Service Reflections, Part 1

This past Thursday started off an odd mess of a day. Twice I found myself in awkward conversations: in the first, the person with whom I was talking was being overtly and obliviously racist. In the second, the other person displayed homophobia so aggressively and venomously—ironically using Christianity to support not just the position but the attitude with which the position was conveyed—that I was left simply speechless.

The world seemed filled with hatred and spite.

And it was cold and dreary and raining, and I did not much want to go volunteer at the Baptist Children’s Village as I’d planned. But I had told students I would be there, and I had told the coordinator to expect us. And so I went.

For an hour or so it was just me. My job was to run envelopes through a machine that sealed and printed postage on them. Easy work, monotonous in a good way. And it was pleasant to chat with the young woman who worked there.

But as my trays of sealed-and-printed envelopes grew into higher and higher stacks, which needed to be sleeved and carried somewhere else, and as we chatted less and worked more, and so had more time for thinking, I realized I wasn’t over those conversations from earlier. The world still felt mean, mean, mean. And on top of that, I was disappointed: my students still hadn’t arrived. We hadn’t set a specific time, so they weren’t exactly late, but given the weather and how the day had gone, I was less than hopeful. I checked my watch—again—and started on another tray of envelopes.

And then the door opened, and in walked three. And soon after, a fourth. Making good on their promises, willing to do whatever was needed—including moving those envelopes about ten times faster than I could’ve.

When I finally had to leave, the four of them were still working. I walked out to my truck in the chilly drizzle, surrounded by a thousand shades of grey.

And the world felt a little more hopeful, a little less mean.

Academic History Essay, Part Two

This past week, I had group conferences about students’ plans for their academic history drafts. The responses ran the gamut—from the student who knew exactly what he wanted to say, and was excited about playing around with how best to say it, to the student who had no idea, really, where she wanted to “go” in her essay.

I was again reminded what a challenging assignment this is. We are each influenced by so many experiences—not to mention other factors, like genetics and environment—that to boil ourselves down, even within the category of “who I am as a student,” to four or five double-spaced pages is, on some levels, simply absurd. We could each write a book and still have material to spare.

And so the giant disclaimer that must overarch our essays is this: our essays only describe PART of who we are, the part we have chosen to focus on. We are other things too. The assignment should then become manageable—but still tricky: we must be careful not to oversimplify, not to sell short either ourselves or our abilities to think critically about ourselves.

I’ve been thinking about my own essay, what I would write if I were to describe “who I was” as a student during that transition from high school into my freshman year of college. My main point, I think, would be this:

I am an (almost) straight-A slacker. I do just enough to get really good grades in part because I’m super-confident (people have been telling me my whole life how smart I am, and I don’t really HAVE to work hard to get high grades) and in part because I’m insecure (people always valuing you for how smart you are means you have to look smart or they might not value you anymore, and what if you try REALLY HARD at something and you turn out to be not that smart after all?).

In my essay, I think I would include the following events:

• My first day of class, in first grade, when I couldn’t find my name on my desk and was afraid the teacher would think I was NOT smart.
• That Lord of the Flies book report, where my teacher suggested I was VERY smart, and my mom suggested I was NOT so smart. (Or at least, that my report was not good enough.)
• How embarrassed I was when I missed my first spelling word—“children”—when I was in FOURTH grade. That’s a lot of school without missing a spelling word.
• How I hardly remember studying at all through junior high and high school—instead, I would stay up late at night reading trashy novels. Trashy as in Stephen King and the like. School was easy.
• But then there was Latin—which I just didn’t get, didn’t try to get, and I cheated.
• And I hid my “C” in physics, where I also didn’t “get” things and didn’t try very hard, from my parents—who by then were so convinced I was smart that they didn’t even ask for my report card.

But I’m wondering now whether my original assertion: that I didn’t work hard partly because I was insecure. . . . I wonder whether that’s right or not. Maybe I didn’t work hard just because I didn’t really have to—and because I could get away with things (like cheating) if I found myself in a bind.

