The Salt-Box

I know that, per internet law, it’s bad form to link to something after it has shown up on boingboing, since virtually everyone online will have seen it.  But . . .

It is a source of deep, abiding shame personal pride that I can elucidate almost any canonical Victorian or modernist work of literature by appealing to some episode or other of Friends.  (This is hard-won knowledge: A & I own the entire 10-season run on DVD.* Most nights we watch one episode, as a way to regroup after The Little Man has fallen asleep, without falling into the, “Hey, I wonder what’s on next?” trap.)

The students who read this blog will doubtless attest that I deploy this shameful power at virtually all opportunities.  (I need to strike fast, before people stop recognizing the show . . . )

Anyway, you all know where this is going:

The Friends - SuperFriends mashup, which has been around a while but which was posted yesterday on boingboing.  I can’t identify the SuperFriend sources, but the Friends episode is a classic: The One with the Embryos.

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*Note: I have never claimed on this blog, or anywhere else, to be cool.

First, a process thing: I’m using the combination of Twitter + Hahlo + my iPhone this semester to encourage me to reflect a little on each class.  It’s a good habit to think about your teaching regularly, and this combination (140 characters, plus playing with the phone) makes it fun enough to do.  (For more academic uses of Twitter, see academhack’s great post.)

Ok–now the actual point of this post.  One of my early tweets from this semester is about the makeup of my League of Extraordinary Gentlemen class.  Upon further reflection, The class isn’t really half athletes–more like 35%.  But about 1/4 of the class plays the same sport.  A few thoughts:

1.  I’m not a professor with a bias against athletes.  While I have concerns about how quickly the cart of Division I athletics begins to wag the tail of academics (and at such a high expense!), that systemic problem’s got nothing to do with my experience in the classroom.  The proportion of athletes who are engaged students in my classes is at least as high as the general student body.

2.  Having said that, it is a Very Hard Thing to stare at the cold fact that 25% of my class (i.e., the ones on the same team) will definitely be absent on certain days.  The problem isn’t even that they’re missing more classes than are allowed according to my policy, which I don’t think is the case, but that so many students will obviously be gone on the very same day.  That sort of thing is hard to miss, and it’s demoralizing, both for me and for the other students.

3.  And yet, whoever’s providing academic advice to the athletes is doing exactly the right thing: I’m the only person teaching an English course explicitly pitched to nonmajors this semester, a course which also satisfies the International gen-ed requirement.  It kills 2 gen-ed birds with one stone, and in an environment that’s friendly to to students without a strong background in the formal analysis of literature.

It’s a pretty strange position, but probably unavoidable without several more sections of courses like this one, to spread the impact.  (Again, I’m not speculating at all about the performance of the students themselves in the class!  “Impact” here is only “the psychological impact of the travel days.”)

How have you dealt with similar situations?

In Paul Clifford, the eponymous hero’s tutor, Mr. Peter Mac Grawler, reflects:

“Why fret myself? –if a pupil turn out well, it is clearly to the advantage of his master; if not, to the disadvantage of himself.”  Of course, a similar suggestion never forced itself into the mind of Dr. Keate.   At Eton, the very soul of the honest headmaster is consumed by his zeal for the welfare of little gentlemen in stiff cravats.

(Definitely click the link: Keate was apparently “the greatest flogging Head Master, the symbol of unreformed Eton.”)

I wonder how often we indulge in similar “philosophical consolations,” especially in conversations about assessment?

Ask, and ye shall receive–How PBwiki & I do class notes:

I was motivated to try this assignment by two factors:

• Many students take almost no notes in English classes, especially upper-division English classes, and especially when class discussions turn to close reading.  That leaves students: 1) unprepared for exams; 2) without a sense that there is a body of knowledge/practice emerging during the class; and 3) slightly cynical about the purposes of class time.
• Class notes themselves are epistemologically weird.  Usually, we think of notes as private, but if they’re *too* idiosyncratic, they might not be very accurate, or very useful later in the semester.    What would be useful is a set of canonical class notes: This is what we agree happened on this day in class.

Wikis, it turns out, are very good at establishing this sort of document.  Someone starts by uploading their notes, and subsequent students can expand, revise, delete, re-arrange, or otherwise improve the version, until it reflects something like consensus about the day’s class.  Further, the page can be updated throughout the semester, as later class periods interact with earlier ones.

I’m now on my second version of the notes assignment.  (You can see my page for it in my wiki.)  Both versions split students into groups, such that each student is only actively having to work on the notes every other week, or perhaps every third week.

Version 1 of the assignment gave students almost no structure, asking them instead simply to establish a page for each class that reflected some sense of what went on in class that day.  This was a disaster.

Version 2 of the assignment is more organized.  Each group now is responsible for, at a minimum:

• Creating a 75-100 word statement of the main idea or unifying theme of the class.  (For a 50 minute class.)
• Transcribing a passage from the text that we discussed in class, and then explaining how it links up with the main idea.
• Identifying any key terms from the class and providing definitions.
• Finding 3 links from reputable sources for further information.

