New Kid on the Hallway

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!

Why I teach history

Craig Smith at Free Exchange on Campus has tagged me for a meme. Inspired by Dr. Crazy's wonderful post about why she teaches literature (and how those reasons are different from the ones espoused at the MLA), he writes, I am challenging faculty to tell us why they teach and do the work they do and why academic freedom is critical to that effort. So, I'll weigh in (and then I have to tag some folks).

Not to be too much of a downer in what is supposed to be more of an inspiring thread, but to be honest? The first reason I teach history is that I wanted to be a historian, to spend my life researching and writing about history, and teaching is one of the obligations attached to that career. I don't have a problem with that; I don't resent teaching or wish it away or consider it less important than research (I think it's more important than research, actually). But I didn't get into this career to teach; I got into this career to do research (more about why below). And while I've never run into the slightest bit of interference in my research, there are still people out there who consider the topics I study invalid and politically suspect. So, yeah, academic freedom remains important.

I also teach history to help students learn that there's more than one way to view the world and that they themselves and their experiences are not the measure of all things. One of the things I've started telling students is that when a source confuses them, that's probably one of the best signs that it's telling us something important about how people in the past are different from people today. Because while I think history requires skills and you can't just "do" history just because you can read a history book, I also don't think history is like nuclear physics; the readings I assign are not usually incomprehensible (my apologies to nuclear physicists). When students are confused by something, 99% of the time it turns out they're not really confused by what the source says; they're just confused about why someone would act that way/think/say such a thing. Et voila - a teachable moment, as the saying goes. I recently taught an excerpt of the Hildebrandlied and students were confused, because here were this son and father and they didn't recognize each other and were about to fight to the death and what was that all about anyway? The reason it confused them was because, for these students at least, the idea that you could grow up knowing so little about who your father was that you could encounter him in battle and not know it - and, in fact, refuse to believe him when he tells you who he is - was incomprehensible. But such a situation wasn't incomprehensible to whoever wrote it down in the ninth century (I'm not saying that they considered it realistic or an accurate account of the past, but the situation held some resonance for them). Boom, a difference! (The father kills the son, by the way.)

That might all seem fairly esoteric, but I firmly believe that to be a responsible, respectful citizen of the world, you have to be able to recognize that not everyone sees the world the way that you do - and that doesn't make them wrong. In fact, they probably have just as good reasons for seeing the world the way they do as you do for seeing the world that you do. So I want students to understand that historically, there have been a lot of ways to organize society and live life that don't look a lot like the modern U.S., and that each of those have been reasonable responses to the circumstances in which those people found themselves. This doesn't mean I require students to accept all ways of living as equally desirable; just because I can understand that there are cultural reasons behind, for instance, female genital mutilation, doesn't mean I accept it as a valid practice. Even though I don't, however, I think you have to understand something in order to change it. Academic freedom is crucial to this - we need to be able to understand even practices we disagree with on their own terms. So we can't just label something "evil" and not try to understand it further.

Finally (and I could probably go on and on but this is getting long enough), I teach and study history because I want to know what it was like to live in another time or place. I want to know what it was like to be a medieval peasant or a woman running an eighteenth-century salon or a member of a Mongol horde - whatever, really. While on the one hand I could say this is just due to insatiable curiosity, I think the cause runs deeper: I have always wondered how much of "me" is me, and how much is the creation of the time in which I live. I've wondered, for instance, whether, if I grew up in the antebellum south, I'd have supported slavery, even though the idea is abhorrent to the me I am now. It's nice to think I'd have stood up for equality and justice and denounced slavery, but honestly? if I'd grown up in a slave-owning culture, as a white woman, I can't see why I'd have been any different from the thousands of Americans who did support  it. So I think I'm constantly driven to figure out what people were like in the past to figure out the ways in which I, too, am a creature of my own culture. This, too, depends on academic freedom, because I need to know what it was really like, whenever and wherever - not just what it's politic to think it was like. 

