As the tales below will illustrate, I have hit the point this semester where I just don't care any longer if I lose a teaching moment.
Right before the withdrawal deadline, I make my students do an admittedly corny in-class assignment which I call The Midterm Reality Check. They fill out a form to determine their current average and write a paragraph explaining what they will do to maintain or improve that average by semester's end. When a student says, "Professor Lightbulb, I can't find Reading Quiz 3," I get to say, "That's because you weren't here the day we took it, so put a zero in the box," demonstrating to the entire class the correlation between attendance and success. I like making students do the math themselves rather than bugging me with a "How am I doing in this class?" I like having the bad students reflect on what behaviors got them into their pickle; I like letting the good students with high marks in all their boxes watch the bad students scramble to make the math work in their favor.
Bryan, always the first to finish—but also the most likely to lose significant points for failing to follow directions—brought me his form, ready to escape the prison which is my class. His average thus far was a 63. I said, "Thanks" and let him go. I should have pointed out that his desire to rush out every day contributed to his low number, but I didn't.
Back in my office, I found an email inbox full of messages, two of them from my most frustrating student, Roderick. This young man is empty handed when work is due, but excuses tumble out of his mouth like presents from Santa's sack. The first email asked for a letter of recommendation for a scholarship. Roderick is not empty headed; he is bright and creative, just undisciplined. I could frame him as full of potential in the letter I was considering writing. A few more messages down the list, I got Roderick's second email, this one explaining that he would be missing yet another class for another unbelievable reason. I returned to the first email to say that I don't write letters of recommendation for students with F averages. I should have explained that the deciding factor was the second email with yet another lame excuse for his missing warm body and/or homework, but I then asked myself, Why bother?
Later that day, I sent midterm averages to my online students. Katherine wrote back to protest a zero. She claimed that she did in fact post a response to our first cyber discussion. I checked the board but found no post. I looked for the automatically generated email copy that the service sends when a student hits "Submit" but found no email. I searched her virtual folder for the .doc copy she was supposed to send "just in case" but found no copy. I wrote back that I had no evidence of the missing work, so the zero would stay in my gradebook.
Oh, claimed Katherine, it was saved on her home computer. She couldn't understand why I didn't have it. Of course, she neglected to send this "saved" copy with her protestation, for she won't actually write it unless I ask to see it. I explained that I do not take discussion responses late, and the zero would stay.
You're being so unfair, Katherine replied. Why, she even sent a draft of her discussion response to her aunt to proofread, and the timestamp on that email showed that she had written it before the deadline. She did not, however, forward this sent email to me and missed a third opportunity to send me her "saved" copy.
I held firm. Zero, Katherine. Part of me wanted to explain the strategies that she could have used to make her story more believable. For example, she could have inquired about this January assignment in early February: "Professor Lightbulb, when am I getting a grade for the first cyber discussion?" I would have scrambled to find it, assuming that I was at fault and taken anything she sent. Or she could have written it and attached it to the first email, hoping that if she immediately produced the work I would believe it was written long ago. But waiting for a cue that I would accept it before she even bothered to write it was misplayed. I hate when students lie to me and refuse any grace in such situations. I wanted to write, "Katherine, sweetheart, I have taught college longer than you have lived. Such amateur tricks don't work on me," but I was too over it all to bother.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Beautiful Boring
As soon as my online office hours were over at 11 a.m., spring break began! Elizabeth and I made our second trip to Lukas Nursery, where she bought more plants, and I spent time with the flying beauties in the Butterfly Encounter. I don't want to become a boring one-trick pony, but here are the latest takes with the camera:
Click photo for large version.
Click photo for large version.
Click photo for large version.
Click photo for large version.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Evolution of My Grading
As an undergraduate, I worked in my college's writing center where I learned to mark student essays in a manner that inspired thoughtful revision. For example, my tutor training taught me to ask questions instead of bark orders—"Can you tell a specific story to illustrate this?" rather than "Give an example." Because I worked one on one with just a handful of students per day, I had time to evaluate their writing in a meaningful manner.
When I got my first real class to teach—one section of prep writing as an adjunct—I still had time to comment in ways that I hoped inspired improvement. But as my dean concluded that I had "the gift" and began giving me more and more classes, and then a temporary full-time contract, and then the coveted tenure-track position, I could no longer comment as carefully on the work of 150 students, each of whom had to write 6,000 words per semester, a state mandate.
