And they're off

It's a strange start to the semester, in many ways. This year's election has been surreal; we all swim through its constant downward spiral as if waiting to wake up from a dream, and there are still more than two months to go. Our retreat weekend with the incoming students has been moved up so that we're leaving tomorrow -- after only one class with them. And although I have worked steadily all summer, producing a journal article and 2/3 of a book, I still feel like I napped my way through these three months.

But here we are. Cady Gray has started grade 7 (accelerated math, we love you!), and Archer is warily wading into grade 10 (AP Physics, Algebra II and Programming woo-hoo, AP World History and Pre-AP English, not sure yet). A new batch of Honors students has landed in my class, and will be anxiously trying to keep their heads above water as they learn to navigate Blackboard and post their first assignments. I have two new teaching assistants and two new thesis students to mentor. And I'm on the search committee for our new dean, while at the same time the university searches for a new president.

It doesn't all happen at once, that's the saving grace. Except when it does. Which are the times I feel like nobody's got their hand on the regulator. More than anything I hate the feeling of a bunch of things, even little things, going wrong at once -- I start to get squirrelly when even one of those things happens, like something breaking around the house, as some primal part of my psyche whispers "this is how it begins."

That's because more than anything I like it when things are going right, when everything's under control, when there are no clouds on the horizon. Yesterday I listened to PJ Vogt, co-host of the podcast Reply All, describe how his mom obsesses about the health and well-being of everyone in her extended family. The only time she's truly relaxed and able to enjoy herself, Vogt said, was when everyone is gathered for a holiday or a reunion. That's when she can directly surveill the entire brood. No one is off falling ill or getting into an accident. Everyone's OK.

I don't have a worrying problem at this level, but I do have an addiction to security and safety. It's a trait that serves me well occasionally (saving money), but more often leads me to forgo even small risks or, worse, steer my children away from them for my peace of mind. Letting them go to camp this year was big in that regard. Maybe I can keep on taking those next steps toward their independence and my mental health.

They both had a great time at camp, by the way. Archer's favorite was all-you-can-eat meals at the cafeteria; CG's was the friends she made. You don't know how teary-eyed that last bit makes me, still, a month later.

Prep work

While walking to the office today I was congratulating myself on making it to the end of the school year. The summer, much longed for in the darkest days of February, was suddenly and gloriously here. My calendar: empty. My schedule: my own to determine.

I still have quite a bit of grading to do. But I can do it in the order I prefer. I can do it fast or slow. A couple of assignments unrelated to class lurk on my task board; I owe some researchers an interim report, and an editor an essay. Not behind on them yet, though. Just know that I need to find a little time in the next few days to move forward on them. None of it affects my chill.

Then at about 11:30 this morning, something triggered my memory. I don't recall what it was. Maybe a student assignment I was grading, in which the student innocently asked about Catholic soteriology ... but I think it was long after that. Maybe the teaching assistant for next semester who arrived for an appointment I had forgotten I'd made ... but I don't remember panicking at that point either.

At any rate, I suddenly remembered that I'd agreed weeks ago to lead a discussion on Augustine for a group at church. Was that tonight? I wondered, with rapidly growing suspicion that it was. It was.

I suppose I should be grateful it came to mind at all. I have in the past simply blithely failed to show up to something I agreed to do, for lack of checking my calendar or getting a check-in from the organizer. (If you ask me to do something, send me friendly reminders. I need them.) I dug up the email with the assigned reading, made a few notes, and in 30 minutes I was ready.

What surprised me was how much of my sang-froid was troubled by the event. It wasn't that I had an appointment, or that my anticipated free time was interrupted. It was that I had to prep for something.

I have to prep for things almost constantly. Every day at work I am prepping for a class -- usually a class that meets in a day or two, but (more frequently toward the end of the semester) a class that meets in an hour or two. To prep, I read, take notes, formulate questions for the seminar, occasionally design an activity, and preface it all with reminders about upcoming events and course logistics. I also have to prep for committee meetings by reviewing the agenda, minutes, documents.

I thought that my happiness about summer break was mostly about my calendar being empty -- about not having classes and meetings and a rapidly rotating schedule of deadlines. But now I think it's because I have nothing I need to prep for. When a prep necessity popped up today, I was unaccountably deflated. I hadn't realized how much I look forward to not having to look forward.

These are the good old days

National attention has been focused for the last few decades on the effort to create meaningful standards for K-12 education. In recent years, Common Core standards have become a flashpoint for conflict. I see Facebook posts from friends both local and far-flung complaining that Common Core is forcing an unnatural and incomprehensible pedagogy on children, especially in math, frustrating kids and parents alike.

Parental complaints like this always reminds me of the Peanuts comics Charles Schulz drew in the 1960s about the so-called "New Math," which focused on set theory, concepts of equivalence, and number lines rather than memorizing arithmetic facts and computation methods. It's clear from the set of strips that Schulz understands the new math, and while he lets Sally channel the displeasure of a generation of angry parents, he doesn't side with her. Instead, he presents her as the voice of willful ignorance and stultifying lack of ambition.

