Never Say Fail

 The recent discussion on failure reminded me of one of those weirdly unpleasant-but-interesting teaching events, one which was outdone only by the curiousness of my reaction.

I had an on-line student, Tempest I’ll call her, that I allowed into a full class late because she was a public school teacher who needed the course to round out a certificate of some sort. She lived on the other side of the state and hit the right (for me) tone of politeness-without-begging. And at this point, I am reminded of what a poor judge of a person’s rationality I am.

Her first writing assignment was graded by the instructor I team-teach the course with, an adjunct who is talented at judging writing and giving helpful feedback: she is an art historian. Tempest’s paper was all wrong, though. It was hundreds of words over the max length, only tangentially in the same ZIP code as the assigned topic, rife with personal and unsupported opinion, and choked with downloaded images that often weren’t relevant to the text. It was a mess, and my partner detailed the mess and — sunny as ever — urged a revision in the kindest of tones. (That tone, which falls just short of condescension, barely misses self-deprecating, and has just the faint aroma of authority to it is one I cannot manage, and I think I’ve avoided a lot of trouble by it.)

Since Tempest couldn’t reach my partner by phone but she could reach me, she did. She was enraged, so much so she almost couldn’t speak — and yet I heard other people talking in the background and since this was during regular school hours and the chatter had that familiar break-room sound, I had the peculiar feeling she was calling from a teacher’s lounge. She berated me for her failing grade, “You never fail a student, never, never, never, never!” and the phone did that little electronic sizzle that indicates it’s being overwhelmed by volume. “To get an F! An F! I am a teacher and I know what that does to a child. You never fail a student!”

I had fleeting thoughts of giving a rationale for a failing grade, particularly when the option for revision looms large, but this was clearly not a time for reasonable remarks. This, I thought, is a time to ride out the storm and see what happens, the telephone gave me a detachment I wouldn’t normally have.

“An F – I know what that stands for! An F stands for Fuck, an F stands for Fuck!” I expected violence next, though I wasn’t sure how she would assault me over a land line, but she had climaxed and began to spiral down toward sanity. “Of course I know I should be talking to T**** but I couldn’t reach her, and you’re my teacher too. And I don’t even know if you read my paper, because it was T****’s assignment and I understand T**** gave me this grade…”

By this time, other than “hello” I had only responded with a few innocuous “yes” or “oh, I see” remarks, and I was preparing to formulate a sentence when the word “grade” set off a fresh rocket.

“But to turn in a paper and receive an F! An F! I know it wasn’t perfect, but an F!” and the phone sizzled again. Suddenly her voice dropped to the level one would use to threaten cockroaches with – “You never give a student an F! Never, never give a student an F.”

Well, the ride was about over and I don’t exactly remember how it ended. She spiraled back down a bit and threatened to drop the course and I suggested that might be a good idea. So she did.

If I’d known what was going to happen ahead of time, I would have predicted that I would get angry, but that wasn’t at all what I felt. Her words echoed around in me for the rest of the day and more than anything I wondered what kind of world she lived in, who she thought we were that would pass every student paper no matter what. Perhaps she teaches elementary school, where every Crayola alphabet drawing is the best she’s ever seen…..yet she has her Bachelors and is working on a Masters. Has she never encountered….. But I gave up that line of thinking. Who is crazier, afterall: the person who raises high the flag of her madness, or the observer who tries to make sense of it?

Yet that’s what I found interesting (as opposed to infuriating or astonishing or humorous) about this encounter. Every student lives in a different world from mine, and we need some bridge, some common ground, some (I’m lacking the right metaphor) shared language before I can teach. I had assumed some similarity with Tempest because we shared (remotely it appears) the same profession, and yet that was exactly where we had our greatest disconnect. 

So with my students, who apparently are startlingly different from me in so many ways, how am I to know what common language we speak?

