The Salt-Box

I want to post more regularly about Victorian topics, and thought that the best way to kick it off was with this satirical take from Fraser’s Magazine in 1832 on Edward Bulwer’s Eugene Aram (the end is worth it–how often does a critic get to wish for an author to be hanged?):

 E.A. and E.B.

A Christmas Carol, to the Tune of “God save you, merry Gentlemen!”

“Impius ante Aram, atque auri caecus amore.”

E. Aram was a pedagogue

     So sullen and so sad;

 E. Bulwer was a gentleman

     Wot plied as Colburn’s Cad:

And the deeds of both, I grieve to say,

     Were werry, werry bad.

E. Aram he whipped little boys

     With malice and with ire;

E. Bulwer wrote Whig articles,

     As Beelzebub did inspire:

And both of them they did these things

    All for the sake of hire.

E. Aram killed a man one day,

     Out of a devilish whim;

E. Bulwer did almost the same–

     A deed well nigh as grim:

For Aram he murder’d Daniel Clarke,

      And Bulwer he murder’d him.

E. Aram’s crime it was impell’d

     That cash he might purloin;

E. Bulwer did his wickedness

     For love of Colburn’s coin:

Alas! that money should debauch

     Two geniuses so fine!

E. Aram he was sent to jail,

     And hanged upon a tree;

E. Bulwer is in parliament,

     A shabby-genteel M.P.;

But if he writes such murdering books,

     What must his ending be?

Why, that in Fraser’s Magazine

     His gibbet we shall see.

I saw this last week on the VICTORIA listserv; the text is available on Google Books.

So, this weekend we received a document with two forms: the teacher of the year nomination and a parent survey, largely about satisfaction with the school.  We’re pretty happy with the school, and very happy with the teacher, so no worries there.  (Readers with long memories will recall that I think the district . . . makes poor decisions, but we like our kid’s school.)

The parent survey is labeled “Holmes Brand Survey,” and, after a demographic question about grade-level, the first two questions are . . . wait for it . . . these:

Holmes School focuses on

1. Leadership
2. Higher Order Thinking Skills
3. Science and technology
4. Global Community

Holmes School’s (motto/slogan/tagline) is:

1. Raising Readers!
2. A formula for success!
3. Launching Leaders!
4. Scholars at Work!

(The answers, for the curious, are “Science and technology” and “A formula for success,” respectively.  And, yes, the fact that the correct answers have lower-case words is reproduced faithfully from the handout, as if it’s a tell.)

After these critical questions come more usual questions about whether the child’s being challenged, etc.

I hear the Connecticut State University system is redesigning and standardizing our student evaluations–I think we should look to the public schools!  Start all student evaluations (sorry, student opinion surveys [!]) by asking them to correctly identify the motto of the system and of their particular university.*  Because that’s what matters in education: maintaining your brand.

</sarcasm>

*Every single day it amuses me a little that my school’s slogan/motto/tagline (”Start with a dream. Finish with a future.”) is basically indistinguishable from my father’s community college’s (”From here, go anywhere.”).  I’m *very* easily amused.

Put the case that you were piloting the widespread deployment of iPod Touches in a classroom.  You can assume the following:

• Two sections of the same class will be taught in a 5-week period.  For the sake of argument–let’s call that course World Lit I, a 200-level course for both majors and nonmajors.
• Both courses will teach the same syllabus, and, broadly, the same assignments.
• In one section, every student and the instructor will have an iPod Touch.  In the other, not so much with the iPod Touch.
• It’s definitely an iPod Touch, not an iPhone.  No cheating!  (Perhaps your governor has banned new cell phone contracts.)
• You’re at a regional comprehensive public university.  You can assume the professor’s down for whatever, but you *cannot* magically assume s/he can throw significant amounts of resources at this one class.  (E.g., no fair coding an application in 2 months during a semester.)
• Update: You can also assume that the default class location has good wireless access, and that the college has a Blackboard/Vista license, and so can support the new Blackboard app.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to accomplish two things:

1. Showcase the tech, but *also*
2. Meaningfully assess its utility in the classroom

What kinds of things would you like to see in the class?  What kinds of information would be useful to you in persuading colleagues to adopt / not adopt the iPod Touch?  What might you do to make the experiment a helpful one for everyone?

