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It’s a bit hard for me as a teacher to sit as a student in a class. It’s kind of like rafting after I learned to row: no way am I not going to be the one in charge of where the boat is going and what rocks and waves it’s going to hit.
I may, come to think of it, have a bit of a control issue.
Anyway, this is relevant because in last night’s childbirth education class, I found myself mentally critiquing the educator, which of course is ridiculously hypocritical since it’s not like I’m the most fabulous teacher to spin the magic web of rhetoric. But seriously, I give you the following situations:
1. To start with, she made a sexist generalization at the beginning of class, something about how women’s labor stories are like men’s fish stories (implying something about lying about the length thereof, I guess), and mostly I was offended because I fish, too. And I have not yet lied about my labor experience (head’s up: I WILL win), so the expectation rankled.
2. Then there was this dandy question, clearly meant to gin up some discussion in the class:
Educator: How do you time contractions?
[ten seconds dead silence]
Me: Um, with a watch?
I knew what she was getting at, although not exactly — something to do with frequency and/or duration of contractions — but when you ask an unclear question and no one answers, rephrase and clarify what you mean. Or else you get smart-asses like me answering. (Though, professional confessional time: I love smart-asses. They make class fun and keep me on my toes. Double bonus. Although I’m not sure this educator feels that way about me.)
3. This is a rhetorical complaint: Everything she says is declarative: You WILL do this, you WILL do that, you WILL like this, you WILL not like that, etc. Um, no, thank you. Being told what I will and won’t do or think works about as well on this 30-year-old as it did on this 15-year-old. I realize I’m knocking my own maturity level here, but thanks to feminism and consumerism AND SCIENCE, women have a lot more childbirth choices than we used to, and I don’t appreciate childbirth “education” being presented as a map with stations where you get your hand stamped before moving on to the next level. If that works for the next woman, great — but not me.
Tangential confession: Last night I was a little taken aback when the educator asked who all was reading books on childbirth and I was the only one who raised a hand. Seriously?! How can you approach one of the biggest events in your life without planning? (And no, I don’t think childbirth education indoctrination counts.) I mean, I know I like to plan, but … HOW DO YOU NOT PLAN?
4. Finally, this childbirth educator pronounces the word “dilated” “dillatated.” THAT IS NOT A WORD, and I know because I triple-checked it on dictionary.com so as to not be made an ass of (which happens often enough as it is). And I know I should be more worried about what it means to be 10 cm “dillatated” than how she mispronounces the word, but it strikes at the heart of her ethos and those twelve or whatever years she spent on a Labor and Delivery ward.
Ugh. Somehow in my life I have morphed from the back-row, I’m-not-here student into the front-row, know-it-all critic. What’s worse, I remember how I hated those people in college, and thus this post is halfway between a cry for help and a blubbering confession. I guess when I’m stuck spreadlegged and naked at 8 cm dillatated and wondering why my epidural isn’t working, I’ll have time to ponder this further.
Apparently the best way to make your students misbehave is to brag about them to the Internets. I wonder if the reverse is true.
You see, one assignment is to watch a documentary and then to analyze its rhetoric in a paper. The students voted on the documentary they’d most like to see, and although “Super High Me” came in first, it was rated R which is generally not approvable, plus my research into it didn’t seem like it would present an argument per se, so we went with the runner-up, An Inconvenient Truth. To be clear, while it wasn’t their first choice, it was still their choice.
Oh. my. gawd.
Such wailing and gnashing of teeth — you’d think Al Gore personally done them all wrong what with all the whining and death wishes directed his way. And what kills me is how this film – that they voted to see — is so irrelevent that they see the idea of human-caused climate change as boring, yet they all want to see 2012. Um, guys? Srsly?
On Wednesday we’re going to talk about ad hominem logical fallacies and evaluating an argument, not a person. In the meantime, I wish aspirin were good for fetuses (feta? fetii?). Or alcohol.
I seriously don’t understand how we can go over summary, quotation, and paraphrase for HOURS and students still don’t use quotation marks for words taken from another source “because it’s paraphrase.”
NO IT’S NOT. The SOURCE may have paraphrased, but YOU did NOT.
*tearing out my hair*
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Update: Have fixed typo in title. Now am considering live-blogging Meltdown to Baldness 2010. Ugh.
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Those faint screams are the sounds of me checking my students’ sourcework.
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I must speak a different language when I teach. It’s the only explanation for a couple of these research papers.
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It’s really only three out of twelve papers (and two of those weren’t my students in ENGL 101) that are so awful, but they’re THAT AWFUL. (And this is one benefit of teaching at the pen: my students will never know I liveblogged my hairloss.)
