Left-Leaning Professors and Their Writing Assignments

My students are currently working on their second essay for my Freshman Composition class, a profile. I like teaching this assignment for several reasons. First, it's based primarily on "field" research, i.e., writing based primarily on the students' observation and interviews. Though somewhat time-consuming and labor-intensive, this kind of research has its own unique set of rewards, especially if the student picks a person or place to profile that is interesting to him (or her) personally or professionally. Students who already have their career goals in sight, for instance, tend to take full advantage of the opportunity this assignment provides them to observe and interview someone in their desired profession (e.g., teaching). Then again, students who really have no idea what they want, or how to benefit from this assignment, end up basically winging it: when I ask what their profile topic is they tell me it's their mother (even after I told them not to profile their mothers), or their boyfriend (ditto) or a concert (double-ditto). Or one day it's an amateur skateboarder (who happens to be their best friend), and the next it's a Kung Fu studio where he happens to work, which is problematic since a profile by definition is not about you, it's about someone or something else.

But I digress.

I started writing about this because this morning, searching for some sample profiles to show my students in preparation for our in-class critiquing activity, I literally stumbled on a gold-mine: an English professor named Dr. June Pullia from Louisiana State University, also teaches this assignment. She obviously teaches many of her classes online because she has posted a prodigious amount of documents for all the courses she teaches (including sample student essays, among them profiles, which I am planning to use in tomorrow's class discussion). This is obviously one overachieving professor.

I bookmarked her site and plan on returning. I like a lot of what she's doing and would like to incorporate some of her ideas in my syllabus and in future assignments. She does a really cool assignment which is team-based and research oriented, but highly original, where teams are assigned a decade in the life of the university to research and then create a booklet using MS Publisher. I'm not sure this is something I could do, primarily because of the technology required, but it might be something I could adapt.

Meanwhile, though, before moving on, I noticed she also requires students to write an essay in which they "Explain an Issue." How interesting. I'm teaching this same genre after the profile. I followed the link to the assignment. Here's what she wrote:

Write an essay where you explain an issue of interest to LSU students. An essay that explains an issue doesn't so much formulate an argument (an essay that advocates one particular position) as it explores a topic in depth by examining multiple perspectives about it. Thus, your research (and quest for outside sources--you'll need three, by the way) should lead you to find multiple points of view about this issue.

Very nice. Similar to my assignment. But then she starts talking about topics for this assignment. Like me, she's tired of essays that deal with the uber-controversial (and always poorly written) hot topics: gay marriage, abortion, death penalty, gun control, and the like. So she offers some suggestions that concern their own locality (Louisiana). I like that too. I wonder if I can think of similar local issues to steer my students to? Then she writes this:

At any rate, a good topic choice would be something that is currently in the news (so start reading newspapers and listening to NPR, and stop listening to Fox News! It's crap!).

Hmmm. NPR (good), Fox News (crap). Besides the fact that I find her word choice to be inappropriate in an academic setting (I always write "avoid slang, colloquialisms, and vulgarity" on my students'
papers), I'm not impressed with this professor's singling out Fox News as the type of news source to avoid. It can't be that it's because this professor is socially and/or politically liberal, could it? Even if that were true, professors are professionals. They are there to instruct, not indoctrinate, right? If Dr. Pullia believes stations like Fox News (italics used deliberately) should be avoided, she should explain why. There are plenty of reasons why I would steer my students away from Fox News, one of them being a conservative bias, but the more important one being the lack of depth in its reporting. However, I would in the same breath or paragraph include stations like MSNBC for the exact same reasons, with its liberal bent and its superficial reporting. I'd gladly direct my students to something like the PBS NewsHour with its fairly comprehensive coverage and intelligent debates.

I've drafted a personal email to Dr. Pullia but I haven't drummed up the nerve to send it yet. Here's what I wrote (after a fawning personal introduction):

It occurs to me that you could have been more precise in helping your students understand what your criteria for "crappiness" are. While I don't necessarily disagree with you about Fox News being "crap" in the sense that it does not go into depth about issues the way NPR might and also the fact that it has a conservative bias, to be consistent, you might also have included comparable news programs that represent a left-leaning bias, such as MSNBC. In this way, students would be taught to understand that it's not the political leanings of a program per se that warrant its being deemed "crappy" but how information is presented. I believe it's important to teach our students how to think, not what to think, and as such, to be careful about exposing our own biases in our classes. Presumably you agree?

