Teaching strategies: Low stakes

My office promises to be a livelier place this week than it has been hitherto this semester.  The students in my Intro to Pseudology classes got their grades on their first paper, and they are very far from happy little campers.  Why?  Well, in a manner of speaking, I sandbagged them for their own good.

I knew their first papers were going to suck, although I was a little surprised by how bad they were in both form and content.  (I mean, damn.)  But since I knew what was going to happen in a general way, I planned for it in the syllabus construction.  The first paper, although just as long and complex as every other paper will be, is worth a trifling percentage of the final grade, making it a pretty low-stakes assignment.  This means that, mathematically, students' GPAs won't really be harmed even if they bomb the paper and get, say, a D-.  (Which, by the way, was the statistically average grade for this paper.)  I believe I have found a strong wake-up call to first-year students who have been floating through school for the last twelve years, and who completely forgot – if they ever knew – that eventually schoolwork will challenge you and you need to work harder than you did before.

Naturally, it wouldn't be useful just to scare the dickens out of them with a low grade without any hint of how to improve.  I wrote extensive grading notes to all of them, pointing out weaknesses that they can and should improve on for the next paper.  I don't doubt that some of my students will ignore this altogether, and settle into a self-pitying pout about how mean and inscrutable Dr. Koshary is.  But if they make the effort to see me at office hours, then they ought to walk away with a better idea of how to write a good paper.

I've used this approach before in other classes, but the last time I did so, the cries of woe were far more muted.  That was in an upper-division seminar class in which at least some of the students were on the ball from the start.  As for the other students, well...perhaps I indulged in a little bit of grade inflation there to keep them from freaking out about the course.  But what I saw after that was the students who should have been scared straight about their poor writing didn't take the hint: I keep forgetting that many students are happy to get a C, and have no motivation to earn anything higher than that.

Let us say I have solved that problem, at least.  My email has been blowing up since I released the grades.  Let's hope my low-stakes paper yields good results, instead of a bunch of angry, vindictive students.  Low stakes is a gambling metaphor with good reason: I'm essentially betting that the students will use this as a learning experience, rather than react unreasonably and shut off their brains out of spite and/or frustration.  And no bet is a sure thing.

Chronically underslept but highly recommended

The title says it all.  I've been operating on less sleep than I (apparently) need all week, even though I haven't been burning midnight oil.  The last two weeks, really, have been draining for me.  The benefit is that I feel like I've been productive, especially in regard to this year's job hunt.  I recently completed a soup-to-nuts revamp of all of my key job application materials, a process that took something like six weeks in total.  Now that my portfolio is thoroughly refurbished – and ooh, look, my writing sample is now a press-formatted book chapter! – I can throw myself into the irritating but necessary task of tailoring job letters for the relatively small crop of jobs so far that I could fit.

In combination with that, I successfully recruited three shiny new referees to write letters for me: one of my colleagues at CBU and two colleagues in my field who teach at universities I've never attended or worked at.  I feel an odd sense of satisfaction when I look at my list of references and see no mention of Dear Old University.  It makes me feel a little more like an academic grown-up to see that three people with no skin in the game are willing to write on my behalf, and even more so that two of them are highly respected pseudologists of Damn Lies in Research Country who teach at fancy-ass R1 institutions.  (Of course, I still have two referees from DOU up my sleeve as well, just in case some jumped-up school demands four or five references.) 

Of course, when you're working that hard on something, something else has to give a little.  I've been so discombobulated about my schedule this past week that I somehow convinced myself at frequent intervals that it was a day later than it really was.  My cooking schedule that allows me to make myself dinner and bring the leftovers for lunch the next day got totally fucked up, and I had to subsist on pistachios and some old doughnuts for lunch on Thursday.  Worse, I forgot to set my alarm for Wednesday morning, and it's only by sheer luck that I woke up soon enough that I could get myself to work mere minutes before I had to walk into class.  And on Thursday, because of the aforementioned crappy lunch, I compensated by drinking too much coffee: I was pretty tweaked out during my afternoon class, and after I came back to my office from that, a colleague remarked that I looked strangely wide-eyed.  Fortunately, zi knows me well, rather than suspect that I had a drug habit.

The cherry on top was that, much as Academic Cog has been dealing with lately, I cannot keep straight what the hell I teach from one day to the next in my double helping of Intro to Pseudology.  These different time banks are hell on wheels to manage, although I admit that it's a pretty speedy education in pedagogy: since one class runs half an hour longer than the other, I not only have to teach different materials at times but must also cook up different ways of engaging the material.  My brilliant achievement in fucking up my shit this week was – hi, Academic Cog!! – forgetting to check my syllabus and assuming I knew what I had said.  Consequently, we spent ninety minutes discussing a piece that I meant to discuss for perhaps thirty, because I forgot that I was supposed to show a film in class. 

The truly amazing part of this to me is that not a single one of my students even mentioned this.  Not in class, not in an email, nothing.  I'm relieved about that, too, because I would have looked like a goddamn fool in front of them.  I came perilously close, even so: when I showed the film (on schedule) to my other class, the stupid worn-out VHS tape (!) died on me, and I had to discard everything I was going to ask them about it on the test.  The silver lining to this problem was that I then got to email the first class and explain that I opted (ha!) to concentrate on our reading last time, but now the film that I "planned" to show them next week was ruined, and we would have to move on to other topics.

And yes, before you say it: I am painfully aware that the moral of this story is, "Read the fucking syllabus, Professor!"

One month

I'm down to one month before a) classes begin, and b) THE BOOK IS DUE.  I am currently attempting to power through syllabus creation so that I can put in my book orders and then restore my attention to the manuscript, which is coming along, but needs — well, just look at the progress meter and you'll see what it needs.  Can someone please arrange for a metric ton of coffee – unground, if you don't mind – to be delivered to my door?  I don't know if I'll have the strength for this otherwise.

But of course, I must, so I suppose I must.

