College Ready Writing 1.0 – Page 9 – Archive of the Original CRW Blogger Blog

Teacher or Preacher? On Basic Writing, Gen Ed Courses

I have a particularly bright student in my developmental writing course this semester. While I know why he is in my class (ACT scores not high enough), I’m not entirely sure how that happened. It would seem that he fell through the cracks. He is everything that you dream about in a student, especially when you are teaching developmental writing: he attends class, he takes the work seriously, does his homework, and participates in class discussions. But I know that he resents the hell out of my class, especially when I have to come down hard on the other students who don’t show up, don’t do the work, and don’t take it seriously. One day I made sure that he knew that I knew that the speech was not meant for him. He shrugged, said he understood, but it got his back up when I started to preach. I hate church, he said, and I don’t want to hear a sermon at school.

This conversation took place almost a month ago. It’s troubled me ever since. I want my classroom be an open place for an exchange of ideas, but, at the same time, there are certain lesson, sermons so to speak, that the students need to hear, often repeatedly, if they hope to be successful in college. While taking the time to do the work and taking that work seriously doesn’t guarantee success in college, it certainly increases the odds. I know there are students who can do little to nothing during college and still do well (I was one of them), but I also know that my developmental students can’t afford to allow school to be the last thing on their list of priorities if they want to graduate and not have wasted their money.

I speak from a position of experience. I have taught developmental and other lower-level general education courses for more than ten years now (seriously, when did that happen?). I’ve seen the students who struggle and ultimately succeed versus those who don’t even bother trying. I also know that one of the ways we learn is through repetition, so I repeat the core mantra every chance I get. But what does that say about my teaching style or my attitude towards my students. On one hand, I want to treat them like adults, but on the other hand, I seem to scold them like children. Minister to them like a flock of unthinking sheep. But if we teach in an influence-based society, is it any wonder some of us adopt a strategy that mirrors some of the most successful personalities, like the preacher?

Teaching might not be a vocation, but there are some very real similarities between what I am expected, required, or choose to do in front of the classroom and what a good preacher does. But is this a good thing? Religion is often seen as a means of indoctrination, and it pains me to say that in some ways, I am trying to indoctrinate my students on how to be successful in college and beyond. I’ve written before how for many of us in academia, institutions of higher learning are the new church, and our religion is based on the tenants of hard work and critical thinking. Some sections of society think that if everyone had a little more God, this world would be a better place. Nationally, however, the common refrain is that this world would be better place if were all just had a little more higher education.

In my classes, it boils down to getting my students to think critically about why they are in college, and then convincing them to use that as motivation to do the unpleasant tasks that are required of them. I know I am supposed to make my classes relevant and engaging, which I try very hard to do, but when faced with a classroom full of students who tell me that they hate writing and reading, well, no matter how exciting and entertaining I make the assignments, they will still have to write and read, in my class and beyond. So, yes, I guess I am a bit of a preacher, trying to convert the masses. But, it is only one of the many personas I use when I teach.

At least he didn’t say I reminded him of a missionary. That’s a whole other can of worms.

Calling All CRW Readers! An Invitation for Feedback

I don’t know if I’m writing on topics that people aren’t interested in, if my current state of end-of-semester doldrums are impacting my writing, or if I’m just not as dedicated as I was to tweeting my posts, but my numbers are way down. This, along with everything else, has got me down. I have at least six posts that I have been meaning to or wanting to write for the past month, but they aren’t coming together for me.

Topics include:

– What role professors/instructors play in this information age;

– Who should go to college (although Tenured Radical seems to have covered the topic quite nicely);

– My pre-academic jobs (and what they taught me);

– Response to the consistent accusation that professors are disconnected from the “real world”;

– Why you should be nice to your administrative assistant(s);

– How to talk like a pirate and make a living (trust me on this one).

But I am stuck. It’s hard to be motivated when people don’t seem to be responding to my posts. I’m thinking that, for the summer, I’ll be cutting back on the posting, in part because, hey, it’s summer, but also because I need to focus on my research. Maybe this summer, the blog will be more about my research than my teaching (makes sense, as I won’t be teaching, no?). I don’t know. Maybe I’ll write about what my dreams are; seriously, you didn’t think I wanted to be an instructor the rest of my life, did you?

