A pre-class post--about AWD (average white dude)

I have a little time before class today (actually, I had a lot of time, but I expended some of it marking those assignments I was whining about yesterday). I will not, however, have any time after class, as a colleague and I are going out for dinner and a movie, so I need to do the "drop, grab, skedaddle" version of my end of day noodling about. I figured, however, this being the last on-campus day of the first full week of this semester, it would behoove me to say at least a little something.

Marking the assignments for the SF class wasn't quite as awful as I made it out to be last night. For one thing, several students did a very good job--one already knocking the work out of the park--and for another, I was in a frame of mind to recognize where the students actually are at the start of the semester, in contrast to where they'll be by the end, if they learn anything. I'm remembering a young woman from last semester's SF class: very shy but managed to speak up a few times, and her work got progressively better across the semester, until, by the end, she was doing solid high-B quality work. I see that possibility in a number of students in the class. There are also a few who may have the chops to knock the assignments out of the park--but who may be the kind who just can't be arsed (as the Brits would say) to do the work. But that's my job. I don't need to get them to where their potential indicates they could be, but I need to let them know what the work is that will get them there. Then they do it or they don't.

After I did the marking, I was recording points and shifting my attendance records from the photo roster to the index cards that I keep--and I realized that there are about four young men in the class who fall under the mental category "average white dude," which is a category I struggle with when it comes to putting name with face. They're all abut the same height, weight, age, all have short brown hair, just ... average white dudes. They're the college classroom equivalent of the birding world's LBJs (little brown jobs: the virtually indistinguishable little brown birds we see all over the place). I almost feel like House in a season when he has to work with a bunch of medical students and says he won't bother to learn all their names: he'll just assign numbers. But at least his students were morphologically distinct in obvious ways. These AWDs are ... well, AWDs. Name tags? Nah, I'll figure them out eventually. But it's an interesting challenge, until their work becomes more distinctive.

And of course, the three most distinctive young men in terms of their work are also morphologically distinct: this one has strawberry blond hair; this one a goatee; this one a face that looks deceptively tuned out.

I suppose there have been times in the past when I've had an assortment of the female equivalent, but that's been a while. Usually, something makes the women stand out as distinct, even in classes where the gender balance is more equal than it is in SF.

Random thoughts:

My colleagues continue to be completely lovely in their response to my emailed remembrance of Le Guin. I've gotten zero student response, but that doesn't surprise me: my guess is that most (maybe all) didn't read it--and those who did were probably either baffled (why is she sharing this?), confused (what the hell does all this mean?), or without a clue how to respond (what do I say?). I may or may not bring it up in class today. Probably not, unless an unexpected opportunity presents itself.

We had an extra department meeting today to begin discussing assessment of basic writing, critical thinking, and information literacy skills. It was very interesting to start with--though I felt bad for the colleague who was primarily in charge (the woman I'm having dinner with tonight, in fact), as she always seems to get sort of targeted for some of the hostility people feel about assessment, even though she's doing heroic work to make it make sense and have use for us, not just busy work we do for the administration. But, as is always the case, there came a point when I just couldn't listen to other people being annoying any more, so I left early.

But last night, Paul and I talked a bit about it, and he and I were pretty wildly split in our evaluations: I thought the sample essays, especially the first one, were OK; he thought they were awful. I'd love to sit with him and parse through them to figure out why we diverged in our estimation. He was teasing me about it yesterday, and I completely overreacted, as if he were serious--but I think part of the overreaction is because I'm afraid that my standards really have slipped to be unacceptably low, that I've caved, given in to "market forces" or whatever. Too tired to keep up the good fight, perhaps? But that's one of the concerns that drives my "I need to retire" statements: I do not want to continue to teach if I'm not still holding the line. That line is fucking important, and I do not want to be one of those who lets it slip.

That said, I'm about to go into the classroom and talk to students about everything from paraphrase to euphemisms to just the need for words on the page. I suppose that's a higher standard than many of them have been held to before. Not that that makes the standard acceptably high, but at least I haven't wimped out completely.