Meanwhile, I can't think of any appropriate song for the phrase "one month," so I'll be a cheapskate and just give you "Two weeks."

RBOC: Buckling down to summer in spite of my advancing age edition

First, the more personal, grumbly stuff:

• I had a birthday recently.  I was not happy about it.  I've never been conflicted about my birthday before, but I was grappling with the anxiety of being [insert milestone age] and not being all the things I once envisioned I would be at this age.  Fortunately, several friends, including the lovely Fie Upon This Quiet Life, took me out for cheese and wine, which made it much better.
• I'm really not so thrilled with the increasingly evident male-pattern baldness that I can see on my head every morning before I shower.  It's not a pattern I've ever seen in any living ancestor of mine.  I find myself scanning old family photographs to divine some idea of what I will look like in another ten years or so.  (The endemic genetic tendency on all sides?  Dorky.  I'm doomed.)

Okay, now for the better (or at least more academic) stuff.

• This is THE SUMMER OF SCARY WORK.  Okay, maybe not quite creature-feature scary, but it's intimidating.  I have until the end of summer to finish my book revisions whilst I plan my syllabi, one prep of which will be brand-new.  And, at time of writing, I really don't give a damn about the syllabi.  Ho hum.
• The book, now that I care about.  I've been digesting ideas for a while now without much committing them to print, but now that I've kicked out the most recent article, I have a lot more stuff to shoehorn into the manuscript.  Naturally, that doesn't fully address the critiques on my plate, but it will go some way toward that goal.
• Oh, and just in case you missed reading my anxious thoughts about employment, I'm back on the job market this fall, as I roll into the second year of my term contract.  At the moment, I have delusions that I will blast into the job market like an avenging anti-hero in a revisionist Western charging into a saloon to annihilate everything that moves.  No doubt, though, that I will soon fall back upon my more familiar metaphorical avatar of Frodo desperately clawing his way up Mount Doom before he expires from exhaustion and despair.  But hey, that's another day and another cup of coffee!
• I'm getting paid this summer!!  The pro-forma renewal letter that CBU sent me explained that my second contract year begins in July, which means I will have no paycheck gap this summer.  I am even more pleased about this than I am astonished.

Stuffed-up nose, wounded pride

I have a cold that I caught through some combination of the ever-present miasma of contagions that thrive on college campuses, and the miserable, dragged-out, never-going-to-fucking-end winter that we're having.  (Spring appears to have been a false alarm.)  I have no strength to deal with anything, and I have to go to campus soon because I have multiple student meetings scheduled, to say nothing of my evening class.  I literally no longer care what my students earn for their final GPAs.  Give 'em all As. 
Or Fs. 
Or Cs. 
Or Qs. 
Fuck. This. Shit.

I'm also nursing some sprained pride: it looks like my upper-division topics seminar course scheduled for the fall will be canceled, since exactly one student has registered for it to date.  (SLACs love their small classes, but there's still a minimum enrollment that we have to hit.)  If this happens, the seminar will be replaced in my roster by a second section of the Intro to Pseudology course.  In fact, from an utterly selfish standpoint, that would be a great outcome for me.  I'll be hitting the job market full-time in August, and it would be a relief to have only two preps to teach — and an even bigger relief that the most difficult syllabus to plan and execute would be off my plate.  I suppose I should be pleased at this possibility. 

But it feels like burning down the house for the insurance money; shouldn't I want to teach new courses, stretch myself, and demonstrate my professional versatility?  I also wonder if this doesn't reflect poorly on me as a teacher (and, by extension, my department) that I can't seem to get the measly minimum enrollment.  My intellect tells me that this is not about my poor skills, but about my status as a little-known quantity at CBU: the students are mostly risk-averse, and aren't highly inclined to take a new upper-division course with a professor most of them don't know.  But still, my emotions are stung.  Come on, people. 

Scheduling conferences on syllabus

Every fall, I am confronted by the same problem when scheduling conference travel around class days on my syllabus, and I'm still not sure how best to handle this situation.  This year, if my luck holds, I'll be going to not one but two conferences in the fall that are practically on top of each other.  If I plan conservatively so as not to schedule a class day that must later be canceled when my travel plans solidify, this would mean wiping out seven class days in a row.  And, due to timing, that would mean that we would only have two more class days before the Thanksgiving break.  (We'll have two more full weeks of class after that, though.)  I will probably be in town for Thanksgiving and could go to class, although I know from experience that I am usually worn to a pulp from conferencing at that point, and neither my lecturing nor my discussion facilitation makes much sense under those conditions.  

Last fall, after I went through all of this in combination with some unbloggable drama back in Hometown that forced me to cancel a few other class days around the same time, I swore to myself that I would just write off the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving as days off with no classes scheduled in the first place.  Some months after that, though, it became clear that it would be in my best interest as a researcher to attend a second conference in addition to my usual Big Giant Pseudology Conference this year, which would almost certainly mean clearing my diary for a few more weekdays.  Naturally, I will also be teaching five days a week next semester, so some class sessions will inevitably be lost.  This hurts some courses more than others, since every course I have next term is on a different weekly schedule.

My understanding of CBU's academic culture is that people disapprove of canceling a class day that had been on the syllabus as usual, and that it is preferable to schedule days off as such, so that students know the score from day one.*  But I wonder if I'd be pushing my luck to say that we would basically forget about having class for half a month altogether.  CBU's academic culture – among faculty and admins, anyway – frowns upon declaring days off on weekdays immediately preceding scheduled breaks like Thanksgiving.  I understand and appreciate this policy for things like spring break, when students always try to skive their way out of taking tests and submitting papers with ski trips and the like.  But Thanksgiving?  Isn't it just a little unrealistic to say that everyone has only Wednesday to travel whitherto they require on the busiest travel day in the U.S. calendar?

Oh, right, almost all of our students are from Cornstate itself.**  They only need a few hours on the road to get home.  But I digress.