Noel and I were talking yesterday about how we sometimes seem to have stumbled through a portal into an alternate educational dimension, with our kids. Their teachers are, almost to an individual, dedicated, energetic, creative, and loving. Their administrations stress college and career preparedness, and I see that emphasis in the teachers' classrooms. The assignments they give and the pedagogies they employ engage our highly intelligent children; nearly every day we hear from them about what they are learning, and the innovative ways the lessons have been brought home to them. Real-world applications have been presented and stressed; when I ask my kids how a certain abstract concept matters in life or careers, they are always ready with an answer.

Maybe we have just lucked out with the teachers and schools we've had. But I don't think so. Seems to me that, despite all the obstacles in their way (of which the greatest by far is legislative parsimony -- far more than unions or out-of-touch professional training, the favorite villains of conservative media in the state), most educators never stop trying to do their job well. I'm constantly amazed at what my kids are learning to do and how they're being challenged. I went to expensive college prep schools when I was their age, and in so many ways they are getting a better education that I did -- largely because teaching methods are so much more advanced, standards are clearer, assessments measure actual learning better, and enrichment opportunities are more plentiful and more challenging.

I'll always be grateful for the teachers and principals that are giving my kids this terrific foundation for advanced learning and lifelong curiosity. What they're being asked to do now -- and how they're rising to the opportunity -- bodes very well for what they'll be able to do five, ten, and twenty years down the road.

The ideal student

This semester, the team of instructors that teaches our first-year sequence is taking a fresh look at the syllabi for those courses. We've had some turnover since we last did this exercise, and it's time to incorporate the new members fully and reassess what the rest of us (including some folks no longer in the team) have brought to the table.

To start off, I borrowed an exercise that I found in a description of an earth sciences curriculum revision. The course designers think of the ideal student who has just finished the class, and ask themselves: What should that student be able to do? What should that student know?

This seems to dovetail nicely with a common topic of conversation among the faculty in my department. When we discover that a student in our upper-division courses, who like all our students has had this introductory sequence, does not know how to do something, we are frustrated. Why can't she cite her sources? Why doesn't he know how to use the library card catalog? Didn't they learn this in the first year? So one could approach answering those "ideal student" questions from the negative side: What gaps in skill or knowledge surprise us when they appear in our upper-division students?

Here's my first pass at answering those questions. Keep in mind that these are high-ability students, for better or for worse. For better: They've almost all had advanced courses (such as AP) in high school, and so can be presumed to start from a higher baseline and make more progress in the first year in college. For worse: They've often been able to conceal lacks and gaps by competence in other areas, and sometimes their schools have not pushed them because scarce instructional resources must be spent on lower-performing students.

The ideal student finishing Honors Core I and II should be able to ...

• summarize the main points of a text
• understand that different academic disciplines utilize distinct toolsets to shed light on "big" cross-disciplinary questions
• defend assertions about an author's meaning and intent with textual evidence
• understand how historical and cultural context shapes thinkers, thoughts, and texts
• write meaningful, effective introductory and concluding paragraphs
• outline an effective argument
• follow that outline to produce an effective prose argument
• construct clear, efficient sentences in formal writing
• construct sentences with active verbs and agential subjects (avoiding passive voice and impersonal constructions)
• avoid empty verbiage, including unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, repetition, and framing devices
• employ effective and well-selected search strategies to find relevant information in the library, on the web, and in online databases
• evaluate the reliability and value of information sources
• apply the perspective of major thinkers and schools of thought to the student's own experience, beliefs, and assumptions
• reevaluate, with an openness to revision, personal beliefs and assumptions in the light of new information, perspectives, and contexts
• appreciate the disciplinary expertise and perspective of each member of the instructional team
• welcome new information, perspectives, and contexts as an opportunity for personal growth
• reflect on the student's own education as a historically-conditioned institution reflecting contested social values and visions
• commit to further thought and exploration as a way of reconciling conflicts of perspective and value
• exercise judgment in responding to feedback

The ideal student finishing Honors Core I and II should know ...

• how Platonic philosophy came to shape current popular understandings of Christianity
• how existentialism challenges claims, both ontological and moral, about essences and natures
• how Darwin, Marx, and Freud crafted rich and compelling accounts of human nature's developmental history
• the broad difference between idealism and materialism as accounts of reality and experience
• the power of environment -- social and physical -- as a shaping force in experience and thought
• the power of language and metaphor as a shaping force in experience and thought
• that the answers to "big" significant questions are complex, historically conditioned, and multi-faceted
• how the kinds of answers we give to "big" significant questions about humanity shape our response to current challenges and crises

I'm sure there's more -- or maybe there should be less. When the rest of the team responds and we look at it all together, I'll be interested to see how our ideal students are alike, and how they are different.

