The Salt-Box

[I had written this for our campus listserv, but a configuration problem rejected it. Then, I thought better of it, and decided that it would make a better blog post. The context is the semi-annual complaining about student writing that crops up at the end of the semester, invariably by people who don’t teach a lot of writing-orientated courses such as composition, and which invariably turns into, ‘How could this student have gotten a B in composition when he can’t write a lick?’.]

The causes of bad student writing are complex and generally poorly understood by those who haven’t studied it.

While it is comforting to cast aspersions on the integrity of faculty in intro-level writing classes (whether here or at community colleges), who are alleged to grade on effort, improvement, or other nonacademic reasons, this misses a key issue.

I have an ex-wife who, after graduating from law school, frequently taught adjunct sections of legal writing. At first, she was surprised by how poorly her students’ writing was–even students who’d sailed through college with A averages, and who had worked on literary magazines or newspapers.

Research on student writing, however, indicates that student writing regresses–sometimes falling utterly apart–when students encounter unfamiliar material, or are asked to think about that material in new ways. Common milestones for such failures include: entering the major, writing capstone projects, entering graduate school, taking courses in wholly unfamiliar fields, etc.

What my ex was seeing, then, was good students who were momentarily baffled by the requirement to “write like a lawyer.”

Some students are bad writers; some students are good writers outside the university, but are bad academic writers; some students are good writers who are struggling with new concepts.

Some students are good writers encountering bad or unfamiliar assignments. For example, I have a carefully sequenced set of assignments that, early in the semester, asks students to exaggerate certain qualities of their writing, in order to reflect on the process of literary analysis. The results are, at least initially, almost always “bad.” But the eventual payoff can be quite startling, as students begin to transfer the targeted skills to other assignments. Other times, I’ve been so enthralled by a specific concept that I crafted prompts that produced unreadable prose.

And some students just aren’t that into you. My wife is the most insightful reader of student writing I know, and we’ve had students in common who were good writers for her, but not for me, and vice versa. In each of those situations, the problem was that the student just wasn’t connecting with the class, whether because of differing styles, or the content, or home/work struggles, or some other reason.

I’ve taught a lot of composition, at 4 different universities, and am not blind to the challenges inflicted on us by student writing. And I’m pretty old-school in my expectations. But vague complaints about student writing in December and May are . . . unhelpful, except as meaningless venting or gratuitous insults.

For the boy’s birthdays, we provide in the goody bags mix cds of his favorite songs.  Here’s the playlist for today’s party:

1. The Hold Steady, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”
2. Everclear, “Speed Racer”
3. Beefy, “I’m No Superman”
4. Ozzy Osbourne, “Iron Man”
5. Ookla the Mok, “Super Powers”
6. Alvin and the Chipmunks, “Witch Doctor”
7. Alvin and the Chipmunks, “Bad Day”
8. Ralph Covert, “Four Little Duckies”
9. Flogging Molly, “What’s Left of the Flag”
10. Bruce Springsteen, “Jesse James”
11. Bruce Springsteen, “Old Dan Tucker”
12. The Wild Colonial Boys, “Kookaburra Sits on the Old Gum Tree”
13. Bruce Springsteen, “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?”
14. Counting Crows, “This Land Is Your Land”

(Beefy & Ookla the Mok I found via the Geek Dads‘ new HipTrax podcast.)

From one spring when I was teaching Atalanta in Calydon, two mock-Mother’s Day cards with loving sentiments from Swinburne:

Card 1

Card 2

There’s some chance this is recycled from a previous year, but I think I purged that post in the great WordPress changeover.  And, anyway, this weekend is grading + the Boy’s 5th birthday party +  Mother’s day.

Random Mother’s Day gripe: Soccer practices were pre-emptively canceled for Sunday–because of the holiday–but our last practice, complete with trophy presentations and such, is on Father’s Day.  Where’s the justice?

From this morning’s InsideHigherEd.com:

The college social scene is the setting or context for much of the unwanted sexual contact that happens on campuses, as a new report by researchers at the University of New Hampshire, exploring the experiences of the university’s undergraduates, details.

