A cry for help

Friends, I need your aid and support at this time.  Support in particular.  I have discovered that my teaching regimen of four lectures a day, three days a week is giving me serious lower back pain.  As a practical matter, I have to stand in order to lecture — otherwise, I can't make eye contact with too many students, I lose energy and focus, and in any case, I have a tendency to pace around the stage or podium area as I talk. 

Clearly, I'm getting old, since I never used to notice that standing and walking gave me lower back pain.  What am I supposed to do, or wear, or avoid in order to stave off feeling achy and exhausted three afternoons a week?  Surely other professors have experienced the heartbreak of backache.

I noticed this especially last week when I proctored midterms for all my sections.  My TA and I were both groaning and muttering by the end, and zi is way younger than I am, so I'm hopeful that this is not entirely a function of my being a broken-down old coot.

Rigor, reason, and reality

Continuing a bloggy conversation that Dr. Crazy started this past week, I've been doing a lot of thinking about, well, look at the title of this post.  I've been bitching and moaning for weeks now about my disappointing students, and some blogging colleagues have offered various suggestions for getting a handle on my anger and frustration, and for finding more useful ways to explain information to students.  In the meat world, some colleagues and I have also been commiserating about all this, particularly those of us who are all new hires at Ghosttown U.

From one angle, at least, I feel a lot better than I did before: I have learned that the students' evaluative narratives count for precious little towards my future job prospects.  Thus, I don't have to fret before bed each night that I won't get another job because my students here, irked at being made to think hard, are going to write "OMG wurst prof evar, to hard, donot take any classes with this jerk!"

And on my end of things, I am making my peace with the fact that some of my expectations for my students here were simply too high, and I will have to adjust them as much as I am able within the confines of the course requirements, and fix them more fully in future semesters.  I've heard universal exclamations from my newly hired colleagues here that the students at Ghosttown U. cannot handle the same level of work that students at a wide variety of other big state universities could do.  My former students at Dear Old University are but one example of this phenomenon: I was at a collegial party last evening, and I lost track of how many different state universities were mentioned in exactly the same way.  They could handle what Ghosttown U. students cannot.

Obviously, this means that I have more work to do on my syllabi than I wanted, but that's the way it is.  Challenging and pushing my students is one thing, but it's a kind of cruelty to set them up for failure by presenting them with reading material that, by all accounts, they cannot yet understand at all.  In practice, this means that I will need to ditch two or three readings on my current syllabus that aren't working out: students come to class without having really tried to read, because they are dead certain that they cannot do it.  As pathetic as that sounds, that's the truth.  The few super-bright students in my classes will not be harmed by not reading these things; they'll likely encounter them later, as they qualify for and seek out successively harder, more ambitious classes.  I'm teaching an intro course, after all.  It also means I have to lower my expectations for one or two readings this semester: the students will suffer with them, not get them at all, and give up.  And, as I remain aware, I do not want them to give up if they are really trying in the first place.  I don't grade primarily on effort, but I pay a lot of attention to effort when looking for ways to engage them.

That's not to say that I'm not going to challenge my students at all, and just pat them on the head for spelling their own names right.  The challenges will continue.  But I'm developing a sense of where the boundary lies between "tough but possible" and "impossibly tough" for the majority of my students. 

I'm also going to fiddle with the current syllabus a bit – it ain't no legal contract, after all – and institute some pop quizzes on the readings.  I'll have to go easy on this in practice, lest I simply demoralize them with the sense of constant testing.  But I'm seeing even some of my better students acting on the belief that it's okay for them to slide on some days.  I'm okay with them struggling with the readings, but not with neglecting them.  I thought that the pace of the standard quizzes would keep them current, but I was wrong.  Too many of the students assume that they don't have to read if I haven't expressly warned them of a coming evaluative assignment.  Like I said, part of the problem is that I overloaded them with reading material that they find too difficult, but another part is that they think that they only have to read before quizzes and tests.  Well, we'll see what happens when they learn that any day (...or every day?...) can be Quiz Day.  

As for not being heartsick and agonized to behold the continuing downward spiral of public education in this state...well, I'll have to toughen up about that.  In some ways, it just sucks for my students that they have run into a professor who runs a tougher class than some others do, and who thinks that even an intro-level class should make students sweat a little.  But I'm going to try very hard to demonstrate to them that, in some ways, this is not only good for them, but will feel good, too.