 

 

 

 

 

The Way We Fail Students

The much discussed Atlantic article, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” got me thinking about how failing a student affects the faculty, and Prone to Laughter’s recent reflection re-ignited the concern a few days ago.

Failing students comes with the job of teaching, but for some faculty it’s almost as strenuous an act as sanctioning a student for plagiarism. Some faculty go to great lengths to avoid either one, and I know of one community college faculty member who has left the classroom because the decision to fail a student is just too weighty. For the most part, I think these are instances where the faculty considers failure to be a heavier burden than the student does, and I wonder if this is the case with Professor X from the Atlantic article.

I fail students, a lot of students, probably too many students, and it doesn’t much bother me. I doubt that this makes me a better teacher than faculty who bleed over every F or perform extra-credit gymnastics to get every student to pass, but I do know I’m different, probably more by nature than by pedagogy. So this strikes me as an opportunity for one of those classification/division lists that fuels blogs of every ilk. My list follows, then, of the kinds of internal clockwork I see functioning in the clammy hearts of faculty as they fail a student, in no particular order.

• My failure is your failure. I think of this as the high school model, where the instructor holds himself responsible for the failure of the student, and the F then is rare and comes drenched in guilt. “He hardly ever came to class,” she says. “What could I have done to get through to him?” And I callously respond, ”You could have failed him in the first three weeks of the semester and either gotten his attention or been done with it.”  
• I’m sorry but you’ve failed – how can I ever make it up to you?  This failure is expressed with an apology, and I have seen students turn from thinking “Oh what the hey, I’ll just re-take the course” to “I am slain Horatio, slain!” as the remorseful teacher convinces them that an F grade is a sucker punch they didn’t deserve.
• The secret is, you’ve failed. Here the faculty has a grading system that is either never explained or is complicated enough that no student realizes the grade she is getting until the semester has ended, at which point the faculty can’t be reached for an explanation. It avoids the messiness of confrontation for the faculty member, but I think it breeds wild rumors as students invent magical explanations for their failure. “Man, don’t take courses from him. You miss a single class and you’re toast.” I have a colleague who, according to student wisdom for several years only passed women over 30 years old. Then a few years later the same colleague supposedly only passed men under 20. Well, at least it’s an objective measure.
• You have failed because I can’t stand your guts. As far as I can tell, this is the Loch Ness Professor: despite the many reported student sightings of this basis for a failing grade, it doesn’t exist. How sad to think that students believe we’re that hostile toward them.
• You have failed and because of that I can’t stand your guts. This one is real. Every semester I encounter somebody who is steamed at a student because the student just didn’t do x, even though he was capable. Sometimes this steam comes from an igneous layer of pride — “How dare he fail my course when he could have passed!” Sometimes it comes from a need to turn the failing student into an enemy, since it seems too mean to fail anyone else.  Some students encounter this sort of failure enough to expect it from all their faculty. They come apologetically to me after they have failed a class, checking to see if they might, please, take my course again because they really are good people. They promise not to screw up again, really… I need to convince them I hold no grudge against students I’ve failed. It’s a clean slate every semester, and I encourage them to use everything they learned the last time through and build on it. “Some people just take two semesters to get through the course work,” I might say, and I believe more often than not, that’s the case.
• How did you manage to fail, given all your talent?  This response comes from a real desire to see the student legitmately succeed: “There’s nothing you had to do that you couldn’t do!” I’ve seen that response be an encouragement to the student to try again, largely because the faculty member believes in the student’s capability that strongly.
• You earned an F probably describes my own attitude most closely. Over 15 weeks, with this work to do, given your unique abilities and pressures and handicaps, this is how your work stacked up against the course standard. It’s not a character flaw, not a critique of your intelligence, not even a predictor of how well you will do next time with different motivations, more or less time and energy devoted to the course, better or worse jokes in my delivery, higher or lower self esteem — whatever.