It sure won't be pretty, but I might be stuck having to travel home from a conference, turn around and teach for two days after a little more than a week of no class at all, and then go back to no class for another three days while I fight off whatever bug will surely attack me during my travels.

Am I missing some better solution?

*That is, if they ever read the fucking syllabus.
**That matter deserves a post of its own.

Divers sujets sans rapport

• Does the French make more sense than the German did?  I continue to labor in the dark here with translations of "Random bullets of crap."
• I made a purchase that I cannot easily defend in any way except ego gratification and, potentially, an extra goad to fight my way into a tenure-track job: I bought my own regalia.  I'll just admit it: I really hated wearing loaner robes at commencement.  Since I'll be wearing this get-up several times a year for the rest of my career (if my luck holds), I figured it was worth buying an outfit that suited me.
• In a new low for my life skills, I no longer appear capable of reading the funny-looking numbers at the bottom of my bank checks.  In consequence of this, I mistyped my own account number on my tax return filing, causing all three refunds I am due to be electronically sent to a non-existent account.  After somewhat frantically calling around, I confirmed that this just means that the deposits will fail and automatically bounce back to the various revenue departments, who will then mail me paper check refunds instead.  Sigh.
• It says something about the instant gratification that the internet breeds that I am so frustrated about having to wait a month to get my refunds.  Remember when you were happy to get them that fast, because there was no choice?  No doubt, my causing this delay by my own idiocy makes it more irritating.  (And before you say anything, I was totally sober when I filed!)
• I was not totally sober last evening, though, when I was editing my manuscript.  This is for the best, I think: it's so annoying to go line by line correcting fiddly little bits of formatting that a nice Manhattan makes the process more bearable.  Obviously, this is not the more important part of editing, but I noted a few good ideas of stuff to follow up on as I pored over the pages.
• Speaking of good ideas: I am finally starting to understand what it means to have teaching influence my research.  A quotation that I hadn't thought about too much before suddenly leapt out at me yesterday, since it fit right into material that I've been flogging in both of my topics courses.  It occurred to me that I should spell out the importance of that quotation to readers just like I would spell it out to my students.  The light dawns!
• I'm actually toying with the idea of giving this particular bit of my book to one of my topics courses, to see how it reads to reasonably smart undergrads with only a little background knowledge.  That's nowhere in the syllabus, of course, so I thought I might offer them a few points of extra credit on the final grade if they gave me constructive criticism.  Is there a need – and, if so, a practical way – to make sure that they tell me something useful, rather than either suck up to me or just phone in something meaningless?  Or would this be a self-selective assignment?
• Ah, the syllabus.  Why do I even bother printing out syllabi?  Half of my students clearly do not read them.  They don't even know my office hours sometimes, and that is given at the tippy-top of the first page.  The flurry of boneheaded questions I have endured lately is getting on my nerves.  Is this how it is everywhere nowadays?  Do faculty at Harvard and Amherst also facepalm over their students' failure to consult the syllabus?
• I long ago decided that my body was not intended to display tattoos or other body modification.  But man, if I ever were to get a tattoo, it would be in Times New Roman, 72-point font, bold and all caps:
  
  
  
  READ THE FUCKING SYLLABUS.

RBOC: New year edition

• I'm doing my best to maintain a social life over winter break, so that I don't cloister myself in my apartment and get all weird and stir-crazy.  Mixed results so far, but at least I occasionally get to hang out with Fie and her family.  Fun to start the new year with some good old-fashioned hang-out sessions.
• Speaking of Fie, I can't believe that teh internetz still have not commented at all upon this photograph.  The sheer cuteness has overwhelmed all of you, hasn't it?
• I am righteously sick of planning my spring syllabi.  Can't these things just work themselves out? I'm starting to feel dread when I sit down at my computer and see my unfinished syllabi sitting there.  More than anything else, it's planning out the day-by-day schedule that irritates me.  It's not how I conceive of the material I teach, but I guess it's hard to avoid doing this for the students' sakes.
• Reading what I just wrote above makes me realize that a vision of my own private hell is a split consciousness in which half of me is my professorial self, and the other half is me when I was a junior in college.  Both halves would deserve the other, I fear.
• Might as well admit it: I'm fussing with my syllabi partly to procrastinate from working on my manuscript revisions.  I need to get my head into that game for real, now that we're into January and my winter break no longer feels like an endless Siberian hibernation.
• The thermostat in my apartment appears to be partly a theoretical construction.  I am always a little cold nowadays, and as a result, I have become obsessed with acquiring woolen clothing.  I'm trying to convince myself that I've already bought all that I need, especially now that the clutch of crew neck sweaters has arrived.
• To continue with obsessive acquisition, I recently indulged in a small online shopping spree of goods relating to my vainest, geekiest interest: nice shaving gear.  I'm getting to know a little badger-hair brush that I acquired, and I have a slightly larger one on the way.  I'm also currently working my way through a sample pack of aftershave splashes and colognes, all of them variations of a particular scent that I like.  My life may be an unending stream of chaos and confusion, but damn it, I will confront all of it with an amazingly smooth, close shave, and smelling good.  (I finally grok my female friends who just don't feel capable of leaving the house until they have applied their lipstick and mascara.)
• Unless some more deals get worked out in Congress soon, I expect to be paying more in taxes this year.  Please remind me not to buy any more shaving stuff until I settle on an aftershave.  And maybe a cologne.

Essays for the untutored

I haven't had a drink in a solid week, and I am grumpy.  I'm fighting a rather stubborn ear/sinus infection – with multiple antibiotics, yay! – that has the unpleasant side effect of making me wake up dizzy every morning as my middle ears try to right themselves.  I have to budget extra time in the mornings nowadays if I plan to drive anywhere, since it often takes an hour before my head is steady enough for me to get behind the wheel.  Fun.

I'm trying to distract myself from my grumblings by focusing on my winter break work, since I cranked out the last of my grading a few days ago.  Aside from trying to assemble some reading lists for syllabi, I'm hoping to re-tool the syllabus for my intermediate-level course, Pseudology of Area Studies.  In particular, I want to jettison most of the reading quizzes and replace them with short papers.