Acting like an imbecile

I've not been in a good mood lately.  I've been avoiding answering emails as well as checking in on the blogging scene here, because I have so much negativity built up.  I'm just frustrated with the apparent inability of my students to think straight, to understand that it's not appropriate to waltz into class twenty minutes late and then start texting on the cell phone, to recognize basic facts of reality.  I'm a little worn down by the realization that the closest place where people aren't exactly like the residents of Ghosttown is a full hour and a half away by car, on poorly maintained roads that throw gravel at your windshield and make you wonder why we stopped investing in the railway system.  This whole place makes me feel lonely and isolated.

Rather than dwell upon this any further, I am going to try to cheer myself up with a music video that involves synthesizers, Morris dancers, and what I can only assume was a huge amount of cocaine and pills.

Accentuating the...well, you know

I really hate that song, but people around here seem to bring it up from time to time, in an effort to keep me from devolving into a little storm cloud of vitriolic bloggery.  So I'm trying not to be worn down by the little stuff.  And trying to focus my mind on the better things swirling around me.  I'd accept some friendly advice, though, about the small stuff.

• The pseudology building at Ghosttown U. is under construction repairs right now.  My large and lovely window affords me a fine view of the crane that is hacking, hammering, and beeping all day long.  Now and then, it also affords the workers on the crane a view of me in my office, on their way across the sky to beat the shit out of the roof right next to my office.  It's, um, noisy.  Cranking my iTunes does not seem to solve the problem.  I'm not a huge fan of earplugs for these occasions.  Anyone know a meditation practice that will keep me from feeling like I'm about to be run over by a backhoe?
• A piece of gravel hit my car windshield yesterday, putting a crack in the center of it.  It's not huge, but it's certainly noticeable in the middle of the windshield like that.  I've never dealt with this before.  Is this the kind of thing that must be fixed right away and damn the cost, or can I ride around without fretting about it?  It's not line-shaped, but a little round flaw, kinda like someone fired a bullet but without the excessive damage associated therewith.  I remember a friend's car whose windshield had incurred some linear crack from debris: that line-shaped crack began to spread one evening when the heating in the car was on, until, in the course of half an hour, it had spread nearly all the way across the glass horizontally.  That clearly needed to be fixed.  Will I be in similar trouble, or can the car live with the flaw?
• I discovered yesterday that the rubber heel-grip of my left dress shoe has broken off, so the heel is currently a layer of wood.  The rest of the sole is smooth leather.  I was careening around like a drunken figure skater all day; it's a wonder I didn't do myself injury.  Now I'm wondering what my peers would recommend with these eight-year-old shoes: do I seek out a cobbler to re-sole the broken heel, and maybe try to tone up the other parts that have just worn down over the years?  (I don't think there is a cobbler at all in Ghosttown.)  Or do I consign these shoes to dustbin of my personal history, and go shopping for a new pair?  Remember, we're talking about a dressy pair of men's cap-toe oxfords, not something of more transient fashion value.  I've been known to hang on to clothes past their natural lives, but I do so because I don't want to spend even more money that I don't have.  Not sure what makes more sense here.
• In better news, I've got a fresh nibble from that book press editor!  Can't say I've hooked a contract yet, or even a solid offer to bring it to the board, but there is some progress there.  Basically, I need to write more of my manuscript for the editor to consider.  Where's the coffee, again?
• It's a new year – for some of us, anyway – and I begin by noting that, all my complaints aside, I'm actually in pretty good mental, physical, and emotional shape.  That's more than a lot of people I know can say about themselves.  I'm lucky.

A short rant about stupid academic titles

All right, listen up, all of you who want to host a conference or organize a panel to showcase your own work, but can't really justify other people's presences except to validate you.  Also, all of you professors who have vague and inchoate ideas of what might constitute a reading group on subject X, and don't have the guts to admit that they're brand-new to the field of inquiry and will need to reduce themselves to MA-candidate level just to begin their reading.  Finally, all of you who want to publish your unexciting (if not actually half-assed) research and don't want to own up to its modest contribution to human knowledge:

Every one of you motherfuckers has to stop inventing bullshit titles like these:

Verby noun, nouny verb: Abusing the English language without mercy

Fucking stupid, stupidly fucking: A history of one-night stands

Asshole of the gods, God of the assholes: Dane Cook in context

Academic jizzing, jizzing on academia: I needed to write something on my travel reimbursement form, didn't I, jackhole?