So I’m going to throw it open to you, dear, loyal readers, tell me what you’d like to read about. Why is it you come here? What can I do better or do more of? I know it can be a little bi-polar around here, with both talking about teaching, but also talking about larger issues of higher education. Is that a strength, or a weakness?

Either post it in the comments below, or tweet me (@readywriting, if you didn’t already know). I’m serious about this; I wouldn’t be a good teacher if I didn’t listen to my students, and thus I wouldn’t be a good blogger if I didn’t listen to my readers. Please, don’t make this like the classroom of blank stares and awkward silence. I know y’all are better than that. 🙂

How to Evaluate Teaching? Tale of Two Classes

This semester has been a study in contrasts for me. I have two of the same class on different days, and the two classes couldn’t be more different.

The class that is on one set of days has “lost” about one third the students. On any given day, only about 14 students are present of a class listed at 23. The class itself takes place at mid-day, so one would imagine that it is neither too early or too late in the day to reasonably justify many of the students not showing up. But the students who are left are a pleasure to teach; they participate thoughtfully in class discussions, always have their work done, and, if they don’t, generally don’t make excuses. They are engaged with the readings and invest real time and effort in the essay writing process. Their grades are generally good, and even those whose grades aren’t stellar are making a real effort.

My other class is first thing in the morning. I don’t think one student has dropped it, and they all show up consistently and persistently. But the class is painful. While they all show up, more than half the class doesn’t seem to have done the homework. No one wants to offer any sort of meaningful contribution to class discussions. They visibly resent any work they are assigned. And the list of excuses I get from them is bordering on infuriating (this is the class that inspired my post on ethos and emails). And while they all dutifully go through the motions on the writing process, they rarely ever actually change anything in their papers. And it shows in their work. Grading their papers is an exercise in endurance.

The content in the classes is exactly the same; same readings, same assignments, and ostensively I’m giving the same lectures. But of course, the dynamic in each class is completely different. But it leads me to wonder how we can effectively evaluate teaching (or, to use current rhetoric, ensure accountability)? I don’t know how this different dynamic will translate in my students evaluations at the end of the semester. I’m also not sure that if the results of a peer evaluation would be the same if they came to one class over the other. On the one hand, I have a dynamic class with lots of absences, versus a less dynamic class with stellar attendance. Does my apparent failure to engage my early morning class reflect a teaching deficiency on my part anymore than my success in the later class represent an inherent gift or talent? Nor will the final class average really reflect communicate anything meaningful; thinking about it, the two class averages will probably turn out to be identical, with one class of failures because of no-shows balancing out some very good students, while the other class will just generally be lower.

We, as teachers, cannot control what kinds of students we get in our classes. If they drop or not is not always a reflection of the job the teacher is doing. Nor is their willingness to take the work seriously or their ability to do it well. I am not afforded the flexibility to simply throw out the syllabus because it is not working in one of my classes. I can’t control what time of day I teach (students HATE morning classes). I can teach the same course in two different classes and get two completely different results. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t evaluate and give periodic feedback on professors’ performance in the classroom; I’m saying we need to take the long view and remember, so much of this is out of our control.

Writing Advice: Take Your Time

Seems like I’m back to writing about teaching and my students after a bit of a break to talk about higher education more generally. Today, I handed back an essay assignment to my first-year composition students. Being that this is second semester, most of the students taking my class either failed their first try or did developmental writing during the fall semester. Needless to say, anything we write in the class is a huge challenge for both the students and myself.

I blindsided them in a way by demanding that they have a meaningful thesis for their recent compare and contrast essay. I struggled with how to help them figure out what meaningful things they could say in their essay without simply telling them, your essay could be about x, y, or z. I wanted them to work through it on their own. Each student had their own unique ideas, as well as their own unique set of challenges. How, then, do I maximize my effectiveness?

It turned out that the only way I could do it was to work with them one-on-one. I read and gave detailed feedback to a draft and set aside class time for conferences. A large part of what I ended up having to do was cheerleading, reassuring that yes, they did have a good thesis, examples, and organization. Yes, I had to talk out some of their thesis or suggest better examples, but for the most part my students had good ideas that they just didn’t believe were good. But, to me, it felt like pulling teeth, getting this essay out of my students.