Many students also post images.  You can see a good example of the result here.  Note that this example isn’t perfect–for example, a simple vocabulary word like “decanted” doesn’t really belong–but the students did reflect the work of the class. Here’s a different example, where the students became interested in the concept of synesthesia, and its relationship to Neuromancer.

Some reflections on this assignment, which I think I love:

• It provides a realtime assessment of whether class made any sense.
• It asks students to reflect on their day in class, and work together a little–thus establishing the idea of the class as sharing a common intellectual project.
• I always show Jon Udell’s screencast about Wikipedia’s rockdots entry, to show students what collaborative writing might look like.
• One drawback of the assignment, right now, is that I don’t freeze pages for grading until the end of the semester.  (This is so people can make connections between early material and later.)  This creates a new kind of problem: The student who didn’t really do much all semester, but who swoops in at the end of the semester and makes a bunch of quasi-random edits to try to “improve” the notes and save his grade.  Depending on the nature of the edits, this can be a real problem.
• Providing feedback to students is delicate: On the one hand, these are *their* notes.  On the other hand, your perception of what happened in class, and what’s important, is not irrelevant.  On the one hand, you don’t want to short-circuit the collaborative process.  On the other hand, if the first person’s notes are . . . not the best, then it can cause some dark nights while you wait for the group to work itself out.  I have no advice on how to handle this!
• The assignment does make for a dramatic late-semester class, when, on a tired day, students are having trouble recalling material from earlier in the semester.  You can just call up the notes and say, “Look . . . we did this in class!”
• It also makes each group implied experts on the content from their days.  They have to look at the material enough that they can usually recall it pretty well in class.

From here, students can begin to formulate their own exam questions, create ready-made (and guaranteed accurate!) study guides, or almost any other thing.

One more thing: Yesterday, I made a screencast (using iShowU) for my students about how to edit files in the wiki.  You can see it on my wiki’s main screen.

I’d be grateful for any thoughts/comments about the assignment!

(This is the first in a series of reflections on last year, when I required only born-digital assignments.  This year, I’ve shifted back to a mix of these assignments and conventional papers.)

In nearly all of my classes last year, students worked in a wiki, with a course blog, and with del.icio.us.   My various assignments all have their own logic, but they also have in common a couple of goals:

• to create a sense of the class as a shared intellectual project, by writing in networks (sometimes collaboratively, sometimes not)
• to disrupt a common pattern of student engagement with course material: drift through the course when possible, but binge around paper deadlines or exams.  Rather than having a few higher-stakes assignments, we’d have more or less constant lower-stakes assignments.

In general, these assignments were pretty popular, and I’ll talk more about them over the next few weeks.  But there was also a persistent minority opinion, which argued that the assignments achieved these goals, and therefore the students didn’t like them.  In the first instance, they resented having to attend to their classmates’ views, and, in the second, they complained that they had to think too frequently about the course.

I usually spend a fair amount of time introducing the pedagogy behind the assignments, but clearly I need to do better at reinforcing it.  (This is one of the reasons I’m looking forward to teaching Digital Literary Studies this semester, as I’ll be making all of my assumptions far more explicit and testing them.)  Also, of course, there will be a certain number of students who just want to get through, and aren’t happy about renegotiating the implied teacher-student bargain.

What was so interesting about this reaction is that when I hear administrative-types talking about our students today, the so-called Millenials, they usually emphasize how students crave new media approaches, how they’re “naturally” technologically adept, and how they expect constant access to course material, assignments, and the like.

I have pretty serious questions about some of these.  A startling # of students I encounter have never heard of a “podcast.” Many, many students can’t adjust margins or fonts in Word.  Lots of students use IE or the branded version of whatever browser comes with their internet provider.  And I think students who are clamoring for access to the material really mean that they want *me* to be around when it’s convenient for them, but not to be bothered with course material too persistently.  I’m far from a skeptic about the potential of these digital tools–but I think that it’s useful not too expect too much.

At chez Salt-Box, I am the one who reads “chapter books” to the Little Man, as opposed to books he can read by himself, or longer picture books or comic books, which anyone is allowed to read to him.  As a result, A Santa thoughtfully made to the Little Man and me a joint present: Simon Armitage’s new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which we’re now about 40% through after polishing off the Iliad* Monday morning.

Armitage has produced an intensely alliterative narrative poem–almost every line has at least three prominent words that begin with the same sound, and some lines have more.  Here’s a representative bit:

In the standing position he prepared to be struck,

bent forward, revealing a flash of green flesh

as he heaped his hair to the crown of his head,

the nape of his neck now naked and ready.

Gawain grips the axe and heaves it heavenwards,

plants his left foot firmly on the floor in front,

then swings it swiftly towards the bare skin.