Maybe the better question is why I worked hard enough to get almost straight A’s—surely I did have to work some; I remember doing tremendous prep for my ACT and SAT exams. So, maybe I’ve arrived at a new thesis: I was an (almost) straight-A slacker because I believed I was smart, and since school really was easy, I didn't have to try very hard. But I tried hard enough--or I hid my less-than-outstanding moments--because I knew people would be disappointed in me if I didn’t live up to their expectations.

How I turned into such a pleaser is another question—I hate to disappoint people still today.

I’ll have to keep thinking about that.

But I’m getting closer to an approach for my essay.

Academic History Essay

This week, we’ve been getting into our first “big” paper for the semester: the Academic History Essay. In some ways, the assignment is a huge experiment: it’s a combination of two kinds of essays (the remembered event and the profile) that have been standard assignments in freshman composition courses for decades now. The assignment basically asks the writer to think of school-related memories that stand out to her or him. Then the writer selects some of the most important memories to write about, and s/he describes them in a way that helps show who the writer is as a student—and what events were important in her/his becoming that person. To me, this is a much more sophisticated writing task than “just” creating a remembered event or a profile, and it seems like a much more significant exercise, as well: after all, students should come to know better “who they are” through completing the assignment.

To get things started, we’ve been working on timelines, where we plot key memories from our school experiences. I always like to “test out” my own assignments, at least drafting a paper myself so that I can have a better chance of seeing what’s difficult about an assignment and where my students might get tripped up. I plan to play around with my draft on my blog, so everyone can see. First, I'll give you some information about my own academic timeline, which I sketched out as a model in class. On it were events like these:

• not being able to find my desk on the first day of first grade (the teacher had put paper apples with each student’s name on his/her desk, and I couldn’t see mine anywhere: she had to show me, and I was so embarrassed, partly because I was afraid she’d think I couldn’t even read my name).
• being intimidated by reading the cursive on the board in the second-graders' classrooms when I was in first grade. It looked so scary.
  
• lying to my second grade teacher about having cheese on my sandwiches at lunch: if we had all four foodgroups, we got a sticker, and I often didn’t have a dairy group item—but I wanted the sticker.
• writing my fourth grade book report on Lord of the Flies: my teacher was WAY impressed, but my mother was not—she criticized the way I’d phrased things. To this day, I don’t show her my writing.
• cheating in some of my high school classes--and getting away with it. Nobody expects the "good girl" to misbehave.
  
• after being a straight-A student almost all the time, getting a C in physics in 12^th grade. I figured my parents would be mad and/or disappointed—and then I realized I didn’t even have to tell them. They just assumed I was making As and didn’t even ask for my report card.

There were lots more items on my timeline from class, but those are a few that stand out. I’m still trying to decide which ones will go in my own paper—and in particular, I’m trying to figure out what they all “add up to.” What do I want to convey as my dominant impression of myself as a student? I’m still trying to figure that out. Right now, I see that the moments that seem to illustrate me are easier to point to than the ones that I really think shaped me—but that Lord of the Flies book report experience was a pretty crucial moment, I think.

I seem to have been a student who wavered between confidence and insecurity, in terms of my academic self. I was a pleaser—but sometimes unethically so. I’m still trying to figure out how those are connected, and I’m realizing that I’ve asked my students to engage in a really challenging task.

I can’t wait to see what we all come up with!

Letters and Numbers and Grades, Oh My!

I so enjoy being able to work with a GTA (Graduate Teaching Assistant) in my composition courses. Our GTA program is set up so that experienced faculty work closely with individual GTAs (who will become composition instructors in later semesters); together, we engage in lots of discussion about the hows and whys of our work: how and why we design our courses, shape our assignments, run our classes, and respond to student writing as we do, for example. I love having an interested partner with whom to talk about all of those things. I might not have all the best teaching strategies figured out, but I want always to be able to explain my reasoning for why I do X or Y or Z, and I want always to treat my students ethically and with their best interests in mind.

I also appreciate having the GTA’s extra pair of eyes: she pays close attention to what’s happening in the classroom—especially to students’ reactions to various moments in class—and her observations are incredibly useful to me.

