The Salt-Box

When you spend three minutes staring out of your office window wondering how to figure out whether it’s stopped raining, the better to return books to the library . . . you may be an absent-minded prof.

Not good.

(One sign you’re a hopeless Apple dork: Your first thought, when thought finally comes, is, “Oh, I’ll check my iPhone.”)

I don’t think this information has been disseminated very widely, so:

According to the list’s main page at the UPenn website, the list is (at least temporarily) dead:

Due to technical and administrative difficulties, we can no longer offer mass mailing functionality. Submissions will appear only in the archives, sorted by category.

It will take about 24 hours for the submissions to appear in the archives.

Please do not email anything to cfp@english.upenn.edu. Messages will be silently dropped. For the time being, subscriptions to the list have been halted. We hope to recreate the original CFP list functionality in the near future. Alerts will be posted here and sent out through the mailing list.

So, right now it’s web-only.

One of my best things is not taking things personally.

Almost nothing has anything to do with me.

–Robert Lopez, A Part of the World

Unlike Robert Lopez’s narrator,  “not taking things personally” is one of my worst things.  I tend to take things personally.  On the one hand, this can add some stress and paranoia to office politics; on the other, it also is a way of ensuring I’m engaged fully with a particular situation.

This week’s instance of “things I shouldn’t take personally, but do” comes courtesy of students who want me to admit them into my full sections of the British literature survey.  (These are students I’ve not met before.  Students I already know rarely present the same problem.)  I have received four different messages since Thursday, all a single sentence, and usually without a salutation or even a signature: “will you let me into your closed course (crn xxxxx)?”

Now, these students are good at one aspect of e-mail etiquette: The action item in the e-mail is quite clear.  (”Let me into your class!!!”)  And, at the margins, an additional student or 2 in a 200-level class isn’t going to kill me.

Here’s the thing: The students *are* asking a favor.  And it’s not a cost-free favor, either.  There’s the additional administrative responsibility (keeping up with the student’s attendance, etc.), the extra grading (goes without saying), and all the other stuff that goes into having a body in the class.  Beyond this, adding students beyond the enrollment caps irritates the departmental Powers-That-Be, because it implies that the courses could be bigger.  (In fact, our survey courses are capped at the stupidest number imaginable, 30.  30 is too big for a proper discussion-based or writing-based class, and too small to achieve any of the potential economies of a bigger class.)

So, please: Help me want to incur these costs.  First, tell me why you’re looking for this course so late?  Did you fail Brit Lit II in the spring, and again in the summer, and really need it again now?  Are you a transfer student?  A new admit?  These courses were open for months . . . why did this just occur to you?

Then, give me a reason, a real reason, why I should let you in.  Don’t ramble on for a paragraph about how you really love literature or something, or tell me you read my rmp.com rating and feel a spiritual connection.  But explain to me why you need this particular gen ed requirement fulfilled this particular semester.  There are *always* sections of Brit Lit II.  Why this one?

For me, a good example of a real reason is that you’re in either a supermajor or an incredibly scripted major, and if you miss getting the gen ed done now, you’re in trouble down the road.  Or, maybe you’re a transfer student, looking to major in English, and you need to get cracking on the surveys.

If your reason is “conflict with your job,” then that’s a less-real reason.  Not because your job’s not important–believe me, I know that it is–but because that’s just bad planning.  If your job’s *so* important, then you should’ve registered for the class earlier.  Or, take the course in the spring, and give your boss lots of notice so you can move your schedule around.

It should be possible to let me know in just a sentence or two that you’ve thought about your schedule and about your audience for the e-mail.

Finally, if you do get into the class, make sure you follow up!  If I’ve let you into a full class, then I know your name, and I know that I’ve done you a favor.  As a result, I expect you to be a good citizen–to come prepared to talk, to have your book, to participate in the online assignments, etc.  It’s not reasonable to expect both to be admitted into a full class *and* to recede quietly into the background of that class.