When the long (we worked on this essay for almost a month) process was finally completed and the students handed in their essays, I was thrilled with the results. Each student had, indeed, found their thesis and crafted an essay that tied their sometimes disparate examples together. The class, or at least the part of the class that actively participated in the process, did very well. And I told them as much. But I also pointed out the one important factor in their success: time. They took the time to work on their essays. The time and effort paid off, but they needed to understand that if they wanted to continue being successful in their essay writing, they needed to give themselves the time.

Learn what is the most difficult part of the writing process and start early enough to get that part done without panicking or rushing. Look at your schedule for the semester, and rather than blocking out the weekend before the essay is due, block off the one two weeks before it is due. Even if you’re not actively writing, at least plan to start thinking/reading/free writing/outlining on the topic. Take the time to sit down and run your ideas by the professor at least a week before the essay is due (it’ll look good for your ethos, too). Allow yourself an opportunity to try, fail, and then try again. Make sure you can read through the essay at least once, carefully, before handing it in.

All of this takes time. I tell my students that one thing that I do is give them the gift of time in my class to allow for them to see that if they take the time, they’ll get results. I’m hoping that if they can see the impact extra time has on their final work and final grade, they’ll really take the lesson to heart. I’m not optimistic, I’m sorry to say, but at least I tried. And I can also sleep well at night knowing that, for at least one essay, we did it and we did it well.

Student Ethos and Email Etiquette

I’ve been silent this past week, in part because I got sick, fell behind, prepared the house for weekend guests, planned my soon-to-be four-year old’s birthday party, partly because while I had a whole list of planned posts, I couldn’t concentrate on writing them. No, I was distracted by trying to come up with a way to write the following posts without impacting my own ethos as a writer and a teacher in higher education.

I received a number of emails from my students all at the same time that really, really got under my skin. Now, I am (still) a regular visitor to College Misery, and I talk to my colleagues, so I know that my students are not an anomaly and professors all over the country are dealing with emails from students that are…frustrating in any number of ways. What really bothered me was that we have just spent an entire semester talking about ethos in writing – how a writer is perceived and how students want to be perceived as writers, students, professionals. We are even doing a blog assignment so they can really start to think about how they are seen by people other than their professor.

But nonetheless, I think it’s important that students realize how their emails impact their ethos with their professors. This, of course, should be expanded to face-to-face meetings and any assignment, written or otherwise, handed in to their professor. And I tell them this. I had hoped that the lessons about ethos, even though not explicitly taught, had been applied by my students to other facets of their communications with me. Namely, their emails.

But I guess not. This troubles me not because their emails communicated to me that my class was indeed not a priority, but because they haven’t applied what they have learned beyond the classroom setting, beyond what they were “told.” And again, I can imagine an undergraduate reading this and complaining, I didn’t mean it that way. And I get that how a student understands the ethos they are (trying) to present versus what a professor may actually read and receive.

For example (and this is an example based on an email I received this week), a student emails explaining that he has an opportunity to go hunting but it would mean that he would miss two [out of three] of the classes this week. Would it be ok, and he promises he’d make up any work that he missed, especially if I let him know now, before he leaves.

Now, some additional context. They have a paper due next week, and the classes missed are peer review/writing workshop classes. This student is pretty good; not the best but also not the worst. I can imagine the student thinking that they were doing the right thing by a) letting me know they intended to miss class, b) not lying about why they were missing class, and c) showing initiative by proactively asking for the work to be missed.

For me, all I read is: your class, in fact, university, is not that important to me. And that may be true. But why, then, should I, someone with over 100 students all taking writing-intensive classes from me, make you a priority, or devote extra time to you? I also wonder about how serious a student he is when he claims he can keep up with the work while outdoors trying to shoot animals.

Critical thinking. We, as professors, want our students to develop the skill. Employers want employees with that skill. But my students can’t think critically about their own communications with their professor, the person, for better or for worse, who holds their future (through their grades) in their hands. It’s frustrating. I don’t care that the student doesn’t care about my class. I care that they don’t see what that might be a problem.

This email will become a unit on ethos, on digital communications, on email etiquette, and on why my students are even in college to begin with. I’m sure I’ve opened a can of worms by writing about it, but it’s been bothering me for a week, and I needed to get it off my chest.

What do you think? Why do students have such difficulty recognizing how their communications with their professors impacts their ethos?

More Thoughts on the Standardization of Higher Education

My post on the standardization of higher education from earlier this week was a hit, so to speak, driving traffic and stimulating some interesting discussions on Twitter. I’ve decide to address some of these concerns and continue venting on what I think is going to be the undoing of higher education in this country.

