New Kid on the Hallway

Quick addendum to last post

I was thinking a little more today about my discomfort talking with profs, and I realized that the profs I've felt most comfortable with are those who've asked, of their own accord, about my life. The prof I RAed for asked me what my story was when I was in her office one time, what had I done before coming to law school. And a couple of weeks ago, I met a prof about my casenote, and he was superhelpful, and then toward the end of the meeting we were just talking about the workload in law school more generally, and he asked, did I have little ones at home? Which really struck me at the time, because I think it is the FIRST time anyone has EVER asked me that.

I suppose it could be seen as an intrusive question, and possibly a sexist one if he wouldn't ask male students the same thing (though I actually think he would). But I actually found it really, really nice (even not having kids)--it just seemed such a welcome recognition that law school isn't the only thing I do (even though it is), that I was a person with an actual life, not just a proto-lawyer-in-training.

Honestly, it made me think about my own persona as a prof, and as an advisor to undergrads, and realize how much I probably failed at reaching out to them in even the little ways that can make such a difference. There is a disadvantage to being all business, all the time.

NaBloPoMo #5: Hunting the belated snark

I'm behind the times, but for the record (because I know you all cared), I really disagree with this piece from Inside Higher Ed. My snarky summary: "John Smith," tenured prof, rants and raves about how students are lazy slackers, administrators pander to their every whim, and no one appreciates his efforts.

Yawn.

I'd have more sympathy if he didn't target teaching outside on sunny days, using videos, sitting in circles, and assigning group projects as signs of the pedagogical apocalypse. Yeah, there are a lot of problems in higher education. The use of new teaching methods is not one of them. I mean, he complains that those who teach outside don't "car[e] if there is no blackboard." What??!? No blackboard????? The. Horror.

I'm not knocking traditional lecturing. It works well for certain things, and I'd rather see someone do the traditional lecture really well, than adopt active learning strategies really badly. But that said, the methods he picks on do NOT require his colleagues to "abandon classroom rigor," as he suggests. So when he identifies these practices as leading to his decision to leave academia? Well, you go, dude.

Now, I'm not saying he has no legitimate grievances. The school at which Smith teaches may indeed be a hotbed of precious snowflakes. It may indeed be a miserable place to teach.

But. One school does not a trend make.

And even if his experience is utterly representative of all of higher ed (despite not being representative of my experience), I just want to say: people, GET OVER IT.

I guess it's just that I get so tired of all the variants on "kids these days!!!!" People, it is inherent to the profession that college professors are of different generations than their students. And generations CHANGE. I did not learn in the same way as my professors; they did not learn in the same way as theirs. And students today are different again. Students today live in an entirely different informational world than even I inhabited (okay, I should probably strike the "even," since I am old enough to be traditional college students' mother, in a perfectly respectable way). I mean, no one had e-mail when I went to school. The web was just something you cleaned out of the corners. Access to information was on a completely different scale.

And yes, I realize that it is the recreation of older generations to deplore the younger ones. But honestly, people: today's students are DIFFERENT. Not better, not worse - just DIFFERENT. 

That doesn't mean you have to enjoy teaching them, and if you don't, then finding a new career is a good idea. But people, stop putting so much energy into bemoaning the inevitable, and figure out how to work with reality instead.

So that's that. Wow.

A little over a year ago, I wrote this slightly melodramatic post about the end of an era: my time as a college teacher. Of course, I spoke too soon, because I then got hired for my current gig and taught for another year. But I think it's pretty safe this time round to say that today I taught my last class - if not forever, at least for quite a while.

Thankfully, my afternoon group were as good-natured and engaged as they've been throughout the term, so my teaching career ended, if not with a bang, at least in a pleasant fashion (especially nice because before my earlier class I had to have a raging fight with a student about hir grade. No, I cannot overlook the fact that you did not take 40% of the quizzes and did not attend 30% of the classes just because you're confident that you met the goals of the course as stated in the syllabus).  Well, I shouldn't say my teaching career has ended, because I have to grade a bunch of papers, write an exam, and then grade the exams, but the next time I attend class, it will be as a student.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this.

