How I explain to my students what Venn diagram is
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Rising
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!
On the climate change debate
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.
Good morning! It’s — wait, what? FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
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.
Back to prison. Er, school.
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.
On religous rhetoric: Watch where you’re sticking that preposition!
Recently, as my disenchantment with religion has grown, I’ve become more and more annoyed with the clichéd rhetoric of the establishment. I find the clichés to be both careless and thoughtless in general communication; to unbelievers, skeptics and cynics, religious clichés are the epitome of the thoughtless, dogma-driven dribble that is the worst, not the best, that religion has to offer.
For example, I recently read of a person who died that she was now “sleeping in Jesus.” I get it, but I don’t like it. Looking at that literally, it’s (a.) creepy and (b.) impossible, as if one regressed Benjamin Button-style to reimplant as an embryo on someone’s uterus. The phrase I think was meant was that she was “sleeping in Jesus’ arms,” which to me is a lot more peaceful and sensible (in a metaphorical way, anyway), the way many would like to imagine falling asleep and awakening.
Yet the prepositional disturbance that is “in Jesus” is prevalent in much religious rhetoric: meant to calm and assuage, it instead sounds eery and mindless. Take, for example, the following phrases:
Victory in Jesus: Would you ever say “Victory in Napoleon” or “Victory in George W. Bush”? Probably not, and not just because the latter was a dismal failure. “Victory over death through faith in Jesus” would perhaps be more accurate, so why not say it? Does the shortcut help anyone not already persuaded to understand?
Joy in Jesus: this is just incomplete. Joy in Jesus’…what? Life? Death? Sacrifice? Pick your object. Or better yet, rephrase your sentence: “Jesus gives me joy.”
New life in Jesus: Again, creepy, suggestive of pregnancy. Rephrase.
Of course, the problem with clarifying your rhetoric so that it makes sense grammatically and to a constituency less familiar with traditional religious verbiage is that you may end up making yourself less clear to the constituency that is educated “in Jesus.”
Well, to plagiarize that one singer, no one said it would be easy.
Being a dick & Jane: e-mail etiquette
Thus far, I am not so impressed with some people who work for a certain place that shall not be named. Let’s say it’s a place of business, and I have done business with them that involves giving them some personal information. Months after I sent them all the information they need — including my e-mail and phone info on several different forms — I got a secondhand e-mail from a totally different contact at the business saying I need to contact “Jane” about a missing document, one of the many I provided.
So I sit down and take about ten minutes to compose a brief, professional e-mail to Jane — whom I’ve never met — about this missing document, telling her where it is and when I sent it. And then, because I used to work in customer service, I say to let me know if she is still unable to find it, and I can get her a new one (even though doing this will cost me time and money, but I don’t say that). I sign off with a professional close and signature.
Liar, liar?
Three weeks after sending this e-mail, I finally get a terse, one-line, unpunctuated reply:
These were not included in your packet
Wow. It’s quite one thing to say, “I cannot find it in your file,” and quite another to say, “This was not included in your packet,” dig? I remember printing off the files, and I remember writing a note in explanation for one bit of information, and I remember double-checking the list of materials I had to send before I sent it. I know it was originally included, so it’s not out of line for me to feel a bit affronted.
The thing that galls me here: Jane’s job is, by nature, a people-person job. Shouldn’t she know better? In this brief exchange, she sounds like a dick: rude, lazy, unprofessional, incompetent, and unlikeable, even though if I met her face-to-face I might find her to be a positively lovely person, inside and out.
This is why writing is so important
People judge based on first impressions, whether electronic or face-to-face. So folks, if you work in public relations, marketing, human resources, and related jobs, you should be neither deliberately rude in nor ignorant of the tone of your message. Even just a professional greeting and close can make up for multitude other sins. And by all means, punctuate it. It really is the least you can do.
Power and the pen
One of the hardest parts about teaching at the pen is figuring out whether my students are genuinely ignorant or just making power plays to see how much they can get away with. Last night we had designated writing time (a chance to use computers, which getting them to actually do is a bit like pulling teeth out with tweezers) and three of them beelined for the door to use the bathroom.
“Nu-uh,” I said, holding up a hand. “One at a time.”
“Since when?” one of them demanded.
“Since always. It’s a rule,” said She Who Hates Rules Probably Nearly As Much As They Do and who enforces them nonetheless.
