Sunday, September 6, 2015

Becoming What We Hate, or, Maybe They Weren't Stupid Grown-Ups?

An article at IHE yesterday about a creative writing instructor rediscovering the once-hated workshopping technique he thought he had left behind inspired this comment from me:
The process by which we implement techniques we considered absurd or toxic as students (and I have myself recreated some of what I thought ridiculous at the time) needs to be examined more thoughtfully. Were we really wrong, or are we wrong now replicating the failures of the past because our newer methods aren't producing the results we want either? Reverting to our training is a kind of null hypothesis, but those methods were themselves innovations at one time...
So, what techniques do you use today that you thought were stupid when your teachers used them? Mine include test essay questions  that practically walk you through the answer; I have colleagues who have reinstituted the "syllabus quiz"...

18 comments:

  1. I go back and forth on the syllabus quiz. I used it in some classes this semester and no in others. I also promised myself I would never READ assignments to my students, but I do find myself at least "highlighting" parts of them verbally in class while I project the assignment (instead of the handouts we used to get). I hated that when instructors did it (don't you think I know how to read?", but I do think part of what WE hated we hated because we may have been more responsible/capable students than others (after all, we did end up in academia, right?). But, maybe that's just a positive spin on a negative activity...

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    1. It's true that we're the weird ones who never left school -- I have to remind myself of that regularly -- and so 'worked for me' or 'didn't work for me' isn't the only metric we should use.

      I'm actually considering instituting the syllabus quiz in my online classes: in my face-to-face classes I still do the "first day run through" (though in my own fashion) so students should have Some idea what's there. Online courses are ... different.

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  2. specifying things like line spacing on term papers.

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    1. Required page formatting for homework problems in my quantitative science. I always felt that was equivalent to being treated as a grade schooler. Then I got a look at how some of my students turn in their homework if you don't make it required; even after I suggested reasons to do it neatly.

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    2. Online submission has been a liberating godsend for me in that regard. When it's electronic text, I really don't care how it's submitted: it's just words on the screen. I can modify text sizes or spacing myself if I care. Same with stapling.

      Yes, they have to learn some discipline and structure. I admit that I'm coasting a bit on my colleagues here: they have all the usual strictures in their assignments. But my survey classes have lots of non-historians, and I just can't be bothered to spend energy on that when I have citations and historical logic and context to worry about.

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    3. I've been afraid to allow on-line submission for the most part. The work on my assignments having lots of equations and figures I'd need to make sure they had an adequate tools and (the killer) knew how to use them.

      But I don't blame you a bit.

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    4. Likewise: if my assignments involved equations and symbols, I'd go back to paper.

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  3. Syllabus quizzes are great. I let them use the syllabus while they take it, and it gives me a permanent record that they did, in fact, understand the policies. That's come in handy more than once in grade appeals.

    I caught myself summarizing the readings in class, and stopped myself a couple years ago. Now, when students didn't read, I make them sit in silence for the whole period unless they can say something relevant about the readings. You usually only have to do that once.

    I also do a lot of group work, which I downright hated. Still hate. Whenever we do a faculty development workshop and they break us into groups, I always loathe it. But I do it because it works. Damn it.

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    1. Absolutely agree on the group work.
      I really would not like to be a student in my own classes.
      "Everyone is a hypocrite except me"

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  4. When I was a young sprout, I had a writing teacher who told us he didn't want to "spoil" our creative output by telling us in advance what he was looking for in assignments. I found his retroactive grading method very frustrating, and when I became a proffie myself, I swore that my grading expectations would be clear. I provide my students with rubrics and examples of A, B, C, and D papers. We have extensive discussions about what is and isn't an academic source. Their reaction?

    "It's impossible to know what she wants."

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  5. STAPLES! It seems so patronizing and middle school and I hate that I have to do it, but I've got to the point of not accepting work that isn't stapled. A hundred unstapled pages, many without names, quickly get confused while I'm grading and it slows the whole process. They get a few warnings over with the early assignments, but after that I just tell them to find a staple and leave it in my mailbox.

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    1. Oooh! I should start doing that, too!

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    2. STAPLES!!!!!

      I wish I COULD implement that old standby from my youth: the good, swift, solid SMACK in the HEAD.

      It didn't cause me any lasting harm. (TWITCH!)

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    3. I knew Frod would like that one.

      @PP: The downside is that when I refuse to accept their homework, some nice "kid" will end up lending them a stapler on the spot. Sometimes this happens every week with the same student. I feel awful for making the organised kid pick up the slack (and the staples!) for their lazy peers.

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  6. All of them. Everything I do now is aimed at middle school mentality. I act like a disappointed parent and mostly hate how it all went wrong. I used to think folks like Cal were too jaded but I started this page 5 years ago and I've lost some innocence. I do not like the teacher I've had to become.

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    1. I haven't gone that far, I don't think, but I do know the feeling. Every time I put together a reading list for a course, and think about how much more could be on there...

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  7. I have trouble thinking of something, because the context in which I teach is so different from the ones in which I was taught (some of that has to do with the relative selectivity of the institutions, and the changing nature of student bodies, but a lot more has to do with their relative wealth, and their ability to offer a funding/pricing structure that allows most of their students to put most of their time and energy into schoolwork). I do do group projects even though I would have disliked them if they'd been assigned to me (I don't think they ever were), but they do work -- for some students personality-wise, and for both me and the students, efficiency-wise (because they don't have much time to do research/read and I don't have much time to grade, it helps if everyone finds and reads one or two things for at least one major assignment, and I only have to read 3 or 4 products per section.) If I had fewer students, though, I'd design a project that could be done individually or together, and give them a choice. As an introvert, I'm all too aware that group approaches aren't really that efficient in many ways.

    And we never had reading (let alone syllabus) quizzes (small classes; hard to hide), but I give reading quizzes.

    Ditto on rubrics: never saw one; use them.

    And yes, the amount of reading one can assign is frighteningly small. I love literature, and close reading, but I also like cultural context, and broad thematic sweeps, and comparison and contrast between works, and all that is hard to do with current students' reading pace. Admittedly, I did somewhat regret it the one semester I took *two* seminars that involved a novel a week (one of them a Victorian triple-decker), but what's a junior English major supposed to be doing but reading books? The upside to this one: I teach mostly comp, so I don't face the issue all that often (but it depresses me when I do. Even though I'm mostly a fiction person, poetry -- nice, compressed, vivid, complex language that they don't even have to read ahead of time -- seems like a solution, but then I remember that a lot of them are afraid of poetry.)

    One thing I swore I'd never do: use "my work" to refer to research and writing (in contradistinction to teaching, which is apparently someone else's work? Maybe that of "teaching faculty" like the now-me?). I'm still not about to use that terminology -- I'm happy for teaching to be at least part of my work -- but I do wish I'd realized how hard it would be to get a job which actually included some research and writing, and prioritized that part of my grad training a bit more. Maybe it's not too late (if I can do it without shortchanging the students I'm paid to teach, because no, I'm not going to become that professor, not that I actually know many of them, but I've met a few).

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  8. Right after I've explained something complicated, I ask them "any questions?"

    Crickets. And blank stares.

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