Style and struggle

2015 marks my sixteenth year teaching college freshman in writing-intensive courses. And not just any freshmen -- the top high school graduates of my state. Here's how the first few assignments of any given semester goes. They write informal reading responses for me that I love -- natural voice, clear presentation. Then I give them their first formal writing assignment. And all of a sudden, they write like space aliens forced to learn English through a 19th century grammar text and a thesaurus. Out of 500 words, fully half will be empty verbiage. Dangling introductory phrases appear out of nowhere. Idiomatic prepositions get mangled. Sentences run on and on, liberally sprinkled with commas -- or curiously devoid of a single pause. Avoidance of first person leads to pretzeled contortions -- or extraneous "I believe thats" and "In my views" pepper every other sentence. There is not a sentence to be found that would ever come out of a human being's mouth.

I find my hardest teaching task is getting these students to see and hear the impracticality of their writing. They are mortified when I point it out; it's obvious upon even a cursory second look. Yet the task of formal writing somehow makes it impossible for them to give that second look to themselves. I labor to get them to turn in clean, simple drafts. They have been rewarded for writing in this way, I suppose, and so that is the spigot that gets turned on whenever paragraphing and word counts are among the expectations. I wish I knew the magic words to get them to approach these formal writes in the natural, conversational, clear way they write informally.

Opening day

Ah, the first day of the semester. When everything is pristine. None of the students are jaded yet; none are alienated. No papers or journals are stacked up waiting to be graded. All is possibility.

I read years ago that students form an impression of their teacher's competence in the first few minutes of watching them, and that nothing that occurs thereafter changes that impression. That's a terrifying thought. What if the technology goes wrong in those first few minutes? What if you call someone by the wrong name? What if you make a joke and it falls flat?

A couple of years ago, I went to a teaching workshop where one of my teaching heroes, David Dussourd, told us about what he does on the first day of his introductory biology class. He's an entymologist, and a world-class photographer of insects. "Why study insects?" he asks his students. They typically offer a wide range of answers: to fight insect-carried diseases, to understand evolution, etc. Then Dr. Dussourd offers his answer: "We study insects because insects are exquisite."

That word has stuck with me. It simultaneously conveys the intrinsic value of the object of study, and the wonder and delight it evokes in the student. I think every scholar should feel the same way about her subject. And if that's so, then the role of the teacher is to open the student's eyes to the ways what is being studied is exquisite.

Every year I enter the classroom for the first time hoping to do this for my subject -- whether it be religious belief, religious practice, scripture, axiology, film, television, or the big interdisciplinary questions raised in the first year of our program (what is human existence? how do we experience it together?). And by the end of most semesters I'm pretty sure I've failed. Yet on the course evaluations, somehow it becomes apparent that more students than not have gotten it. They've seen through all the mess of a course -- assignments, logistics, timetables, deadlines, organizational schemes, improvisation -- and grasped what it was supposed to be all about.

It's their perseverance in the face of what Walker Percy called the "preformed symbolic complex," the educational "package" (or "postcard" as we like to call it here), that makes the class work. It's not my doing, believe me. All I can offer is a little space in the window of education with the mud rubbed away, smeary and streaky and soon fogged over. If they are alert and intrepid enough to gaze through, they get all the credit. On the other side, without fail, there is something exquisite.

Changing course

I am halfway through so many things. Halfway through my sabbatical. Halfway through my academic career. Halfway through my life (if I am fortunate). Halfway through raising my children.

Our family has always rendered the old saying this way: Don't change horses in midstream. I don't know if that's the original or some muddle of horses and boats. But I know what it means. If you get cold feet about whether your original strategy is working out, think twice before trying to change it, lest you wind up in the drink.

But like all such bits of folksy advice, it's difficult to know when it applies. Sticking to the wrong methodology just because you fear it might be too late to make a change -- that's not a good idea either. There's wisdom in recognizing when you have made a wrong start, even if you are already halfway through the course.

There's a lot to be said for administration. A good administrator is a tremendous benefit to an organization. Administrators at their best can build structures where wonderful things happen, can reward people who do them, can obtain resources for them, can clarify procedures and expectations so that people know how to get things done, can provide evidence to demonstrate the wonderful things happening.

I know that I want to work for good administrators, and I know that I've been very fortunate to work for them and learn from them. (The bad ones have taught me some important lessons, too.)  But at least where I am now, here at the halfway point, I want to get off the administrative horse.

It's carrying me farther away from teaching, farther away from being a productive scholar. What it's carrying me towards is something that needs to be done, but it's not something I need to do. As a person who likes to be in full control of everything, whether it's any of my business of not, recognizing the difference between "a job that needs to be done well" and "my job" has always been difficult for me. Here halfway through, I have to remind myself that caring about something does not require managing or leading it.