I received two tweets (one from @qui_oui and another from @rwpickard) about how a certain degree of standardization is necessary for transfer and the like. Look, I’m all for standards. We should all have a clear idea of what a 100, 200, 300, or 400 level class should contain within a discipline (how much to read, write, and the level of ideas/concepts expressed). I also understand that in other disciplines, you need to know a certain set of skills or concepts before moving on to the next level; I completely understand that Cal I has to come before Cal II, and that there has to be some standards in order for a student to make progress in their education. But, these standards would seem to grow organically from disciplinary requirements. Sometimes they are imposed by professional organizations, but often in the name of safety; I’m glad that my nurse has a standard set of skills that are required of her before being accredited.

It’s when we get into the “softer” disciplines, like English, where I live, that things get dicey. I have written already about my experience teaching an upper-division Modern Literature course. I appreciated the fact that, within a set of clear guidelines (400-level class on English literature written during what is known as the Modernist period), I had the freedom to teach the texts that I wanted to using the approaches that I thought would work best. I was able to “create” arches, comparisons, contrasts, and evolutions with the works we studied. Modern literature is a huge field (much like any field in English) and each professor will teach the course differently, according to their biases and expertise, but also based on the make-up of the student body and institutional culture. What works in a Modern Literature course at Yale won’t necessarily work in a Modern Literature course at Regional State U. But we can safely assume that given the guidelines and descriptions, a student coming out of an upper-division Modern Literature course should be able to do a certain set of things, from identify the major authors and features of the movement, as well as write a lengthy, in-depth research essay on a work from that period. How we get there will vary wildly.

And it should. Some may point to my characterization of the class as a disaster as a reason why we need more, not less, standardization. The argument goes that I was not to be trusted with coming up with the class, and instead I should have been given the syllabus and reading list to teach in a prescribed way (hey, just give me the script while you’re at it). I say that my failure is an indication that the institution needs to invest in professors, not temp workers, to teach class. If the administration continues to undermine and devalue what goes on in the classroom, no amount of standardization and accountability measures are going to improve student learning. Saying that we should teach all students the same things in the same way, all in the name of accessibility, is not the answer.

Which brings me to the next point of contention. Faculty, then, should then take it upon themselves to develop the accountability measures. We do already; it’s called the syllabus and grading. Apparently, that’s not good enough anymore. But is that the faculty’s fault or the fault of an administration that continually undermines the classroom experience (and professor’s authority) in the classroom? I just came across this essay about how we, the faculty, are increasingly pressured to let learning slide in the name of “customer service”:

Faculty members were being asked to be responsible for students instead of creating a system within the classroom that makes the students responsible for themselves.

This is what I am talking about when I say that the administration often don’t support what professors and instructors are trying to do in the classroom, but then blame us when learning doesn’t happen. Students are seen as tuition machines, and we are told they are to be retained, at all costs. When a student isn’t happy, we hear about it and need to adapt to keep the customer satisfied.

I say, get our backs, get out of our way, and let’s see what happens.

Money is being invested everywhere on campus except in front of the classroom, illustrated by increasing class sizes, the increase in online education, and the over-use of adjunct faculty. Students get the message; the professors (and learning) are the least important component on campus.

And even when faculty are involved in developing the accountability measures, it is usually because they are being required to do so and have to follow narrow guidelines with the demand for very prescriptive (and arbitrary) outcomes, in order to feed the data machine. Yes, cosmetically, faculty came up with the measures, but our hands are tied, impacting the results. Rather than having measures and standards that are organic to a given discipline, we have data driven measures that give us stats, but little else.

Time and resources are also a factor. Often, it is an already over-worked tenure-track faculty member (or committee of tenure-track faculty members) who is tasked with coming up with the measures. Those measures are then imposed on even more precariously positioned instructors and adjuncts, who are already burdened with the demands of teaching intensive introductory courses to larger and larger numbers of students. But none of that comes into the minds of the administrators requiring the extra work from their instructional staff (tenure-track and contingent). There’s no course release, no reduction in class sizes, nothing. Something has to give, and it is either dropping other elements from the syllabus or devising the “easiest” measures to implement.

There’s a win-win situation for student learning outcomes.