My grading changed from thoughtful remarks about content to covering my ass by marking sentence errors. I believed this strategy was necessary because of the precariousness of my employment. In those early days, I quickly learned that students shared their papers with everyone. As a result, I began to mark essays so that if a senior colleague or my dean got his hands on the paper, he would know that A) I read the entire essay, and B) I knew my grammar. Another factor influencing the number of sentence errors I marked was the do-or-die, department-graded final exam. At the time, the college required that freshman composition students pass this final exam essay or fail the entire class. The most common cause of failure was too many grammar mistakes, especially when a paper indicated a lack of fluency with English. So I marked every sentence error—top to bottom—in the essay; if a Korean left out articles, I added ^a, ^an, or ^the wherever necessary. No student could complain, after receiving a semester's worth of papers dripping with green ink, that she didn't realize that she was in jeopardy of failing the class heading into the final exam.
Once I was awarded tenure, new responsibilities and observations affected my grading. Freedom from paranoia didn't turn me into a lazy grader who didn't really read, nor did I become a hardass no longer concerned if students complained about my unreasonable demands. Instead, I began loosening my standards, mostly as a result of the hypocrisy my colleagues demonstrated.
I first learned that my classroom expectations weren't in line with the reality of academia when I began editing a professional journal showcasing the interests/research of the college's faculty and staff. Before this experience, I was really nitpicky about works cited page entries/parenthetical references in student essays. Because my students and I had a lengthy discussion/practice of how to compose works cited page entries and the corresponding parenthetical references, I took 2 points for every error I found in the final document, no matter how small. A miscapitalized word, a missing mark of punctuation, forgetting the brackets that enclose the web address—minus 2 points, minus 2 points, minus 2 points! I could get an essay down to a 70 on the works cited page alone. But after reading submissions from PhDs who made up their own personal citation style as they wrote—which then required extensive changes from me and the other editors—I decided I wasn't going to bust first-year students so harshly for something that their professors couldn't do correctly themselves. If the list of sources looks works cited page-ish, I'm okay with it now.
I am crystal clear about what plagiarism is and my penalties for it. Those penalities, however, have lessened over the years. In the past, if a student lifted a single sentence verbatim from a source and neglected to include quotation marks around it—whether or not a parenthetical reference followed—she earned a zero. A second instance meant I WFed the student from the class. Not so any longer. When I heard a colleague bitch that the papers she wrote for her daughter's college history class were earning only B's, I quit losing my temper over plagiarism. How could I bust students for doing something my fellow faculty—as well as more prestigious teachers at better schools—did without real penalty? A lifted sentence without quotation marks is just a punctuation error for me now.
I used to agree with my colleagues that too many errors—no matter how intelligent or insightful the content—equalled a failing paper. Then I began to serve on faculty hiring committees where candidates had to write impromptu essays right before the interview. Some of these pieces were grammatical disasters, but I would listen to faculty who argued that we should overlook the mistakes, especially if they really liked a candidate. "He was nervous," "Twenty minutes is too little time to write and proofread," or "She is very good with students" were some of the excuses I heard when committee members wanted to move a candidate to the second interview with the provost. Then when our Chief Learning Officer sent an email introducing a new hire as a former principle of a local high school—for even she didn't remember that your principal is your pal—I gave up. I'm not failing students for making mistakes at the beginning of their higher education that folks with advanced degrees can't handle themselves.
If you get a group of faculty together in a room, they will insist that they are, by god, upholding standards. They will bemoan the fact that students today can't do things they themselves did stupendously back in the day. Anyone listening should have plenty of skepticism, though. Most of those faculty have skills only slightly better than the average first and second-year students in their classes.
I still give plenty of Ds and Fs as final grades, but those students don't pass because they either A) can't follow simple directions, usually because they didn't attend class to get them, or B) can't get the work done at all. Skills like documenting sources, avoiding plagiarism, and editing for sentence errors are not what get the students in my classes in trouble.
When I got my first real class to teach—one section of prep writing as an adjunct—I still had time to comment in ways that I hoped inspired improvement. But as my dean concluded that I had "the gift" and began giving me more and more classes, and then a temporary full-time contract, and then the coveted tenure-track position, I could no longer comment as carefully on the work of 150 students, each of whom had to write 6,000 words per semester, a state mandate.