I do often wonder if my students would somehow be lifted to greater achievement if I was more psychically invested in their success. What if I hounded them, agonized over their absences and pleaded them into perfect attendance? What if I sought them out when papers were late and IMed them over deadlines? Would they be brilliant if my world depended upon it?

Nah, I’m not about to find out. And I’m not about to put more energy into their success than they do, because when they do succeed they will own 100% of that success, even if it’s a C+.

 

Raising the Next Generation of Trouble

I was in Staples last week, picking up a four-pack of Uniball pens I didn’t need because they were on sale for 99 cents. Eventually I will need a pen, or one of my descendants will. 

I was waiting, in no particular hurry, behind two women with a boy of about 5. There was some problem with the mother’s credit card. By the Cash Register is a little tree of Tootsie Pop-style lollipops, and the young gentleman wants one. “No” the mother says, but in a language that is incomprehensible to the boy, though clear enough to all adults. As mother swaps out a different card the boy plucks a pop from the tree and slips behind Mom, giving me one of those “I could spew pea-soup if I wanted to” looks.

The sucker is still wrapped, but the boy is licking it lovingly, wetly. The mother sees this, tells the lad she had told him “no” and returns the lollipop to the tree. I have never yet done my lollipop shopping in Staples and I am confident now that I never will. While the mother tries to get a pen working on the credit slip, the boy plucks the lollipop again and applies tongue. 

Now there’s some difficulty requiring a manager, and the mother with a little more heat tells the boy that he doesn’t deserve the lollipop given some previous misadventures at Wal*Mart. “But I want it” is the extent of his argument, but it’s evidently persuasive. The lollipop returns to the tree, the sales is finalized, the child whines, and from out of nowhere swoops in Mother’s friend, who I think of as the aunt. She plucks the wetly wrapped lollipop and another one off the display and plops two one dollar bills on the counter.

“Two!?” says Mom as the aunt hands them to the young gent and they leave the store. Now all done rather discreetly: no fits or tears or violence. But is this why, every semester, I find myself warning students that some error or behavior or plagiarist activity will produce a failing grade and they some weeks later react with astonishment when it does?

 

Working at the Composition Collision Shop

In downtown Paragraph City, with sky scrapers soaring high enough around it to cast the shop in shadows for most of the day, stands the ancient Strunk’s Service Station. He and his pal Ebenezer Whitey hire high school kids and put them in snappy uniforms with their first names over the station’s crest on the chest pocket. They run out with spray bottles and shop towels to clean your glasses and check the dipstick on your inspriration the moment you pull in by the two old pumps with Pegasus on the tops and hoses with clear plastic filters and colored marbles that dance as the kids pump whatever it is they pump into your tank.

But pumping petrol is just a sideline here, like the Briar’s Birch Beer and Vernor’s Ginger Ale and Kutztown Cream Soda in the chest cooler where the glass bottles are suspended in ice water, and after you thumb in your quarter, you take the bottle you want by the crimped metal cap and work it along the rails to the corner where you can lift it out dripping wet and cold. No, the real work is revealed in the service station’s sub-title: “or Composition Collision and Towing.” Three fire engine red wreckers are parked by the rusy iron railing along the River Mnemosyne that flows through Paragraph City.  On the wreckers’ doors it reads, “to reign by due praise or to seize for vain rights.”

I asked old Whitey about the company slogan one day when I was getting a tune-up on an old scrap of Drivel I drove around one summer.  He grinned and told me it was a mnemoic for calling the shop. “You can’t reach us on a cellphone or land line,” he said. “To reach us, use a homophone.”

Some days, the writing teacher can’t find a single running idea all day, for the mechanical mayhem the students have wrought. Or written.

 

Thanks to Marilyn vos Savant and a 14 May 2006 “Ask Marilyn” column for the homophone phrase.