For both female and male students, unwanted sexual contact occurs where they live, at social events, and often when the perpetrator and victim have been drinking. The vast majority of incidents occurs between UNH students, and an acquaintance is most often the perpetrator,” the report states.

Wait! You mean incidents of “unwanted sexual contact”–ranging from violence to profound misunderstanding–tend to happen among . . . people who are around one another a lot?  When *both* people are drunk?

Who *ever* would have guessed such a thing?

At first I thought the report was just burying the lede, but no:

“I think the main point we’re trying to make is that there are situations in which students find themselves, where they have these kinds of experiences, and they’re not situations that they would define as threatening situations,” said Sally Ward, a professor of sociology and one of five faculty authors of the report, which is based on paper- and Web-based surveys completed by 2,405 New Hampshire undergraduates, male and female, in 2005-6.

“It’s part of the normal social scene. People go out and they party and things happen that they aren’t expecting to happen. That is, we think, a consistent finding over time in this research,” said Ward.

So . . . when you’re drunk, sometimes events slip out of your control, especially in contexts where boundaries are ambiguous.  Oh, mysterious universe!

Classes ended today; “all” that’s left now is grading, final papers/projects, and exams. But it’s still a moment of relief and some joy. (Why, yes, I did have complex issues in some of my classes this semester . . . )

As a end-of-the-semester treat, then, here’re 3 videos of indie people covering rap songs:

• Jennifer Owen Youngs, “Hot in Herre“
• Nina Gordon, “Straight Out of Compton“
• The Gourds, “Gin & Juice” (via academhack on Twitter)
• Update: Dynamite Hack, “Boyz in the Hood” (via Don on Facebook)
• Update: I can’t believe I forgot Jonathan Coulton’s “Baby Got Back” (reminder via Don)

And 2 of them covering r&b songs:

• The Klaxons, “No Diggity” (via Flawless Walrus on Twitter)
• and the most well-known on this list, the not-very-much-liked Alanis Morissette, “My Humps“

Enough kidding around. (Though see Barrelhouse Magazine’s blog for a related post.)

The most highly-anticipated album this summer (among, like, reasonable people) is surely The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive, which will release in the US on 7/15. Thanks to YouTube, there’s no need to wait, at least for live versions:

• “Sequestered in Memphis“
• “Lord, I’m Discouraged“
• “Stay Positive“
• “Magazines“
• “Joke about Jamaica“

Unfortunately, the song that seems to be the best live (at least on YouTube) doesn’t seem to have made the album: “Ask Her for Some Adderall.” Here’s hoping they come to CT soon! (I think they’ re actually here today, at Wesleyan, but that’s restricted to Wesleyan students only, alas.)

Ok–back to work.

Sometimes students are mystified when professors take a hard line on late work–but last night my computer *really* did crash / my grandmother *really* did die.

Let me explain with an example from my own current organizational nadir: For several days now, I have been without my office computer.   This has presented a challenge in returning student work, since I only have electronic copies of it and I’d been dutifully tucking it away in various triage folders in Entourage.*

On Friday and Monday, then, I’ve been explaining to students that, no, I don’t have their papers, and can’t provide an estimate of when I’ll have them back.  (Especially since I lost the weekend . . . *that* was a blow.)

Mainly the students have understood this, although it’s a little stressful since everyone, quite appropriately, wants to know where they stand going into finals.  But there’s also been a little–wholly deserved–eye-rolling, since the crashed computer simply masks a larger problem: that I’ve been *really* behind on some of this.  Had I been caught up, or close to it, things would not have been so dire.

That’s the problem with the “my computer ate my work” excuse: It might well be literally true, but it doesn’t recognize a larger problem with the way the work was being produced.  (I.e., in a last-minute binge, rather than in drafts.)

This summer, God willing, I’ll be organized. Time for a revival meetin’.