If the student center changes their fries (to “steak-cut”), shouldn’t they have to run that by the faculty senate?

Steak-cut’s gross.

(It may well be, of course, that they’re just out of regular fries.  But isn’t it convenient that they’d make this change in the summer, when the senate doesn’t meet?)

Thursday’s e-mail brought the AAUP’s monthly e-newsletter promoting the contents of Academe.  Here’s a screen shot of one of the news items:

I don’t want to defend either ACTA or Anne Neal, but I do think it’s weird to conflate “anti-faculty” (headline) with “right-wing” (in the slug).  I’ll grant that  AAUP and ACTA are probably not going to share a lot of policy goals, but still.

The actual article is headlined more neutrally, “Critic Appointed to Accreditation Review Panel,” and the article also omits the (apparent) epithet, “right-wing.”

At the Academic Commons today, I have a post introducing Collex, a search- and tagging- tool that allows researchers to move seamlessly among most of the major 19th-century digital collections.  Collex is one of the coolest early fruits of Jerome McGann’s NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) group.

My two summer classes end today!  July and August will be the first two months I’ve gone without teaching since 2003.  I scarcely know what to do . . .

(Well, Alton Locke is due to Broadview in August, and I’ve got interesting summer plans at Bookslut & at Re:Print.  So it’ll be a busy summer–just not a *teaching* summer.)

This year I’ve been experimenting with a variety of digital replacements for my conventional “3 explication papers + one short paper + one medium-length paper” assignment set; for the purposes of this experiment, I’m not requiring formal papers at all.  This has had some hits and misses, and I’m looking forward to ending this experiment soon and moving back to a mix of born-digital and conventional assignments.

One student this summer took a look at the assignments and bolted, but not before sending me an e-mail asking “What ever happened to discussing works in class and then writing papers about them?”  I’ve gotten similar questions from some colleagues and friends.

My first answer is that nothing’s happened to them–there are many such courses on offer in our department.  But my real answer is to turn the question back on itself: Is the point of a literature class “learning how to write papers,” or is it “learning about literature” and “learning to write”?  In other words, I don’t think that the learning outcome of English classes ought to be, “learn how to write critical analysis papers at X pages in length.”  Instead, people assign papers because they think that the sustained work of writing a paper might facilitate other learning goals.  But papers are, or ought to be, just a means to an end.  Certainly they’re a means we’re comfortable with–but there’s nothing magical about them.

Speaking for myself, this  has been a real benefit of working on assessment over the past year.  In the past, when pulling a syllabus together, I would start from the probable due dates of papers, and work backward from that. “It’s an English class, so there should be papers.”  (Note: I still think that “It’s an English class, so there should be *writing* of many forms.”)  I’m trying to get better at fitting assignments to the learning outcomes for a particular class.  Thinking more seriously about why I’m choosing assignment X over assignment Y–and what the tradeoffs are for each option as the class tries to achieve certain outcomes–has helped the design of my classes significantly.

Over at Academic Commons, my first post is up: It’s about the so-called Voluntary System of Accountability being promulgated by the American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) in response to the Spellings Commission.

Inasmuch as the VSA program relies on standardized testing to assess general education / liberal arts outcomes, I have misgivings about its utility.  And since it’s trying to capture “value-added” education, the problem of student motivation seems insoluble: The VSA methodology suggests testing random samples of first-year and senior students.  But, almost by definition, the assessment can’t be part of the student’s grade for the class.  Why any senior would take this seriously is beyond me.

Having said that, I’m probably a little bit more sanguine about the public reporting of assessment data than some colleagues.  On the one hand, I’ll admit that too much federal control of this would be disastrous; on the other hand, I do think that colleges have been so high-handed about the sanctity of their mission, and so blithely confident in the effectiveness of their methods, that unconventional methods are called for.

Anyway, read the whole thing there.