At present, let’s still call this hypothetical, but let’s also call the question a serious one.

Two points that, while interesting, don’t quite merit their own entries:

• If you were interested in the recent post about online quizzes in lit classes, then you might be interested in this posting from Tomorrow’s Professor about crafting effective multiple choice questions.
• In comments to my post about reaching out to administrators and college staff, Terry Brock pointed out the important point that many college staff members are . . . academics on a different career path.  (Bethany Nowviskie made this point, too, on Twitter.) This is an excellent point, and reminded me of an anecdote David F. Bright & Mary P. Richards recount in The Academic Deanship: Individual Careers and Institutional Roles* (Jossey-Bass, 2001):

The dean is thrust into a new place in the world of the college, and this can strain or even distort individual relationships.  Many colleagues, of course, accept the shift, often with mordant witticisms about selling out or fading out, whereas others assume that the individual has not merely taken a new position but become a different person.  One faculty member who accepted a year’s assignment as acting dean of his college had been collaborating on a book with a colleague, and they ate lunch together every week to discuss the project.  When the temporary administrative stint was announced, the colleague said, “I will see you in a year.”  The almost-dean assured her that he would have time to continue the project, but she said, “That is not the point.  I do not eat with Them, and you have become a Them. Call me next year.”  She stuck to her aversion to administrators but cherfully resumed lunch and project the next summer when his administrative contagion had passed.

You’ve not lived until you’ve seen one professor dismiss a colleague’s input as invalid because the latter is temporarily serving as a dean’s appointment to some committee or other.  It’s always a charming moment.

–

*I know this book well because I helped copyedit it, not because  I have delusions of grandeur.

Earlier this month, UCLA reported on their triennial survey of faculty attitudes and values, “The American College Teacher.”  (Here’s the study; here’s the InsideHigherEd.com writeup.  Quotations below are from the latter.)  The above-the-fold news from the study was that faculty are apparently interested in promoting personal change:

Compared to three years ago, faculty members were more likely to believe it is part of their job to “help students develop personal values” (66.1 percent, an increase of 15.3 percentage points over 2004–05), “enhance students’ self-understanding” (71.8 percent, a 13.4 percentage-point increase), “develop moral character” (70.2 percent, a 13.1 percentage-point increase) and “provide for students’ emotional development” (48.1 percent, a 12.9 percentage-point increase).

Some of these sound pretty . . . um . . . squicky.  I’m pretty sure that I don’t want anything to do with students’ emotional development, and I’m *certain* that I don’t have much to offer students by way of “develop[ing] moral character.”  I also have a hard time understanding how I could help students “develop personal values.”  (And, lest you think I’m just another misanthropic jackass . . . I teach in the FYE program.  I helped pilot learning communities program at my school.  [Ok, “misanthropic jackass” probably still fits, but student success means a lot.])  When people talk about the transformative power of education, they’re supposed to be referring to its self-transformative power.  As Adam Phillips once said about psychoanalyis, the illusion that teaching too often leaves in place is the belief in the power of the teacher–which is a problem.

But it turns out that the same center at UCLA releases another study, “The American Freshman.” (Study; InsideHigherEd.com report.)  And there’s a question in this other survey that arguably speaks to the shifting faculty interest:

The survey also contains questions about students’ personal goals, often depicted in the report as a struggle between “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” and “being well off financially.” During the counterculture years of the ’60s and ’70s, students often emphasized the importance of having a meaningful life philosophy, an interest that receded over the next two decades as financial concerns surged. In the last three years, students increasingly have said that both areas are important, a change that analysts attributed mainly to women’s rising interest in financial success.

Slightly more than half (51.4%) of current freshmen said it was important to develop a life philosophy and more than three-fourths (76.8%) said it was very important or essential to do well financially.

It would be interesting to introduce a question about helping students develop a life philosophy into the faculty survey.  I tend to read the answers quoted above as proxies for “life philosophy,” which makes sense: It’s not that faculty really want to build students’ moral character *directly*, which would be weird; rather, we know that an education in the liberal arts can help students embark on a program of self-transformation.

(I think Mark Bauerlein’s critics run past this point too often: That students today seem much less interested in self-transformation or self-improvement as a goal, at least according to all of these longitudinal measures. I don’t think it’s Twitter’s fault, but he has a point.)