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I think the key here is to not read all the good papers first. Stupid, stupid planning.
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Remember copyediting? That was a nice, stress-free career with regular hours….
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The delusions are getting stronger.
I’ve decided to answer your questions about teaching at the pen in installments, partly because I’m lazy and mostly because …
WTF, I think the neighbor just drove his motorcycle across our weeds. I mean lawn. But still!
…anyway: mostly because some of my responses will be longer than others. Like this one.
Question 1: I’d be curious to hear more about the roadblocks I remember you talking about (limited access, pencil trading, obnoxious bureaucracy, etc.) and how you’ve learned to work with or around them. I’m also curious about what they are writing about, if you have received any particularly interesting papers, etc.
There are still plenty of roadblocks. We still have librarians do the research part of research writing, which is frustrating in that the students should be doing it, but I am working on getting us to buy access to a database specifically designed for teaching in prison situations that we can load onto some of the computers in my classroom so students can find journal and magazine articles related to their topics (so much research is online these days, something I have trouble explaining to bureaucrats whose last research paper was written decades ago!). I am trying to get more books for the fledgling library, but no one wants to spend money on books (the sarcastic part of me says, Yeah, let’s give these students an education but god forbid they read books! *sigh* I do understand budget constraints, but there are so many cheap, used books out there that it seems preposterous not to buy them). I do think I have an in right now to get a series of books, which I am hoping for, but I find that doors open and shut here with little warning.
You may recall my minimeltdown over whether or not students could use highlighters. Last quarter there was a clamor for highlighters, and I was able to procure both the highlighters and permission forms for students carrying them. (Yes: Permission forms to carry highlighters. It kind of makes those fucking dorm hall passes they required in boarding high school pale in comparison.) That said, there has been no such clamor this quarter, so I am not worrying about it right now, but it’s nice to know that there are workarounds for some difficulties. I guess learning to be a grownup/bureaucrat and pose my requests with potential solutions is working.
I think sometimes there is unnecessary harassment of students; for example, one student got a disk to use to save his Word documents on and took it back to his cell not knowing he wasn’t allowed to have it there. He was taken out of class and remonstrated for having done this. He came back angry and embarrassed, and I thought it was unnecessary. I mean, where the fuck is he going to use this disk, anyway? I’m pretty sure the dinosaur computers in our classroom are the only ones that still have a disk drive. But this is why I teach instead of guard: I don’t have to worry about how a disk could be broken down and fashioned into some sort of weapon, which was probably the concern. But still — humiliation is not an effective form of punishment or correctional education, in my opinion.
Other little things that might be of interest: I can only give my students one pen and one pencil — and the pens are closely guarded in a locked supply room (pencils are more freely available). The reason for this, as you can probably guess or already know, is that the pen ink is used for prison tattoos, and therefore pens can become objects of barter and trade instead of tools for education (huh, grad school flashback). And let me just say this: I love my students, but some of them have some seriously ugly-ass tattoos: all manner of skulls and flames, barbed wire, naked women; lots of knuckle tats (you know, the type where you put your fists together and it spells out a word); a surprising number of facial marks, such as teardrops. You can tell the difference between a prison tat and an outside one: prison tats are black/blue and sometimes either very artistic and thin, or very poorly done and blunt, depending on the artist; outside ones are full color or deep black (no skimping on ink). I don’t ask the guys about their marks, but I’ve really wanted to. One guy obviously has the name of his dead child on his arm, which makes me sad every time I see it.
To the second part of this question, what they write about, I would answer that I gave them more latitude to write about what they wanted in the first couple quarters. Seriously interesting shit, but I found myself getting so into their stories that it was difficult to assess their writing, and anyway, I’ve changed the direction from personal writing to topical writing to better fit the course goals as laid out by the English department. Some would write about why they were in jail (it surprised me how many cited alcohol and/or drug addiction as their downfall, which generally led to whatever they did to go to prison); many wrote more idealistically and nostalgically about times and places they enjoyed before prison, or, somewhat depressingly, between prison stints. What I find particularly interesting are the guys who write about their ethnic heritage: one of my favorite papers was from a student who wrote about learning the language of his heritage when he was an adolescent; another wrote about male patriarchy in his native culture and how language was actually a tool for male dominance and female subservience — the women aren’t allowed to address or speak to men the way they would speak to women — wow! I probably enjoy these essays more because they are born from research writing, not just experiences, which when woven together are particularly more compelling to me than experiences alone.
