Academia: August 2006 Archive Page

I know I sound completely backward, but please do not dumb down or slow down the class for me. As time goes on, I know I will become much more proficient and I am sorry if I am off to a clumsy and bumbling start...As I said before I learn fast and once I get into the swing of things I know I will be fine...I just hope I don't make you batty [with] questions in the meantime. -- Anonymous Student''[P]lease do not dumb down or slow down the class for me''

A student who sent me a routine "Did I do this right?" e-mail followed up with this message. What a great attitude. Now, I'm not going to ramp it up and deliberately leave this student behind just because I've been given permission not to slow down. In fact, I'll be watching this student even more carefully, now that I've seen this evidence of self-reflection and engagement.

It's the first week of classes. All my classes have met once or twice, I've already got the first homework to grade, and I've started to notice the classroom dynamics form.

My dean asked me to pick up an additional section of basic comp, so every day I'll see plenty of new faces that don't look particularly thrilled to be there. I tried to pitch the course as being a vital tool to prepare them for the future, and their first writing assignment was their response to hearing the words "college writing." So perhaps they can vent their angst usefully, and we can get focused on revision right away.

There are also a lot of new journalism majors in Media Lab (the course students take when they want to get credit for working on the student paper), and a good mix of familiar faces and new ones in "Writing for the Internet."

Of course, "a lot" is a relative term -- we're a small school, but this year we have as many freshman English majors as there are English majors in all the other 3 years. In a minute, I'll explain why that makes me feel a bit nervous.

I'm particularly excited about "New Media Projects," a 400-level class that's required for new media journalism majors, but has also attracted almost as many non-journalism majors. We'll be creating interactive fiction, 2D games, informational Flash sites, and 3D objects for a Half-Life 2 mod. I've been preparing for that one all summer long, and while some of the students who are in the class are wary of the game-heavy content, others are excited about the class precisely because it does focus on games.

My wife is teaching a course for the first time since the stork first paid us a visit.

So why am I nervous? And why did this student's e-mail message inspire me to blog it (with the author's permission, of course)?

It's been a rough couple of weeks for me. A few months ago, I learned that one of the senior English faculty was changing her schedule so that she will only be part of the graduate program. Another senior member is out on medical leave, and the one who's been here a few years longer than me is enjoying his well-earned sabbatical.

That leaves, as the senior member of the English faculty... me. Since I came on board, three additional full-time faculty have been hired.

No momentous decisions are looming, and the two colleagues who are on leave are available for consulting if there's a problem. But there are routine things that other people used to take care of, and now I'm taking a bigger chunk of the responsibility. Since things are actually going pretty smoothly, I'm enjoying the experience. (Knowing it's only temporary really helps.)

So let me echo the words of my student: As time goes on, I know I will become much more proficient and I am sorry if I am off to a clumsy and bumbling start...As I said before I learn fast and once I get into the swing of things I know I will be fine...I just hope I don't make you batty [with] questions in the meantime.

Among the dark corners where Dr Baker's thesis - titled Broadcast Space: TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek - shines light is the changing link between the starship Enterprise's intergalactic adventures and the real world's space race.

Shatner's monologues were inspired by the visionary speeches of JFK, advocating greater exploration. Thirty years on, the roles were reversed, with astronauts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration guest-starring on Star Trek spin-offs to promote their underfunded existence. --Adam Morton --Star Trek's a thesis (The Age)

Come on, headline writer. You can do better than that.

I'll also mention that "mute point" is an "eggcorn" -- a new category of writing mistake that linguists have identified and my fellow college teachers might find useful in responding to student writing. I'm certainly glad to have a new tool that helps me climb down from the high horse I have occasionally mounted in 10-plus years of teaching creative writing, essay writing, business writing, and you-fill-in-the-blank-here writing. It's nice to have a way of explaining mistakes that doesn't make students feel stupid.

[...]

All eggcorns makes sense on some level. For example, the eggcorn "girdle one's loins" is far more understandable than the archaic "gird one's loins." "Free reign" -- an extremely common misspelling -- expresses a similar laxness to "free rein," and there's a kind of exclamatory kismet between "whoa is me!" and "woe is me!" --Mark Peters --Like a Bowl in a China Shop (Chronicle)

I just recently used "free reign" in a blog entry. Whoa is me!

Computers & Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue, Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming

While video gaming has been a strong cultural force since the advent of the popular coin-operated arcades of the 1970s, it is only within the last few years that video/computer gaming has been an academic focus: there is a lot of catch-up work to do. The average age of gamers has been steadily increasing, as has the number of dedicated players. Inevitably, this dedication to gaming will have -- if it does not already -- a profound impact on learning and literacy. Video/computer games are historically- and culturally-situated texts that operate in particular social contexts significant to composition theory and praxis. --CFP: Computers & Composition -- ''Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming''

Matthew S. S. Johnson sent me this via e-mail and asked me to help publicize it. I posted the full text on KairosNews.

You rarely see, for example, a faculty member from an Ivy League university alongside one from a community college on a Modern Language Association panel, regardless of any research interests they might share. That shows the dangerous classism that pervades academe, something I admittedly did not see for myself until I began teaching at a "second tier" institution.

That classism is dangerous not because those of us who are categorized as less elite may be slighted at conferences or by journals or seminar leaders. It is dangerous because it divides us -- faculty members and students alike -- at a moment when financing for higher education is eroding, when grants for professional development and research are shrinking, when even the largest and most prestigious universities are still cutting faculty positions.

It is critical for the well-being of the academy and the students we serve that faculty members find common ground and work together. One way to do that is to work together locally; that is, for institutions -- public and private, large and small -- in a given area to capitalize on their proximity and benefit from one another's strengths. Hence my immodest proposal: Professors within a given region would swap jobs for a semester or a year with colleagues at institutions with different Carnegie ratings. --Lisa Bothson --A Cure for Academic Classism (Chronicle)

Not very practical, but an interesting suggestion. I've blogged before about the life I might have had if certain job interviews had gone better or worse than they did, and I had ended up somewhere very different from where I am teaching now.

The blog hurt the administration in two key ways: First, administrators were unable to focus on correcting the problems that led to the creation of the blog, and second, the administration's clumsy and futile efforts to combat the blog simply compounded the anger and contempt on campus. --Daniel W. Barwick --The Blog That Ate a Presidency (Inside Higher Ed)

Good analysis of an administrative train wreck that started because a college board responded poorly to a controversy started on a blog.

To be fair, anonymous complaints are hard to deal with, but ignoring a forum -- even an unfair forum -- is a sign that those who wish to abuse it will have free reign rein.

Barwick has a good solution: "Clearly what Alfred State needed (and other colleges probably need as well) is a blog that is confidential, accessible, not regulated for content, and yet not completely public."

Of course, if anything in the "confidential" blog becomes contentious, it's a simple matter for warring factions to copy and paste material to other forums, so it's probably better to think of such a community as gated, rather than the content as confidential.