Hmmm. Two out of three of these are completely selfish, aren't they? Although I suppose the third reason is easy enough to turn outwards: I want students also to recognize that they are creations of the culture in which they live - that they are not the culmination of a mysterious process called "progress," the pinnacle to which all of human existence has been moving. They are trapped in their own culture and it's only by figuring out how people in the past were trapped in theirs that they have any hope of escape. That may sound hostile towards my students, but truly, I don't mean it that way; I don't resent them or dislike them for being who they are. I just think that history can make them that much better.

History makes everything better. ;-)

So, the tagging: I'm going to tag a whole bunch of premodern folk - Anastasia, Dr. Virago, Bardiac (though I guess you might be a little busy right now!), Flavia, squadratomagic, and Another Damned Medievalist. And anyone else who wants to participate should feel free!

And so it begins again

There are things I hate about the first day of class. I hate walking into a room full of strangers; I find students in the anonymous collective kind of intimidating. Once I've taught them a few times and start to be able to sort them out into individual personalities, that goes away (usually; there is occasionally the odd student whom I find intimidating, personally, but that's rare). But the first day they're all staring at you and I'm always convinced they're thinking, "Oh God, who is THIS dork?"

I also hate the artificiality of trying to get them talking and engaged when we haven't covered any material yet. The standard advice is that you need to set the tone for the term from the first day - if you want students to talk and share ideas, then you need them to do that the first day (none of this "let's read through the syllabus and go home"!). And I get that, and I kind of agree with it, but I teach something incredibly content-based, with content that very few students know much about before walking into my classroom. I usually do a "What do you think of when you think of the Middle Ages?" discussion on the first day, but really, that only goes so far (it segues into a little random lecturette on the humanist invention of the Middle Ages and the Pre-Raphaelite/Arts & Crafts romanticization of the pre-industrial, but if it turns into me lecturing that defeats the purpose of getting students to talk). I'm fine with getting students to talk about something we've already read, but that first day is kind of a drag.

But you know, I do like the shiny newness of the first day sometimes. You get students who are excited about the subject and haven't been dragged down by the reality of actual assignments yet. They smile and nod and even kind of laugh at your lame jokes, because there's that air of hope, of potential, that this - this! - will be the cool class that college is supposed to be filled with, the class in which you learn a ton but it's so fascinating and fun that you don't even realize you're learning, the class in which the papers practically write themselves because the reading for them is like play not work, the class in which you feel at once incredibly smart and yet also like you're being challenged and learning and growing. I don't think I've ever taught that class, but on the first day, we can all hope that this - this will be it.

Still thinking about research and teaching

In my recent post on what the hell I'm going to do with myself now, I articulated probably for the first time the gap between what I enjoy - research/writing - and what I value - teaching - and noted that for someone who wants to write, I haven't done very much of it. And then I was reading a recent post by the Bittersweet Girl, in which she notes, "For essentially my entire academic career, teaching has taken a second place to research/writing/publishing."

I had one of those kind of wow, people sure are different! experiences reading that: teaching has taken a second place to research/writing/publishing. Really? Gosh. How does that work?

This not remotely intended to criticize Bittersweet Girl. Her explanation makes perfect sense:

Originally this was due to my immaturity, back in the days when I idolized my famous professors and dreamt of joining their ranks as an international celebrity academic. They seemed to treat teaching as a minor distraction to the truly important work of their minds, and I followed their lead.

More recently, my focus on R/W/P has been driven by necessity and abject fear. Tenure hangs over my head like a knife and, despite some pretty words about the importance of teaching, everyone knows that tenure at MidState U. is determined by one’s publishing record.

She describes the priorities of academia, especially in graduate education, perfectly. Of course research is more important than teaching. Of course research is what gets you jobs, tenure, promotions.

But it was just funny to read her statement because I, and I think many of my colleagues throughout my academic career, have always struggled with the opposite - research takes second place to teaching.

I came to grad school from a small liberal arts college in which we students were the precious special flowers to whose nurture the institution was dedicated, and when I idolized my professors, it was as teachers, because that was how I knew them - I had very little sense of their research activities. So that probably predisposed me to put teaching ahead of research.

