

Of course, most of us probably didn't recognize that we were latecomers to the grad-school pyramid scheme. Theory with a capital T grew up with the expansion of graduate programs and the adjunctification of higher education during the last 30 years. It was a ticket to success for a charmed circle of insiders: a few people at elite institutions with the connections and advance knowledge to get in and out of the game before the general rush. The language of theory -- carefully deployed in the world of academic hiring and publication -- still functions in ways that suggest the sub rosa communications of Ivy League clubmen in the world of investment banking.

By the turn of the millennium, however, the jargon-laden writing was on the wall. Shoeshine boys were talking about Jacques Derrida. You could buy books on Theory at Wal-Mart with a six-pack of Zima and an "Indigo Girls" T-shirt.

And now it seems like everyone is rushing to get out with what's left of their devalued stock. Famous scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Homi Bhabha, and Terry Eagleton have announced that "theory is dead." Of course, at this late date, it's as if our leaders have emerged from months of concentrated thought to announce that Jefferson Starship is no longer on the cutting edge of popular music. --"Thomas H. Benton" --Life After the Death of Theory (Chronicle)

I had the very same alienating experience with one particular theory class at the University of Virginia, though I also remember some very productive courses with E.D. "Cultural Literacy" Hirsch and Arthur "Shakespeare" Kirsch, among others.

In Hirsch's class, a history of critical theory, there were two philosophy students who frequently arrived about 10 minutes late, walked all the way across the lecture hall to their seat right next to the instructor's desk, and dominated the post-lecture Q & A sessions by arguing philosophical points with Hirsch. Once I actually went up to Hirsch after class and asked that he not let those students dominate the discussion, though in retrospect I'm sure that if I had simply raised my hand to ask a good question, he'd have gladly called on me. I was such a putz.

Kirsch's class was very much in demand. As a culling technique, he required students to write a 10-page paper every other week. What a way to ensure a dedicated student roster!

At Toronto, I got a good grip on a first-semester course, "History of the English Language," and also took a course on bibliography (which was more than research -- it was also an introduction to the history of books). I loved those classes, and I remember that they shook up some of my classmates. These were Ph.D. students who confessed they didn't know the difference between an article and a preposition. A bibliography course is even more necessary now. At the time, most of the grad students probably remember switching from writing papers long-hand to composing them on the computer, but that's probably not the case today.

My dissertation adviser, F. J. Marker, characterized me as a "theory refugee." Fortunately for me, he was a theater historian with a joint appointment to the English department, so that wasn't a problem to him.

Among my classmates, there were plenty instances of posturing and tunnel vision. As an American who had lived in Virginia all his life, I found myself in an interesting position in a class on Southern American lit, being offered at a Canadian institution.

One fellow, with steely blue eyes and long, flowing Jesus hair, got very excited about Foucault. He could "do theory" like there was no tomorrow. Years later, he told me that a library worker had cleared out his library carrel, throwing out a draft of his dissertation in the process. He said something about filing a lawsuit against that employee and the university. (Didn't he keep a backup? Hadn't he ever heard "Jesus Saves"?)

Another guy was planning to do a computer-assisted textual analysis of The Canterbury Tales (Or was it Paradise Lost?). I thought it was a cool idea, and at the time I was working on a computer project involving medieval drama. While my fiancée did end up joining me in Toronto, I had left behind a big network of friends in Virginia, and I was very lonely that first year in Toronto all by myself. So, one day after class, I asked this guy if he wanted to go out for coffee. He thought about it, then said he had some work to do instead. I later saw him in the library, reading. I never spoke to him again.

I feel like a hypocrite as I write this, but a student to whom I was polite and respectful seemed to get the idea that we were soulmates. She spouted theory left and right, interspersed with the occasional unthinking anti-American remark (which seemed almost obligatory in Canada at the time). For instance, when some text we were discussing featured rather violent and sexual language, this student noted that the author lived in such-and-such a town, and that near the town was an American military base, so it made sense to her that the author had picked up that language from the U.S. soldiers. Every couple weeks, she would call me up and share with me her latest outrages and department gossip. I was always polite, but never reciprocated. After several years, she stopped calling.