Here's the thing: how do you assign a paper on material that you expect students to understand poorly?

The aggravation I feel toward this class is largely due to the fact that it attracts a fair number of students who are interested in learning about the geographical region of my research – after all, it's my Area Studies course – but who are largely or totally ignorant of the discipline of pseudology and how we pseudologists go about things.  Sophomores through seniors can generally register for a class in any discipline they choose, no matter what their major, even if there is a prerequisite.  This odd combination of qualifications means that the prerequisite really applies only to frosh, and once they've taken the disciplinary prereq, they can register, too.  (One of them did exactly that for the upcoming semester.)

In practice, this means that many of my students expect to be given a neatly presented plate of facts that they can digest with little effort — hors d'oeuvres, if you will.  They are then unpleasantly surprised to discover that I am not butlering cheese and crackers, but am instead trying to get them to strap on aprons and learn to do some cooking.  (If I may continue with my cuisinary metaphor.  Did I mention that I'm feeling peckish, as I often do before going to bed?) 

The reading quizzes I gave were, if I may confess to my readership, often a scandal of incompetence in which the students frantically tried to remember a few facts, slap those facts down on the page, and hope that I would be good enough to fill in some ideas around those nuggets of factuality.  For my part, I quickly recognized this problem, but I felt helpless to remedy it in any comprehensive sense.  Never mind my neophyte fears of freaking out my students (and myself!) by retooling the syllabus on the fly.  I just couldn't figure out what the point of Pseudology of Area Studies would be if I didn't make the students focus on both parts of the course title. 

So how do I structure some short papers that make the students engage with the abstract ideas as well as some concrete facts when I cannot guarantee that the students will have already learned the basics of what pseudology is and how it operates at the undergrad level?  I don't want to set them up for failure – gee, déjà vu there – but I want them to understand as well that they have to work, not just absorb.  Surely this is a common issue for social scientists teaching in college.  How does one split the difference so that the students get a decently scaled challenge and the prof gets papers worth the trouble of reading?

And we're off!

I survived the first few days of the semester!   I'm kind of fried right now, after a whole week of poorly slept nights and constant improvisations of all sorts.  Let me see if I can get my thoughts ordered.

• Three preps is going to kick my ass if I don't keep to a tight schedule.  I have to do an unusual amount of prep for Intro to Libel and Slander, since the substance as well as the form of the course is somewhat alien to me.  Pseudology of Area Studies requires relatively little prep, thank goodness; I've read everything we're going to study cover-to-cover, except for one text that I've only dabbled in.  (And I've already read the intro to that one.  As any pseudologist worth hir salt knows, the intro chapter of a pseudological monograph is the key bit.)  But it's my baby, Super Awesome Cool Stuff, that may kick my ass the most: I couldn't resist the temptation to assign a bunch of nifty-sounding texts that I have never read.  I'll just have to read them right along with my students, which means I probably won't get a decent night's sleep until December.
• Being a new faculty member requires an odd balance of enthusiasm and reserve.  On the one hand, I obviously want to do a good job, and as my regular readers all know, I'm deeply grateful to have escaped from Godforsaken State.  On the other hand, I felt peculiar hanging out with a senior colleague yesterday.  Zi is a recently tenured pseudologist and seems to be stepping into the role of departmental mentor to me.  But of course, those who are tenured and have been around a while tend to develop grudges and complaints about some structural issues in any university.  It was, frankly, weird to feel hir dampening (or trying to dampen?) my enthusiasm for the job by venting to me about the administration's vision, the quality of the students, the ignorance of the alumni community, etc.  One just can't be all Pollyanna in the face of such unloading by a close colleague.  But I feel like I can't take on those attitudes, for a multitude of reasons.  First and foremost, of course, is that I'm not permanently tied to CBU, as zi is.  But stating out loud this lack of need for institutional loyalty feels discomfiting, even after we had a frank conversation about the impossibility of my staying past my two-year contract.
• So far, I enjoy my classes in direct correlation to their academic levels.  The 100-level, Intro to Libel and Slander, may have its moments, but I can't even pretend to be deeply invested in it, nor to think much of the grade-grubbing kids with math anxiety who register for it to get a distribution requirement the easy way.  (I took my share of Science for Poets, but I would like to think that I never expressed to a professor my fear that I would actually have to, you know, like, know facts.)  
• My 200-level, Pseudology of Area Studies, is much more promising than the intro course, even if all the students have is some native intelligence and the will to learn.  Explaining the basics of my area studies to even the most erudite undergrad can be a frustrating experience, but at least my students acknowledge that they feel out of their depth on some matters.  I'll have to walk a fine line between pushing them to think out loud and freaking them out because they recognize the limits of their own knowledge in some sensitive subjects.
• My 300-level, Super Awesome Cool Stuff, could hardly be better so far.  I nearly applauded my students today at the end of our first session discussing a text.  It's a famous foundational text that I first encountered as a wee freshman, lo these many years ago, and which, as I ascertained, none of them has ever read before.  It's a doozy: complex and tangent-ridden prose style, littered with references to historical figures and literary quotations totally beyond their knowledge base, and predicated on some very difficult abstract concepts.  With just a little coaxing from me, they took that ball and ran with it.  They mused out loud about its implications, wondered what the author was trying to do, asked each other questions, and occasionally (very gently) critiqued each other's understanding of the text.  I actually had to cut short the discussion when time ran out: they literally talked right up to the end of the class period.  I told them, in all honesty, that I had never taught such a successful first day of class before.  If they can maintain this level of intellectual curiosity and engagement, then the course will be a real treat for me.
• My kitchen is currently full of dirty dishes and glasses that I just can't be bothered to touch right now.  Something had to give during this first week, and it turned out to be my housekeeping.  I'll do a lot of clean-up tomorrow, but tonight, I'm just going to fall into bed, lulled by a cocktail and a considerable sleep deficit.
• I suppose I also had to give up a little emotional stability, courtesy of the aforementioned sleep deficit.  When I'm underslept, I get more emotional.  I was reminded of this when I plopped myself down on my couch to listen to this podcast, and found myself sniffling regularly.  Time for bed, I'd say.