When I got to grad school, I and virtually all the other students were funded through teaching assistantships - there were fellowships floating around, but usually for no more than a term or a year at a time. Hence, almost everyone taught. And since teaching so much probably slowed our progress, the more we taught, the longer we took, which meant the more we taught. I'm glad to have had that experience (hell, I'm glad to have had the funding!), but I know that right from the very beginning, it was difficult sometimes to make research our absolute top priority.

After all, things like Ph.D. exams or prospectus defenses only happened (ideally) once, and could even be rescheduled if necessary, but we had to get up and confront a room full of students at a set time, usually four times a week. We were all teaching courses for the first time - and sure, the professor chose the material, wrote the syllabus, and delivered the lectures,  but there's still a lot to prep when you're going to spend an hour+ at a time talking to students about that stuff, at least, when you've never done it before and in fact may never have studied the subject in question before. Teaching for the first time is stressful and takes a lot of energy. And when you're grading for someone else, you get that grading done on their schedule, not your own.

Moreover, my grad program, while big (HUGE!) and research-y, actually did a pretty decent job in training us to be teachers. This was probably as much because grad students taught so many students that it was easier to give them some training and help them be competent than to deal with dissatisfied or woefully prepared students, as because of any philosophical inclination, but the result was a cohort of grad students who largely took teaching seriously and tried to do it well. We all taught a lot, and we all talked about it a lot. In fact, among ourselves we probably talked more explicitly about how to teach than how to do research (we discussed research a lot, too, but as a department, we discussed research results, not so much the research process).

This wasn't necessarily because we valued teaching over research, mind you, but just because failures in teaching seemed to have much more immediate consequences than failures in research! Getting your advisor's criticism on a chapter draft could suck, but it was a very different kind of suckage than finding yourself in the middle of a classroom in revolt or coping with a storm of grade challenges, or even watching the seconds tick by agonizingly slowly on a day when no one in class - NO ONE - was willing to say anything.

We were also all very well aware (because the dept told us) that we were not at an Ivy League school, and that since there were far more teaching schools than elite research institutions out there, we'd better be able to teach/talk intelligently about teaching, in order to get a job. So we put a fair amount of energy into the teaching sphere.

(I could even wax all psychological and postulate that an identification with teaching is a pretty natural response to being in grad school - that in a context where you're a student, and thus not a full, independent adult, for so long, and where it often feels like one person - your advisor - holds your very future in their hands - it's not surprising that one's sense of self becomes invested in the one arena in which you actually are an authority figure and over which you do actually have some control. But that would be wild speculation.)

So the point is, my graduate program emphasized teaching in a lot of ways, and I remember it being very early in graduate school when my colleagues and I started commenting to each other on the all-encompassing nature of teaching, and how it was so easy to put everything else aside in favor of teaching prep, because other people depended on our preparation for teaching, whereas the research only mattered to ourselves.

And this certainly didn't change when I started working full-time. The people who hired me as a full-time adjunct didn't care particularly about my research; the ~120 students I taught each semester that year certainly didn't. My two tenure-track positions were both in teaching institutions, and while both had research expectations (though Former College's were much higher than Rural Utopia's), again the constant refrain from faculty was how teaching took up all of one's time, was the thing that couldn't be pushed aside, and how the difficulty was to make time for the research. Because after all, teaching was why we were there.

Now, none of these things are actually  incompatible with what the Bittersweet Girl said. It depends on how you define "take second place." What's most important to you - what you prioritize, what you value - does not have to be what takes up most of your day. There can be a difference between practice - the amount of daily grind spent on teaching - and priority - the importance placed on it.

But it was still just interesting to see, in black and white, the idea that teaching takes second place to research, and to realize that I'd probably never have articulated my work life in that way. Research has always taken second place to teaching, because teaching is about other people, and research is just about me. (Don't think that means I'm suggesting I'm some altruistic saint and people who prioritize research are selfish bastards; that's not at all what I mean. It's just easier for me to be accountable to others than it is to be accountable to myself. It's why I'm much better at writing conference papers than articles - if I commit to standing up in front of a group of strangers, damn straight I'm going to write something. If it's just me sitting in my office - eh. I find the short-term consequences of not working on my teaching much more painful than the short-term consequences of not working on my research, and as for the long-term consequences of the latter - well, I'm not very good at thinking in the long term.) What I do, what I spend my time on, becomes what I prioritize, even if it's not actually what I value more.