I have a lovely former colleague who has expressed regret that I'm going to law school, because she thinks it's a waste of a great teacher. It's terribly sweet of her to say so (and she has actually seen me teach quite a bit, so at least can claim to have evidence of my greatness, although I still think she's just being nice), but I don't really agree; my opinion of my teaching has declined quite a bit in the last four years. When I worked at Rural Utopia I thought I was a pretty decent teacher (though I have never thought that I didn't have plenty to learn or plenty of room for improvement), perhaps because my teaching worked well there. Former College shook my confidence in my teaching ability, because according to any number of people, my teaching didn't work well there, and though I think I tried to improve and adjust - and might have done so successfully, given a bit more time - I didn't figure it out in time (though honestly? I'm not sure I'd have have felt truly comfortable teaching there). I think my current gig has split the difference; I've done fine here - not brilliantly, but fine.

On the one hand, being a good teacher used to be a significant part of my identity, and it feels a little sad to let that go, for good. On the other hand, something useful I've learned from all this is (as corny as it sounds) that I can't rely on external approval for my sense of self-worth. People (faculty and students) at Rural Utopia thought I was a spiffy teacher. People at Former College did not. But I didn't change; I didn't decide to transform myself on landing in Former College City; I was still me, and still the same teacher. Sure, a better teacher than I would have adjusted better to Former College than I did, but it's a little bit like responding to reader's reviews: some readers love an essay and some readers hate it, and you can't control their reactions. You can always revise and improve an essay - and sometimes the friendly readers don't push you hard enough to improve it - but there are some readers you're never going to satisfy, and at the end of the day, you have to do with the essay what you feel is right. You have to decide what you think works and what doesn't, and think about why you've done what you've done, and ultimately the only one you need to satisfy is you. Teaching is the same. Which is not to say that I don't still crave praise - I do - or that this means you don't have to pay attention to what others say - you do. But if you judge yourself by what others think of you, you're building your house on sand. (Okay, can I add any MORE cliches to this paragraph??) (And can I ask you remind me of this brilliant conclusion when I get my first semester grades next year?)

Anyway, endings, even happy ones, are always at least a little bit sad, so I'm sad to face this particular one. But I'm also glad to stop teaching. Despite all my fine words above, I'm really tired of trying to gauge the effectiveness of my courses in the reactions of nineteen-year-olds who know nothing about my subject and are only taking my class to fulfill a requirement. Once that frustration outweighs the enthusiasm for the moments when students really do learn, it's time to stop.


(When I started this post I thought I'd talk a little about how I found the differences between being a tenure-track person and being a lecturer to play out in my teaching, but this is long enough for one day - I'll come back to the contingent faculty thing at some future date. And if I say as much here, I might even remember to do so.)

Yet more evidence that my students think differently than I do

Before I start, let me note that I do NOT mean to poke fun of my students in my comments below. My students are the products of their educational backgrounds combined with their individual personalities; pointing to any weaknesses in their work is not meant to suggest that they're stupid, lazy, or bad people.

That said, there are a few things in their papers that I find fascinating.

• A fascination with viability and credibility. An author's argument is viable or it is not. It's the medico-scientific metaphor here that's so interesting to me. The argument, it will grow! and live! ...or maybe not. They're also obsessed with authors' credibility. This makes sense - but it's funny to me how small differences in language really signal big differences in meaning to me, the specialist. I talk a lot about "reliability" in class, but not about "credibility." I don't know, perhaps it's because "credibility" seems to me something associated a priori with a person or thing, like hir/its reputation? It's sort of like saying that The New York Times is a credible news source, whereas Weekly World News is not (unless perhaps you're interested in alien abductions). You know that without reading anything published in either one. Whereas for me, "reliability" is a function of the specific - is this author reliable about this topic in this source? To me, there's a difference, though I can understand how to my students (who in this class are I think universally non-history majors), there isn't. I don't consider this a problem in the way that I consider the use of "bias" a problem - but each time I read students talking about a text's "credibility" it jars on me, slightly.
     