Well, that's actually somewhat disingenuous. Presumably she won't agree. I know it, and I know she'll know I know it.  So it's all a little game, which is why I'll probably chicken out.

Besides, some measly adjunct from across the country shouldn't have to be the one calling this woman to task. Someone in her department--her superiors, her colleagues--should be challenging her. Even if she's tenured, there should be some level of accountability. But that's the problem, isn't it? Her colleagues no doubt share her views, and as a result they would be utterly baffled by the distinction I'm trying to make here.

Midnight English Class?

An end note in one of Professor X's chapters took me to this article in the New York Times about a community college in Boston that offers a couple of late night classes due to high demand and overcrowding. I guess "late night" doesn't quite capture the meaning of of what's going on. The article focuses on a literature course that begins at 11:45 p.m. (that's a quarter 'til midnight) and lets out at 2:30 a.m.

I thought at first it was a typo, so I read more carefully. Then I went to the chapter notes to get the publishing information. The writer of the article is named Amy Goodnough. This has to be a joke, I thought. An Onion article, surely.

I went online. Sure 'nough, Amy Goodnough name comes right up as an education reporter for the New York Times. I located the article. It looks legit. But so many questions come to mind: Is there an evening administrator after midnight? (somehow I doubt it). What about security? Is there access to copy machines? What if there's a power outage? What if there's a medical emergency? I've had two students over the course of my teaching career who've had epileptic seizures. Is the health center open at 2 a.m.?

Somehow this doesn't seem right.

Thoughts on Teaching Writing

I'm about a third of the way into the recently published "memoir" by Professor X (In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic). I'm sure I'll have more to say once I finish reading as the book represents one of those rare opportunities to read about something that's literally right up my alley, Professor X being both an adjunct professor and an adjunct professor of English. The similarities don't end there. Oddly enough, Prof X also did a stint teaching junior high, as did I. One of his funnier moments in the book is when he reminisces about teaching middle school:

As far as teaching gigs go, middle school is generally considered the bottom of the barrel. I liked it. Seventh graders were the worst, but I never tired of how they tortured you for a year, vanished for the summer, and reappeared in the much more reasonable guise of eighth graders. They would greet me warmly by name, shake my hand and ask about my family, as though we were all corporate executives (57).

 He's right about that! I remember marveling at the transformation that occurs between 7th and 8th grade. It's as if they mutate, sometimes right before your very eyes. For me, the distinctions were dramatic since I taught a combined 7th/8th grade class. In the same room would be just-turned-12 "Jimmy" (say), all smooth-cheeked, delicate-framed prepubescence, seated beside about-to-turn-14 "John" (say), sprouting facial hair and leg hair and exuding testosterone from every pore.

Professor X seems to have several points he wants to make in writing this book, one about the life of the adjunct and another about the art (or craft) of teaching writing, and particularly whether writing can be taught at all. But his primary focus seems to be about whether we (as in the collective "we") are selling students a bill of goods when we suggest that everyone should go to college. His last point is the one generating probably the most controversy, but for the moment I'm interested in the second point: can writing be taught?

This summer I'm teaching a non-transfer level (i.e., remedial) introductory English class "for students who want to develop fundamental essay writing skills, acquire an A.A. degree, or enter a transfer program, but who need further preparation in composition skills." This is definitely a hands-on class with plenty of opportunities for students to try their hand at academic writing with fairly low level of risk or consequence. We do quite a bit of hand-holding. For example, for their fourth out-of-class essay, I provided them with a selection of readings from which they would choose two or three as their "sources" for an argument. Part of the required elements for this last paper would be to cite from these sources using parenthetical citations and to include these sources in a correctly-formatted Works Cited page at the end of their paper. In short: a "research-based" essay, albeit without the research element and on a much smaller scale than the one they will be writing once they transfer into Freshman Composition.