Driving a Thesis

In the future, a student in Paragraph City who needs to write an essay will take the Tube to the second sub-level of Locution Towers and for 25 rubles lease a 2024 Thesis. She will get behind the wheel, stroke the biometric ignition and engage in a complex set of Q & A until she arrives at her prime assertion. Next a Garmin mind map will guide her in locating supporting evidence for her assertion before the Thesis roars off on its verbal highway toward a conclusion, jettisoning as it does any words which could possibly be seen as having racial, sexual, gender, political or spiritual overtones.

Now the only good part of this fantasy is that our student would begin with a thesis, and for some of my folk, purchasing a thesis might be the only way to get their hands on one. The main obstacles seems to be the distinction between a topic and a thesis. Locating the thesis in Staples’ “Black Men and Public Space” or Amy Tan’s ”Mother Tongue” or Orwell’s ”Politics and the English Language”: they can do that. Build an essay around a thesis: well, maybe not.

Here’s the essay that so many of my students want to write, and it’s a glutenous, plastic form I see over and over again, one I suspect succeeded brilliantly for many in some adolescent Eden when naming a topic was an adequate replacement for thinking about an idea:

1. Begin with a global statement so obvious that four year olds say “duh!” “The world is filled with people, many of whom desire happiness in which to live.” Stating it awkwardly is not part of the formula, but is a frequent characteristic since the writer doesn’t care what he’s saying. He’s merely looking for a way to reach the last sentence of the first paragraph.
2. Meander around for two or three more sentences, being careful to never touch on the true topic of the essay but showing how all things are connected. “People may look for happiness in religion, in movies, in horticulture and in a loving relationship with a significant other. Some people may search for happiness unsuccessfully for years in which they live unhappy.”
3. Arrive at your topic in the last sentence of the introductory paragraph, a relatively brief and simple statement which, by its contrast with its context, is so blessedly clear that readers will mistake it for an actual idea. It is required to have at least one incomprehensible pronoun. “This happens to puppies when they are abused.”
4. Finish the introduction by giving the essay a title which is a single dramatic word so vague no one can guess what the essay is about : “Devastation!” 
5. The rest of the essay writes itself, each paragraph a description of a puppy the writer has known. The conclusion is the challenging part since the writer has to say exactly what he said in the introduction but with mostly different words. This is what makes writing so hard.

 Lately I have been abandoning the mossy “thesis” for terms that may have more meaning to students. “Main idea” is inadequate, since it is far too much like “topic” and since students already “know” by rote that thesis = main idea = topic = abused puppies are sad. “Claim” is a great word, and one which is gaining momentum in the rhetorics and handbooks I come across. However students often seem to think a claim is something false.

“Gatekeeper idea” was a phrase I used for a few semesters, thinking that the image of a concept that allowed material into the essay if it offered support but denied extraneous material admittance would communicate to my students. Mostly it didn’t.  I currently like “assertion” though it’s a bit far from student vernacular. I’m open to suggestions, though I do realize that concentrating on the label is just a way to fool myself into thinking I’m actually working on the problem when I’m actually wool gathering.

The real work has to be this: to stimulate students to think, to find or force an idea they want to say to the surface, to reject the facile observation and the stereotype and the easy excuse that they aren’t that bright, to have them seriously look at what they write, and to pay off thoughtful content with a thoughtful response.  

 

Technoshock of the Digital Immigrant

My office in Paragraph City is in the Digital Immigrant wing of the Scriptorium Building. I was not born into a world muscled by the Internet. I came of age in a pre-Google (indeed, pre-Netscape) world. I was tenured before I had my first computer, a white little Apple that came with a handle and a 5 inch green screen CRT. I still have it; it still works.

I watched an aspect of the world change, like Iceland watching America colonized, revolutionized, industrialized, weaponized, supersized and about the time it became digitized, I left my little volcanic island and became a Digital Immigrant, and like real immigrants I don’t quite speak the language or think in the culture of those Digital Natives born into a Googlized world, but unlike real immigrants, I don’t think of us — Natives and Immigrants — as being that different. Yet others do.