So unprepared

First day of classes is tomorrow.  I think I'm going to die.

I would do the most ungodly favors for anyone who will finish my Intro to Libel and Slander syllabus for me and prepare the lectures.

Aaargh...I'd better chug this whiskey and ginger, or I'll never get myself to sleep tonight.

Trying to be a good kid: Citation for students

I'm sitting in a Panera at a mall, since this is the only way to get both breakfast and wifi out here in the sticks.  I was getting nervous about all the repairs that my car needed, and decided to bite the bullet and take it to a VW dealership so I could get people who know their business to fix it all.  They're probably going to be working on the car through lunchtime, so they gave me a ride to the mall so that I had a slightly nicer place to twiddle my thumbs.  I am smart, though, and instead of thumb-twiddling, I have work on hand, so I went for the wifi and coffee.  I fear that the repair bill will be frighteningly close to $1000 $1300 (fuckfuckfuck), but I couldn't see any way around it.  This is why the devil invented credit cards, right?

Speaking of work, one of the syllabus-related matters on my mind is how to explain thoroughly to students how to avoid plagiarism.  I constantly sit on the fence in the argument about whether these kids nowadays don't properly understand what plagiarism is or whether they're just lying little sacks of shit trying to get away with whatever they can.  In any case, one must assume the former before getting to know them, so I need to walk them through the whole deal. 

What all should I be covering?  Obviously, there's the old-fashioned matter of how one should cite various kinds of sources.  That much is easily accomplished, and I can always tell them to consult the Chicago Manual of Style when in doubt about formatting.  Then there's the larger issue, related to doubt: when should one cite?  The traditional answer that I stand by is "When in doubt, cite."  But how do you explain this to students who do not yet recognize your version of common sense?  I'm trying to think of every situation, reasonable or not, that students could bring up.  Here's what I've brainstormed:

• A short phrase of two or three words involving technical or abstract vocabulary that they wouldn't have thought of on their own.  "A good idea" is not a phrase that one needs to cite, but "a trenchant paradigm" might be.  The latter phrase is also ugly as hell and likely a smokescreen for a bullshit artist, so it throws up more than one red flag for me.
• An idea or observation that needs a bit of explanation, even if it is phrased in the student's own words.  As much as most pseudologists are familiar with Benedict Anderson's idea of print capitalism and the effects it had on creole nationalism, I'll eat my hat if most college students know that.  Talking about that stuff without clearly citing the page numbers of Anderson's book so that I can fact-check an argument might not be plagiarism, exactly, but it's shoddy practice.  (Not acknowledging Anderson as the source of the idea at all — that would be plagiarism.)
• Then there is the occasional student who thinks that zi can copy entire pages of text wholesale, as long as the source pages are clearly cited.  What's a good way to explain to a student that zi must simultaneously cite sources clearly and write for hirself?  I imagine this would be confusing to at least some people, especially the overly cautious ones who distrust their own instincts.  Should I just forbid block quotations of more than three lines?
• Web pages.  Oy.  I would like to forbid my students from citing them at all, but of course this idea is increasingly troubled by digital access to peer-reviewed scholarship.  Even the idea that some sources are inherently less trustworthy than others can be hard to work with, since pseudologists frequently engage with things that people say and write that are verifiably inaccurate — we need to study things outside of peer-reviewed scholarship in order to do our jobs.  Is there any practical and brief way to explain to students how to be wary of the internet without throwing the baby out with the bathwater?  How do you make undergrads wary of factual truth-claims without making them paranoiac?

What other craziness am I missing?  And what say you, my esteemed colleagues, for solutions?

Frazzled: the run-on

OMG I am so tired that I can barely focus my eyes right now but despite that I am drinking an after-work beer at my desk because I'm underslept from trying to work on my syllabi and tone up the response to my readers' reports and all of that was sort of thrown off to the side last night because I had to change my cell phone number because it used to belong to some cheap thug and I was getting scary text messages and so now I'm underslept and had to go to a workshop on campus this morning and don't get me wrong the workshop is actually through Wednesday and then I have another workshop to go to on campus for Thursday and Friday for which I'm even less prepared and all I really want to do right now is finish my response and then think cool thoughts about my upper-division syllabi but I can't really do that right now because I'm a little stressed out because my entire back from my hips all the way up through my shoulders and neck is sore from helping Fie Upon This Quiet Life do a little preparatory moving and also I'm totally stressed out because my car's electrical system is slowly going on the fritz and my car title is totally fucked because the bureaucrats in Godforsaken State fucked up the odometer reading and now I'll have to get a notarized document and mail off the title certificate so that they can send me a corrected version if they feel like it and so until then I'm driving around Cornstate with expired license tags from Godforsaken State and a broken headlight cover and apparently as of last night a burnt-out turn signal and as if that weren't enough my dishwasher is on the fritz for real and I half-suspect that my leasing company will have to replace the whole damn thing so I guess it's good that I've built up so much experience in hand-washing dishes because that's what I'm still doing until they get around to that and that decreases my energy not only to cook but to worry about the subtleties of pedagogical method that this workshop is exploring and as if that weren't enough to fray my nerves I learned this morning that a family friend has died and that creates a lot of unpleasant unbloggable problems for my family so enough about that but at least I suppose I have my own health and I'm slowly figuring out my syllabi although I have four freaking days at the end of the semester for my Intro to Libel and Slander for which I literally have nothing fucking scheduled because I will have completely run out of things to say and again I must remind myself that life really could be a whole hell of a lot worse and hey I guess I've had much worse problems than my new-found difficulty in juggling schedules to go out with the sudden and I mean really sudden and unanticipated rise in women who want to go out with me and hell I suppose that if I have to take the constant low-level risk of driving with expired license tags in a dodgy car in order to have a dinner date when my work life is in overdrive and the unbloggable anxiety is rising once again then I'll just have to do that and be content that my social life is suddenly quite interesting.