My students this semester run the gamut when it comes to writing skills. Since this is a class designed for remediation, I do teach with remediation in mind, even though at least three of my students could have by-passed the class and gone straight to English 100. I'm not entirely sure why these students enrolled in English 50. Some perhaps tested in, but some enroll by choice, either to "bone up" on skills they've forgotten after having been out of the classroom for a while or simply to take advantage of the opportunity to supplement their current education at a reasonable price. Such is the case of Justin, a home-schooled high-school student who seems to be skating through the course-requirements, and I mean that almost literally. He actually seems to enjoy the class, likes to write, is playful with language, confident enough in his abilities that he experiments with style, deliberately breaking the traditional rules of writing (e.g. fragments) in order to create interest and freshness. Sometimes he overdoes it, and I let him know when overuse of one type of style wears thin (e.g., fragments).

The majority of my students, however, are beginners. Several are second-language students, primarily Hispanic, many of whom can barely craft a paragraph while others can write decent papers but still have to deal with the first-language interference that obscures meaning. I have older students in their late twenties or early thirties, some of them veterans, some parents, some single, some married. And of course I've got the fresh-out-of-high school kids who probably didn't pay too much attention during 10th grade English. So here they are spending a couple of hours four days a week with me.

Professor X writes eloquently of all these students. And though he tries to be gracious, he clearly believes many of them are "in over their heads," as he puts it. He writes, "What I encounter regularly in my students' writing are yawning canyons of illogic and error (78)." He asks, "If you do ninth-grade work in a college classroom, does it automatically become college work?" (81).

I've been teaching composition now (part-time, it must be said) since the early '90's, first at the junior high level and then, starting in 2000, at the community college level. I often work with unskilled writers. Even when I'm teaching transfer-level English, many of my students are under-prepared. I typically have to start from the very beginning: teaching them to read critically, to analyze text, to extract meaning from the written word. I teach them to formulate and articulate their ideas in a reasonably coherent way. In remedial classes, I work at the sentence level, the paragraph level, the basic essay level. At the transfer level, I'm still addressing problems that students long ago should have mastered. It's not glamorous work. I am not always successful. Like Prof X, I get frustrated by the sheer ordinariness of the prose, annoyed by the lack of originality, the level of (to put it bluntly) incompetence.

But then, once in awhile, a student will surprise me with what can only be described as eloquence. It happened again this week as I was preparing my English 50 students for their final exam, an in-class, two-hour, hand-written, prompt-based essay. I gave them an article written by a virulent anti-war activist named Andrew Tonkovich ("Learning to Say No to the Military"), in which the author argues against military recruiters coming to high schools. I had hesitated before giving my class this article. At least three of my students are veterans and another is a military wife. By giving them what amounted to an anti-war screed, would they think I espoused this view?  But I distributed it anyway with a simple disclaimer and let them have at it. And while many of the essays they turned in two hours later were unremarkable, several of them (not surprisingly those written by those who had served their country), were impressive. One student, disagreeing with Tonkovich, concludes his essay as follows:

In closing, as a veteran myself, I have seen first hand the trauma and horror that war holds. I understand that no parent would want their child to experience the darkest depths of what man can do. But someone has to do it. Someone has to go fight the bad guys. Someone has to defend the flag. And if we are going to send some teenager or young adult over to die for us, shouldn't they know we support them, love them, and thank them for doing it? When they return from an 18-month tour in Iraq, don't they deserve a high school gym chanting "USA! USA! USA!" instead of some kid preaching his father's beliefs? Thomas Paine once said, "An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot."

I'm not sure if his last quote undermines or enhances his argument, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt (this was an in-class, hand-written essay, after all). I teared up a bit as I finished his essay. I'm a parent, after all. And the parallel structure. Well, I'm an English teacher, after all. Lovely!

Can writing be taught? I've seen it happen, though sometimes I don't know if fault or blame or credit can be laid at my feet or if the student would have eventually succeeded on his or her own. Maybe it's not what we teach or how we teach but that we teach. Perhaps classrooms are like petri dishes where students are placed and instructors add the nutrients and the right environmental conditions and then something almost biological happens--like writing.