I've received a lot of great advice about this halfway point from relative strangers and from people who know me well. Most of it is simple and obvious, but rings almost heartbreakingly true. Just because you are good at something does not mean it's what you ought to do. You can't be there for the people you care about unless you take care of yourself. Arrange your life to spend the bulk of your time on what's most important.

It's been hard to accept the conclusions that are inescapable when I follow that advice, because I've spend so much time riding this horse to the middle of the stream. But it would be more foolish to stay on this horse than to attempt a change, however risky.

When I entered academia, I wanted to help students mature in their thinking about religion. I've done less and less of that each year. It's no less needed than fifteen years ago; quite the opposite. It would be a personal failure, and a terrible shame, if I let go of that goal when I have the ability and the position to accomplish it. And focusing on what's important to me will allow me to reclaim the energy that administrative tasks tend to drain away. The thought of doing more of the latter in the future is bleak and dispiriting; the thought of teaching the subjects about which I'm passionate, of reading, researching, and writing in the field where I can contribute something unique, is exciting. The message couldn't be more clear.

That's where I stand, halfway through. Changing horses and changing courses is a process. I'm not where I was in this process of rethinking and reorienting six months ago, but if you'd asked me then where I thought I was going, I should have told you, if I were being honest, that I suspected I might end up here. I might have feared it more than anticipated it then. Now the fear is diminishing.

Maybe I've been on the other horse for awhile, and just needed to open my eyes to see which way I've been headed. Check back in a few months and see if I've picked up the reins or have been swept away.

Introductions

My classes are all seminars.  That means the students work as a team throughout the class.  They need each other to bring up ideas, develop them, and work through discussion topics toward learning and understanding.  They don't absorb and respond as separate individuals; they are responsible collectively for generating the material for the class, and they must contribute if they want to have anything to take and make their own.

So on the first day of my classes, we spend a lot of time getting to know each other.  I like to have the students fill out a brief questionnaire, and then share some of their answers with the class.  This semester I'm co-teaching with a colleague, and we have double the usual number of students.  So we built on my usual questionnaire in order to include items from other of our perspectives, while at the same time cutting down the number of questions in order to get through the intros expeditiously.

Today was the first day of our class, and we allotted 20 minutes to go around the room and have everyone speak. There were 27 students, so everybody had less than a minute apiece. And because of the room we were in, they were seated in a large circle with some people in a second row behind.

Yet despite these disadvantages, it was one of the most invigorating introductory sessions I've ever experienced. In the end, it wasn't due to our structure or prep.  It was one simple choice that student after student made when they stood to introduce themselves.  They turned to speak to their fellow students instead of talking to the instructors.

We didn't tell them to do that.  We didn't give any indication about why the introductions were happening at all.  But over and over again, it happened.  The students stood and told each other, not us, who they were and what movies they liked and where they'd like to live if they could live anywhere and what's unexpectedly changed about them in the last few years.  

I was moved, I confess.  No lectures about how they needed to work together were needed here.  They were already in seminar mode.  If that twenty minutes is any indication, it's going to be a great semester.

Trust

Sometimes we teachers get a little too caught up in our status as leaders.  We think of ourselves as the shepherds and the students as the sheep.  They need to be herded and led for their own good.  They are not capable of leading themselves, or of generating worthwhile ideas on their own, or of organizing themselves into groups that get things done without help and prodding.

At least with the students I teach, which are admittedly students of high ability and motivation, that's demonstrably not so.  Each time we give them the opportunity, they show that in the right structure and with clear expectations, they can do amazing things -- and can reap the benefits of having done it themselves, together.  Those benefits include the belief that their ideas are worth having and worth sharing, and the confidence to lead instead of waiting for the teachers to clear the path ahead of them.

Last year at the freshman retreat, after much discussion, we faculty decided to dispense with the folk band we used to regularly invite to provide Saturday evening's entertainment.  They were great, and we love them, but it was never a pleasant task to hound and herd the kids to the event and to glower disapprovingly if any of them left early.  Some freshmen always enjoyed it, but as an event that we planned and scheduled, it became clear that the band was more for us than for them.  The general feeling in the room was "mandatory fun."

In place of that event, we decided to provide an open mic venue for the students themselves.  It was a risky move for some of us.  What if nobody came? What if nobody performed?  Thinking about the kids we have in our community, though -- their general outgoing nature, their desire for the spotlight, their well-documented talents -- it seemed like something that could work.  And it did, like gangbusters.  The kids flocked to the venue, took their turns at the mic with both planned and spontaneous performances, and stayed late.  The secret ingredient, though, wasn't anything we had anticipated.  It was their support of each other.  Each performer who had prepared in advance had already enlisted their friends to encourage and cheer for them, and the whole group took that on for everyone who took the mic, lauding their efforts and giving them massive positive reinforcement.  It was a lovefest.

