A better day

Grading the papers for Nature in Lit is still painful, and taking longer than it ought, as I want to provide comments that might guide them toward the kind of writing they need to produce, but at least I'm getting through the stack.

I had a nice meeting today with Wonder Student: he knows that he has a tendency to write sentence fragments (a habit he evidenced back in the Comp 1 days as well), and realizing he didn't know how to recognize them, nor how to fix them, he wisely decided to come in to talk with me about it. I think he gets the concept now, but as I've often remarked, there is a lag between understanding something conceptually and being able to put it into practice. I told him to expect that lag time; this will take being shown the problem and fixing it, over an over, until it starts to soak in.

I'm having a harder time with the students who don't know how to think--at least not in any real way. Sample sentences, from several students' papers:

"Francis Bacon and Henry David Thoreau are two different authors with both similar yet slightly different views."

"Man and nature have a very unique relationship. ... If nature wasn't around to bring out the finer points of man, then man would simply die out and wither away."

"Thoreau focuses on deep emotions and uses many strong words to describe nature."

"We can depict nature as being this boundary as what we consider to be the unknown, as I have said throughout this paper. It is something that we cannot live without, so we learn to cope and deal with it."

[Regarding Thoreau's essay "Walking"] "It is very inspirational, and it keeps readers on the edge." (That one made Paul laugh out loud. Yeah, it's a page-turner all right, a breathless and fast-paced read.)

I read that bilge, and scribble and comment and get frustrated in red pen, all over their papers--but I'm not entirely persuaded that it has any effect whatsoever. The student who was the sole attendee the other day was at least clued in enough to recognize that she needs to think a whole new way--and her paper shows effort in that direction, but across the board, the empty phrasing is only the start of the problems. In addition to lack of clarity and precision of thought (as evidenced by sentences such as those above), the papers lack connection, lack focus--and the students often lack understanding of the quotations they select. I keep writing, "But the author's point is much more specific." Generalities, trivialities, meaningless phrases: argh argh argh.

And yet, with all that frustration, today was a better day. The meeting with Wonder Student helped; we chatted a bit, in addition to working on the sentence problems. He's one of those rare birds who is both a scientist and someone with a love of and facility for language. Once he starts publishing in his field, he's going to knock people's socks off. (My kid sister has the same combination of skills, and it is one small but significant contributor to her shining success.)

I'd rather hoped for a canceled P&B meeting, but we met--and in fact we have some work still to do: mentoring year-end evaluations, a completely stupid requirement that tenured faculty balk at but that is contractually required. I was absolutely certain that I had to do one this year (those of us who are tenured have to do them every second year); I had zero memory of doing one last year. But I did, so I'm off that particular hook. I just have to round up the evaluations from the group I'm responsible for and provide the little P&B statements that accompany the evaluations. Tedious but not terribly time consuming--and not due until May, thank God.

Most of the meeting was not about work we have to do but rather was devoted to talking about what may or may not happen when the current contract expires and debate about whether faculty can effectively teach four sections of our developmental courses--or anything else. (Four sections of 101? 102?) We also talked about what to do now that so many students are being misplaced into 001 because of the idiot computer testing system (Bruce has an interesting plan that we'll pilot to see how it works), as well as whether we might try to have an additional "lab" hour attached to certain sections of 101.... Nothing was determined, but it was interesting to bat the ideas around.

I wish the administration cared enough about education to understand what is going on in a meeting like that. We're perpetually trying to figure out how to actually educate students, and how to educate them better than we do now (if that's possible). And the administrators manifestly do not give a rat's ass about education in any real sense.

In fact, I get pretty incensed when I think about the "support" for community colleges being bruited about by individuals in the federal government (Obama, Arne Duncan, and recently NY Senator Gillibrand): all of those "supporters" assume that we are trade schools. Maybe I should figure out how to do a TED talk about that. Writing what I would take more time and energy than I feel like I have, but if I could just rant into a camera for a while, I might end up saying something relatively pithy and intelligent.

Wait. I'm supposed to be talking about what a good day today was. Let me get back on track.

Got a few papers graded. Check. Had a lovely meeting with a bright and capable student. Check. Found out I don't have to do a year-end evaluation of my own. Check.

Had a terrific class with Native American Lit. They're getting the poetry beautifully, and my hope that we might churn through it a little ahead of schedule seems to be coming true; that means we should be able to begin reading Ceremony before the break, which would be great. Doing so would help get their feet under them for the reading that's due after the break. I told them I'm canceling class on the Tuesday after the break (rather than finding the right sub for such a tiny group), so giving them a start on the novel before the break makes up (in my mind at least) for the missed class after.

After class I had another good meeting with a student, one of the young women from Native American Lit who wanted guidance in revising her papers. I think she is starting to get the idea of what's needed; we'll see when I get the revisions.

As the final good thing of the day today, Paul and I are talking about the possibility of writing a style guide together. We've looked at about a zillion of them over the years, and not one does a decent job of talking about theses: what they need to include, how to develop them, how to recognize a good one. Most style guides also do a crap job of explaining documentation, both conceptually (why it's needed, what it does) and technically. Of course, there are about twenty different variations on in-text citations, and probably a hundred variations on the entries on a works cited page, so it is admittedly complicated, but it needs to be broken down into small, understandable increments for students. I also haven't found a style guide that does an adequate job of talking about how to incorporate quoted material, or about a dozen other points of writing well. Paul and I together have a lot of ideas about all those things, and we'd teach them all beautifully--if we had time. The point of a style guide (I think) is that it allows the professor to assign pages so the students can teach themselves, freeing up class time for the stuff that we actually want to impart. In effect, Paul and I would have all the time we need to teach the lessons as fully as possible--and other professors could let us do that teaching for them.

And if we were to get such a guide published, and if it were widely adopted, we could live off the proceeds and quit our jobs.

Of course, that wouldn't happen any time soon. Not only would it take us a good while to get the thing written, we'd then have to sell it to a publisher. And the publisher would have to publish and market it--and possibly design some kind of web apparatus to go with it, as that seems de rigueur these days. So this isn't a quick out--and may not be an out at all (as there are the rather crucial "if" components of the plan)--but it's cool to contemplate, and the process of figuring out the best way to write it all down would do a hell of a lot for our own pedagogy, I'm sure. More fodder for the perpetual search for the magic assignment.

But now, I'm about to take off. There is, of course, more work to be done, but I'm trying for another early night tonight. Sleep not only knits up raveled sleaves, it also makes it easier to hold on to patience and compassion when grading crap papers. A consummation devoutly to be wished.