That's it. Teaching writing is like a science experiment. Good writing grows, like bacteria, when all the right ingredients are present.

I always knew English and Science would marry.

This is Living?

This ad has risen to the top of my all-time favorite commercials:



Favorite lines:

"I read an article...well, I read the majority of an article online...."

"I have 687 friends. This is living." 

What a brilliant ad. Yes, it's promoting the 2011 Toyota Venza. But I love the jab at the Facebook-addled Internet generation (and apparently, internet addiction is becoming a real medical "condition," along with gaming addiction) who need to "get a life."

These are my students!

Of course, it's not just 20-somethings who are "addicted" to social media. Here's the latest from Facebook's Statistics page:

People on Facebook:

• More than 750 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

 Activity on Facebook:

• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month. 

Mobile Users:

• There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products 

That's a lot of people spending a lot of minutes per day interacting at (what most people would agree is) a fairly superficial level.

What Does an English Professor Look Like Anyway?

So it's 6:50 a.m. I'm one of the few people on campus. I'm dragging my rolling office behind me (a "Ricardo Elite" which we bought at Costco). It contains my notebook, textbook, folders, pens, pencils, tape, stapler, paper clips, scotch tape, dry erase markers, notebook clips, flash drives....etc.

In other words, I look like the adjunct professor that I am (real professors don't drag their offices behind them).

A guy driving a cart on the sidewalk approaches me. Mid thirties, maybe, with longish hair. I head towards the grass and stop, making way for the guy in the cart. I wave and smile, he waves back, in acknowledgment. Sidewalk courtesy. I walk on.

I'm about to turn the corner towards the MD building when I hear someone yelling something behind me. The guy in the cart has pulled over, stopped, gotten out of the cart, and is saying something to me.

"Do you teach English?"

"Um yes...how do you know? Have you taken one of my classes?"

"My girlfriend works in the bookstore. She says you're the prettiest English teacher on campus."

"Wait...but...what? Do I know her? What's her name? Did I teach her?"

"No, she's seen you in the store. I just guessed it was you."

Well, I just had to laugh out loud. What a sweet thing to say! (Maybe he says this to all the 50-something teachers pulling rolling briefcases behind them...?). I have to admit, this one kept me smiling for at least another half hour, even as I went from one copy room to another, looking for a copy machine that wasn't broken.

And wasn't it lucky for me that I happened to be looking pretty spiffy that day (if I do say so myself) in my brown leggings and flat slip-ons and layered tank tops and a short-sleeve khaki-colored tunic length dress (which I wear as a light jacket) accented by a jangly gold necklace which I'd tossed on last minute just before leaving the house this morning at 6:25 a.m. I guess I have a reputation to live up to. The "prettiest English professor" on campus better dress the part!

So the secret's out: I look like an English professor, and a pretty one at that.

But how did this guy know I taught English? I could have been a good looking Econ professor. I could teach science or math or physics, for all he knew. There are doubtless quite a few good-looking history instructors on campus.

But out of all the adjuncts on campus rolling their mobile offices behind them, he singled me out as an English professor.

Is it that obvious?

Psyching up for Summer, or, Why I Am Not a Math Teacher

This is my seventh year teaching summer school, so you'd think I'd have things mostly figured out. Why, then, am I struggling with what would seem to be a simple math problem? For instance, I was reading in the Course Outline of Record for English 50 that, for outside assignments (and I quote): "Students are expected to spend a minimum of three hours per unit per week in class and on outside assignments, prorated for short-term classes."
This is sort of confusing to me. Assuming I'm understanding this correctly, if students are expected to spend a minimum of 3 hours/unit/week "in class and on outside assignments," that amounts to  a total of 12 hours per week for a 4-unit class. Since students spend 10 hours per week in class during the summer, that leaves only 2 hours per week extra that they would presumably spend on outside assignments.

Not possible. Two hours per week would barely cover reading my syllabus. 