My grading changed from thoughtful remarks about content to covering my ass by marking sentence errors. I believed this strategy was necessary because of the precariousness of my employment. In those early days, I quickly learned that students shared their papers with everyone. As a result, I began to mark essays so that if a senior colleague or my dean got his hands on the paper, he would know that A) I read the entire essay, and B) I knew my grammar. Another factor influencing the number of sentence errors I marked was the do-or-die, department-graded final exam. At the time, the college required that freshman composition students pass this final exam essay or fail the entire class. The most common cause of failure was too many grammar mistakes, especially when a paper indicated a lack of fluency with English. So I marked every sentence error—top to bottom—in the essay; if a Korean left out articles, I added ^a, ^an, or ^the wherever necessary. No student could complain, after receiving a semester's worth of papers dripping with green ink, that she didn't realize that she was in jeopardy of failing the class heading into the final exam.
Once I was awarded tenure, new responsibilities and observations affected my grading. Freedom from paranoia didn't turn me into a lazy grader who didn't really read, nor did I become a hardass no longer concerned if students complained about my unreasonable demands. Instead, I began loosening my standards, mostly as a result of the hypocrisy my colleagues demonstrated.
I first learned that my classroom expectations weren't in line with the reality of academia when I began editing a professional journal showcasing the interests/research of the college's faculty and staff. Before this experience, I was really nitpicky about works cited page entries/parenthetical references in student essays. Because my students and I had a lengthy discussion/practice of how to compose works cited page entries and the corresponding parenthetical references, I took 2 points for every error I found in the final document, no matter how small. A miscapitalized word, a missing mark of punctuation, forgetting the brackets that enclose the web address—minus 2 points, minus 2 points, minus 2 points! I could get an essay down to a 70 on the works cited page alone. But after reading submissions from PhDs who made up their own personal citation style as they wrote—which then required extensive changes from me and the other editors—I decided I wasn't going to bust first-year students so harshly for something that their professors couldn't do correctly themselves. If the list of sources looks works cited page-ish, I'm okay with it now.
I am crystal clear about what plagiarism is and my penalties for it. Those penalities, however, have lessened over the years. In the past, if a student lifted a single sentence verbatim from a source and neglected to include quotation marks around it—whether or not a parenthetical reference followed—she earned a zero. A second instance meant I WFed the student from the class. Not so any longer. When I heard a colleague bitch that the papers she wrote for her daughter's college history class were earning only B's, I quit losing my temper over plagiarism. How could I bust students for doing something my fellow faculty—as well as more prestigious teachers at better schools—did without real penalty? A lifted sentence without quotation marks is just a punctuation error for me now.
I used to agree with my colleagues that too many errors—no matter how intelligent or insightful the content—equalled a failing paper. Then I began to serve on faculty hiring committees where candidates had to write impromptu essays right before the interview. Some of these pieces were grammatical disasters, but I would listen to faculty who argued that we should overlook the mistakes, especially if they really liked a candidate. "He was nervous," "Twenty minutes is too little time to write and proofread," or "She is very good with students" were some of the excuses I heard when committee members wanted to move a candidate to the second interview with the provost. Then when our Chief Learning Officer sent an email introducing a new hire as a former principle of a local high school—for even she didn't remember that your principal is your pal—I gave up. I'm not failing students for making mistakes at the beginning of their higher education that folks with advanced degrees can't handle themselves.
If you get a group of faculty together in a room, they will insist that they are, by god, upholding standards. They will bemoan the fact that students today can't do things they themselves did stupendously back in the day. Anyone listening should have plenty of skepticism, though. Most of those faculty have skills only slightly better than the average first and second-year students in their classes.
I still give plenty of Ds and Fs as final grades, but those students don't pass because they either A) can't follow simple directions, usually because they didn't attend class to get them, or B) can't get the work done at all. Skills like documenting sources, avoiding plagiarism, and editing for sentence errors are not what get the students in my classes in trouble.
Monday, March 2, 2009
When Things Work and When They Don't
Our favorite barista invited Elizabeth and me to meet Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. He is, we learned, visiting individual stores all over the country, talking to patrons, trying to determine what can be done differently/better since the current recession is the first time in Starbucks history when profits/growth have declined. Any caffeine fiend without a special invitation had to peer at us through the plate glass as the staff served custom drinks in ceramic mugs and slices of cake decorated with whipped cream and cut flowers. When Mr. Schultz asked for feedback—either positive or negative—the invited guests offered praise and complaints. I enjoyed watching a billionaire honestly engage his customers. He admitted when he thought the company made mistakes; he talked with great passion about health coverage for his employees and ethical farming. He was nothing like the banking and automobile execs dodging questions before Congress.
One story he told got me thinking. During a recent visit to New York City, he walked into a filthy Starbucks. He explained that the mess wasn't the result of a busy lunch hour when the employees were too overwhelmed to keep up with cleaning. No, this filth was established. He then bemoaned the difficulty of finding store managers with the leadership skills to run each individual location in an ideal manner. We could all relate. Throughout my city are Chick-fil-As and Burger Kings that I refuse to enter, and yet I know individual stores where the employees keep the tables shiny and the fries hot.