The cleanness of the strike cleaved the spinal cord

and parted the fat and the flesh so far

that the bright steel blade took a bit from the floor.

The handsome head tumbles onto the earth

and the king’s men kick it as it clatters past.  (417-28)

Obviously, such a translation is going to be necessarily somewhat free, which Armitage discusses his introduction.  In the main, I think only medievalists are likely to care very much about this: Armitage’s version is a great read, and the decision to imitate the Gawain poet’s alliterative style gives a kind of “percussive” (Armitage’s word) drive to what is already a gripping story.

I have three observations about reading the poem aloud:

First, although the free translation doesn’t bother me at all, there are some moments when Armitage’s desire to bring the poem into the modern world results in diction that is already a bit tired.  He describes the Green Knight’s “hoge and unmete” weapon as “the mother of all axes,” and elsewhere notes of Gawain that “Fastened in his armor he seemed fabulous, famous.”  (”When he was hasped in armes, his harnays was ryche.”)

The other two points are about Sir Gawain as a children’s book:

It’s a lovely parallel edition, and once the Little Man discovered that it’s the same poem in older language, he naturally wanted to hear both.  Let me just say that Middle English is *very* appealing to a 4-year-old.  Very.  We now read both versions.

Finally, while I’m sure that Armitage wasn’t thinking about child readers of his translation, his decisions to emphasize alliteration and to bring forward the narrative as dramatically as possible–well!  You couldn’t ask for a more powerful draw for a kid.  This has been the most popular “chapter book” by far over the past 6 months or so, including various Narnia books, the Iliad, lots of Roald Dahl, and some Star Wars-universe novels.  He follows it very attentively, picks up details, and repeats back phrases he likes.

If you read to your child, I would strongly recommend at least taking a look at this book.  Lots of fun for all.  (Thanks, Santa!)

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* Depending on how you count, that’s his 3rd time through the Iliad in his 4 years: I read the Fitzgerald translation to him when he was about 6 months old, and now we’ve read 2 prose versions marketed at kids.  He actually complained about the (admittedly, truly dreadful) Disney movie about Hercules because of its inaccurate portrayal of the Greek myths.

Hartford Stage will be staging Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in about a month. I’m sure it’ll be interesting; A in particular is excited because she’s teaching the book in an honors class this semester.

What I liked was this bit of text–is it a warning? a promotional blurb?–from a pamphlet, targeted at educators, being distributed today at the Wadsworth Atheneum:

 The Bluest Eye is recommended for high school students–contains themes of violence and sexual abuse.

Apparently high school students today really are hard-core!

And, on that note, the semester officially opens tomorrow, with my first day of class W.

Alex-the-Churchmouse was kind enough to whip up banners for my three main classes this semester:

and

and

Spiffy!

PopMatters recently ran my review of Oren Rudavsky’s brilliant 2006 movie (out on DVD in late 2007), The Treatment.  If you have any tolerance whatever for romantic comedies, then you will probably find something to like here.  If you find crazy analysts funny, then you are in for a rare treat, as Ian Holm is a maniacal one–though, as my review explains, The Treatment is actually quite canny about the cinematic function of this mania:

 An analysis can take years; Rudavsky has 86 minutes.  How, then, to represent the outsized place an analyst holds in his analysand’s psyche?  By transforming him into a monstrous presence, one who trangresses all manner of boundaries and takes up permanent residence over the patient’s shoulder.  This is a highly effective strategy, at once witty and psychologically acute.  It even keeps the movie from veering into sheer sentimentality, as Holm pops up at the most inopportune moments.

Read the whole thing!  (And rent the movie!  Encourage smart, watchable movies about psychoanalysis! or about love!)

This week at Bookslut, I’ve posted a terrific interview with Laynie Browne, about her new book, The Scented Fox:

Can you talk about the relationship between the work of form & time in Daily Sonnets (which you explicitly describe as a “collaborative experiment in time”) and in The Scented Fox, which perhaps aspires to “A form which becomes what it must in the presence of the actual calamity of time”? Do these differing approaches to the time of poetry supplement one another?

Daily Sonnets is also a time experiment but of another sort. In that book I was trying to invent time which did not exist. I experimented with writing in very uncongenial circumstances, such as wrapped in a towel after a shower for a time limit of one or two minutes. I was trying to find a way to work within that sense of rapid, noisy, interrupted time very much of the moment. This was a very liberating experiment and I recommend it to everyone. Whatever constraints you think you live within, in terms of what time you have to write, try breaking them. Write standing in line, half asleep. Write in every way except the ways which are habitual. In this way time and form open tremendously. Suddenly instead of having only an hour here or there, you have all of time. I think the approaches in the two projects do supplement each other. One is more electric, the other meditative. Both are necessary. And in each book the project is a distinct experiment. All form is somehow an experiment in time.

Read the whole thing!