Two weeks left in Ghosttown = PARTY

I mean, if you wanna party Koshary-style, that is.  I realized yesterday that, between the house-hunting trip I'm planning and the visit to Hometown I've scheduled, I really only have two weeks left to live in Ghosttown, besides a few days of frantic packing at the tail end.  This realization, all by itself, has stimulated my good mood, as well as a sudden attack of industry: I have to read books!  Write syllabi!  Plan my move!  (Side note: all-online banking may have just changed my entire freaking life.)

It is now 2:00AM, and I am buzzed after a second glass of cheap-ass moderately priced riesling.*  What am I doing with said buzz going, you may well ask?  Writing syllabi!  Considering various forms of writing assignments!  Drafting an email to send to colleagues to consult their opinions on the matter!  And, naturally, creating my own soundtrack from hell by listening to "Call me maybe" on repeat.  Goddamn catchy pop songs drawing me in with their peppy hooks.

The line "Before you came into my life/I missed you so bad" drives me almost to distraction, given its temporal impossibility and quasi-postmodern collapse of past and present time.  Carly Rae, you cannot miss that of which you are totally unaware.  HOWEVER, if you simply ignore the stupid fucking lyric and concentrate on the sickeningly catchy chord changes and string section in the background – and maybe throw back a third of a bottle of wine – you will find yourself captivated as all fuck.

And now I shall return to contemplating the merits of research papers, as all of you are ASSIMILATED BY A ONE-HIT-WONDER POP SENSATION, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*Pairs nicely with the kinda-sorta expensive-by-weight wedge of Stilton that you bought while telling yourself that you could justify it by buying some inexpensive riesling to make a proper wine-and-cheese break.

Vacation!

I finally sent out that damn book review yesterday, and I feel much better for it.  If I were a really conscientious academic, I would now turn my full attention to bear upon the books that I must consider for use in my classes.  However, since I am not so much a conscientious academic as a punk-ass slacker academic, I shall instead take a short vacation.  An old friend of mine has a four-day industry conference in a city about five hours' drive from Ghosttown, and has kindly offered to let me glom onto the hotel room zi has already booked.  Cheapskate vacation FTW!

I'm debating whether or not I should even try to bring some work with me.  My friend will be tied up with professional stuff all day, so we'll only be hanging out together in the evenings.  And I should be figuring out my reading lists, I know.  But...vacation...  Hm.  Perhaps I'll bring a few of the books along with me, since I rarely do much before I've had breakfast.  I can skim a book, and then run along to see the sights around town, or just relax, knowing that I have the run of the hotel and can sashay on out to do stuff whenever I damn well please. 

Or maybe I'll just slow down.  

Off to pack an overnight bag!

Summer to-do list

All right, I'm going to take a page from Haphazard Musing's book, and post a list of the things I want to accomplish this summer.  Aside from needing to keep all of this stuff clear to myself, I need to ratchet up my sense of accountability — 'tis oh so easy on pleasant summer days to find that an entire working day has gone by and I have done nothing but mix myself drinks and eat processed food while fucking around on the internet.  That will not do, friends.  Let's see what I have on my docket:

1. Read Painfully Boring Book and write a review of it.  This will actually be my first book review for a dedicated pseudological journal; I've done a few others before, but they were always for journals in allied disciplines.  Now I've been solicited (on a senior colleague's recommendation!) to write a review of a book very much in several of my subfields, for a respected journal.  And I'm so fucking bored by the goddamn thing that I can hardly stand to pick it up.  I'm already dreading concocting a suitable review for it — we all know that you don't want to write a really negative review unless the piece under consideration is truly dire.  I'm just not excited by the methodology, nor the analysis, although there is nothing wrong with either.  I need to bang this one out before anything else, since it's on deadline, so I must focus myself and power through it.  I fear this will be one of those reviews that summarizes a book more than assesses it critically, if only because I do not want to translate my yawns of apathy into a review of a book by a colleague whom I am almost bound to meet soon at one event or another.

2. Work out THREE (count 'em, three!) new syllabi.  Or, to be more precise, two new syllabi and a revision of one I've already taught.  I'm just beginning to comprehend the scale of this task, since I am
a) painfully ignorant of my intro course material;
b) obliged to re-structure and enrich my Pseudology of Area Studies syllabus to suit an academically intense SLAC; and
c) have not actually read most of the texts I've considered assigning for my new seminar course, Super Awesome Cool Stuff.  (Admission: the actual course title is very much in the vein of Two Apparently Unconnected Things Juxtaposed to Suggest an Insidious and Fascinating Structural Relationship, as discussed several years ago on this here blog.) 
All of this means that I have to catch up on as much of the material as possible before I can even attempt to parcel out readings by class session.  I've already looked over the academic calendar at CBU, so I know that we have precisely fourteen weeks per semester.  (Which, given the clusterfuck of outside obligations that occurs every fall without fail, means that we really have only about twelve or thirteen weeks of class time in the fall semester.)  I have to figure out what we're going to read, when we will read it, and what evaluative assignments I can/should cook up so that the students are challenged but not crushed.  Sigh.  At least I can start naming texts I like for the area studies class off the top of my head.