• The respect for authority. I have had any number of students tell me that because an article is published in a national scholarly journal, that lends credibility to the argument. And I mean, yeah, I understand that perspective, and the point of peer review is to ensure that stuff published in journals is credible. But while being published in a national journal does suggest that your ideas are more "credible" than if you print them in crayon on construction paper and staple them to a telephone pole, what's interesting to me is that by making such a statement, students are implicitly comparing the journal article to all other kinds of discourse out there. Whereas I don't want to know that the article is credible compared to the rest of the written universe - I want to know if it's credible as a published, scholarly work. Since all published scholarly works are, well, published and scholarly, pointing out that it's published in a journal seems a little redundant. It's like if you were reviewing a Formula One racing car, and pointed out that it's faster than a Volkswagen Bus. Well, yes - but wouldn't you kind of hope that would go without saying? If you're reading reviews of Formula One racing cars, don't you really want to know whether one F1 car goes faster than another F1 car? Again, this isn't something I ding students on (not in this first-year gen ed course, certainly); it's just an interesting difference between learning how to write in a particular academic discourse and discipline from a position decidedly outside that discourse/discipline, and not knowing how to write in any other way.

For some reason, this quarter I find myself especially struck by these small differences in word choice and the larger understandings (or misunderstanding) that they reveal of history as an academic discipline. They're the kind of thing that help me think about how best to get across to my students the purpose of the writing assignments I give them, especially now that my understanding of writing is so very different from theirs.

I think this is a sign I've made the right decision

I just got back from (what was really a quite lovely) class, to find an e-mail reminding me that book orders for fall were due [at some upcoming date].

And I was filled with glee at the thought that IT DIDN'T APPLY TO ME.

(Technical note: while stuck in the Detroit airport, I futzed with my blogroll, trying to clear it out/update it a little. If you think you should be there and you're not, feel free to drop me a line. Also, tell me what you think about the new template!)

(ETA: I should note that I do still like the original header picture, VERY much, which a very kind blogger made for me - but I was just feeling like a change. Maybe I'll go back to the other one when I'm a Real Lawyer with Real Leather Books [which are all entitled LAW...].)

Oh, and another thing

All you people who are finishing semesters, grading exams and papers, attending commencements, and whatnot?

My last day of class is May 28. Exams end June 5.

So, till then I will be reading your posts about imminent summer with whatever is the reading equivalent of my hands over my ears, saying LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

Just so you know.

An open letter to my students

Dear students,

In this, my last term of teaching, I've decided that it's time to comment on one of your favorite words, a word for which I don't really share your enthusiasm.

That word is "biased."

First (for reference's sake), "bias" is a noun and "biased" is an adjective. A historical author or source might be biased, but cannot be bias. Just so you know.

Second, do you know where the term "bias" really comes from?

Cloth.

Every piece of cloth has a direction in which it likes to move. If you pull cloth in the direction of its bias, it stretches nicely. If you pull it against the bias, it resists. It wants to go in one direction and not to go in another. (It's kind of like the grain in wood - cutting with the grain is easier than cutting against the grain. Meat has a grain, too, and if you cut against the grain, you get short pieces that melt nicely in your mouth; if you cut with the grain, you get longer, rubberier pieces.)

When you say that a historical author has a "bias," you're saying they incline a certain way. They lean in a certain direction. And that's fine, as far as it goes.

The thing is, you inevitably declare that the author is "biased" as if this is all you have to say on the subject - as if discovering "bias" is some form of analysis.

I hate to tell you this, but it's really not. Because if we go back to our cloth analogy: can cloth not have a bias? Not really. The characteristic of inclining in a particular direction is just something that's built into fabric.

It's the same with people. ALL authors are biased in some way. To declare a historical author "biased" is like declaring that a writer uses words. It's kind of a DUH! statement.

Instead, what you need to do is tell me HOW the author EXPRESSES that bias - and specifically, in detail. I don't want you just to tell me that an author is biased in favor of (Christians, the king, their children, Republicans, who/whatever); I want to hear how the author shows that favoritism. What does that actually mean, to be "biased," say, in favor of Christianity? Does that mean the author is willing to lie about/omit matters that make Christianity look bad? Or does it mean the author exaggerates matters that make Christianity look good? Show me what's going on in the text. Something more that just "making Christians look good"; there are LOTS of different ways to make something look good. How does this specific author in this specific text do it?  "Good" is an awfully big category - portraying someone as a "good Christian" because they take up arms to defend the weak and helpless, say, is different from portraying someone as a "good Christian" because they pray, fast, and embrace pacifism. Authors make choices about how to portray their subjects (I think Flavia would agree), and if they portray their subject as a veritable Terminator of Christianity, they do so on purpose. That tells us something important about what "Christianity" meant to this society. Which may not be - in fact, probably isn't - the same thing it means to us. Which is the whole point of studying history in the first place.