All this makes me wonder how things might have been different if I had gone to grad school where activities matched priorities - where grad students didn't teach, or at least, not nearly as much. I'm not saying that my grad experience is the only reason I've ended up with this mentality, but I think it's one reason. In any case, Bittersweet Girl's post helped me figure out some more reasons why I haven't actually put my money where my mouth is.

RBOGrading

• I realize they may only be sucking up, but I love those notes students leave in final exams, thanking you for your work over the semester or for the interesting class, and wishing you a good break. It really does feel nice (and adds something fun to the whole grading process!).
• I'm at the point in grading where I have to resist the temptation to count how many exams I have left. Too many, is the answer. Counting will just depress me. Counting after every other exam and finding that the number has not gone down as much as I'd like will REALLY depress me.
• I am a medievalist, true, and have been trained in paleography, but damn, my students have terrible handwriting. (Total sexist observation: the subject of this course tends to attract more men than women. Reading these exams is correspondingly more painful.) I have some students who get to do their exams on a computer, and I wish they all could. Grading the printed exams is soooo much easier.
• I wish there were some way to create final assignments for students that were either enjoyable or at least quick to grade, that actually served a useful pedagogical purpose. If anyone has any brilliant ideas along those lines, please share!

ETA: Okay, I actually have a kind of a grading/student question. I hope this doesn't sound too ranty, but here it is: what is up with students who don't turn in a piece of work, and then ask you for it back or ask you for their grade on it?

Occasionally this happens to me - I hand back papers, Student X stands expectantly by the table as I do so, and I find myself empty-handed. So I apologize, tell them I'll look for their paper, and go back to my office and do so. Usually, this is a paper that got handed in either late or in a different format from the rest of the class (i.e. they e-mailed it to me rather than handing in a hard copy), and I just have it in a different folder. So then I can happily hand back their work.

Sometimes, though, there is no work to give back.

Now, I'm not going to say I'm incapable of losing student work. It is possible that I have lost papers, and in such a situation, I always err on the side of assuming that it's my fault, and I apologize, and ask the student to resubmit the work so I can grade it. I would then happily do so, no questions asked.

Thing is, I really really really really DON'T think I'm actually losing student work. You know why? Because in 99% of those situations, the student is very forgiving and polite and says it's no problem and that they will definitely get that paper to me.

And they never do.

I don't mean they come back to tell me they lost the file, don't have a copy, their hard drive died, whatever; I just never hear anything from them about it again.

(Recent example: student e-mailed to say that they were sick and couldn't come to class and were attaching their paper and could I let them know I'd got it. There was no attachment. I wrote the student back to tell them this. No reply. No paper.)

Say you were your average industrious student, who actually wrote a paper that your professor confessed to losing. Don't you think you'd get that paper resubmitted in about 6.2 seconds? I mean, you'd want CREDIT for your WORK, right?

So I can only conclude that students in these cases haven't actually done the work. I mean, is there another explanation that makes sense? (Okay, occasionally some students might just flake out and forget. But I'd imagine this is rare - see above for wanting credit.)

What I don't get is why they actually ask for the work back. I mean, they have to know I don't actually have their nonexistent paper. Do they think that I will absolve them of doing the paper entirely - say, "Oh, I lost it, I guess you get a free pass"? And when I don't, why don't they actually *then* do the paper and turn it in? I mean, if they're concerned enough about getting credit for an assignment to try to disguise the fact that they haven't done it, why don't they then just actually do it?

Am I missing something here? Have any of you experienced this, or am I just a madwoman?

Verklempt (AKA a pretty self-indulgent post)

So, I'd had a former student ask me for a letter of recommendation for grad school, and I said yes, of course. She wrote me back today thanking me, saying that this was especially important to her because she wanted to study the subjects she'd taken with me. She then wrote:

Also, and I feel this is far more important, you were in a large part one of the reasons I decided I wanted to go the grad school to teach. I had previously planned on being a lawyer with a history emphasis, until I had you as my professor. You through your energy and lively teaching methods showed me the fun and joy I myself could get out of affecting students in such a way.