Another aspect of research writing in my classroom is how many students are interested in prison reform: when we had to decide on a topic for the first research paper, prison reform was second only to the oil spill in popularity, and several students are doing it for their individual choice paper. I know it’s probably an interest that comes from their frustration, but I hope that it is also educational/enlightening to them to find out how to get out and stay out. This topic sometimes gives me an opening to tell them, Hey, learn this stuff, and don’t repeat your mistakes; I don’t want to see you back here. (Some students are open about how they consider themselves career criminals, which is depressing and probably self-defeating, but I am not always in a position where I can say anything. And I will say that I think my ethos to challenge them on these things is growing — I can say things now that I couldn’t and wouldn’t've said my first quarter, but some classes, and students, have different chemistry than others.)
Many students, despite their inability to vote, are politically aware, though sometimes I think there is an odd disconnect between the politics they support and the politics that would benefit them. But it makes for interesting discussions and papers. One student wanted to do his research paper on why social progressivism was a bad form of government (bet you’d never guess how he feels about the president), whereas another is doing his paper on what type of government structure is closest to utopia.
So that’s a small overview of bureaucracy and the topics my students write about. Coming soon: Part 2 — why my job rocks and I could never go back to working at a desk.
Every day I come home from my rockin’ ENGL 101 class totally exhausted (haven’t even gone to 102 yet…that’s in the evening) and yet totally exhilarated. I want to write about it, but don’t know what to say that would be interesting to others. So I thought I’d toss this to my readers (all two of you, of which only one is probably interested in education): What do you want to know about teaching English comp in a prison now that I’ve got about a year of it under my belt? I won’t disclose my students’ identities (obv.), but if you’re curious about anything, let me know.
That as a political group who believes in individual responsibility, right-wingers blame the government for an awful lot of stuff (not that they’re necessarily wrong; it’s just hypocritical), and I am cynically amused. For example: This week, Someone messed up something important at a government institution. As I understand it, it was very much Someone’s fault — no one/nothing else’s. Yet because it was a gov’t institution, my very right-wing friend blames the government. And somehow dragged the census into it. (Um, okay?) So I guess this righ-winger wants both personal responsibility and a convenient punching bag.
…Ugh. That’s it. I am starting my own country and it will be totally anarchist and I will be the only person there, so I will have total freedom. Total freedom and total control. I’ll have it both ways, too.
I know, I know, it’s been AGES since I’ve said anything (and longer since I’ve said anything worth reading). Rest assured, oh three-point-two-five readers, I am still alive, and I still have Opinions on Things that Need to be Addressed.
For today’s Opinion, I’ll start with Doug Batchelor’s recent sermon on women in not in the ministry. This was fucking appalling, and I’m ashamed that people weren’t walking out of his sermon in droves. There is no excuse for misogyny. None. Doug Batchelor needs a restraining order to keep him away from pulpits, and his ovis-audience needs to check their cud before they chew it. (Although I suppose these people seem like the type who blindly swallow, but that may not be the best metaphor….)
Chiefly amongst my uncharitable toughts toward the mallustrous preacher man is that I hope purgatory is real, or that hell is temporary, but I also hope that purgatory/hell is individualized per a person’s sins. My hell, for example, would be full of engineers who dam rivers and that abomination of imitation chocolate, carob. And from that experience, I expect I would learn to respect others’ work and not be so quick to stuff what appears to be chocolate in my mouth. Doug Batchelor’s hell, I hope, would be full of women who are more intelligent than he is, and not only preach but are fucking preachERS. I also believe, in this imaginary purgatory/hell, that close-minded people will take longer to learn their lessons, and in doing so, be there longer. Batchelor’s going to steam for awhile, I think. Though I prefer not to conjecture on the length of my interment.
I’ve been thinking that Dutch Bros. should sell a Monday-morning, week-starter beverage that loosely involves about five shots of coffee and a pound of sugar (pure cane, of course; none of that corn syrup rubbish). I think today that, and only that, beverage could get me started on the mound — nay, butte — of grading I need to do. Which is to serve as the segue into how this quarter is going, which I will neatly summarize for you:
Hell.
Teaching three writing classes is not doable, or at least not for me. The only way I have a single nostril above water right now is because my research writing class is in the research phase; even that is slated to end this week as the annotated bibliographies come in. Of course part of the stress is teaching two new classes, where I have to devise new lesson plans (oddly, it’s the daily grammar lessons that are sapping my will to live…hmm, tangent:
I learned this teaching ESL learners: if you don’t teach grammar, students complain that they don’t learn grammar. If you do teach grammar, students either don’t apply what you’ve learned (because writing is more complicated that sample sentences on an overhead projector), or they don’t care, or they believe they are the exceptions who may abuse grammar because they think they know better. Which they don’t. In my experience, the only way to learn grammar is to use grammar, and revise until you learn how to use it correctly. I don’t know how to teach this effectively.).