The same thing happened tonight, with this year's group.  And it followed an event that made the case for trusting the students even more clearly.  We brought in a colleague as the facilitator for the academic discussion about the book we had them read this summer, and he let us know that he intended to let the students generate the questions and come up with answers -- without faculty or teaching assistants leading them.  That made some of us nervous.  What if they just sat there like dumb posts?  What if they hadn't read the book?  What if they couldn't come up with anything worthwhile when they broke into groups and worked together?  Without us guiding them, how could we make sure the experience was worthwhile?  But -- you guessed it -- the students were fantastic.  They came up with incisive questions, worked together to answer them, and gave reasons for their answers, supporting them from the text.  While reporting their answers, they even became passionate about some of the competing interpretations that emerged, engaging in back-and-forth exchanges with each other during which the facilitator became part of the audience, rather than the leader.  This happened because the facilitator set up the situation skillfully and queried them closely about their ideas, helping them sharpen and clarity them.  But it also happened because he was determined to trust them.  And he was right to do so.

I truly believe that when we are disappointed by our students, or when we encounter a situation in which we seem to have uncovered something they are incapable of doing, some limitation in their ability, it is far more likely that we have failed to create a framework where they could succeed.  We have not been clear about what we wanted them to do, and we have not provided the tools or the setting in which they could do it.  Those expectations, tools, and settings are not that hard to make available.  All it takes is a willingness to lead in a different way -- to observe rather than herd, to facilitate their activity rather than making them an audience for ours.  And most importantly, to trust that they can do it, and demonstrate that trust by leaving them to it.

Quest for progress

I'm always trying to improve my teaching, even if I find it difficult to follow through on all the ideas I might have. It helps me to tell my classes what my personal goals are for the class, so they can know that I, too, am continuing to work and get better, and don't hink I have all the answers.

This semester, in both my classes, I'm trying the technique of sending e-mails outside of class for two purposes: (1) to reinforce something important from the previous class, and (2) to set a particular expectation for the next one.  Much of the frustration or disappointment we feel with students not being prepared, I think, is based on not communicating clearly what they should be prepared to do.  I'm going to test that theory this semester.

My university's Instructional Development Center has a blog where professors are asked to write periodically in reflection on their teaching.  I've read the first couple of posts this year with interest, and left comments.  It's good to be in company with colleagues who care about their students' learning, and think together about how best to foster it.  I'm sure all of us with higher education experience know that such an orientation is by no means universal.  If we can give students a taste of professors who have it, though, maybe they'll gain the courage to demand it of all their instructors, though.  I think they should.

Connecting

I'm going to be in Boston for a conference in the fall of 2012.  Looking forward to the visit.  But I don't have to wait to connect with some folks in the city.  I'm going to do that tomorrow via Skype, thanks to an alert and nimble teacher who asked me to visit his class.

Steven Berbeco teaches history and Arabic at the Charlestown School (his Arabic classes were featured on NPR's Day to Day back in 2006).  When he decided to show his kids Walter Salles' film Central Station as part of a unit on Brazil, he went to the web to find some texts to supplement their viewing.  He found my 2001 article "Faith and the Absent Savior in Central Station," and thought it was accessible enough to give to his kids -- less as a way to enrich the information about Brazil than as an example of analytic academic writing.  In that vein he's asked me to Skype into two classes early Monday morning to chat with the students about how I approached the movie and generated an argument about its meaning.

I have to get up an hour earlier than usual to make the date -- Berbeco's first class meets at 7:30 am Eastern time, and I'm going to join them at 7:00 am my time, thirty minutes later.  But it's a happy obligation.  I'm impressed with their teacher's initiative and energy, and excited that I can be present in their class across the miles.

Mr. Mo Mentum

Two weeks ago, my senior seminar students kicked off their Green Bear Project, an effort to secure permanent protection for the Jewel Moore Nature Reserve, with an enormously successful petition drive.  It was one of the best starts any of us could have imagined.  Ideas for follow-up events proliferated.

Between now and then, we had spring break.  And all that energy dissipated, blown away by the winds of South Padre and Panama Beach.

So our job, now that we're back in class, is to get the balls rolling again.  It was surprisingly hard to pick up the threads and figure out what needed to be done next, who should take charge, and what deadlines we could set for ourselves.

In my other class, the service initiative (called the Agora Project) hasn't had any public events yet.  We are still in the planning stages, but time is ticking down to the end of the semester and we need to achieve lift-off.

The two tasks feel surprisingly different.  There is more pressure on the Green Bear Project, because we have already declared ourselves and gathered a cadre of supporters.  Now we need to come through.  For the Agora Project, it can still be anything we want it to be because it is nothing yet.  The anxiety is living up to our own expectations, not those of others.

Four weeks remain in the semester.  Experience leads me to believe with confidence that both projects will come through and achieve their objectives.  But at this point, anything could happen -- and both my students and I are well aware that to see things through will take plenty more effort.