Boy, I really needed to hear such a thing today. (Well, see such a thing. You know what I mean.) I haven't been feeling very energetic and lively these days, so it's nice to know that at least, I used to be. Maybe I can be again.

What feels like good teaching and why

I haven't felt very satsified with my teaching this term.

Ironically, although the level of student preparation here isn't, collectively, as high as that at Former College, I actually like teaching these students better, for a variety of reasons, so it's not that.

It's just that I used to feel like I was doing a better job than I do now. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what's different here, and what am I doing (or not doing) that I do when I feel more successful. There are a number of things I've been thinking about, but I've realized that one of the problems is adjusting to lecturing more frequently again.

The biggest difference from my previous teaching is that at my current institution, there are fewer class meetings in a term, but each class meeting is quite long. It's really nothing more than two short classes back to back, but it means I have to think more consciously about varying what we do in each class meeting. One way to mix things up (not the only way, but one way) is to throw in some lecturing to break up the blocks of discussion (usually one worries about breaking up blocks of lecture, not the other way around, but I find that almost two hours of straight discussion is a little much for students, too).

Another difference is that my classes here are quite a bit bigger than my classes at Former College. They're by no means huge, but they're at least one-half again to twice as big as what I've taught for the last three years. I taught classes this size at Rural Utopia all the time, but I think I have to make a conscious effort not to see these classes according to the light of Former College, and to stop thinking of them as "big" classes. Because I associate "big" classes with lecturing, and while these classes are definitely not so big that I can't run discussion, I still find myself lecturing more than I used to.

Thing is, I have a kind of love/hate relationship with lecturing.

The first time I taught a course of my own, in grad school, it was an evening course, two-and-a-half hours at a time, once a week. I'd TAed a lot by that point, which in my grad program meant running discussion sections, so I was perfectly comfortable with classroom management and leading discussion by then (not necessarily brilliant at, but comfortable with), but I'd never spent any significant time lecturing. With a 150 minute class, I had to lecture, just for variety - while I prefer discussion-based teaching, I think asking students to discuss for 150 minutes is just about as cruel as asking them to listen to me for that long.

And I remember that what was most disconcerting about lecturing was that I had NO idea what the students were thinking. I administered midterm evals that first term because I really needed to get a sense of what was going on in the course, and was kind of stunned to find that by and large, students were happy with the course and thought my lectures were just fine. It wasn't that I'd had any evidence that they hated me/the course or were totally lost; it was just that I really didn't know.

It's really hard to tell what people think of lectures. Some students are those lovely people who watch intently, visibly respond, laugh and frown when they should. And other students are those that doodle, look out the window, stare at the floor, look blank, doze, or give you that slightly skeptical, slightly perplexed look every so often.

Thing is, the latter students may be just as engaged and interested as the former. I know, because I'm a terrible audience. I doodle, I gaze out the window, I don't think that as a student I looked like I was paying an iota of attention - but I was. And I know from past experience that some of the students that look the most physically disengaged are some of the ones who are enjoying a class most. But when I'm teaching those students, I always assume they aren't engaged, until I'm given evidence to the contrary.

I'd kind of forgotten this element of teaching bigger classes and lecturing. Former College had such small classes, and was so gung-ho on seminars and student-centered learning and yada yada yada that it felt positively wrong to lecture (though I did, on occasion, and I know my colleagues did too). So teaching was almost always of the instant-feedback variety - that is, you knew instantly if the students had done the work or not, based on how they responded, and you got a sense of how well they'd understood it, and so on. I'd really forgotten how lecturing, and larger class sizes, distance you from that kind of feedback.