The Standardization of Higher Education = #FAIL

I was at an institutionally-mandated get-together for those instructors who taught the various developmental classes (math, reading, writing) at our institution a few weeks ago. We were hearing about the educational technology the math department was using to get students up to college readiness when the instructor presenting told us a disturbing little anecdote about how she caught a cheater last semester. “It was just like Big Brother!” she exclaimed excitedly. Ugh.

Now, I’ve already voiced my thoughts about our over-reliance on ed tech as the savior of education, but this statement made me think about one of the unintended (or intended) consequences of the move to standardize higher education, heavily facilitated by educational technology: the constant monitoring of all activity of both instructor and student. If we can standardize and record every instance of learning in a student’s academic career, then we can certainly pinpoint where learning failed, exactly which teacher or advisor is responsible for derailing a student’s career.

The more we standardize, the more we continue to infantilize our students and undermine our faculty. We are basically telling students that they aren’t responsible enough to learn and professors can’t be trusted to teach. Think about that for a second. Students can’t learn, and we can’t teach, so you need to be constantly monitored to make sure that these things happen.

How does this move towards standardization and assessment actually help students? What happens when institutions and accrediting boards rigidly dictate when and where learning happens in higher education? When instead of facilitating “informal” moments of learning, the university is required/requiring rigid reporting/return on investment data on campus talks, meeting spaces, and optional (but really mandatory) activities? Or that students (and eventually instructors/professors) measure success exclusively through test scores?

How do we teach and learn through experience, experiment, trial and error, and failures when Big Brother is always watching us? Does $44 billion really buy the Federal government the right to dictate to us how and what we teach, or how and when students can learn? As I put in the comments of Mary Churchill’s post “Can We Afford to Play,”

As we discover with young kids, we can spend all the money we want, but at the end of the day, all they want to play with is the empty cardboard box. I think the same thing goes for higher education, especially on the side of the professors. If professors didn’t have to worry as much about constant accountability measures, measurable outcomes, and reporting, we might be more likely to relax along with the students. If more people in front of the classroom had job security and more time, they may be more invested in the students outside of the classroom. If it didn’t feel like Big Brother was constantly monitoring all of us, we might relax, let loose, and really, really, learn.

At a certain point, the institution needs to get out of the way and just let learning happen. I have been critical of the type of “leisure” that takes place on (or rather off) campus, but is this behavior a result of the high states, high pressure environment we’ve created on campus? Most faculty and students can’t wait to get off campus at the end of the day; why is that? Universities have invested billions in creating “spaces” for students, faculty, and sometimes even community. Some have been very successful, but I wonder how many of them developed organically, and how many of them were responses to accreditation board requirements (having gone through two at two different universities, this is an important component for any re-accreditation)?

We may end up passing whatever tests they put in front of us, delivering more mandated content in increasingly rigid ways, but at the end of the day, we have failed.

What Ed Tech Can’t Do

In Fahrenheit 451, one of the characters describes what school is like in the near future:

But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and then telling us it’s wine when it’s not.

Now, read a Tweet from a teacher in LA:

f2f is going 2 end up being security aka paras 2 make sure kids dont get on facebook in jr college f2f will disappear.

If Sir Ken Robinson (and many others) are right that the way schools are set up now was to prepare workers for factories, what are we preparing our kids for now, increasingly relying on computers to teach them? How to follow orders from a machine?

This is, of course, a dystopic view of the future, fueled in part by the fact that I am currently teaching Fahrenheit 451. But, I can’t help but wonder, are we really helping our most vulnerable students when we increasingly rely on technology rather than more traditional face-to-face instruction. Where are the mentorships, the relationships, the systems of support, of learning how to “think with others“? Certainly, we need to prepare students for a world that is increasingly interconnected through technology, but when do we say, enough, and start valuing, really valuing, personal interactions, rather than seeing it as an unnecessary cost, a budget line that is easy to eliminate.

Apparently, technology and online education is the real disruptive influence in education, allowing us to offer degrees for less than $10k. Having written about this very issue for the University of Venus recently, I remain skeptical. In the comments, the author of the post on creating a degree that costs less than $10k addresses my concern about teachers needing to eat with a response of only wanting teachers who are truly passionate about teaching. Great. More about how teachers are supposed to sacrifice everything for the greater good of “education. ” I am all for a more entrepreneurial approach to education, but I think we are trying to think bigger, rather than the true disruption coming from going smaller. If anything, money is being spent in the wrong place, in infrastructure instead of people.