Not worth doing

Twice this week I've found myself talking to students about how they deal with work that isn't worth their time or effort.  As much as we teachers might hate to admit it, such work exists -- arguably, it's rampant across the curriculum.  The work might have purposes for the person who assigned it, but in terms of advancing learning objectives for the students, it is useless.  If I were a student, I wouldn't take an instructor's assertion that the work has a purpose from their perspective as enough of a reason to care about it.  Shouldn't it count toward some goal more significant than "I can't get my A unless I do this," in order to motivate students to do quality work?

Decades ago, when I was a college student, I ran across this phrase in one of those lists of Murphy's Law-type maxims people used to compile (I actually think I had a page-a-day calendar of them):  "A research project not worth doing is not worth doing well."  That one has stuck with me.  There's a grain of truth to it.  Trying to make everything we do something of the highest quality is probably a terrible idea.  There are plenty of endeavors where the ratio of reward to effort just doesn't justify doing your best.  Effort is a limited resource.  We have to apportion it where it will do the most good.

What makes us unwilling to to admit this, as teachers, is that we're allowing for the possibility that the work we assign might be deemed not worth doing well.  Maybe that's a possibility we could take more seriously, though.  Is the work in our classes worth doing for our students?  Is it worth collecting and evaluating for us?  If not both, then why would we expend an effort to do our part of it well?

Getting past "can't"

The always-intriguing Joe Hoyle blogs today about students -- and teachers -- who claim they just can't succeed in their classes.  To the student who says, "No matter what I do, I can't seem to get an A in that course," and the instructor who says, "No matter what I do, I just can't get those students to learn the material," Joe says: What if you were offered $10 million if you did what you just said you couldn't do?

In that case, I believe we'll all agree, the student who find a way to get an A, and the instructor would find a way to reach those unreachable students.  Which reveals, Joe says, that it's not a problem of ability, but a problem of motivation.  What these people are saying is really "I can't succeed within the parameters of what I am willing to do."

For some weeks now I've been bothered by a few memories from my crafting class -- memories that fit into a pattern I frequently witness among other friends and on social networks.  "Oh, I just don't get knitting charts."  "I could never make socks."  "Lace (or cables or colorwork or whatever) is beyond me."

It's simply not true.  These are smart people.  They learned to manipulate complex symbol systems as children.  They have aced organic chemistry, raised children, served souffles, become fluent in Japanese, filled out IRS forms.  I think they believe themselves when they say they can't do it.  But it's shorthand for some far more complicated statement.  "I consider myself a beginner, and that is an advanced skill.""I'm not willing to make the effort to figure out a chart when I can muddle through with written directions and get the same result."  "I can't picture the process of doing this, so I prefer to believe it's utterly mysterious."

If they really wanted to, of course they could do whatever is under discussion.  Their excuses or self-deprecation all come down to this: "My desire is not strong enough to overcome my inertia."

Putting it that way might just shock somebody into hearing their excuses for what they are.  I'm in favor of being honest with yourself, always, and I think what bothers me when I hear people say things like this is that they are not being honest with themselves.  If they are happy with their skills the way they are, say so.  But if they contend that acquiring new capacities as a student, teacher, or maker is something they actually want to do, then they shouldn't pretend that some immovable object -- their own inadequacy or the impenetrability of the task -- is blocking their way.

Six times a year

I believe in the purpose-built device.  As opposed, you see, to the all-purpose device.  I find great pleasure and utility in having a Kindle that is built for reading.  Sure, I could read e-books on my phone or my computer screen, but that's not what those devices were built for, and so reading long passages on them has significant drawbacks.  If I value reading, then I don't want to struggle through the compromise it takes it read on a device that will present e-books, but not well.  I want a purpose-built device so that it disappears and doesn't constitute a barrier to my work.

For years now I've had a tablet PC at work.  I insist on it because there are six times a year, at minimum, that nothing other than tablet technology will do.  Those are the three student essays I typically need to grade every semester.  I want to receive the papers electronically and give them back electronically.  And although I could type up my comments or use Word's track-changes feature to interpose them, I find this process extremely clunky.  I just want to write on the page, cross out things, add things, bracket things, make marginal notes.  And so only a tablet will do.

I like my tablet PC (Lenovo's X series of ThinkPad tablets) just fine.  But my current X200 died for the second time today, the predictable victim of connections through the swiveling hinge.  I can always tell when I'm in trouble -- the swivel suddenly becomes difficult, and after pushing the screen into place, a few days later, the tablet pen won't move the cursor anymore.

So I took it to the help desk, and I expect to get it back with a new motherboard again in a few days.  But it's made me wonder whether the hybrid nature of the tablet PC (it's both a laptop and a tablet) makes it especially vulnerable to this problem -- and whether it is almost time to go with a new purpose-built device for this important task of grading essays in a natural, speedy, and paperless way.  I wonder whether it is time to get an iPad.

A few weeks ago I did some poking around to see if any teachers were grading papers on the iPad, and I saw that some people have cobbled together little ad hoc suites of apps that annotate PDFs or Pages documents.  I don't want to spend time inventing something, really.  I just want to grab a tablet and write on a paper that I can then send back to the student in a form they can read.