All y'all ain't fooling no one, as the locals around here might put it.*  These stupid-ass would-be puns are the lazy and confused academician's way to try to tart up an unexciting, uninspired idea.  I've known this for years, but I'm especially aggravated about it lately, when an inexplicable bumper crop of them has littered my email inbox.  The unifying factor in them appears to be the author's unwillingness to say out loud, "I haven't yet worked through all the ideas here, and I cannot claim any authoritative voice here, but I want to enter into the conversation and do what I can."  It wouldn't fucking kill you to be a little humble about your position as a scholar, would it?  You will not dissolve into a puddle of ooze by admitting that you don't know as much as you want to about a given subject, and that is why you want to form a reading group of your peers.  You will not spontaneously combust if you give your unsexy but perfectly respectable conference talk a useful indexical title, a la Analyzing official correspondence between junior Episcopalian clergy in 1820s England.  Yeah, it sounds a little dry, but no one actually sits through a conference panel to be dazzled by CNN-style sensationalism.  You'll just have to trust that the interested parties will remember to gulp their coffee beforehand, and you'll have to work up the courage to ignore the senior scholars who drift off into a gentle, snoring doze after ten minutes. 

And here is the most damning part of all.  All of those faux-clever reversals of words that you think will justify your departmental expense accounts and seduce journal readers?  To the best of my knowledge – literature scholars, please correct me as necessary – those are all a type of rhetorical device called antimetabole.  Do you know with whom all of us who are older than, say, thirty associate with antimetabole?

YAKOV. FUCKING. SMIRNOFF.



I hope I have made my point clear.

*I mean, if they gave a goddamn about education past the age of seven.

RBOC: Colossal foolishness of students

• My students appear to be prudes, for the most part.  The subject of sex as a social science topic came up today, and people tried all kinds of verbal acrobatics to avoid saying the word.  Several of them seemed almost involuntarily to speak about "marriage," even though I kept reminding them that "marriage" was not the topic under discussion.  What I really wanted to say was, "This is not about people getting married.  This is about people FUCKING.  Do you understand that those are two separate phenomena?"  Some of these students may swallow their own tongues when we get to the gender studies component.
• I had not one but two students come to the same class today while visibly, audibly ill.  One of them was in such bad shape that zi couldn't fully stand up.  They both came to (attempt to) attend class, and give me doctor's notes to explain why they hadn't been in class for the last quiz.  Kids, when you're so ill that you look like you could keel over at any moment, DON'T COME TO CLASS.  I now fear that I will contract whatever microbes are messing with you, thus causing me problems I don't need, especially due to the fact that you are total idiots.
• I had a student spend two weeks avoiding class, because zi had done poorly on the first quiz and thought (completely erroneously) that this meant that zi had already failed the entire course.  Stu: read your fucking syllabus.  DON'T PANIC.  I explained this to Stu, who seemed hugely relieved, and promised to start attending class again, now that it seemed worth the trouble again.  Stu promptly failed to show up to the next class.  *facepalm*
• Almost no one seems to be doing the reading, with or without proper note-taking habits.  Including, as far as I can tell, most of the students whom I counseled one-on-one about this.  In most of my classes, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of students who actually know what the fuck is going on.  
• Almost no one did the reading for today, either.  No big shock there, I guess.  But I can't help but think it's additionally foolish and counter-productive not to read an assignment for a class that the motherfucking professor wrote himself.  Once again, I learn by experience that the professor's ego is worth very little in this complex equation.  I intentionally scheduled my own reading for a day that didn't matter much, since it's more complicated than the basic this-is-what-your-friendly-neighborhood-pseudologist-does lesson.  But boy, I didn't know how wise that was.  
• Seriously, I can't get over this in its entirety.  I understand blowing off a reading here and there.  I can even understand a clever, cynical college student figuring out that the professor's own research publication is relatively unimportant for study purposes, and deciding to skip it.  But if you're going to do that, then why the fuck would you show your ignorant ass in class, where I can call on you and ascertain in a public forum that you didn't do the reading?  Why would you scowl at me when I do this?  You could have taken the day off and avoided looking like an asshole in front of the class, and you didn't.  Your fault, not mine.
• I have to grade the more recent quiz this weekend.  I'm kind of dreading it, based on the responses I noted in passing while collecting papers from students.  Just like with the reading, a select few seem to comprehend the very basic concepts being examined, and the rest are stumbling around in the dark.  Figuring out a fair rubric for these things is bad enough, but I can usually handle it once I reach a place of serenity in which I can see some useful effort in mostly mindless responses.  What is worrying me now is what I will have to do, based on the grade breakdown that I end up with.  Dr. Crazy suggested I send a warning to students by threatening to zero out the grades below C if they don't come in for a consultation, and maybe suggest that they should drop the course if they incur this result.  I like this idea in theory, but unless I get myself in a frame of mind to grade with great leniency, then I will essentially be threatening to zero out a huge majority of the quizzes.  And, if my last experience is any guide, forcing them to come in for consultations accomplishes nothing if they're not actually already on the ball.  I'll look into my options for this next semester, but right now I feel like I'd be overstepping what little authority I have by suggesting they drop a course they're failing.  (The phenomenon seems far too common at Ghosttown U. for a youthful VAP to make some moral stance out of not letting people trudge along to failure.)
• Depressingly, I keep coming back to the realization that lowering my grading standards through the floor makes my life easier and less angst-filled, despite the angst that I feel at the idea of not really holding my students to a standard of achievement higher than what everyone else the Dumbest State in the Motherfucking Union expects of them.  It actually feels worse, to my surprise, to hold them to high standards, see them fail, counsel them on how to succeed, and watch them fail worse than before.  It's even worse when I, unlike the students themselves, have a clear understanding of the kind of dead-end nothing to which they will need to resort, once they either fail out or drop out of college.  Dead-end jobs in this part of the country are pretty grim.

