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THINGS HAVE CHANGED:

Since I am no longer a professor in the classroom, this blog is changing focus. (I may at some future date change platforms, too, but not yet). I am now (as of May 2019) playing around with the idea of using this blog as a place to talk about the struggles of writing creatively. Those of you who have been following (or dipping in periodically) know that I've already been doing a little of that, but now the change is official. I don't write every day--yet--so I won't post to the blog every day--yet. But please do check in from time to time, if you're interested in this new phase in my life.


Hi! And you are...?

I am interested to see the fluctuation in my readers--but I don't know who is reading the blog, how you found it, and why you find it interesting. I'd love to hear from you! Please feel free to use the "comment" box at the end of any particular post to let me know what brought you to this page--and what keeps you coming back for more (if you do).





Saturday, January 30, 2010

Catching up a little

I wish I'd had time/energy to write on Thursday, while it was fresh in my head. It was another of those days in which I did not have a meeting (bliss), so I did crank through a couple of promo folders for P&B. I still have one to go--and I still have to make myself just dammit GO to personnel to double-check everyone's folder (including mine). I was even in that building yesterday, and it didn't even cross my mind to take advantage of the opportunity and get that done. Clearly this just seems like a snorting pain in the patoot to me, so I keep conveniently "forgetting" to do it.

The 102 class was OK, but as I suspected, the lesson on literary terms didn't go quite as well as it had on Wednesday. In a previous post I said I thought the T/Th class would be the more lively; now I'm not so sure.

But I'm already getting flurries of e-mails from students in all classes, asking for clarification on assignments, meeting times... I hope this is a good sign. At least they feel already they can come to me for guidance, which is nice.

The best part of the teaching week was the Thursday 101 class, which took off in terrific ways. I've mentioned before that I have returned to an essay I haven't taught in a while: in the past, students seemed to utterly miss the point, and I got tired of banging my head against it. But I have since gotten tired of banging my head against the Kingsolver essay "Knowing Our Place," which I've taught the last umpty-ump years, so I figured at least I'd have a different head-mashing experience. I needn't have worried. There were two new students, who clearly couldn't have read it, but of the rest, only one student hadn't done the reading (Miss "I Read People Like Books," naturally). As they worked through the reading journal form, they were coming up with exactly the right questions. They did get a little hung up on whether Lopez is Hispanic (for the record, he isn't, though I should probably find out where that last name came from; possibly from his step-father?)--but they found textual evidence in his essay to support themselves in the conclusion that he is not, and more interesting, they were very aware of the class issues that are important to his piece.

They also got into a terrific discussion about what it takes to be a writer and to feel one has a voice, especially whether one needs to have diverse experiences in order to become a good (or great) writer. They are still trying to believe that, when Lopez advises any aspiring writer to travel, he doesn't mean it literally (he does), but at least they're getting the idea that they may have to explore stuff that would initially be alien and strange in order to "become someone," as Lopez puts it. All of the thinking they've been doing on his essay is going to feed into their diagnostic essay (written in class) on Thursday, as well as their first formal essays. (I still have to come up with that assignment, but I think it's going to require less fussing to revise the topic I've been using than I'd feared.) I won't get their reading journals until Tuesday--and they will have to read Kathleen Norris's "The Beautiful Places" and do a journal on that, too, so I won't be surprised if many of them are unprepared on Tuesday. But I don't think the Norris essay is significantly more sophisticated or difficult than Lopez (I don't; they might), so here's hoping. In any event, I'll know a lot more about how well they really got the essay once I see those journals.

Another nice moment: similar to my experience with the concerned student from 265 (did I write about her? don't remember), a student from 101 came to see me during what will be my office hour (we hadn't officially started holding them yet, so I kinda forgot that it would be). She was very nervous about whether she was understanding the essay, about how to do the journal form, about the fact that she's shy and so has a hard time asking questions in class. I told her that if she's too shy to ask in class, it's fine by me if she e-mails or comes to see me. I also told her that if she has a question, others probably will, too, and they will be grateful to her if she asks. Further, I said I expected she'd be a lot more comfortable speaking up in class by semester's end. It didn't take her that long: she jumped right into the conversation about the Lopez essay, making a fine contribution.