Finally, because every author is "biased" - because "bias" is inherent to the human condition - being "biased" doesn't mean the same thing as "unreliable" or "inaccurate." In the same way that declaring an author biased is not analysis, dismissing the author as unreliable doesn't work, either. If bias = unreliability, there is no possibility of a reliable author. Of course, if you define "reliable" as "mirror image of the truth," wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, then no, there probably is no possibility of a reliable author. But since then historians would have to sit around twiddling their thumbs lamenting the impossibility of knowing anything, I have to reject that approach. There are some incredibly unreliable authors, from whom we can nonetheless learn a lot. And there some authors who are incredibly reliable. Again, you have to explain how this author is "biased," and demonstrate how that specific expression of bias gets in the way of a reliable account of whatever it is you're reading about. A person who's convinced that they've been abducted by aliens may not be the most reliable commentator on astral phenomenon, but they may be lucidly crystal-clear about the best way to cook beef stroganoff.

So please, my lovely industrious scholars, please stop telling me that a source is "biased." (Although that's preferable to being told that a source is "bias.") Tell me something I don't know already.

Affection and analysis*,
your instructor

*apologies to profgrrrrl

Shopping season

It's registration time at my current institution, or as it might better be called from the student e-mails I'm receiving, "shopping season." I've been getting e-mails from students telling me that they're interested in maybe taking my course X, and could I send them a syllabus? Or tell them about the topics we'll be covering? Oh, and can I tell them about the grading?

I'd applaud these students' initiative, except that the ones I've heard from have mentioned specific things about themselves (majors, recreational activities) that can only lead me to think that they're not interested in finding out if my course will meet their particular intellectual interests - they're shopping around to find a course with the minimum requirements.

Now, I think it's perfectly reasonable for students to assess their time/interest levels and try to figure out what courses will best fit their needs in a given term. Yes, if you're in a spring sport and you know you're going to have to miss a bunch of classes, taking a lab science that term probably isn't the best idea. Or if you're taking organic chemistry, or writing your senior thesis, and want to balance those out with less demanding courses - sure, I understand that. But for some reason - maybe just because I'm an evil old woman - I'm a little irked by students contacting me to find out how much work my course entails. Maybe it's because of the unhelpful way they ask about such things? One asks me to tell hir about my "grading system" - well, you know, it looks kind of like it does in the rest of the university, A through F - pretty standard, really. Another wants to know, "how are the exams?" (NLLDH suggested I answer "long and torturous," which is awfully tempting.)

Again, I realize this isn't fair, because the average undergrad, especially if they're not majoring in your department, doesn't always have the  vocabulary for talking about such things in the way that professors do. Still, it is awfully difficult to know how to answer the question, "How are your exams?" If you ask me how many there are, what format they are, cumulative or not, whatever - that's cool. But how are they? They're doing nicely, thank you, how are you?

Not whiny for a bit

My class this term, it so rocks. (Actually, I have two classes, and the other one is perfectly fine - nice students, pretty responsible, going smoothly - but this one class, it rocks.) It's just a really cool combination of students, most of whom seem to do the reading most of the time, who are smart and willing to engage with this stuff that has, honestly, very little relevance to their lives. (I know I shouldn't say this, but truly, most of what I teach has very little relevance to their immediate lives. Which is, I know, why some students like it so much. It's always nice to find those students.) I don't always want to go to class (because the work, it is so hard), but I always leave class having had fun.

Well, okay, not our last meeting, which highlighted the work of a spectacularly underprepared student. But usually, this class is awesome.

I always wonder what makes a good class so good, and how much of it I have any control over whatsoever. In this case, it's a good size - between 10 and 15 works really well for me; under 10 is starting to get a little dodgy. You get a couple of people missing class, and the dynamic completely changes. I don't mind bigger classes, but they tend to fragment into cliques in ways that can be unhelpful past 15. But I've had classes this size that weren't so great. What else?