My chair (yes, that’s right–my chair blogs!) was on this story a while ago,  which isn’t surprising since the two of us argued just this point in the local paper three years ago.  Faculty might be more interested in helping students change than they’ve ever been, but that can be understood as a defense of relatively traditional educational values against an increasingly pre-professional reduction of the undergraduate curriculum.

Everyone in graduate school gets drilled into their head that they should be good to the department secretaries.  Department secretaries can accomplish all sorts of excellent things–they can expedite your travel paperwork, teach you the funky new copier, make sure your stipend money doesn’t stop when your funding department changes . . . they’ve got their hands on lots of levers.  They’re great.  And, in case you ever get a teaching job, it’s good practice, since department secretaries can help you with all manner of things–like getting you a good room to teach in, expediting your travel paperwork, &c.  Quite often, especially in your first couple of years, aside from filling in personnel forms in your first week, the department secretary may well be the only university staff member you deal with on a regular basis.

One of the things I have tried to be mindful of over the past couple of years is university staff outside of departments.  They used to terrify me, and they still scare me a bit.  They promulgate rules designed to cover contingencies I can’t imagine, and they deal with faculty, students, and state auditors–three audiences with very different interests.  Plus, they often like to use the phone to accomplish work-related tasks, and I hate the phone.  (My current voice mail quite literally begs people to hang up the phone and send me an e-mail.)

But as I’ve worked on a couple of committees that are populated by faculty and staff, and as I’ve worked on events that have occasionally required massive contributions and favors from administrators and staff, I have generally come to think that it’s important to know these people and to understand their jobs.  And not just because you may one day need a favor.

What’s interesting–aside from the normal interest one might take in people and their jobs–about the administrative side of the house is that it is, in many ways, an embodied history of the university and its decisions.  Policy X is housed in this department rather than that one because of historical contingency Z.  Policy exception Y, touted as exceptional customer service by one department, ends up interfering with another’s mission-critical task.  Rule 42, which seems intuitively stupid to any right-thinking faculty member, is *also* hated by the staff, but they have to do it anyway.  Rule 43 emerged because faculty members a, b, c, d, e, and f over many years refused to address circumstance foo.  And so forth.

I was at a meeting of such a committee a couple of weeks ago, and one of the participants said that the most amusing thing about the meeting was watching my face as I processed all the sausage-making that goes into making certain kinds of decisions, given the resource constraints that we operate under.  That experience is incredibly useful.

Don’t take me the wrong way: I don’t know much about how things work, and I have precisely no power on my campus.  I know that there is *always* going to be conflict between faculty who tend to improvise and a state-regulated bureaucracy that needs to have paper trails.  And I lean *way* too much on a handful of people who–out of kindness and out of a shared desire to make awesome things for students–are able to fix things when I just start beating my head against the desk.  And I don’t want you to get the idea that if you just walk across campus in someone else’s sensible shoes that all of your campus’s problems will vanish.  That can’t happen, especially in times of budgetary crisis and recission.

But I think that in addition to working on committees with faculty (which I’ve written about before), it’s worthwhile to find ways to connect with staff.  Maybe that’s through clubs.  Maybe it’s through the union, if you’re on a unionized campus.  (Or, if you’re on a campus with multiple unions, through inter-union collaboration.) Maybe it’s through big, honking committees. Learning about how your university works, not from gossip (which privileges scandal and vitriol), and not through the one time you need a particular office to process something, is a remarkable experience.  Because the staff serve the faculty and students as a whole, rather than just a department, they are the living memory of the institution.

I’m slow with the grading.  Some of it is garden-variety procrastination; some of it is bad planning (assignments for different classes coming in at the same time); some of it is overcommitments elsewhere; some of it is figuring out the assignment design before figuring out how the grading will work.  But a big part of it is overcommenting.  On most papers, I give three different kinds of feedback: a rubric score, interlineal comments (now delivered, in most cases, via track changes), and a terminal comment.