A good faculty friend of mine, with her office in the same wing of the Scriptorium, wanted a way to publicize some great student writing she came across. We talked. We don’t have a place to do that. We ought to have one. You know the way these conversations go. So I suggested she start a blog and use it to post great student writing. Writing teachers could use them as examples and the great student could get mom to log on and say “that’s my Timmy!” My friend is a little less removed from the homeland than I am, though, and she paled.

“It’s not hard to do,” I said — those words that always have preceeded every disasterous crash with technology that I have ever squealed into, brake pedal flat to the floor, blue smoke sheeting off tires. Of course, they have always preceeded every pleasant tech event, too, but we forget that. So my friend went home and dreamed and wrote me this, which I quote with her permission.

“I am sitting in a classroom. The tables are dotted with what I know to be computers, but they look more like rounded toasters with television screens in vivid colors. The teacher is in front at the board. I have a question, “I’m finished with four of the citations,” I say, “but I can’t find the format for Listerine.” The teacher sighs.

“The student next to me (she is my age but her hair is not gray) explains that MLA is not the right format for any of the citations. She shows me her screen. The visual is a medieval scene of crowd chaos. On the top is a series of numbers and letters, much like an extended product identification. She explains that the 12 at the end means “medieval.” Then she tries to explain something about the 1 at the beginning. I feel panic rising and tears swelling.

“I know that I am unfamiliar with this code and with the hardware and that the entire class has been working with these things for years. I have asked the dumb question. My fellow student opens the spiral-bound manual. There is no index. She attempts to explain the code. I know I’ll have to withdraw from this class. I weep that I have been so far removed from the assumed world of my peers that I can no longer connect.”

The dream expresses so much – her connection & identification with the lost students she tries to tutor, the loss and loneliness that simply not understanding brings when understanding is what brings people into the same room, the bewilderment that something genuinely new brings, the disorientation that results when a knowledge structure we depend upon is kicked apart. But I simply want to mention the one little reminder it gave me.

This dream was triggered by a suggestion that my friend start a blog, an action that seems to me easy and quick.  But new stuff carries anxiety on its back unless we can be casual and friendly with it, and for those of us to whom the stuff is no longer new, we wonder where the clumsy behavior comes from, and now I’m thinking more of the marginally literate student thumbing through an MLA handbook. For me, it’s the student’s sudden lack of concern I don’t understand, and the subsequent slipping away, but perhaps that’s a means of dousing the anxiety. Unfortunately, it’s also the way of failure. For the academic immigrant as for the digital immigrant, we must remember that between anxiety and failure are other more attractive options.

Digital Native vs Lazy & Dull

Dawn doesn’t always come at the same time in Paragraph City. In fact, there are some corners where it hasn’t dawned in years; the television is on in most of those corners. However, it dawned recently in a third floor apartment of a brownstone on Duh Ave. over in the Tech/Learning district of Paragraph City.

 

This particular dawn began in Ira Socol’s fine SpeEdChange blog when he recommended the Becta report, Emerging Technologies for Learning . The Diana G. Oblinger (CEO of Educause) article “Growing up with Google: What it means to education” pulled a number of observations and confusions together for me, like tightening some loosened mental drawstring.

 

Observing Myself: When I teach research writing (as an example – this experience repeats in many other topics), I lecture a little, I demo a lot, I break the task down into its components, I give exercises designed to let students encounter the sort of problems they will really encounter  — like judging the credibility of a website —  and we talk a lot about what we would do & how we would troubleshoot a problem, and so forth. It’s not brilliant and it’s a lot like being in school and it’s not especially fun, but it is solid workmanlike learning and I keep students “engaged”. It would work for me.

 

One Confusion: More and more as the years go by, this process doesn’t work with my students. My students behave as if they were lazy or bored or dull, because they understand a process for a moment but then are not making the leap into applying the research writing process in their own writing. Students who have gotten good grades in writing courses before do fine, but the things that other students don’t get, they should be getting. I’m not talking about applying them to produce polished prose; I mean the basic “getting it”.