Case in point:

On Wednesday, a student asked why the grading scale for my course is a 8-point instead of a 10-point. An excellent question, really. Certainly a fair question. I wasn’t expecting it, though, and I’m afraid I spent way too much time on my answer (which, ironically, I’m spending even more time on here in my blog). Ms. Hornback, the GTA paired with that class, mentioned afterward that she thought even though I’d talked for a long time about the grading scale, the class still hadn’t “gotten” it.

I figure Ms. Hornback was right. It was an awfully circular discussion, trying to cover too much, too quickly, and going in too many different directions at once.

I could’ve answered the grading scale question a lot of different ways. I could simply have said, for instance, that I’m trying to raise the bar. Or that I’m just exercising my faculty right to set my grading policies—that I use an 8-point scale basically just because I can. Those would have been easy answers, and both are partly true. But neither gets at the heart of the reason.

I use the 8-point scale, as I tried to explain to the class, in part because I think it helps create the illusion of extra difficulty, conveys the idea that the course will be extra challenging. So, I use it to send a message. The word “illusion” in the last sentence is key, though: I also tried to explain that grading scales are incredibly arbitrary and that, in fact, I could use any typical grading scale in the course and my students would earn the same grades—a “B” in the 8-point scale would also be a “B” in the 10-point scale.

As I write that, I can see why my students might have been confused, even with an example sketched on the board. If an essay earns 82 points, and that’s a “B”-range grade with one scale and a “C”-range grade in another, how could I possibly be right in saying that a “B” in one is the same as a “B” in the other?

Here’s why: For writing courses, I don’t start with a number grade pulled out of the air (though I’m afraid that’s the sort of thing many students have received on lots of writing assignments, and it certainly helps explain their preferences for 10-point grading scales). Instead, I assign letter grades to formal assignments, and then I use a conversion scale so that my letter grades translate into number grades, which are then easy to average with consistency and fairness.

A little more explanation for how a “B” is a “B” is a “B”: If, in my grading scale, a “B” ranges from 85-92, I’ll let the number in the middle of those equal the solid “B.” So, a “B”=88.5. (“B+” and “B-” are numbers close to the ends of the span, and other letter grades follow that same pattern.) If I use the ten-point scale, however, the “B” range is 80-89. The number in the middle of those—the solid “B” grade, in my system—is 84.5.

So, in the 10-point system, the “B” translates into a lower number than in the 8-point system, which means that earning a “B” in either system is equally easy (or difficult).

If you’ve stuck with me this far, I’d love for you to comment as to whether you follow my explanation. I didn’t much intend to blog this week on grading scales, but there are a couple of points this all (sort of) leads to that I think are important to make. Here they are:

• Many students experience education as something that simply “happens to” them—with elements that may seem unclear or even unfair.
• For various reasons, many students would never question, for example, how a professor arrived at a particular grade.
• As students, you have a right to understand, and as faculty, we have an obligation to be able to articulate--and have good reasons for--why we do what we do.

Those are my “big picture” observations, things I’d like you to remember during your time at MC.

And now an observation about myself, as a teacher: I think sometimes I’m too honest and open. By telling you the 8-point scale gives the illusion of difficulty, I’ve negated the illusion. Being honest with you feels “right,” but I hope I haven’t made the course seem less challenging—it has to be challenging, after all, or you’re wasting your money and we’re all wasting our time.

Later in the semester we should return to questions of grading and education and of how much an “A” (or “B” or “C”) that was easy to earn is really even worth. . . .

A point of advice, as I close: some of the most challenging professors I ever studied under used a 10-point scale. Don't let a grading scale give you a false sense of security.

Blog Fodder to Spare

Earlier this week, I stood in Dr. Miller’s office chatting about our blogs. Dr. Price and I had just recently posted our first entries, and Dr. Miller commented that he had been waiting for us to do that, so that he could go ahead and write another one—he had lots of things he’d been thinking of writing about. He was just finishing up his second entry.