On the one hand, intellectually I know perfectly well that this isn’t necessarily helpful.  On the other hand, when I was a student I felt very strongly that comments = professorial love and engagement, so it’s hard for me to let that go.  Beyond that, the biggest problem with a lot of student writing is that it seems to have been produced with no thought of a reader.  It’s as if churning out material of a certain length is good enough, and so the plethora of comments is supposed to say, “Oi! Live reader here!)”

The track changes feature in Word actually makes matters worse in one way: If you change a formatting aspect of the paper (say, the margins), then it produces a comment about that for every single paragraph in a paper, so it looks like you’ve commented a lot.  But then it looks like all you’ve done is look at formatting, so I always make extra comments to convey that I read the paper carefully.

I also don’t think of comments as negative; often, I’ll use comments simply to suggest alternate lines of thought or stylistic possibilities.  (How else are the students going to get them?)

This really isn’t sustainable, however.

The other day, I re-discovered this word: satisfice, or to be happy with a good-enough solution, rather than one that is maximally optimal.  It reminded me that my current grading practice is a mostly failing attempt at maximizing the amount of possible feedback on any given assignment, which leads to two different counterproductive effects: it takes too long for me to grade, and students may well feel overwhelmed.  (Although very good students usually point to this overcommenting as the thing they like best about my teaching.)

What I need to do, then, is to develop a satisficing strategy: knowing where I’ve said enough to suggest opportunities for revision (and, to be candid, to justify the grade), but in such a way that it’s acceptably fast, light, and flexible.  Students who want more comments can always come in and talk to me anyway, right?

How do you know when enough’s enough?

(There’s always Ross’s solution . . . .)

In this morning’s Times, at least in the CT editions, Benjamin Genocchio reviews Endless Forms: Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts, an exciting show at the Yale Center for British Art.  By way of setting the exhibit up, however, he wanders off the path:

Darwin is to biology as Einstein is to physics, a towering genius so far in advance of his time that people thought he was out of his mind. His theory of evolution, the foundation of modern biology, was largely rejected and ignored when it was first published in 1859. And for decades scientists were skeptical about natural selection, the process that Darwin proposed to account for evolutionary changes.

Of course Darwin deserves all manner of credit, and I’ve no real objection to the comparison to Einstein.

Having said that, almost everything else in this paragraph is wrong.  Alfred Russel Wallace, for instance, would be very much surprised to hear that Darwin was so very far ahead of his time, and the vigorous debate over the Origin of Species, and its several editions, suggests that the idea was not “ignored.”

As to whether it was rejected, Michael Ruse, in the “Prologue” to the second edition of The Darwinian Revolution, notes one circumstantial, but telling, detail:

But if we want to draw our boundaries more closely and consider the main question to be the theory of evolution–When and how did people get converted to the idea of evolution?–we can narrow our study to about a twenty-five year span.  Consider: In 1851, when Cambridge University first offered exams in science, one question was as follows.  “Reviewing the whole fossil evidence, shew that it does not lead to a theory of natural development through a natural transmutation of species” (Cambridge University 1851, p. 416).  By 1873, however, a question told students to assume “the truth of the hypothesis that that the existing species of plants and animals have been derived by generation from others widely different” and to get on with discussing the causes (Cambridge University 1875, qu. 162).  If one makes the reasonable assumption that by the time something gets into undergraduate examinations it is fairly noncontroversial, it follows that in no more than a quarter of a century the scientific establishment had made a complete about-face on the question of evolution. (xi-xii)

Genocchio is right to state that the mechanism of Darwin’s theory was poorly understood until the 20thC, but it’s wrong to imply that the Victorians were just dismissive of evolutionary ideas.  Even Wikipedia gets this right:

The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and much of the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory.

A couple of years ago, I began requiring online reading quizzes in my 200-level lit classes (Brit Lit II, plus topics-based courses for nonmajors).  This year, I’ve extended it to any class where there’s assigned reading.  As usual, there are some gains and losses.

Here’s a sample question:

According to Keats, a poet is:

1. A man speaking to men
2. A chai-drinking beret-wearer
3. An unacknowledged legislator of the world
4. The most unpoetical thing in existence
5.  An eolian harp

People who’ve read their Keats letters recently will recognize the answer as #4, though 1, 3, and 5 are definitions offered by other romantic poets we’d read earlier in the semester.