 

In Oblinger’s articles she writes three things that I have known before, but her clarity and connections brought them home as if they were fresh out of the oven:

Thing #1: “[Today’s students] prefer to learn by doing rather than telling or reading. ‘Don’t just tell us – let us discover.’ To illustrate, one student describe how she learned about video. ‘Well…I opened up the camera box, started messing around, and then figured out how to upload it.  Took a while. Had to Google it a few times to figure out how to splice stuff together. Just took an hour or so.’ They teach themselves how to use technology – or learn it from their peers.”

 

So maybe my research writing students are lazy and dull, or maybe they need to learn by doing, with lots of messy mistakes and false starts and IMing each other.

 

Another Confusion: Why do my online students email me around mid-semester with questions about what my revision policy is or how much the quizzes count? It’s obviously in the syllabus, which they read at the start of the semester and which is still there back in the first course documents. If I were the student, I’d just go look it up.

 

Oblinger Thing #2: “Many students describe education as a business where efficient, convenient, technology-mediated transactions are expected.”  In other words, students expect information to come to them, the Google model. Good grief, I think, students are using me to Google the course! (There are lesser things I could aspire to than being Google, but it’s really not what I set out to be.) Or are they just being lazy and dull?

 

A Last (for now) Confusion: So if this is the Wired, Digital Native, Google Generation, why are so many of my students so poor at finding things online?  Why do they settle for weak, unreliable sources and base their writing on information which is biased, incomplete and often just wrong?

 

Oblinger Thing #3:  “Nor does comfort with technology equate to a full appreciation of issues…. When asked, most students confess, ‘Sometimes we just don’t think about what we’re doing online.’” And “It’s easy to assume that learners – with their tech-savvy attitudes and world wise veneer – have greater maturity than their years….the tendency of young people to not be reflective – to pause, think, and ponder – may simply be a characteristic of youth.”

 

My Personal Revelation: Certainly some of my students are lazy and dull (just as some are, to give equal billing, crackly with intellectual voltage and laser focused), but to these tired eyes, the lazy and dull do not look much different from normal students who stand firmly in a new paradigm:

Information comes when I beckon it; I use it in my own sloppy, sling-about style, making lots of errors as I muddle through with the help of friends & strangers (of whom the professor is one), learning along the way, as I need it.

And that this is not laziness. It’s not particularly efficient and bursts the factory model of education, but haven’t we recognized since the days of John Dewey that “learning by doing” is what integrates the thing learned into the life lived?  I can teach in this paradigm, I think, but it will take some doing.

 

Cover Letter Blunders

When the peepers in Paragraph City’s Central Park start drowning out the traffic about dusk and the snow cover retreats to the deeper shadows, we know it’s time for the charming Job Applicants to begin poking their noses through the leaf mold. I’ve been reflecting on the apparently lost art of cover letters and have made a quick list of what one can do with a cover letter to prevent one from getting an interview. It turns out to be quite a lot.

My list of Blunders, with explanatory diversions:

1. No Cover Letter at all, I suppose because the applicant uses email and so thinks “Here is my resume — thanks for the opportunity to send it to you” suffices. But it doesn’t. This applicant doesn’t understand that the cover letter is his one chance prior to the job interview (which he isn’t going to get) to become a human being. The resume defines one as qualified or semi-qualified or unqualified, but not as a person, and we on the search committee would like to hire a human being, thank you. We work with people, but more importantly we laugh with them, learn from them, ask them for favors, save their bacon, and hang them out to dry. A list of qualifications gives me no clue that Ms. X will forgive my interruptions, stay late to help a wayward student, care that the college is adrift, or hold the door open for the blind guy with the sneezing seeing eye dog. But can the cover letter do that? Not really all that, but it can suggest the personality that can suggest all that and more.
2. A Cover Letter that merely repeats the Resume’s content leaves the same gaping hole that an AWOL cover letter leaves, but it costs me my reading time in order to find that out, so there’s a certain grouchiness solicited by this blunder. I will have to work with this guy, I think. Is he the sort that leaves class early, values his tee time ahead of his review session, mocks his students behind their backs? Where is there a hint that he’s forgiving of his students’ rudeness, believes students will rise when challenged, motivates by example, recognizes his own failures?
3. Cliches, especially for English faculty and especially for searches drawing many applicants, are deadly. Not only have we seen them before, we just saw them ten minutes ago on four other letters. Sounding like everyone else does not suggest one has a personality.  So don’t start your letter out with “I was excited to read about your opening in the (fill in name of newspaper or website here),” or “As you can see in the enclosed resume, I (summarize the resume here),” or “I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss how my education and experience will be helpful to (fill in the name of the college here). I will be contacting you shortly to talk about the possibility of arranging an interview.”  It’s not that these statements are bad, it’s that everyone is saying them.
4. Polite lies, glad handing and flattery don’t work any better on a search committee than they do on a date. Don’t tell us you’ve heard what a powerhouse institution we are when we are pretty sure you don’t even know what part of the state we are in. Saying one fulfills our requirements perfectly when one doesn’t falls into this category, and usually comes as a flat, unsupported statement, often disproved later in the letter when mention is made, for instance, of how important it is for the applicant to work with a racially diverse, urban population. Particularly for English majors, we would expect you know how to research (as in Google Maps or our college homepage) and how to support an assertion with evidence (as in, name our requirements from our ad and explain how you meet them).
5. Misplacing us in New York City because we are in New York State. Every search some candidate will withdraw from the search at the phone interview stage when he learns that it’s a 6 hour drive, in good traffic, from here to the Holland Tunnel. Do, please, a little research.
6. Failing to explain obvious and apparent mis-matches, neglects the sales function of the cover letter. This college rom which I write is a rural community college, with our sponsoring city at a population of about 40K. So if Applicant Q has never worked outside of an urban area weighing in at 3 million souls, or has always been associated with metropolitan museums, or a vibrant theatrical presence, or a college with a Renaissance Literature department — then Applicant Q had better speak candidly to the 400 lb gorilla.
7. Sending a form letter, particularly one which makes several of the above mistakes, tells us that you just want our paycheck, not our students or our mission or ourselves as your colleagues. The worst I’ve seen: a four page form letter where our college was named only in the first sentence of the letter, in a font different from the rest of the letter.

Instead, how about a personal letter that honestly says what you like about our college, addresses the needs we mentioned in our ad, lasts about a page, tells us something we didn’t know, and leaves us thinking, “I’d like to talk with this one.”

 

When the cell phone isn’t about technology

Inside Higher Ed stoked up a bright, feisty discussion today (here) that anyone not in academia must think is pretty silly, and maybe a few within the halls do, too. The article in the midst of the blaze is by a philosophy prof who walks out on his classes when students text message.

Topics of respect for instructors, racial roles, student rights, and the cost of a year of college all are raised, sometimes flamboyantly. It shows how unsettled the professorate is about this particular piece of technology, and I think about “new” (let’s call it within the last seven years) classroom technology as well.

If someone other than the professor falls asleep in a class, I think we faculty all have a response we’d take, and it’s likely a response we saw or heard of some faculty taking when we were students. The same for students chatting off topic, arriving late, leaving early, or listening to music via headphones or ear buds or whatever.

Almost none of the faculty at today’s podium can say that about text messaging during class. It’s not really all that different from my other examples, but it’s uncharted territory in our experience, which means we’re free to blaze a new response of our own. We’re not always so good at doing this.

One prof decides texting is a flagrant disrespect and a personal insult. Another takes it as sneering at the her subject matter, and a third sees texting as a grand giving of the finger to all of higher education generally and his own college in particular. We have no tradition of response, but these responses all seem out of scale to me.