It’s funny that we would be waiting on each other to take turns. I wonder if we’re playing by some unspoken rules of politeness or if it’s just that none of us wants to look too terribly nerdy. (Nerdily competitive: I had entertained hopes of being the first to post during this second round. Oh well.)

And we are nerdy, and in wonderfully fulfilling ways. How fun to have colleagues to write with, to have given ourselves occasion and audience to encourage our own writing.

We laughed a lot—at ourselves and our enthusiasm. I commented that several events had recently struck me as good “blog fodder.” I didn’t elaborate then, but on my mind were my only niece’s recently heading off to college for her first semester; preseason football, Deuce’s sideline cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and my hopes that he can stay healthy for one whole, good season; the way our English Department workshop reminded me how much like our students we faculty sometimes are. I wanted to write about all of those and more.

What I did say to Dr. Miller was this: “I should probably write up a bunch of these right now and save them for later in the semester. Then when crunch time comes, I’ll have something to post.”

We laughed some more at that—this time not nerdily, but rather the kind of knowing-and-empathizing laughter that accompanies confessions of weakness, admissions of understandable guilt.

We all know that as enamored as we are with the blogs right now, and probably with the sounds of our own voices, a semester’s worth of momentum is tricky to maintain. At some point each of us, I suspect, will be busy and distracted and will see the blog as an extra task that takes extra time.

That’s a good reminder for me, here at the beginning, as I shape each of my classes. It doesn’t mean that, come mid-term or Thanksgiving, I’ll be willing to “let up” on either myself or my students. Rather, it means that we will all have to keep our eyes open for those moments that inspire us, that give us something to say, that make us want to write.

Getting Started

Dr. Miller’s first blog entry explains the hows and whys of some of the MC English Faculty’s decision to blog in connection with our comp classes this semester. Rather than repeat him here, I’ll jump in with something else. First, though, I’ll remind myself and my readers of our plan to blog about specific events we see connected with goals of development included in MC’s Mission Statement: intellectual, spiritual, social, physical, and emotional development. This blog’s event connects with intellectual development, certainly—both mine and my students’. And with the emotional, I suppose, as well.

After our breakfast meeting on Friday, I headed to my office to plan for a composition workshop we’re giving for our department’s faculty and graduate teaching assistants. On my things-to-do list was choosing a student-written sample essay we could examine and discuss during the workshop.

In a corner of my office floor, I sat cross-legged in the Cemetery of Dead Student Papers. Or rather, in the Cemetery of Students’ Dead Papers. I like to assume that the students who wrote them are alive and well. But the papers themselves are most decidedly dead: long ago written, printed, turned in, graded, returned to the students, and then returned back to me for departmental records. Then forgotten. For the workshop, one paper would have a new life.

As I browsed, the essays and names reminded me of faces and personalities from semesters past: the talented-but-lazy student with the creative spin on the men’s dorm bathrooms (he could’ve done so much more with that); the weak writer who tried so hard that grading her papers always broke my heart; the weak one who didn’t seem to try at all, for reasons I would never learn; the motivated one who attacked assignments like my horse attacks hills: lots of willingness, energy, power—enjoying himself every stride, confident hooves hitting treacherous ground in all the right places.

I’m not sure what any of them “got” from my classes, whether they were really all that better at writing or thinking when they left me than when they first arrived.

What struck me overall, though, was how arbitrary my assignments seemed. Why did I want them to write about X, or Y, or Z?—Because composition students have been writing about X and Y and Z for years and years now. That’s what they do; what we ask them to do; how it is. I was reminded, too, of how much writing I did as a student—and sometimes for my job now—that didn’t seem very useful or important or interesting.

It’s the middle of August, and I’m excited about the coming semester. I’m excited about my colleagues’ willingness to experiment with me, to try something different with our composition classes, to try to make the course more useful and important and interesting for our students. Realistically, as a writing teacher, I will always have a Dead Paper Cemetery in my office. But hopefully, my students will have benefited substantially from writing those papers—and from our time together, in general. We’ll see.