I’m starting to see the movement in education as analogous to industrial farming; we all embraced farming technologies because food got cheaper, safer, more plentiful, and easier to grow (ok, education hasn’t gotten any cheaper, but isn’t that the goal of increasingly using technology?). But we now see that it might be cheaper, but it isn’t any healthier (and in many cases less healthy), it is more devastating to the over-all environment, and only economically beneficial to a handful of massive multi-nationals. Is this really the kind of education we want to offer our children, particularly our poorest and most vulnerable? In poor neighborhoods, they’ll be fast food and private online edu.

The disruptive innovation in farming and food isn’t in technology; it’s in scaling down, finding balance, quality, and over-all sustainability. Organic farmers, growers, and animal ranchers, urban farmers, and others are changing the way we think about food. We might see disruption coming from similar sources in education. Take for example a movement in England where people have taken over abandoned buildings and turned them into schools; curious people, some smartphones, and voila, learning. No bells, no whistles, no nothing. That’s disruptive. Not providing standardized pre-packaged education online offered by underqualified individuals with little to no support. Government, school boards, and universities need to reinvest their money in the people who teach and create knowledge; the rest can clearly fall away and not impact education. In fact, it may facilitate it.

Next fall, I will be integrating a lot more technology in my classroom, in part because of forced standardization and accountability. But part of it is trying to make my class more effective. My job is to teach, but it is also to coach my students, particularly my developmental students. It’s to disrupt their worlds in order to encourage critical thinking or knowledge creation. A computer program might be able to award a student a “badge” (again, what is that preparing students for in their professional futures?), but a computer program can’t look a student in the eyes and tell them that they can do it, they can write, that they truly did a good job, ask them the right questions to get the heart of whatever problem they’re having, care enough to keep asking, or even express sincere disappointment when they let you down.

There’s a reason why the children of professors overwhelmingly go to small liberal arts colleges. There’s a reason why rich and middle-class parents fight to send their kids to good schools with small class sizes and good teachers, and will continue to do so, no matter how expensive it becomes. Technology is a tool, not a replacement, nor a silver bullet, especially for our most vulnerable students.

Maybe none of this matters. Maybe we are training our most vulnerable students to listen to machines rather than people. Workers of the future.

Reasons Why I Blog: An Examination

It’s been a year since I’ve started blogging. It seems like as good a time as any to look back over the year and reflect on how blogging has changed me.

Yes, you read that right, it has changed me. I am more engaged, more reflective, and, perhaps, more militant, in my own small way. I don’t just read about issues on higher education, I think about them in order to write about them here. When I teach (or, more accurately, after I teach), I am forced to reflect a little more carefully about what I am doing and why, because I need something to write about.

I am more connected to the larger community of academics. I write, people read, share, and respond. I know I have not only an audience, but a community of people who read and who I read. We have conversations, and maybe one day will meet face-to-face. Until then, I know more people than I ever did as a traditional academic.

And I know I am having an impact. I figured that between the four institutions I have taught at, I have reached approximately 1100 students (keep in mind, while I was doing my PhD, I only had one class; my other experiences were closer to full-time, but with writing intensive classes with lower caps). At least that many people have read my top post, How Higher Ed Makes Most Things Meaningless, especially considering that it was featured on both Inside Higher Education and Ed Leader News. Imagine my delight to find out that no less a figure than Henry Adams of The Academic Bait and Switch fame on the Chronicle and that he linked to my post in the comments of another Chronicle piece (which I can’t find right now). More people than I have ever taught have read that one post. More people than who have seen me speak at a conference. More people than who have read any of my academic essays.

But it is all of the people I have met outside of academia, those who are passionate about topics, rejecting the status quo of education at all levels, caring deeply about meaningful change. For me, blogging has opened my eyes to the world outside of academia. Does that sound like a sheltered academic statement? Indeed, it is. There is a degree of willful ignorance that an academic needs to have in order to survive the demands of living the academic life in higher education. The best thing that has ever happened to me is that I was unemployed for a time; I was forced to see thing differently and to do things differently. I saw others letting go and being successful, and it has empowered me let go.