We all become thoughtless, particularly about things we do a lot. I would guess that students are all so used to texting and fondling their cell phones in various other ways that until someone blows up about it, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. They have no tradition about its classroom use either. A bit rude, they might think, but they all occasionally cross-talk, daydream and doodle in their notes during lecture anyway, so what’s the difference?

For as much as I want respect for the professor, and his academic subject, and the institution that employs him, I pretty much see things from the students’ perspective on this one. I’ve got other things to get lathered up over, like they haven’t done the reading or they’ve plagiarized their journal writing or they refer to Hemingway as “Ernie” in their papers on “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

So here are my guidelines for gauging my response to classroom behaviors

• If it distracts other students from paying attention, it has to stop. Based on this principle, for instance, I usually let sleeping students sleep.
• If it distracts me, it has to stop. For instance, butt cracks. I can’t teach if I’m losing my lunch, so cover it up
• If it puts anyone in danger, it has to stop, and perhaps we have to leave.

That about covers it. I could list things like, “if it makes me look foolish” or “if it’s vulgar” or “if a student is drunk” but all those are problems mainly because of these three principles. After class I’ll get over myself or I’ll explain the impact of vulgarity one-on-one or I will try to get the drunk to a counselor, but the classroom is about a teaching-learning thing happening for the great majority of students who are polite, present and more or less conscious.

So the cell phone thing really isn’t about technology at all, and thinking that it is may well distract me into violating one of my own principles.

Did I just step in some Technology?

If you take the @ train to downtown Paragraph City sometime, duck into the Toffler building and elevator up to the observation deck. If you drop a quarter in one of the View-Masters up there, you won’t be able to see the cutting edge of instructional technology, but you’ll see – in 3D – colleges who can see it.

IT is like that at my college, distanced by cost and a lack of IT people from what’s new, but not entirely out of sight. At a small college where we worry about keeping the tuition attainable for our over-jobbed students, that’s probably appropriate. Still, I often wish the IT jungle were a little more lush here.

Two events bring the instructional tech topic to the fore.

Item one: an occasionally heated discussion of the “don’t push tech on me” – “you’re such a Luddite” variety that University Diaries points out here: http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=3740

Item two: the 2008 Horizon Report (http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ELI/2008HorizonReport/45926), which tries to forecast the IT weather coming our way over the next five years. It has seemed to me that most crystal balls are about as predictive as bowling balls, but the Educause & New Media people who publish this report have a pretty good 5 year record built up. I recommend the report.

Both items put instructional technology’s relationship to learning up for view, and there are a host of questions, like these

• How does the faculty keep up with the tech du jour? Should we?
• Just because we can learn a new dance step, should we? It remains, after all, the same couple dancing: just me and milady composition.
• How do we know learning happens better with tech than it did when chalk used to stutter across a blackboard?
• Is a higher tech presentation what students want? The follow-up to that is often this: Why give students what they want when what they want is often not that good for them? But I’d rather ask this: Is there any reason to not teach students with the sort of presentation that they would prefer?
• Will the tech dumb down the material, for instance by putting it into sound bites or making an engaging discussion unlikely?
• Do our students have the companion tech necessary, or are we digging the digital divide ever deeper?
• Can we afford to have the necessary tech, and can we afford not to have it?

Both item one and item two above address some of these, and so will I in upcoming morsels. One point more, right now.

PowerPoint is often raised as an example of technology everyone, Luddite or not, is familiar with, and the argument is often made about how dreadful PowerPoint presentations are. But it isn’t the PowerPoint, it’s the lecture. Lectures by incompetent lecturers have always been dreadful, and they continue to be dreadful in PowerPoint. But it’s not the fault of the tool, and if I let the tool change the way I think about how I communicate to my class, it’s possible what results is an improvement.

That “if” however, is not surmountable by all faculty, for better or worse. And there are bigger monkeys in the jungle than that old PowerPoint grouch.