How about it, iPad owners and instructor or editor types?  Are you using the iPad to mark up text?  How do you do it, and do you think this use of the device is ready for prime time?

Moment of decision

Twice a year I have to conduct what amounts to a job interview without the interview part.  It's an opportunity and a burden all at the same time.  Thirteen students have applied for positions as teaching assistants in the freshman seminars.  Five positions are available.  One of them is mine.

We get to select our own assistants out of the pool of applicants, and it's always a daunting task.  The students provide written statements about what they hope to contribute to the class, a leadership resume, and samples of their lesson plans and essay writing.  Some of them I've had in class; many of them I haven't.  You'd think that those I know might have an edge with me, but in practice I've selected a number of assistants over the years without firsthand experience of their academic skills.  I feel like I should consider everyone on their own merits and not eliminate anyone from consideration based on what classes they happened to take up to this point.

So from the material they provide, I have to decide who will serve the freshmen best; who will mesh with my pedagogical values most adroitly; and whom I'll be able to work well with.  All of that involves predicting an uncertain future.  Even if I happen to know the applicant as a student in a previous class, there's no guarantee that our experience together forms enough basis for this new decision.

My task isn't to select the best of the applicants, but the one who will be the best partner for me in the classroom.  Or perhaps it's the one to whom I can teach the most.  At any rate, there will only be one each semester.  I have to live with my choice, and so does the student who ends up with me, and the freshmen who will be in our class.  It's a moment that defines a semester for all of us.  So far I've chosen well ten times.  Tomorrow I'll try to make it eleven.

The right start

One of the most thought-provoking reads on the internet, at least for a college professor like me, is Joe Hoyle's Teaching Financial Accounting blog.  I've gotten plenty of ideas from Joe's ruminations on being an effective teacher.

Yesterday Joe wrote about setting the right tone on the first day of class.  That's something all teachers think about -- or should.  As our opening day approaches, I start to rehearse those opening speeches in my mind.

My junior seminar on handcrafting is likely to be the first course of the whole semester for most of my students, given its 9:25 am start time on the very first day of class.  And I'm determined not to spend the 75 minutes talking to my students about how to turn in their work and what the class policies are.  Every semester I resolve to demonstrate on the first day that this class isn't about me talking to them, but all of us talking and working together.  And sad to say, most semesters end up with me reading over the syllabus to them, as we profs have done from time immemorial.

This year it's going to be different, I vow once again.  Thanks to an idea I stole from Joe, I have a fighting chance at making that real.  I sent a two-week-notice e-mail (and Facebook post) to all my students a few days ago.  In it I shared a few pieces of news and tips for success, pointed them to the course schedule, assignments, and policies already posted online for them, and stated some key elements of the philosophy I hope the class will follow.  Given that everything I would normally go over in class on the first day is already available for them to read, I don't plan to review those documents at all.  Instead we're going to spend that day reporting on the work we were assigned over the summer and maybe gathering a list of topics and questions we collectively hope the course will shed light upon.

In other words, we're going to hit the ground running -- with work already underway, with the matter of the course in our hands, with the ideas of the course set pinging around in our conversation and in our heads.  I want the first day to be the model for all the other days to come, not the introductory throat-clearing that students have come to expect.  And I've let them know they will be engaged in learning and contributing from the very first day.  They may not believe it, given what that day is usually like in college, but that's the whole point of expecting something different from them, informing them of my expectation, and then following through with the reality.  If they don't know this course is different by 10:40 am on that Thursday, when the class lets out, then I've failed in my effort to make it real this time around.

With bated breath

For the last month, the students in the film class I'm team-teaching with a digital film graduate student have been working in teams to make short films for their final project. We've been gathering each week just to check in, touch base on logistics, and troubleshoot. Mostly the teams have been on their own -- shooting, editing, and finalizing their films.

I've also had a window on their team work through their blogs and through the minutes of their weekly team meetings posting on our course site. And I know by experience why many professors simply don't want to know what goes on inside those groups. Sometimes the reports don't reflect so well on the instructor's planning. In this case, I found that my careful schedule hadn't taken into account the necessity of digitizing each team's footage after it was shot -- a process that can only be done with the cameras. Meaning that the cameras were tied up and unavailable for team shooting for several hours each week. And since we have only two cameras, a glut of digitizing after the shooting was done made for a bottleneck, and it became difficult to get footage back to the team editors for them to use in constructing their films. I had thought that teams would have at a minimum three weeks to edit, but because of the bottleneck, most teams didn't get their footage until this week -- only one week before the deadline.

I'm perfectly able to take account of this in evaluating their work. The bigger worry is just the effect that this unforeseen difficulty has had on class morale. I would like for students not to feel as if I've set them an impossible task; I would like for them to have confidence in the instructional team, and by extension in the skills and insights we've tried to give them.