Blogging has also, admittedly, fueled the more negative aspects of my personality, manifesting itself specifically as an obsessions with my blog’s stats. Lurking deep beneath my desire to be an academic is a need for validation, and the stats are one way that I can feel that sense of validation now that I am off the tenure-track. I see sites that do better than I do; College Misery gets the same amount of traffic a week as I do a month, if I’m lucky. Then again, misery loves company, and I’m not sure what thoughtful writing on the current state of higher education as well as teaching attracts. Less hits, apparently. Which is also depressing.

Wait, I’m celebrating here. I’m not perfect, and I still have some things I need to work on.

I’d really like to thank a few people: Mary Churchill who has been so supportive and inspiring me with her great work at University of Venus and Old School/New School; @ToughLoveForX who I have no idea how I “met”, but I am amazed at how connected this retired printer is, especially in the world of education; @comPOSTIONblog for founding #FYCchat with me; Worst Prof Ever for just generally kicking ass and doing and saying all the things I’m still not quite ready to; and all of the people who have come here, read my posts, commented, followed me on Twitter, shared my writing, and encouraged me to keep writing.

My goal for the next year? Get big enough to attract trolls. 🙂 I’m only half-joking.

What is College For? Spring Break Vs Reading Week

In Canada, because spring comes around so much later, we call the week vacation that occurs during the semester that occurs during the first months of the calendar year Reading Week. I still call it that, out of habit. My students here, they have no idea what I’m talking about. Spring Break, I say, it’s what we Canadians calls Spring Break; it’s just cruel to say spring when there’s still three feet of snow on the ground. But, I also think that it’s a reflection of a different attitude Canadians hold towards higher education.

I asked one of my developmental writing students what he was planning on doing for Spring Break. He’s off to Florida to party. This particular student has missed a great deal of my class because he had strep throat (yes, he had a doctor’s note). This student is also repeating the class because last semester he partied too much. If anything, I was hoping that the student would take this week off to rest, recover, and catch up in his classes. But no. I probably won’t be seeing him for an entire week after Spring Break because he’s recovering from alcohol poisoning, lack of sleep, proper nutrition, or any combination of the three.

I know that this student is not an exception. Many of my students, in fact many of my students who are the most vulnerable in terms of their grades, will be spending the week off unwinding in unhealthy ways on “SPRING BREAK!!! (copyright MTV).” I understand that students (and their instructors/professors) need a break. What I don’t understand is how students can justify the time and cost of 5-9 days in Florida/Mexico/wherever. My students constantly complain that they have too much work, no money for food or for printing their papers. And yet, March rolls around and suddenly, there’s money to be had and time to be spent.

(And no, I never did Spring Break. The one year my friends went to Florida, I was stuck on a work term. My other trip to Florida in college was for a training camp, which was subsidized by the school; we swam or worked out 4-5 (or more) hours a day. If we had been out drinking, it wouldn’t have been pretty the next morning at practice.)

This attitude is not limited to Spring Break; many of my students consistently show up hung over (or still drunk) on Friday mornings, but complain that I am asking too much of them to buy a 45 cent folder for their essays. Students, studies keep telling us, are studying less and less, but seem to be partying just as much as they ever have. College now is about the experience, and the experience is everything and anything except what happens in the classroom. Which is fine, but I tell my students that there are way better ways to spend the tens of thousands of dollars they are currently spending on their college “experience.”

There was an essay recently that extols the virtues of learning through hanging out. But when I ask my students what they do when they hang out, they admit that it often involves getting pass-out drunk or stoned out of their mind. What, then, are they learning by “hanging out” that they couldn’t learn while not also paying college tuition? Drinking, drugs, and sex are acceptable behavior in college; kids of the same age who are engaging in this kind of behavior and are not also college students are considered deadbeats. What’s the difference? Tuition, and a couple hours of courses a week that the student may or may not attend. For some students (and I include myself in this), they can get away with this and still come away with their degrees (and futures) in tact. But for the majority of my students, they can’t get away with it; they don’t graduate, can’t get a job, and are left in debt.

Personally, I wish I had been encouraged to save my money, work, and get the parties out of my system so that I may have actually benefited from my education. It’s what my husband did, and it benefitted him immensely.

In fact, the university encourages this kind of laissez-faire attitude towards the educational purpose of college by consistently investing money in the “experience” side rather than in the classroom (for example, building stadiums and then increasing class sizes, hiring adjuncts instead of tenure-track professors). Why should students take me seriously when the university doesn’t, either? So, enjoy Spring Break. Just don’t expect me to cut you any slack when you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned; I spent my break reading.