On the other side, there is an older student (male) who may become a bit of a problem. He's pretty rigid and narrow in his thinking and doesn't seem to want to have his ideas challenged. I understand why he'd be resistant: in effect, I'm telling him he needs to reevaluate his experiences to date and consider whether they've been sufficient for his future success. (I suspect his experiences have been pretty narrowly confined to his particular subcultural milieu as a working-class black man.) But we'll see. I'm glad he's challenging ideas, taking on the material, not blindly accepting whatever I say. And it was cool to see the younger students arguing with him. It was one of those heavenly classes in which the students were responding to each other without much reference to me (though I did have to periodically ask them to rein it in so no one was monopolizing the conversation, as one young woman had a tendency to do). Our Miss Books made some fine observations (I suspect she actually did read the essay, or at least most of it--or she got enough specific detail from the group discussion that she wasn't talking through her hat). It was a fine way to end the week.

Today I've gotten lots of little nit-picky record-keeping stuff set up: the students' attendance cards; grade sheets, so they can keep track of their own progress; the abbreviated and annotated versions of the syllabi for me (so I know what needs to be handed out when, and what to collect when). I started marking the response sheets from 265, but my brains seized up, so I hope I can find a little time/energy to do them tomorrow. If not, I'll be up pearly early on Monday, as I refuse to fall behind on the second week of classes. I also have self-evaluations from the 102s to look over, so I'll have to do the ones for GD either tomorrow or Monday morning. (I actually should do those first: that class meets first, which I'm having a hard time keeping in mind: I keep thinking the poetry class meets in the G hour, as I'm so used to 229 meeting during G). Once the Monday assignments are marked, then I'll get to the ones for RD either Monday or Tuesday.

And the meeting mishigas begins on Tuesday, with College-Wide Assessment (otherwise known as ASAC, for Academic Senate Assessment Committee), oh joy. I went to a webinar yesterday that arose from that committee: it was a presentation about an externally designed and administered standardized assessment test that some SUNY campuses are using. As standardized tests go it seems to have the right idea (more than most, though I'd still be highly skeptical about its value in testing anything important). In any event, the upshot is a consensus it is a rotten idea for us. The webinar was nothing wildly exciting technology-wise (a conference phone call and we could all see a PowerPoint presentation on the computers at our remote locations), but I was curious to see how it would work. (Now I know.) The good thing is that I was there with three other faculty members--one, the chair of the Academic Senate; one, the chair of ASAC; the third, the chair of sociology (and a statistician, so he gets off on this stuff)--and one relatively important administrator. Getting my face/name known in these situations is important if I intend to eventually go up for full professor--and yes, I'm already thinking that far down the road. I don't even have associate yet, and I've got my sights on the next one. Anyway, the meeting, of course, lasted longer than we expected (we are academics, after all), but it was nice that we all were immediately sure that the test was just not for us. Janice Grackin, the administrator, seems pretty reasonable. She is a proponent of assessment generally (she has to be: she is the Associate Dean for the Office of Assessment and Program Review), but she also understands that capital A-assessment is only worthwhile if it helps us understand on an institutional level what we're doing right and what we can do better so our students leave actually having learned what we think we've taught them.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll rant about Assessment more as time goes by. Janice has tapped me to be on a special committee she's putting together, purpose of which is still unclear, but she said she wanted me because she thought I'd have good, clear ideas. I'm sure when I'm attending the meetings (when/if they actually begin) I will find a lot to tear my hair out about.

But--shifting gears--pretty soon I'm going to hop in the shower and get ready for a dance party tonight. Then tomorrow I'll go to two dance classes and another dance party (a benefit for the Red Cross efforts in Haiti). And I think I'm going to get homework marked? Perhaps I should revise my expectations--unless the party is a dud, in which case I'll be home early (ok, early-ish) and might have a shot at sufficient brain clarity to work. But work be damned: I haven't danced since Tuesday, so I'm going through withdrawal, and I am going to feed that addiction and figure out how/when to get the work done around my dance time. I won't be able to do that all semester, but I can certainly do it now.

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