At tonight's brief meeting, though, the mood seemed upbeat. I asked students to fill out the course evaluation, and everyone was accommodating. I won't know what they think until after grades have been submitted, and I'm expecting some critique of the course structure and process. It certainly was an experiment, and it certainly wasn't perfect. I could use feedback. My hope is that the feedback will be constructive -- that the students will give us credit for our efforts. And my hope is that the experience of overcoming these obstacles will not only lead to good films at the final exam festival next week, but an appreciation for what they've learned and accomplished.

To tell the truth

So what did my students discover when they fanned out across the campus in search of the truth about parking? What they knew ahead of time was that their friends -- maybe even their professors and advisers -- almost unanimously thought parking was broken, and that something needed to be done.

And what they found was that parking places are not in short supply. What is scarce are spaces within a three-minute walk of any given classroom building. But anybody on a college campus with more than 10,000 students will tell you that students are not entitled to such spaces. "The real problem lies in the unrealistic belief and desire to park at the front door of every class," my students wrote in the executive summary of their findings.

The danger of the perceived problem of too little parking is that it leads to demand for unnecessary, expensive, and precipitous solutions. Remember that one student in my class whose major concern was convincing the administration to build a parking deck? By the time the group's research was done, there were no voices calling for a parking deck. Two factors led to this result. First, as mentioned above, parking spaces were plentiful, if not located on prime real estate. And second, the only prime real estate most people see where a parking deck could be located already has an occupant: the Jewel Moore Nature Reserve, a few acres containing trails, educational material, and the last remaining remnant of the prairieland that once covered this area.

My students became fervent defenders of the Nature Reserve. They discovered how many science students use it as a living laboratory. They found out how many campuses are trying to add green space, while we have a big chunk of it already in our backyard. And they learned that only the ongoing consent of the university administration shields the Reserve from development -- no contracts, no deeds, no official designation to protect it from the campus's insatiable need to grow.

A sense of history was vital to the students' new perspective on the parking "problem." The archive contained newspaper and yearbook stories from the past several decades, all complaining about parking. Students who are here for four years and then gone don't realize what my students learned -- that there used to be roads, traffic, and parking throughout the campus, and that following a nationwide trend starting in the 1990's and continuing until the present day, lots were moved to the perimeter and traffic rerouted around the campus. The result is a pedestrian-friendly campus where community members moving from building to building aren't competing with cars.

Even though we have the parking we need, we can still make the system of parking and transportation better at UCA, my students concluded. Shuttle routes have a checkered history of being added and yanked unceremoniously, and currently they serve only one-quarter of the academic area of campus. The university could do much more to encourage walking and biking, activities that contribute to a healthier student body. Carpooling could be incentivized with premium HOV spaces; higher fees could be charged for access to highly desirable spaces. Maps showing where particular categories of parking are located and what amenities are available to ameliorate the inconvenience of distance could be more user-friendly and available on the website. The campus could become a showpiece for sustainable and innovative transportation technologies and strategies.

Maybe you can tell from this short summary just how much work these 17 students did, and just how much truth they uncovered from the morass of rumor and opinion and uninformed desire that rules this topic. Now came the moment to decide what to do with all this information we excavated and all the knowledge we synthesized. And that's the next chapter of the story.

Putting it together

I don't always relish developing a new class. It's a lot easier to take a syllabus that's already developed and tweak it a bit than it is to start from scratch. Until you begin, it's easy to overlook how much goes into that document -- objectives, policies, assignments both daily and long-term, the flow of topics, and of course, readings for the whole semester.

But I'm tremendously excited about the course I'm developing for next semester, "Craft Wisely: The Past, Present, and Future Of Handmade." In fact, I can't remember the last time I was looking forward the hard work of syllabus construction this much. For one thing, it's a course that students have been hounding me to teach for a couple of years. For another, the topic is something I spend much of my free time -- and work time -- thinking about. There's a real chance that I'll learn as much or more in the class as my students. And I believe the course could put into action many of the pedagogical ideals I've come to cherish over the past several years -- about experiential learning, students taking on teaching roles, and class members all working together to support the group's overall goals.

I'm still glad I don't have to start from scratch. A professor at another institution was kind enough to share her syllabus and bibliography from a course with some similarities. That gives me a big head start -- a reading list and some assignment ideas to start with -- and makes the task of putting the whole thing together much less daunting.

But my course will have a larger scope than my model, and will range more into the philosophical and historical modes. The question then becomes how to keep it focused, and how to ground its diverse facets in a common experience.

I've got some great ideas. And the desk copies of my required text arrived today; I wanted to stop everything and read them cover to cover. It's not going to be perfect the first time out. I expect to make a bunch of mistakes, as we all do when mounting a course for the first time. But I'm going to work hard to build a structure with the required specificity and flexibility. And best of all, I'm already looking forward to the second time I teach it, when it will be that much better.