Deadwood students

I'm having trouble getting my mind around how my students think.  On a superficial note, I had to throw out one from class, and issue a stern warning to another about not using cell phones in class.  (I couldn't quite see for sure what the second student was doing until class ended, although she kept looking down to do something in her lap.)  I guess students have always tried to get away with things they know are forbidden, and they always think they can avoid getting caught.  It irritates me that they refuse to understand that using their cell phones in class is disrespectful, but I freely acknowledge that this is partly my own ego talking: they are disrespecting me much more than their fellow students, especially when they oh-so-cleverly sit in the back row and then tack back and forth between looking at me and the iPhones in their laps.  And, as we all learn at one point or another, the professor's ego is largely an expendable item in good classes.

I'm more perplexed by the culture of ignorance that seems to suffuse Ghosttown U.  Most of my students seem totally unmoved by my explicit warning that they failed the first quiz because they didn't know what they were doing, and my concomitant offer to explain all of this to them if they came to my office hours.  I understand why the students who hacked out a good (or at least passing) grade might skip this; I probably would have done the same as a freshman.  But failing?  I'd have been unable to get a decent night's sleep until I found out exactly how I had managed to bomb something like that.  It seems that most of my students are literally not bothered by the thought of failing.  WTF?

I guess my colleagues warned me about this, but I didn't fully grasp the scope of the phenomenon.  It's no secret that education in this entire state sucks the dog's balls, so I expected to see a lot of unprepared students who needed to be brought up to speed pronto.  But I hadn't realized how many of that bunch would be so fatalistic, or accepting, or just plain apathetic that they wouldn't bother to do anything about a class that they had begun to fail by the third week.  To my mind, that first quiz was a wake-up call, a warning siren, a fire under the ass.  To them, it seems to have meant...nothing.  (The number of students who sought me out to discuss the quiz were perhaps a quarter of the total.  Maybe less.)

Trying to fathom how or why a student would approach college in this way feels like staring into the abyss: existentially terrifying.  In a way, it even makes me nostalgic for the previous bane of my pedagogical existence, the grade-grubbers.  Haphazard Musings has a post up now about these and other hobgoblins of her classes, and I am envious of her conclusion that the real problem students are only "a small handful" of the total.  In my case, it seems that only a small handful give a flying fuck about whether or not they fail out of college.