The students are almost equally distributed between sophomores and seniors.

A little over half of them are history majors or minors, and about a third of them have a major or minor in English.

About two-thirds are women.

None of these things, I think, guarantee a successful class; I've had classes full of history majors which fell flatter than Nebraska. The English connection probably helps, given the topic of this particular course (it always ends up very literary in feel - it's a cultural history kind of course), but again, I don't think that guarantees anything. And while I'd love to say that of COURSE it's successful because there are more women then men!!!, I don't remotely believe that.

Honestly, I think one of the biggest indicators of success is the fact that, as far as I know, this course doesn't fulfill any requirements (except those filled by any history course, like if you're a history major or fulfilling a humanities requirement or something). Everyone there chose to be in the class, and while they probably didn't realize what they were getting into when they started, they at least had that initial spark of interest. I know that a bad professor can kill student interest did, and a good professor can create an interest that the student never knew they had. Nonetheless, looking back over my career (if one can call it that), I have definitely had a better vibe from classes that did not fulfill requirements than from those that did.

Yeah, I realize that's a conclusion of earth-shatteringly obviousness. And it's not like we often have any control over whether we teach requirement fillers or not. But I'll take what I can get, and enjoy how well this class is going right now.

If only I could bottle it, to sprinkle over those more common, run-of-the-mill classes when inspiration is lacking on both their part and mine.

Why I enjoy teaching (when I do)

We've had the now-infamous "why we teach" meme; I was thinking today of a related topic - why I enjoy teaching. Not in the sense of, "I enjoy teaching because it brings light to oh-so-many lives," but in the sense of, "Today, at this specific place and time, class was fun." Because truthfully? Not every class meeting is fun. Plenty are, but not all. What makes the difference?

The thing I've realized is that it's not just about student preparation and performance and so on. Sure, it's pretty much a given that if students aren't prepared, class will NOT be fun. But I have taught classes (individual sessions, that is, not a whole term) where the students were prepared, bright-eyed and busy-tailed, engaged, and willing to talk about the material, and class has gone well, but for me, it hasn't been fun. It's even possible that it was fun for the students, just not fun for me.

By not fun, I don't mean painful or unpleasant or anything like that - I guess I really just mean, well, boring.

It seems I've reached a point in my (so-called) career where there are some things I've taught often enough that oh my god I am SO BORED with them. I know that even if I've read a text seventeen hundred times, it's the first time for my students, but sometimes it's really hard to remember that. And yes, one can change the readings around, and I do, but even so, after teaching a course six or seven times, certain conversations get a little old. Because there are certain conversations that you have to have when teaching a given subject, regardless of the specific texts you're teaching. They're conversations that I consider absolutely necessary for students who are approaching this all for the very first time, but when you've had them so many times before....

Take the Crusades, a subject completely outside my research interests but which I teach due to a variety of circumstances. The Crusades is a perennially popular medieval topic - it's one of the few medieval topics students have heard of, plus, you know, blood and guts - and so I've taught it a lot, probably more than I've taught stuff in my area of research. It's not that I don't want to teach the Crusades; I like teaching it - the students get into it, and there's lots of good stuff to talk about - lots of drama and conflict and all sorts of fun stuff. It's got built-in relevance in today's world, and it serves as a great entree into considering the impact of religion on society in lots of ways (something else relevant to today's world, but also great for introducing students to some of the peculiarities of the Middle Ages).

Anyway, it seems to me that if you're discussing the Crusades, you have to - HAVE to - discuss the question of why people went. I don't think you could possibly NOT talk about that. It doesn't matter which texts you're reading, you have to talk about it. But can I tell you how uninterested I currently am in discussing why people went on Crusade? (Not that I'm teaching the Crusades this term - hypothetically speaking.) It's not at all that I think I have all the answers about why people went on Crusade or that there's nothing else to be said on the question. And it's not that I don't think students are incapable of coming up with new observations on a text, either, because I do - each time I teach a text, a student comes up with something I hadn't thought of. It's just that I, personally, have reached the limits of my own interest in the subject. I've considered the question enough times that I've come up with an answer that works for me, and I'm good with that. I'm ready to move on.

Except, of course, that if I'm teaching the Crusades, I can't.