They’d been abiding by the one-at-a-time rule all quarter until now, so I suspect this was one of those times when they were just testing me to see what they could get away with. It’s unfortunate, though, that it puts me in the position of having to wield power. I don’t like to, and I’m not good at doing it in a way where I don’t come across as a major bitch. Usually it’s not a problem, but last night — I blame the full moon, because I can — was a bit of a trial.
And other rules seem designed to frustrate all of us: that in order to get a new pen or pencil, they have to turn in the old one; to get more paper, they have to turn in the cardboard backing of their old notepad. They know this but often “forget.” And because not all teachers enforce these rules, it puts me in an awkward position when I do: what am I going to do, tell my students they can’t write because they lost their pencil? No, of course not.
What I understand, though, is that these are minor frustrations that come with being new. And hey, with time and practice, hopefully I’ll become the type of instructor who’s able to engage students enough that they aren’t running like packrats to the bathroom.
On persuasion
From Straight Man by Richard Russo:
I haven’t persuaded my freshmen that the ability to persuade is an important skill. …[P]ersuasion — reasoned argument — no longer holds a favored position in university life. If [students'] professors — feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists — belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in talking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.
Although I publicly espouse the tenets of argumentation — because it worked on me and for me — I privately agree with Russo here, at least as regarding the majority of people.
#teacherfail
It’s been a rough week or so of teaching. My students are heartily objecting to writing a summary and response paper, which involves the following complicated structure:
1. Summarize someone’s opinion of something you read or watched.
2. Respond to it with your opinion of what you read or watched.
For whatever reason — and I’m sure it’s due to my inability to explain things in a way that makes sense — this idea is breaking their world.
Then sometimes, because I try to be nice and helpful and extend the benefit of the doubt, I get drawn into really, really stupid power plays, like when one student usurps ten minutes of class seeming like he’s trying to understand how a hook, summary, and thesis all go in the introduction. When I finally caught him smiling as I tried to explain for the fifth time that the HOOK, the SUMMARY, and a THESIS STATEMENT ARE ALL COMPONENETS OF AN INTRODUCTION, I got pretty mad (inwardly) and told him to get to work on it and we’d see how it goes.
Another student simply refused to try, so I had to coach him: “Well, what does the author say here? Okay, then, what do you think about what he said?” Once we had that figured out, I said, “Write it down.” He said, “I’ve already forgotten.” I actually picked up his pencil and handed it to him, and we went through it again.
The complicating factor is that my students have such a broad range of skills — from fifth-grade drop-outs who somehow wrangled GEDs to experienced, albeit drop-out college students. One student put his head down, did the entire lesson and wrote his paper during the two-hour class; another got maybe five sentences.
It is so incredibly frustrating some days. I love teaching — I love teaching at the pen more than anywhere else I’ve taught. I want my students to learn this stuff, to challenge themselves, and to write successfully and think critically. But I’m not sure they are.
Top Ten Reasons to Teach Without Technology
10. If I can’t read their writing, I don’t have to read their papers.
9. Relatedly, I get a refresher on what cursive looks like. Some of my students quit school in fifth grade and think that cursive is how everyone writes. (Seriously, cursive still exists?)
8. I don’t have the problem of Blogger marking my students’ blogs as spam. Yay?
7. When my students lose interest, it’s because I’ve genuinely bored them — not because they got distracted by texting under the desk. (BTW, traditional students: it is so totally obvious when you’re doing this. That’s why I call on you when I do.)
6. I save my back the pressure of trudging around with a laptop.
5. My students can’t instantly fact-check me with their BlackBerrys and iPhones.
4. There aren’t any hard-drive-ate-my-homework stories.
3. I don’t catch them turning Safe Search off and “accidentally” “running across” porn while doing “Internet research.”
2. Three words: No fucking ringtones.
1. I don’t have to worry about what they say on RateMyProfessor.com.
If I may, Internet, a brief grammar lesson on the affirmative
Yay = short for “Hooray!”
Yea = “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”
Yeah = “yes,” but casual/slang
Yah = NOT A WORD, unless you want to sound like you’re saying “Ja” in German, and you continue with “das ist gud,” and then you chug a beer and eat a sausage at the same time
Yar = “yes” in Piratespeak
Yup, yep = “yes” in Redneck
Yuppers = “Yeah, I am an idiot”
Go ye therefore and not be stupid.