One student from Europe launched a whole interpretation of a story (written by a black author) on the premise that one family was white and another was black, and that the white family was oppressing the black one. When I pointed out that the mother of the "white" family used the "n" word to describe her own son, my fellow student paused, blinked, then suggested that the "white" mother was just demonstrating her racism by using a racial epithet against her son. When I pointed out several dialectical similarities between the way the two families talked, and when I showed how both families spoke in a completely different way from a group of characters who are described in the text as being white, he stuck to his guns. He was so interested in defending his interpretation that, when I asked him whether it was at all possible -- under any circumstances -- to use dialect to identify the race of a character in fiction, he said "no." So much for textual criticism.

The one time I made a sudden connection over a literary text was a complete accident. In one of my classes, we were about to discuss some W. H. Auden poetry. I think I was scheduled to be the "respondent" to a paper written by another student. A few days before the class period, I saw her in the halls and said, "Do you want to go to the lounge and talk about Auden?"

The woman did a double-take, then flashed a confused smile.

I realized she wasn't who I thought she was. "Whoops, My mistake," I sputtered.

She was still smiling.

"I think I just accidentally hit on you, didn't I?"

She laughed. "I was about to say, 'yes!'"

Looking back, I am a bit saddened that I spent so little time talking about literature, and so much time fretting over my own shaky grasp of theory. It was a love of books and writing that led me to grad school. Between classes in my first year or so, I read a list of books on my own, so that I could pass a series of written tests. I also studied -- alone -- for a German test. Maybe I just remember it that way, because talking about the literature wasn't hard, but reading, making sense of, and then talking about the theory was a challenge. I suppose we needed to spend that time practicing our ability to "do criticism."

I enjoy spending time with the grad students and other young professionals I've met via blogs or via CCCC meetings, since they are so literate in the theory of their fields. Reading Mike Vitia or Clancy Ratliff reminds me of the best things I took away from my graduate seminars. (Hmm... it looks like Clancy has been goofing off a bit lately, but that's okay -- she deserves it.)

In the interests of teaching kids not to be gluttons, CTW has transformed Cookie Monster into just another monster who happens to like cookies. His trademark song, "C is for Cookie" has been changed to "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food." And this is a complete and total reversal of Cookie Monster's ontology, his telos, his raison d'etre, his essential Cookie-Monster-ness.

If the Cookie Monster is no longer a cookie monster, what is he? Why didn't they just name him "Phil: The Monster Who Sometimes Likes to Eat a Cookie"? --Jonah Goldberg --Let Cookie Monster be Cookie Monster (Townhall.com)

[A] de-emphasis in the academy in recent years on the formal elements of poetry, in favor of the social, legal, historic, and cultural background to literature, has meant that even doctoral candidates in English need not concern themselves overly with poetic form. Another quick but, I think, telling example: I was serving on a panel of poetry judges, and as the panel proceeded to deliberate, one judge, a university professor and poet, chimed in to say that I and another of our colleagues seemed to be paying a lot of attention to the language in the poems. It was never entirely clear to me what was meant by this statement, but I suspect that the implication was that, in carefully examining a poet’s deployment of words, I had failed to give proper weight to the poet’s biography as it was suggested by the poems. --David Yezzi --The Fortunes of Formalism (New Criterion)

I teach blank verse (iambic pentameter), and required my Intro to Literary Study students to write sonnets. The poets in the class overwhelmingly prefer free verse, but enough "got into" the exercises that I consider the experience a success.

I'm a much better poetry editor than a poet. When I do write verse, it's solely to play with form. That's almost the opposite of the student poets whose feeling gush forth into their keyboards.

Students in my upper-level Media Aesthetics class have started exchanging glances and smirking every time I bring up T.S. Eliot -- a formalist who knew the rules well enough to break them to pieces when he needed to. ("Wallala leialala" anyone?)

Nogroski presented his results before the entire fifth-grade science community Monday, in partial fulfillment of his seventh-period research project. According to the review panel, which convened in the lunchroom Tuesday, "Otters" was fundamentally flawed by Nogroski's failure to identify a significant research gap.

"When Mike said, 'Otters,' I almost puked," said 11-year-old peer examiner Lacey Swain, taking the lettuce out of her sandwich. "Why would you want to spend a whole page talking about otters?" --Fifth-Grade Science Paper Doesn't Stand Up To Peer Review (The Onion (satire; will expire))

Thanks for the suggestion, Will.