I was thinking about this today because I was thinking about how much I'm enjoying one of my current classes, and I was realizing that it wasn't so much that the students are so great or that every day goes swimmingly (though the students are pretty great and the class meetings so far have gone pretty well, but not in a way that's radically different from other classes I've taught). It's more that I'm enjoying this so much because I haven't worked through this all in my head, I don't know exactly what I think about it all, and so I get to work through all the issues with the students. To put it bluntly, I'm getting just as much out of this course as they are.

My relationship to the topic of this course is very different from my relationship to the Crusades. While this class isn't explicitly on my research (at all), a lot of it is set in the right century and country. I do find things in the course readings that I note down as relevant to my research. It's also pretty focused on a specific phenomenon, rather than a chunk of time or geographical region. Beyond that, though, I've only taught this topic once before, as a course aimed at first- and second-year students who, it turned out, were all pretty much fulfilling requirements. This time round, it's an upper-division course that fulfills no requirements. (That I know of.) So obviously that leads to a very different kind of class dynamic, one that's immensely more satisfying than in the previous incarnation.

But seriously, I really enjoy this class because I'm learning lots of cool shit. Some of that's coming from me, but a lot of it is coming from them. I didn't change the readings, so it's not that the material is new to me - but they come up with things I hadn't thought of, and I put that stuff together with things I already had thought of, and the result is something entirely new to both of us. This is one of the few courses I've taught where I feel like the students and I are collectively doing research, and coming up with what I consider honest-to-God scholarly arguments.

I hope this doesn't sound dismissive of my students' efforts in other courses. I have had many, many students who have produced really great stuff in my classes. I've had a lot of students who are way smarter than I am. But the structure of many history courses just doesn't allow for what I think of as really scholarly thinking. For instance, I used to teach the first half of the World Civ survey. I actually enjoy World History a lot, for some of the same reasons that I enjoy the Crusades. But it just seems to me that given the parameters of your average World Civ course, you're not able to address the material at what I'd consider a scholarly level. This has nothing to do with the abilities of the students; it's just that scholarship doesn't do what a World Civ course does. Comparing and contrasting the Roman and Han empires is a valuable classroom exercise and students can learn a lot from it, but in Intro to World Civ, we're never going to make that comparison in what I would consider a really scholarly way - in a way in which I learn just as much as the students, and what I learn is NOT about how better to teach the course or put materials together or emphasize themes, but is an actual understanding of the history that I wouldn't have had otherwise. At the intro level, that's because students are simply learning how to do this thing called history. Upper-division courses aren't always better, though, because they're still often divided into bigger units than your average scholar tries to tackle in their work.

Graduate seminars are probably a whole different kettle of fish. I know my program had an "Intro to Medieval History" sequence, which might not have been much more fun to teach than the undergraduate medieval survey. But there were also always those seminars that reflected the instructor's current research project, like Modernity and Violence, or The African-American Experience in South Africa - cool stuff like that. In some undergraduate contexts, you can teach courses like these; the one I'm teaching now is along these lines. But there's still always that need to teach World Civ, Western Civ, Intro to US History, etc. etc... and if you develop a cool topics course, it often ends up as a permanent addition to the catalog and a warhorse of the departmental offerings. In heavily teaching-oriented departments (as opposed to a doctoral program, perhaps), there's not always a lot of incentive to keep developing new courses, because the chances of connecting them all to your own research interests are not good, and it's a hell of a lot of work. (It's not that developing courses like these isn't work for graduate instructors, too. But if you can turn your current research project into a graduate seminar it seems to me you're making it serve double-duty in a way that's less common at undergraduate, teaching-oriented institutions.)

Obviously, me learning history is not what teaching is about. Producing scholarly work - the kind of scholarly work that teaches me something new - is not a realistic expectation for most college classes - again, not because all undergraduates are incapable of doing so (though many are, and we have to work with a range of students), but because the structure of their courses doesn't allow it. Nor is it the point. The point is for students to learn a whole bunch of stuff that, by now, I've known for a long time - but that doesn't matter, because they don't know it yet.

But me learning something new is what makes teaching fun. I take great satisfaction in my students' learning and progress, but it's not always fun.

The course I'm teaching now, though? Fun!