3. Start making plans for apartment hunting ahead of time in Tinytown.  I know from last year's experience how stressful it is to search for an apartment when you're already in town and have to worry about paying for a motel room while you look.  It would be that much worse if I did that in Tinytown with an entire moving truck full of my belongings.  It's a little easier to drive from Ghosttown to Tinytown than my last move, so I'm planning to drive to Tinytown some weeks from now, do my recon, and secure an apartment before I make the big move.  Really, that's the easy part.  The bitch will be the big move, since I will have to transport both my car and my possessions.  I'm hoping that I can wheedle a relative into coming out to Ghosttown to perpetrate a one-way road trip with me.  But if I can't, I'll have to do the same pain-in-the-ass rigmarole I did last year, doing the one-way drive twice over, with an expensive one-way airfare in between.  (ATTENTION BLOGGING FRIENDS: Come with me to Tinytown!  Drive the truck!  I will pay your meals and beer, I promise!  Don't make me do this by myself, please!)
The other thing that comes to mind with apartment hunting is that I should be a little pickier this time around.  I'm slated to be at CBU for two years, and I want a more comfortable, homey dwelling space than the serviceable but kind of crappy apartment I'm in now.  I'll need to schedule sufficient hunting time to get something good, and not just something cheap and immediately available.

4. Plan short visit to Hometown.  Sigh.  I should go home for a bit to say hi to everyone, since I'm going to be dead busy once July comes around.  I'm dawdling about figuring it out, since then I'd have to actually, you know, commit.  And I'm pissed that I have to pay yet another airfare for this.  Maybe I can find something cheap on a red-eye.  Sigh.

5. Exercise more.  Which is to say, exercise at all.  I can feel how soft and pudgy I'm getting, now that I'm not obligated to go anywhere on a daily basis.  I don't kid myself that I'm going to start paying gym fees here in Ghosttown, although I have every intention of getting more serious about this stuff when I get settled in Tinytown and can make good use of the facilities at CBU.  I do plan to walk more, though: with a little extra drinking water and some sunscreen, I wouldn't need to drive to get to about half the places in town that I frequent.  My spare tire tends to balloon during the summer, which has a number of unpleasant effects for me.  I wonder if I could actually force myself to start doing crunches at home...?

I can look ahead to a whole other to-do list that revolves around moving, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Brief update of reassurance

I haven't fallen down any manholes.  The end of the semester has slowed things down considerably.  It's the quiet, impoverished time of summer now, in which I must construct a daily schedule of Things I Should Be Doing in order to avoid wasting away entire days doing nothing useful.  So far, this effort is a near-total failure.  My productivity sucks lately.

Meanwhile, this is beginning to look like a problem.  I have a book review to write, due in about a month, and I should be frantically reading pseudology textbooks in order to cobble together a workable syllabus for Introduction to Libel and Slander.  Am I doing any of this?  Not really.  I sort of hit a point of apathy towards everything work-related after I uploaded final grades.  I feel like I want/need a vacation, although, given how careful I need to be with money this summer, it would be more of a staycation.  At the same time, this stuff isn't going to sort itself out.  I need some self-discipline.  Can someone lend me some?

Well, fist me in the a** and call me Foucault

I got an email today from one of my soon-to-be-colleagues at Cute-as-a-Button University, asking to confirm my teaching assignments.  I looked over it, and it all seemed good.  They even list old syllabi of the intro course written by other professors, which come in very handy for gauging what people expect, and what sorts of texts and assignments are favored.  In the process of reviewing these syllabi, I noticed and then slooowwly realized that I was being assigned not to teach my usual intro – call it Introduction to Pseudology – but the other intro course for the department.  I will have to teach one section each semester of Introduction to Libel and Slander.  This is a much more, well, sciencey kind of pseudology, one that is very far distant from the broad segment of the discipline that I usually think of as the whole.  And, uh, I'm not well schooled in it. 

Last time I took a course in Libel was 1997.  It was an undergrad course.  The intro course, in fact.

Last time I took a course in Slander was, oh, MOTHERFUCKING NEVER!!  FUCK ME WITH A CHAINSAW!!!!!!

I'm trained in Pseudology, for heaven's sake!  You know, the non-sciencey pseudology!  This is one of those situations in which one's CV can unintentionally raise a bid that one meant to stand pat on.  Technically, I have taught several semesters of Intro to Libel in grad school, but really, I was a TA in an excessively computerized course.  I was more of a computer lab monitor than a regular TA.  And sure, I had to read the textbook, but I really had to read it, not just review and skim.  And probably half the information that I learned (and forgot) has been made obsolete by later findings anyway.

The closest I've ever gotten to Slander is in having some good friends and drinking buddies in grad school who are trained Slanderers.  Couldn't tell you too much about their work, but I can state on good authority that they can hold their liquor.  Somehow, this seems inappropriate knowledge to impart to freshmen. 

And, because I a) put all that on my CV, b) I blithely agreed in my campus visit to teach this course because I'm a fucking idiot, and misunderstood the course as broad enough in scope to use an adjusted form of my current intro syllabus, and c) I've accepted the job and have no intention of backing out of that, I've gotta string together something.  My entire current intro syllabus, which I have crafted and smithed over the course of three years, is completely useless for this purpose.  Virtually all of my theory knowledge, never mind my methodological training, is irrelevant to this class.

I think I have a lot of reading to do this summer.