I'd forgotten, in fact, that that distance was why I didn't like lecturing. I have a variety of pedagogical reasons why I don't like lecturing and don't think it works as well as discussion-based teaching, but really, my problems with lecturing aren't based in abstract pedagogical principles so much as in the fact that primarily lecturing just feels wrong. My second "own" course was a class of 70, which pretty much required lecturing, and I remember thinking one day that every time I walked out of a class in which mine had been pretty much the only voice talking - which was pretty much every day - I felt like I'd failed somehow. Again, not because I had high moral objections to lecturing - just because it felt like putting messages in a bottle, tossing them into the ocean, and crossing my fingers.

I'd kind of forgotten that this is how I feel about lecturing. But now I'm lecturing more than I have done for a while (again, partly due to the need for variety), and I'm feeling like a bad teacher again. Thing is, I don't actually think I'm a bad lecturer, and I don't think that lecturing has to be in and of itself bad. What I need to do, I think, is work harder on incorporating interactive elements into my lectures, as a way to bridge the distance that the format creates.

Which gives me something concrete to think about for next term.

(This was intended as the post on lecture/discussion that I referenced earlier, but I'm not sure it ended up quite where I'd planned.)

RBOC, furlough edition

• Yet again, the class for which one is severely underprepared goes swimmingly.
• That being said, "underprepared" is sort of relative, because the topic was something I've taught a whole bunch of times, though not in the last eighteen months.
• So I guess there's winging it, and then there's winging it.
• I wouldn't exactly recommend getting too little sleep, grading all day, skipping lunch, and grabbing some notes from last time  you taught a subject in the ten minutes before class begins, as a consistent pedagogical approach.
• Still, it's nice to know that doing so doesn't have to preclude a successful class.
• Or maybe it isn't... wouldn't it be nicer if the success of a class meeting really was commensurate with our preparation? Then we could feel like we had some actual control over the outcome.
• I mean, we do - we do have some control. But it's probably good to acknowledge that as professors, it's not all about us.
• And yes, if I'd bothered actually to string these sentences together, this would have been a random paragraph of crap, but I'm thinking at bullet-point level right now. A paragraph would require too much energy.
• Finally, I love and respect all my students, but honestly, walking up after I've handed back papers and informing me that you don't think you ever handed that paper in? Not. the best. strategy.  Now, I recognize that your blase exterior may be a way to mask/cope with the anxiety this realization has produced, but dude, if you've just realized that you missed an assignment, two weeks after the fact? And that you don't know what the assignment was? I'd kind of like to see a little anxiety. Just squirm a little, okay?
• When I'm out of grading jail for good, I want to talk about lecture vs. discussion, but that will not be today. Stay tuned. (Or, you know, not.)

Ah, the nun with a ruler column

Wol mentioned this column in a comment to a previous post. It's by Charlotte Laws (you can find her website here), a woman who has taken many courses through community colleges, and she complains that:

Community-college instructors tend to focus on grades and classroom conduct, and to issue rules that encourage uniformity. Those practices hamper mastery of subject matter, creativity, and personal responsibility, and groom students to be obedient workers and followers rather than executives and leaders. There may be maverick instructors who operate outside of this paradigm, but unfortunately my educational path has not yet crossed theirs.

Now, I've neither taught nor taken community college classes, but while on the one hand, Laws's experiences are worth considering, on the other, she seems not to consider at all any constraints under which community college instructors work.

For instance, she complains about instructors' obsession with grades, exams, and attendance. She fails to consider the possibility that institutions set policies on these matters to which instructors must adhere. If community colleges are offering courses that they intend students to be able to transfer to a four-year institution, they may well have to set some parameters that aren't necessary at said four-year colleges. Schools frequently have attendance policies in order to meet financial-aid regulations (if a student hasn't been attending class, then they lose their financial aid). The results of focusing on grades, exams, and attendance may be less than stellar, I don't know. But it is worth considering that there are administrative reasons for such policies that are not about creating mindless worker drones, but about trying to facilitate students' movement from one educational institution to another.

Perhaps these very constraints are actually what she's talking about, as towards the end of the column she moves away from talking about individual instructors to talking about community-college education as a whole, but nonetheless, there seems to be little recognition that these issues are part of any broader institutional structures, rather than deficiencies on the part of the individual instructors. The column reads very much like a complaint about community college instructors, not about community college policies. She may equate those two things, but I think her emphasis is misleading and unfair to said instructors.