15/51 students who took this quiz (out of 59 enrolled), or ~29%, missed it.   Of these, 10 picked Wordsworth’s “a man speaking to men,” and 5 chose “an unacknowledged legislator of the world.”  The rest got it right, which isn’t surprising because the question uses verbatim language from the assigned reading.

Here are the gains:

• When there’s a quiz, more students do at least some of the reading, or at least it seems that way based on class discussion.
• The frequency of the quizzes reinforces my general shift toward assignments that are more frequent, but with lower stakes.
• The course management system does the grading automagically, so no grading for me!  (Because, like all sane people, I hate the current version of Blackboard/Vista, I use Moodle to do this.)

Here are the losses:

• Wow, is writing quiz questions a pain in the ass!
• Course management systems excel at grading defined-answer questions, such as multiple choice; I would have to review or manually grade any other kind of answer.  So all the questions are multiple-choice.
• Not that this ever happens, but if I get behind, then I have to figure out a way to account for that in a fair way.  Usually what I do is assume that I gave a quiz, and students all got the questions right.  (Because I don’t like to punish students for my own failings.)
• The quizzes are supposed to be easy, to compensate for other assignments that are harder.  The idea is to offer a carrot for doing the reading.  Nevertheless, a lot of people will miss any given question.  This is depressing.
• I tend to ask questions that don’t require much interpretation, because I started this in classes that weren’t necessarily for majors.

Apparently people in other disciplines have quiz questions that they can simply download from the publisher and plug into their course management system.  If a similar solution exists for a literature anthology, I’ve yet to see it.  (I use Broadview, and they offer multiple choice questions for students to review, but they’re in PDF format, and they give the answers.  Similarly, Norton offers a quiz students can actually take, but it’s pegged to a period as a whole, not individual authors.)

And there’s no bank of questions, at least not that I’m aware of, for all the myriad texts one might teach.  (E.g., all of Trollope, or Kathy Acker, or whatever.)

Someone who developed such a bank–or, that is, someone who coordinated such a bank of questions, able to be plugged in to Vista, Moodle, & Sakai–would be a hero.  It could just be a site where people upload questions from their various courses, and other faculty could download them and manipulate them as they see fit.

Katy asked for a post about grading with the computer, and I always try to honor requests, so here goes:

Online grading doesn’t save me any time, although that’s probably because I do it badly.  The main benefits I get from grading this way are two: Students can read my comments, and I get sick less frequently during the semester.

Some crucial points:

• I take files in just about all formats.  This is probably a mistake, for two reasons: First, as far as I can tell, no one application opens all file types, and so I’m always switching  apps.  Second, I have to adapt my grading based on the file type.  For example, between 10-20% of the papers in any section arrive in Microsoft Works format.  With documents in Word (or Pages, or Open Office, etc.), I can grade using the “Track Changes” functionality.  But not with Works.  That makes things slower.  It’s my understanding that other faculty specify a file format.
• I both use a rubric and offer copious marginal comments.  This only gets worse when I get behind, because then I feel as if I have to justify taking so long by offering super-detailed marginal commentary.  This is stupid.
• I don’t have any macros, templates, or text expanders set up to automate stuff I type all the time.  This is stupid.
• I used to have a somewhat complicated rubric that depended on math. This turned out to be counterproductive, because, instead of grading faster, I spent more time trying to game the rubric so it matched my judgment of what the paper should get.  But I liked the categories and descriptions, so I’ve kept the rubric as a checkbox, and just assign the grade the paper should get.
• All told, it probably takes me about 30 minutes a paper for short ones, and as much as an hour for longer ones.

So, to recap.  If you would do online grading successfully, do it as differently from me as possible:

• Be strict about file formats.  Even naming conventions end up making a difference–I’m *always* spending a few minutes going through and changing all the files named “Paper1.doc” to something more helpful.
• I’d use a rubric, or something comparable, but if you do, minimize interlineal comments.
• Help your word processor help you: Figure out what comments you write over and over again, and set up a macro of some sort to insert that text automagically.

Here’s an annotated list of links with more information about various approaches. If anyone has shortcuts or tips, I’d be glad to hear them!

Update the next morning: I woke up with the same thought Tom had (in comments): monitors matter.  I’m a *lot* more efficient on campus, with my dual 24″ monitors, than at home, on my MacBook.