So I have to look at the phrase "prorated for short-term classes," and adjust my numbers. I emailed my department chair and asked for clarification on the amount of time summer school students might be expected to spend on homework for this class. Here's what she said: 

During fall and spring semesters, students would spend 4 hours per week in class, so they can reasonably be expected to spend a minimum of 8 additional hours per week on homework outside of class.  For summer classes, this does require some translation about the "prorating," since summer squeezes a sixteen-week semester into a six-week session; the basic formula is that you can expect them to spend at least twice as much time on homework as they spend in class.

This made sense to me upon first reading. If I can expect my students to spend "at least twice as much time on homework as they spend in class," and if they're spending 10 hours a week in class, I could reasonably expect them to spend 10 hours ("twice as much time") outside of class doing homework for my class. 

But then I read it again. And I got confused again. Does "twice as much time on homework as they spend in class" mean 20 hours (10 + 10) total, or does it mean 10 hours (in class) plus twice as much (20 hours), which comes to 30 hours per week on English 50 related work? 

That seems a bit much.

Now I'm really confused. Is this a math problem or a semantics problem? 

I emailed professor friend with these same questions. I tried to justify my fixation on this by explaining that I want to clearly convey my expectations on the first day of class so they know exactly what they're getting into (I didn't mention that what I'm really thinking about is how often students complain about the amount of homework I assign on Rate My Professor).

His reply: "I'd forget the equations. You expect them to do as much work as during a regular semester. I tell  my students that the first day. Like you say, so many think six weeks means not much work. Wrong!" 

He's right, of course! And by extension, I'm right, too! Students who take summer school should expect to do more work outside of class, not less! The should not be surprised with the amount of work they're assigned!

I've been tweaking my syllabus all morning, but after all my calculating and all my pestering, I think I've got the wording I want:

Because of the accelerated nature of summer school, students are expected to spend twice as much time on homework as they spend in class. Plan on allocating approximately 10-15 hours per week on English 50 homework this summer at minimum.

I italicized "at minimum" so students who are paying attention will understand that it's possible--probable, even--that they might spend more than 10-15 hours per week working on my assignments. 

So that should do it. Summer syllabus is finished. Check. 

(But I emailed my department chair again, just to be sure..).

Rating Me

I try not to give too much credence to the comments posted about me on Rate My Professor. I realize that the students who are the most critical are the ones who likely did not pass the class, so maybe there's some cathartic reward in justifying their lack of success by blaming me. I would probably be better off not reading the comments, in fact, since there is scant evidence that the comments are either constructive or relevant (hotness? easiness?).

Nevertheless, I do read the comments, and I do take them somewhat seriously. I was hoping my students from this past semester (Spring 2011) would "rate" me since I made some significant changes in how I teach English 100 and specifically invited feedback at the end of the semester. Some of the comments from semesters past have been critical of my requirement that they do a significant amount of pre-writing ("Invention & Research" is how my text describes it) for every essay. Students who resent this requirement think this pre-writing is a waste of time (they derisively refer to it as "busy" work). Never mind that students who comply with this requirement tend to turn in better-quality papers, or that there is less likelihood of them cheating or plagiarizing if they are required to pre-write for an essay (one of my main justifications for the requirement, by the way), or that the mere act of writing in and of itself actually makes them better writers. Never mind all that. These 19-something's resent the extra work, resent being marked down for not doing the extra work, resent my attempts to help them improve and become better writers.

Sometimes I think I should just skip it (and save myself a lot of time and trouble) and just assign an essay, tell students when it's due, collect it two weeks later, read it, grade it, return it. That's probably what the other professors do. If the student cheated, or if someone else wrote the paper for them, it's not the professor's problem.

Here are two ratings from Spring 2011:

Terrible teacher! who also might be a little crazy. A ton of busy work, homework assignments are never clear. The essays were easy but the amount of work that goes into them is so much. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS, unless you want to go crazy.

Her work was tedious busy work and i felt nothing good came out of it. We answered questions for "pre writing notes" that we answered multiple times before. She drove me crazy but she was not mean, very nice lady. just couldnt stand the class.