–

2 workflow mistakes:

• Not forwarding the papers to Gmail, or moving them to a flash drive, so that I could access them anywhere.
• Not implementing a badass, comprehensive backup system.   I didn’t lose any data–I was backed up to that extent–but it wouldn’t've been easy in the short term to extract the relevant files from Entourage.

These action photos from a recent campus event–Undergraduate Research & Creative Achievement Day–kill me.

Viewed as a set, I seem to be fired up.

In reality, I’m doing speaker introductions.

This must be what the students are talking about when they talk about my being excitable and/or energetic.  Note to self: Less caffeine!

This has been a bad day (with no tech support lined up yet!), so I’ll keep this brief:

1.  What does it mean when other parents say, “Oh, so he’s your only child . . . that explains it”?

and

2.  Did someone rescind the “if you don’t hear from the coach, practice is ON, no matter what” rule?

Here’s the upshot of my del.icio.us workshop today. It’s useful to have seen my del.icio.us assignment, if you haven’t before. (Here’s an official del.icio.us blog post about its educational uses.)

          4 information-management problems

1. My bookmarks are on my work machine, but I’m at home / on vacation / . . .
2. I’d like to find out more about some topic, without setting aside time to search for it and filter out what’s new.
3. I’ve got all these bookmarks or web pages that I need to organize.
4. My students are all working on similar problems, but they’re not sharing information, or not sharing it at the right times.

del.icio.us solves these problems

1. Your bookmarks live online, not on any one computer.
2. Easy, RSS-friendly tools for passively discovering new, relevant information (Is there a user who seems to use tags similar to yours? Add her to your network. Want to find out whenever people bookmark something about Victorian fiction? Add the tags to your subscriptions.
3. A new approach to organizing information (Folksonomies instead of taxonomies. NB: I’m aware that del.icio.us didn’t invent this. I just meant, “new relative to organizing your bookmarks into folders.)
4. Easy tools for sharing information (In addition to subscriptions and networks, there’s also “links for you.”

         Demo!

Here I pointed, clicked, and talked. We talked through the assignment, too. The assignment tries to do a couple of things:

• increase a sense of in-semester intellectual community, especially among undergrads.
• encourage students to move away from a model where they only think of the class at high-stakes times (right before the paper) to a constant, lower-level kind of engagement. (Ideally, I guess, there’d be a mix of both low-level and intense engagement.)

         Two things that taste great with del.icio.us

1. A real browser, especially Firefox. There are some nice del.icio.us plug-ins for Firefox.
2. An online news aggregator / RSS reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator, etc.). Virtually everything in del.icio.us can be set up as an RSS feed, which is convenient.

          Two possible problems, and how to turn them into opportunities

1. Tag proliferation / synonyms, etc. When you start tagging pages on a topic, it can be hard to settle on a particular convention. For a while, I had “digital, humanities, computing, digitalhumanities, humanities-computing, humanities_computing, humantiescomputing” as variations on the same concept. This can make it hard to find stuff. However, del.icio.us makes it possible to rename your tags for consistency, so you just have to remember to clean them up every once in a while. Also, though, for me this tendency has been a feature, not a bug. When I start tagging in a particular area, it takes me a while to settle on a particular convention. That I start to notice this problem, and think of ways to standardize my tagging practice, is one of the signs that I’m starting to get a good feel for a particular topic, or for the scope of the project.
2. “What do you mean by that?” What’s “cool” or “interesting” to someone else, might not be to me. Likewise, I’ve seen people use tags ironically. This is always a problem in any folksonomy. But in a classroom, this is also a teachable moment, because students frequently assume that their judgments are wholly transparent, and not in need of elucidation. Trying to figure out some inscrutable tag can be a proxy for this process.

Do you use del.icious? Any tips/tricks?

CCSU readers may be interested to know that I’m doing a workshop on del.icio.us for the recently re-branded  Instructional Design & Technology Resource Center (the old FCC) this afternoon, 4/30, at 1pm.  Free registration is required: http://www.ccsu.edu/media/ExpertsRegistration.htm