I think I'd also be more convinced by her column if she were able to say more about her fellow students and how the policies in question affected them. Laws has a doctorate, two master's degrees, and two bachelor's degrees. And she's a real estate agent. The only other student she mentions specifically is her husband, an Oxford-educated lawyer. Were she and her husband typical of the students in her classes? If not, has she considered that policies that don't work for her and her husband might work for other students? What works for highly educated adult learners is not necessarily going to be appropriate for first-time college attendees, particularly if they're in the 18-21 age bracket. Her classrooms may have been full of the former, but we don't know that.

I'm thinking here especially about her point about grooming students to be obedient workers and followers. This is a really important critique. Theorist Pierre Bourdieu famously wrote about how institutions of higher learning replicate societal power structures - how instead of functioning as a vehicle to social mobility, they help maintain the status quo. At the same time, in the U.S. we have a long and venerable tradition of education enabling people to improve their social and economic positions, and this tradition may help mask the ways in which higher ed does exactly what Bourdieu argues it does. But while training students ONLY to be obedient workers and followers is a terrible idea, one thing that I do wonder about is whether giving students the skills to be successful employees is such a terrible thing, if they come from a background in which they don't know such things already.

By saying this I don't mean to stereotype community college students as all coming from terrible poverty or broken homes or whatever things you think of when you think of "bad homelife." Community colleges reach such a wide range of students that it's impossible to generalize. That said, my impression has been that community colleges have often been seen as good options by immigrants and their children and by first-generation college attendees - people whose backgrounds may not have prepared them to excel in the world of middle-class employment in the contemporary United States (I've had students like this at four-year colleges). I'm probably horribly conservative or reactionary in this way, but I'd rather start by giving students the tools to succeed in the world as it is today - if they don't already have those tools - than by asking them to reimagine the world entirely.

So for instance, when Laws says,

Class attendance is part of my film teacher's obsession. All students are required to sign in twice: once at the start of her class and again at the end, and two absences means a failing grade for the semester. I suppose members of the proletariat need to learn how to comply with a time clock, to practice being tame and mindless workers, to experience what it feels like to receive a demerit or get fired. My teacher's message is clear, whether she realizes it or not: We can't have community-college students thinking they can be executives and control their own schedules

my response is, she's right, BUT: some students do need to learn that, in fact, you don't always have control over your own schedule, and that you're going to have to show up for work when you don't feel like it.

By saying this I am not at ALL trying to insult community college students. It's just that I've had plenty of four-year college students who haven't necessarily grasped this idea. I know some people (not just Laws!) find attendance policies juvenilizing. But I'd rather make the connection between success and just showing up explicit. Students can think they can be executives all they like, but if they don't have some of the concrete skills for succeeding in employment, they're never going to get there.

In fact, I suspect that the criticisms Laws directs at community colleges are not so much about community colleges as much as they are about education, period. I would bet she'd have a similar reaction to teaching in many four-year colleges, too. Based simply on the information she provides about herself, it sounds like she's been pursuing postgraduate education and her career for some time (many degrees, real estate agent, member of the Greater Glen Valley Council; she describes her husband as 62 five years ago, although obviously he could be quite a bit older than she). Postgraduate education is a very different beast from undergraduate education. When was she last in a four-year college undergraduate classroom? Are the policies she decries really limited only to two-year colleges, or would she be troubled by what she finds in a four-year classroom as well? I have had a number of senior colleagues at four-year institutions who discuss (decry) the increased kind of structure and regulation  expected in higher education today, not just by administrators but also by students themselves, who grow up with such scheduled and regulated lives that the freedom of college can be baffling and scary, and who turn to their helicopter parents for help in negotiating it. I wonder if the practices that Laws complains about are really community-college specific, or if the column is another case of "kids these days."

ETA: For a striking contrast to Laws's column, one that articulates issues that instructors in two-year colleges can face and that Laws completely overlooks, check this out by Kathleen Sheerin Devore.