RBOC: Spring 2012 semester edition

• It's been an emotional rollercoaster for me this week, just like the rest of January.  I'm increasingly convinced that Ghosttown, for a variety of reasons, is actually bad for my mental health.  It is therefore uncomfortable to speculate on the possibility that my only hope of employment for next year may be begging to have my current contract renewed for another year.  Sick irony, anyone?
• My therapist seems to have zeroed in on my emotional distress as rooted in guilt, shame, and self-loathing.  I find myself agreeing with this and, at the same time, wondering, Are there survivors of graduate school who don't fit this profile?
•  The semester kicking off doesn't do much good for my emotional stability, since there's the inescapable fear that I will somehow screw everything up and scar my students.  I'm calming down from that one, as the classes start to knock themselves into shape.  The add/drop period makes everything so chaotic that I have totally abandoned teaching actual material for the first week, since so many people register late.  I feel good about this choice, now that I've tried playing it both ways.  This is definitely the more efficient way to go.  The students may be bored the first few days, just going over the syllabus, policies, study skills, etc.  But hell, it's not like students won't be bored anyway.
• Even faster than last semester, students are dropping my courses (or the idea of them) after getting a look at the requisite work.  Effort appears to frighten them intensely.  I feel I chose wisely this time around by forcing the students to go through the entire syllabus with me so I can explain to them what college professors mean when we say things like "read" or "take notes."  No one seems to arrive at Ghosttown U. with any study skills worth a goddamn, and I figured that out too late to really address it properly last semester.  Now that I'm walking them through the processes en masse, and am forcing them to confront the reality that they will have to read for nearly every single class session, a few more of them seem to be jumping ship during the first week.  
• My favorite example of this so far: a senior came by my office today after class, apologetically explained that zi had just registered a few minutes before, and wanted to know what zi might have missed the first few days.  Zi seemed on the ball, well aware of how college operates, and I was fine letting hir know where we'd be picking up.  I printed out a syllabus and the little sheet I concocted this morning about reading and note-taking skills and gave them to the student, who seemed almost insulted by the thought that zi would have to read such elementary instructions.  I practically apologized as I gently urged Stu to read them through to understand my policies, even though I was sure zi knew all of this stuff already, and explained that these things were intended primarily for my first-year students.  Before the work day ended, Stu had already dropped the course.  I believe zi was on my roster for approximately two hours.
• Not that this is brag-worthy, but I have managed to write bits of my book manuscript more days than not, so far this week.  This evening, I was puzzling over which chapters to focus on preparing for my potential book editor's review, and I suddenly realized, while fiddling the wording of a footnote, that Microsoft Word doesn't include footnotes in the word count.  (Is this a Mac thing?)  I can't for the life of me find whatever widget in Word would change this scenario.  But anyway, I created a separate document and copied all of my footnotes from all my chapters into the body text, so I could see the count.  It expanded my manuscript word count by nearly 3,000 words!  Celebrate!

Evaluations and syllabus revamping

I had all kinds of bad physical feelings today: I resolved this morning that I need to man up and review my students' evaluations of me, which I've been avoiding.  One way or another, I need to know what's in those documents, since they will factor into my job hunt in a few different ways.  After fighting off the very real urge to have a whiskey first, I sat down after lunch and downloaded them all.

I'm kind of shocked to see how positive these evaluations are, all in all.  Class by class, my students were remarkably high graders on every metric that the university uses.  Thankfully, this seems to be due to the tendency of the disgruntled students to chuck the survey altogether, and of the happy students to effuse about their success and whatever they perceive to be my role in it.  The only class that seemed generally less contented was, of course, the one composed primarily of lost souls who scored way below their peers in my other classes.  Can't say I'm surprised to see that I didn't rate quite as highly with them.

The critiques my students gave ranged from the totally absurd – one in particular seemed aggravated that attending class was a needful part of the course – to the dead-on accurate, which was generally the suggestion that I chill out a bit.  I'm never going to be Zen master-mellow, but I can recognize that the students are right that I tend to come down harshly on people who screw up.  I need to remember that those who screw up will be penalized for it in their grades, and that attempting to goad them into getting it together comes across as shaming and counter-productive.  Let the grades tell them the story, let the grades tell them the story.  I can do that, I think.

I've also thinned out the readings, over my instinctive objections.  Some of the readings I tried last semester are simply too hard to comprehend without more prior knowledge (or – sigh – better reading skills), and I'll be able to communicate the material better by interactive lecturing than by making them read.  Where I could, I also trimmed the lengths of the readings I kept.  No doubt I will always get complaints on evaluations that there was too much reading, but I'm hardened to that: way too many students come to college with the apparent belief that reading should not be required at all.  I've made my peace with the reality that some students will skim, and some will skip a reading completely, and they may even have good reasons for doing that, but all of this does not mean I shouldn't assign a useful reading anyway.

On the other hand, something I plan to try to avoid a bit of this is to hand out the syllabus in hard copy.  Last semester, since I had a huge number of students to deal with, I decided to just upload the syllabus to Blackboard and let them download at will.  This led even some smart, hard-working students to give into the temptation not to read the syllabus at all.  I'm hoping that sticking a copy under their noses will make them a little more aware of what awaits them.  (And, in a perfect world, encourage the real slackers to drop during the first week.)

Finally, I'm also planning to spend part of the first week walking students through how one reads in college, and how one takes notes on that reading.  I figured out way too late in the game last time that most of them didn't know these study skills at all, and I had to tell them on an individual basis, which meant that only the students who came to my office hours ever heard that talk.  Clearly, I need to take the bull by the horns here.

I have some other issues to deal with for my new class, Pseudology of Research Area.  This one will be a brand-new experience for me all the way around, and I'm a little freaked out about not screwing it up.  I never even TA'd for an upper-division course, and now I have a course of my own and a TA.  Good heavens, how will this work out?  I settled on what I think – I'm probably wrong, but whatever – is a really light, doable reading schedule for the syllabus, one which will let us read two full books closely, and take in a bunch of articles and, depending on how crazy I feel, a little multimedia.  My enrollment is all over the place, so I have no gauge of how this will pan out.  Most of the registered students are pseudology majors, but a fair minority are not, and many of those are only sophomores — and this is an upper-division course.

One might ask how or why such students could even register for my course.  The answer is that, for some politicky purposes that I hope will eventually serve someone's interests (preferably mine), I was not permitted to impose any prerequisites on registration.  I'm not actually certain that I won't end up having a frosh or two.  It's weird, but as long as registration doesn't go much higher than it already is, I'll be content.  Ideally, this class would function as a smallish round-table seminar, and we're already on the hefty side of that.  If a few more students sign up, I'll have too large a class for my preferred style of interaction, and the course will necessarily skew more toward lectures and less toward student-to-student interactions.

To combat this, insofar as I can, I've arranged for the first few readings to be on the harder, theory-oriented side of things.  That, plus a few early quizzes, ought to clue in the idler students that they need to, in the words of Junior Soprano, "come heavy or not at all."*

*In the metaphorical sense ONLY.  Don't even get me started on the topic of concealed firearms on college campuses.