Anyway. This is week five, I think, so we’re nearly halfway through. That does not, however, in any way help me get started on what needs to be done this week. It’s a strangely paralytic feeling, knowing how much needs to be done and not being able to actually summon the strength to do it, then stressing about the mounting stress, then imagining my dad saying, “Quit fiddling around and get started,” which only further stymies my will to live.
And the water, I can feel it seeping into that last remaining nostril.
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Edit: five hours later, I have more or less gotten my shit together, have quit feeling quite so sorry for myself, and am … er, don’t remember how this sentence was going to end, as I’m not fixated on whether “gotten” is a word. Okay, it is. Life can go on.
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Edit No. 2: six hours later, I am finished; better yet, the last few papers were great!
Reading this article about climate change consensus unraveling and recalling the snafu of hacked climate e-mails makes me — and hopefully a lot of people — sit back and think. I’m pretty committed to having a small carbon footprint and living in an ecologically and environmentally conservative manner. Recently I’ve gotten pretty excited about tiny houses and composting toilets, but the annoying, pragmatic part of my personality — the one that always butts heads with my idealism and is often aided and abetted by my cynicism – makes me question if I’m just some loony, leftie wannabe-hippie who sways with the gust captured by the nearest wind turbine.
Well, that may be, but I don’t think so. I’m beginning to see climate science not as a science with a defined (or definable) truth, but rather as a developing and evolving truth, much like a wiki. To take that metaphor further, imagine that the “climate change” Wikipedia article is just beginning to be written, and there are an awful lot of smart people involved. But, like all people, they have biases, beliefs, and politics that come into play, even though most strive to leave them at the door. The point we’re at is the nasty editing wars where accusations are hurled here and there, where people feel the dichotomous pull to one side or the other, even though there is a large and poorly defined area in the middle. There is not Truth, not yet, even though we’re working on it. Some of us feel we can dimly see where it’s leading, and others boldly plunge down that path, blind to obstacles and Reason and so forth. Others dig in their heels and refuse to budge. You see where this mangled metaphor is headed.
Remember when J Harlen Bretz thought the Pacific Northwest had been formed by catastrophic floods and everyone laughed at him? Truth wins out, if given time and energy. We’re just not to the point where we can quite see what that will be.
This morning marked the beginning of my most recent foray into narcissism: teaching evenings and early mornings. In fact, I teach every evening at the prison from 6 to 8:30, and then I teach an early morning class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. How early? Good question.
Until, oh, about 6:53 a.m. this morning I thought the class was from 7:30 to 9 a.m. Fortunately, I guess, it’s always been a nightmare of mine, missing the first day of class as a teacher, so after sleeping in a bit, making a cup of coffee at 6:45, and sitting down to print off a roster, I happened to notice the class time: 7 to 8:20 a.m.
WTF.
I said some bad words and there was a great flurry of coats and scarves and keys and papers and running, and it is very fortunate that we live on this side of town. I made it with about a minute to spare.
Always good to start things off on the right foot, I say.
Today ends the three-week “vacation” that people think teachers get during holidays. While a considerable amount of time was spent with family and their screaming progeny as well as preparing for and partying in the new year, a significant amount was spent getting ready for this new term. And Internets, I am frightened: I have never taught full-time before, never three different classes with three different preps and sets of students and assignments and work and OH MY GOD I’M NOT GOING TO MAKE IT.
Well, I probably will make it: I’ll probably meet the challenge, if barely, because that’s what I do: when I was taking three graduate school classes and teaching two and commuting from here to there, I managed. But last quarter, teaching only one class — it almost kicked my butt. Not because it was hard, but because it was so different, and I had to start anew on so much pedagogy. This quarter is the first time in my entire three-year teaching career where I’m finally teaching the same class twice in a row, and I hope to reach the point where my class prep is at an absolute minimum — reusable assignments made ahead of time — and I can instead focus on my students and their writing.
Here are my goals for the quarter:
- Minimal daily assignments — less busywork and less for me to grade
- Return to rubrics so students have clear goals and I have a clear framework for assessment
- Delve more deeply into readings
- Focus on pragmatic writing skills, including grammar (oh, I can imagine the gnashing of teeth from some comp people!)
- Convey the idea of research to a population unable to actually conduct research
I say the following honestly: I am often a mediocre teacher, and I want to be a good teacher. I will never be inspirational, I’m sure, because that gene doesn’t grow on my family tree, but if I can provide clear, straightforward instruction and advice that my students use, and if they go on to write well and think clearly, then I will have done my job.
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