You can’t consider yourself a moral person and at the same time allow the field of education to replace well-designed instruction on tough and important material (what it takes to sustain a democracy, how to read accurately and with deep comprehension) with superficial coverage of dumbed-down subjects.

You can’t spend your life in silence, smiling in a collegial (brain-dead) way, while a thousand schools of education celebrate themselves for being “stewards of America’s children” as they turn out new teachers whose heads are filled with nonsense (“pedagogy”) and who have no idea how--exactly and effectively--to teach anything. --What Got Me Started Was This Kid in a Cub Scout Uniform (EducatioNation)

Strong words.

I don't teach in an ed program, so I'm looking at this from the outside.

At Seton Hill, ed students must major in a subject besides education, so when I do teach education majors, they are usually double-majoring in English. On the other hand, one of my classes has a large proportion of education majors who aren't terribly thrilled by the fact that they have to take several English courses (even if they don't plan to teach English). But I take this as a sign that our ed program holds students up to high standards.

Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

Here's what you can't do with a textbook:

You can't annotate it. How strange is it that students can't add their own reflections or thoughts or reactions, that they have to do that in a different space?

You can't search it.

You can't link it to other relevant ideas or concepts in any organized way.

You can't access it if it's not in your posession.

You can't copy out important information and paste it with other important information.

You can't share it in any meaningful way.

You can't have the most up to date information about the topic.

You can't edit it.

Think of how much more interactivity we have with digital content, how much more power we have to make meaning of that content through connecting ideas and people with it.

--The Case Against Textbooks (Weblogg-ed)

If students own copies of the book, then of course they can annotate it.

They can search a book if someone else has prepared a concordance, and they can link to the contents of the book by referring to a page number.

And there are all sorts of things that you can't do with a digital text -- such as read it without access to a computer, or add its weight to the milk crate in which you plan to present your tenure review package. Of course, the former concern comes with the territory, and the latter is no flaw in digital text itself.

But I'm picking nits, because I'm mostly in agreement. I use printed collections of essays in my teaching, and of course I use printed literary works, but rarely do I use traditional textbooks.

Since I think of myself mostly as a writing teacher, I tend to think of content as a means to an end. So I'm more interested in getting students to be critical thinkers and researchers, rather than have them absorb the contents of a book and remember it long enough to take a quiz.

I'll use a textbook in my "Newswriting" course this fall, but in my upper-level courses, I'm more likely to use web pages, supplemented with journal articles. Textbooks that cover digital culture go out of date so quickly that Wikipedia is often a better resource.

I fancy myself a pretty good sadist when it comes to generating shame and self-loathing in the tardy. If I spot a repeat offender in the hallway before class, and find that they’re not in attendance even after I’ve given them a comfortable buffer of time, I might push trashcans and desks in front of the door, constructing something of an obstacle course between the doorway and the desk so that they realize they can’t sneak into the room unnoticed. In fact, all eyes turn upon them, turning what would otherwise be my lone steely glare into a collective gaze that beams upon them like so many hot spotlights. I don’t even pay attention to them, and just continue my teaching unabated.

Other tricks I’ve tried include: calling on the latecomer to answer a question the second they walk in the door, having students put their book bags on every remaining open seat, and even leaving a note on the board that says “we’re outside” while promptly canceling class altogether. Well, okay, I haven’t really done all these things. But I’ve thought about it, and they’re all in my bag of tricks if I ever get desperate. I have, however, threatened to extend class for as many minutes as it took for the last arrival to enter the room. --Mike Arnzen --Ambush the White Rabbit (Inside Higher Ed)

Welcome to the world of professional paper-writing, the dirty secret of the tutoring business. It's facilitated by avaricious agencies, perpetuated by accountability-free parents and made possible by self-loathing nerds like me. For three-hour workdays, the ability to sleep in and the opportunity to get paid to learn, I tackled subjects like Dostoevsky while spoiled jerks smoked pot, took naps, surfed the Internet and had sex. Though some offered me chateaubriand and the occasional illicit drug, most treated me like the help. I put up with it because I feared working in an office for $12 an hour again. --Nicole Kristal --'Tutoring' Rich Kids Cost Me My Dreams (MSNBC/Newsweek)

Shizzam! This, my friends, is entry #201! Hard to believe that only 8 months ago, I wrote my very first entry here on the Seton Hill University blog system. I don't think I could say enough positive things about blogging:

1) I get to be part of a large r community of like-minded individuals - we are all here to learn, to get a decent education complete with a college degree that (we hope) will lead us on to bigger and brighter things.