Unlike Mr. Schultz, I think a well-run store is not entirely up to the manager, that location and the corresponding clientele make a difference. When a number of guests bitched about the Starbucks near the university, several people noted that rude workers staffed every food and beverage location in that area, that students serving—for the most part—other students were bound to be surly. Elizabeth and I once ordered coffee from the Starbucks at the Florida Mall. The store was a pigsty; we watched unoccupied employees ignore the mess. We surmised that the store atmosphere which we so prized at our regular Starbucks could not develop in a location where tourists visited a single time, and the lack of intimacy affected the attitude of the employees.
In the classroom, student mix can handicap an otherwise effective professor in the same way. I have gotten enough feedback—on classroom visits by the dean, on student evaluations, in comments at RateMyProfessors—to know that I am a good teacher. But my classroom leadership skills do not mean every section of a class goes equally well. I can adjust my methods so that if I have a really extroverted class, I tone down my own enthusiasm to keep the top from blowing off, and if I have a reticent class, I have a few tricks to get the reluctant participating. Even so, some classes, despite what I try, fail to respond, and four, five, six weeks into the semester, I give up on ever enjoying them; I count down the days until final exams.
This semester, I have thrown up my hands in one section of freshman composition. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I have a group I love, whose papers I enjoy reading. After grading a set of essays, I pick out the four best titles, the four best thesis statements, the two best introductions, and read them aloud; then I let students vote on which ones they like the best, rewarding the winners with candy bars purchased from the book store. The class has gotten very competitive composing those introductory parts of an essay where the writer grabs or loses the reader's attention. Does the other class get candy? No way. The students are cowardly automatons, afraid to have an original thought that might distance them from the safety of their boring peers. For them, I bring grammar worksheets. And if I were Howard Schultz and they were one of my Starbucks stores, I'd immediately close the doors and lay off the workers. Unfortunately, I'll still be serving up composition instruction every Tuesday and Thursday until late April.
One story he told got me thinking. During a recent visit to New York City, he walked into a filthy Starbucks. He explained that the mess wasn't the result of a busy lunch hour when the employees were too overwhelmed to keep up with cleaning. No, this filth was established. He then bemoaned the difficulty of finding store managers with the leadership skills to run each individual location in an ideal manner. We could all relate. Throughout my city are Chick-fil-As and Burger Kings that I refuse to enter, and yet I know individual stores where the employees keep the tables shiny and the fries hot.
Unlike Mr. Schultz, I think a well-run store is not entirely up to the manager, that location and the corresponding clientele make a difference. When a number of guests bitched about the Starbucks near the university, several people noted that rude workers staffed every food and beverage location in that area, that students serving—for the most part—other students were bound to be surly. Elizabeth and I once ordered coffee from the Starbucks at the Florida Mall. The store was a pigsty; we watched unoccupied employees ignore the mess. We surmised that the store atmosphere which we so prized at our regular Starbucks could not develop in a location where tourists visited a single time, and the lack of intimacy affected the attitude of the employees.
In the classroom, student mix can handicap an otherwise effective professor in the same way. I have gotten enough feedback—on classroom visits by the dean, on student evaluations, in comments at RateMyProfessors—to know that I am a good teacher. But my classroom leadership skills do not mean every section of a class goes equally well. I can adjust my methods so that if I have a really extroverted class, I tone down my own enthusiasm to keep the top from blowing off, and if I have a reticent class, I have a few tricks to get the reluctant participating. Even so, some classes, despite what I try, fail to respond, and four, five, six weeks into the semester, I give up on ever enjoying them; I count down the days until final exams.
This semester, I have thrown up my hands in one section of freshman composition. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I have a group I love, whose papers I enjoy reading. After grading a set of essays, I pick out the four best titles, the four best thesis statements, the two best introductions, and read them aloud; then I let students vote on which ones they like the best, rewarding the winners with candy bars purchased from the book store. The class has gotten very competitive composing those introductory parts of an essay where the writer grabs or loses the reader's attention. Does the other class get candy? No way. The students are cowardly automatons, afraid to have an original thought that might distance them from the safety of their boring peers. For them, I bring grammar worksheets. And if I were Howard Schultz and they were one of my Starbucks stores, I'd immediately close the doors and lay off the workers. Unfortunately, I'll still be serving up composition instruction every Tuesday and Thursday until late April.
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