The Salt-Box

Dr. Crazy has a great post this week about the intensity of an assistant professor’s workload, and how that’s different from graduate school. I also teach at a “regional comprehensive” university, and so have a roughly similar mix of teaching, research, and service expectations. She says more or less everything I would want to about work; this post is about mindset.

The biggest difference for me–apart from service expectations–was a more fully-realized consciousness of teaching in a department, and the idea that one is responsible to one’s colleagues (and vice versa). When I taught in graduate school, and afterwards as a Brittain fellow, it was predominately composition. I worried about surviving the paper load, about helping students to write a bit better, and that was it. I didn’t really need to think about how the course’s content fit into a broader curriculum. The times I got to teach an upper-division class, I could think of those as quasi-autonomous entities, little self-contained jewels. My vision of my students was strictly one-semester: It wasn’t like I had students from composition turning up two years later in my Dickens and Dostoevsky class.

But now, almost every semester I teach courses at all levels of the curriculum. (Though, weirdly, I have no first-year courses in the upcoming year.) And it’s interesting to see the same students again and again on a regular basis, either as they progress through the major, or as they come back for electives. It makes tangible the (obvious) point that students progress through time, have different needs at different moments in their education, and so forth.

And teaching a course that’s more or less required* both for the major and for gen ed–such as, for instance, Brit Lit II–requires, I have found, more thought than I would’ve given to it as a grad student. Majors and nonmajors arguably need quite different things from such a course: Majors need some orientation to periodization, strategies for reading, and so forth; nonmajors might benefit from these, but one also wants to “play the hits” a bit. I’ve also found it strange to teach the Victorians in the survey, inasmuch as one feels obliged to teach–how to put this?–”things other people would expect students to know.” That’s a set that intersects imperfectly with “things I’d want people to know about Victorian literature.” Plus, one ends up trying to recruit a bit for one’s classes: since students can easily navigate the curriculum without a Victorian novel class, I want to bait the hook a little bit.

Then, when I teach that Victorian novel class, or the junior-level Victorian survey, I try to think of how the course fits in with other courses being offered, and how it intersects with the overall emphases of our department. (When I taught T. S. Eliot under the auspices of “Major American Authors,” rather than as a “Studies in British Literature” section, this became an explicit theme for the course.)

Having a multi-year vision of my students changes lots of things. In composition, for example, I try to focus on thesis-based writing, because that’s prevalent in the humanities. But in my survey and upper-division courses, I’ll sometimes overplay born-digital assignments because it’s my impression that many students aren’t being asked to do them elsewhere in our curriculum. Aside from the sheer # of students, fitting courses into a sequence has required the most thought in my time on the tenure-track.

(And, hey, in two weeks I’ll officially be an associate professor–I can start making snarky comments about “the junior faculty,” and “these kids just out of grad school”!

Update: Welcome, InsideHigherEd.com readers!  You might also be interested in this recent post on service.

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*Technically it’s not required for either. But students do have to take a literature course to fulfill gen ed, and many do this with a survey. In the past, when Brit Lit II counted for international credit, nonmajors would use it to double dip, fulfilling two requirements at once. (It’s not required for the major because the dept offers 6 surveys–World Lit I/II, Brit Lit I/II, and American Lit I/II. You can’t have 18 credits of the major be surveys. [How do Americanists fill a whole year?] Still–lots of people take it.)

Today I found out that my parents check up on A’s and my teaching by reading RateMyProfessors.com regularly.

Awesome.

This month’s issue of Macworld imagines a typical student’s writing process, and it isn’t pretty:

If you’re using Safari to do so some heavy-duty browsing, you’ve probably got multiple windows and multiple tabs open at once.  For instance, when doing research for a paper, you may open Wikipedia in one window and Google in another, and then [apple]-click to open multiple tabs within each window.

Sounds like a C paper  to me,  magic Safari tricks or no.

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.

I’m grateful to Chuck and Alex for their encouraging comments about my plan to make my grade distributions public, and it still seems like a good idea to me.

However–and maybe this is just me–it is slightly anxiety-provoking.  Last night, for instance, not long after writing the post, I went to sleep, and dreamed that the provost read the post, and ominously called me in for a meeting to discuss it.

I do think there’s a shame that can attach to grading, at least in the humanities.  “My, that’s a lot of A-s . . . ” or “You really thought she was a B writer?” or “What was wrong with you that semester?  So many Cs . . . ”   And then I get defensive. But that’s part of the reason for pursuing this–to try to open up that shame to sunlight.

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.