2) My writing has noticeably improved over the last eight months - I've been forced to tailor what I say to suit my audience (less swearing for instance) and to transform "forced blogging" assignments into something that I hope is interesting for other people to read. This is an essential skill for a person who's hoping to make a career of words.

3) I have a ready made audience at my fingertips. This is a great thing.

4) Blogging got me a job! (at the Writing Center with a whole other community of great people! sweet!)

Okay. enough. We now return to our regular programming. --Moira Richardson --Joy of Blogging - Entry #201 (Literary Tease)

Moria is one of my students. This is one of those examples of student enthusiam and achievement that I just want to print out and hang on the wall, to remind me why I love this job -- and to keep me going when thinks look bleak.

Note that each letter of the word "larger" is a link to a fellow bloginator. Very clever!

They Took It Sitting Down (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The other night, about a third of my American Lit survey class insisted on sitting on the floor. They pushed the chairs aside and clumped together in the front of the room. The weather was nice, but we couldn't go outside because a student was using her blog for her presentation. So I guess this was the next best thing.

The sitters were bloginators -- part of the core of English majors who put more than average effort into their academic blogging. I think on some level they were trying to assert control over the class. They weren't aggressive or rude about it... in fact, they asked my permission first, so I can hardly call it a protest or a rebellion. I had to position myself in a strange way so I could make eye contact with them and also the rest of the class, but it was a harmless, cheerful request.

American Lit is a general education course, which means that I have to teach so that it makes sense to students who've never taken a lit course, and who may resent being forced to take it. But the students who have had me in other classes have already heard me explain the difference between plot summary and critical analysis; they have heard me explain why it's important to keep up to date on your blog (and not try to get it all done the night before the portfolio is due); and they have heard me give the lecture on the importance of finding peer-reviewed academic sources before you commit to a thesis statement. And they've heard me repeat those lessons several times (since they themselves might have needed a while to accept it). So I can't blame them if they feel a little bored.

I don't require the class to read all their peer blogs, but many of the English majors already read each other's blogs for social purposes. So the most vocal group comes into the classroom already knowing what the most active participants want to say about that week's reading. I had to remind some of the more intense bloggers that they are welcome to blog more than they are required to, but for a while there we had a kind of digital divide. The online part of the class was going well, but the most committed bloggers felt the class discussion was redundant.

Sometimes I feel I'm able to go into much more depth in the freshman "Intro to English Study" course. While the students in that class have a diversity of attitudes towards such things as punctuation and academic research, they all enjoy writing. Today when I passed out photocopies of a book chapter on Death of a Salesman, one of the freshmen noticed my name on the handout and beamed. She held it like it was a precious gift, and she practically cooed, "Oh! You wrote this?" It sounded completely spontaneous, not at all calculated to flatter me. And of course, these freshmen will be among the bloginators taking American Lit survey courses next year... and I'll have to teach them alongside students who don't like writing or reading.

When I humbly went to the Ed school seeking advice, the boss was adamant that I shouldn't even think of lightening up on the course content simply to make the education majors feel less terror (or rage). He pointed out that Ed students take the course to fulfill two area requirements -- literature and American culture. If they feel the course is too difficult, he says, they are welcome to drop the one course and take two others that are less demanding -- if they want to pay double the tuition.

Next year, the American Lit surveys will go from a lecture (capped at 35) to a writing-intensive seminar (capped at 18). I welcome the change, especially because I'm teaching two sections of Am Lit in both the fall and spring terms -- one on Tuesday and Thursday, and one on Wednesday evening. I like that arrangement. The two sets of students will be able to read each other's blogs, but they won't talk about the same things in the classroom. Each week, half of the course content will be freshly prepared just for them, and half will be a tweaked and revised version of material I had just presented the day before.

"[B]logging is not an educational use of school computers." -- Chris Sousa, principal of Proctor Jr.-Sr. High School. --High school bans blogging (Rutland Herald)

I wish this were an April Fool's Day hoax.