A liberal conversation the liberal arts

We had some great conversations in my Ethnomathematics course today, a day we devoted to trying to obtain a better and broader view of the university we all work at. After doing a peer review of each others' brochures (advertising campus offices and organizations of important to new arrivals to campus), I asked the students what it was that drew them to UNC Asheville in the first place.

The list they came up with was a comprehensive one. According to them, the draw of the school has to do with the fact that UNCA

• is cheap,
• is in the mountains,
• is in North Carolina,
• is in Asheville,
• is close to family,
• offers a "real" [I think he meant "more comprehensive"] education, as opposed to a conservatory,
• has a small campus,
• has a green campus,
• has promising programs of interest [teaching licensure and Chemistry were mentioned specifically],
• isn't pricey,
• has nice faculty,
• has an accepting community,
• is part of an active larger community,
• is situated in a "hippie town,"
• has no football team,
• offers diversity,
• offers a large number of extra-curricular activities,
• offers small classes,
• allows students flexibility in their studies, and
• offers a broad variety of courses one wouldn't find elsewhere.

I pressed the students a bit on this last point: what courses do you think distinguish UNCA from other institutions?

"This one," one student offered. "This doesn't seem like the kind of class you'd be able to take just anywhere." Students also cited a number of other courses, many of which have an interdisciplinary flavor to them: a jazz course on the popularity of The Beatles, physics courses on music and sound, Asian studies courses, and teaching licensure courses relating to every discipline across campus.

Toward the end of our conversation, we began to drift toward the topic on which I asked the students to write a brief reflection for next week: what is it about UNCA that makes it a liberal arts institution? Judging from their responses to this question, I think the students have a good idea already, and I'm looking forward to further discussion:

"I went to UT [University of Tennessee] before this, and there all of the teaching was straight out of the textbook. You had to read the text and then you'd get lectured to about it. Here there's so much more variety in the way things are taught. And the classes all fit together and build on one another. They affect one another."

"There are connections between all of the different components of our education."

"We have a chance to learn in small classes like this one, instead of large lectures with several hundred people."

"The range of courses we can take is huge. And they sometimes consider the same ideas from different points of view."

Unwittingly the students are hitting some of the reasons I came to UNCA and enjoy my career here so much: I have the chance to actually get to know my students and their hopes and dreams. I have the chance to teach rich courses with a similarly rich assortment of pedagogical techniques. Moreover, I do this all with strong students who would never be able to afford the cognate experience at a private school like Bucknell, Bard, or Davidson. It's a good life.

I'm looking forward to reading the students' reflections...and to their presentations on the campus offices to which they've been assigned. More to come!

Where it's at

At the end of Calc II today I asked the students to write two things on a scrap of paper: (1) whether they'd like to get the first take-home exam this Friday or next Friday and (2) on a scale of 1 to 10, how they feel about our class so far (with additional commentary as needed).

Most of the students are really enjoying the class and getting a lot out of it, giving a rating of either 9 or 10, and in one case 11, for the second question. (There were, of course, some oddballs who insisted on giving a rating of 3π or √97 or some similar silliness.) Most people loved the way the class is set up, with a high level of interaction, applicability, challenging but authentic problems, and fun. "I'm enjoying the togetherness," said one student, and another said "I really enjoy your approach. It can be overwhelming, and a lot of work. But you make it fun."

The most common concern was the speedy pace of the class: 4 out of 30 students mentioned this concern. (3 out of 30 mentioned the amount of work, the next-most-common concern.) The pace is, sadly, hard to make much slower, given how much mileage we're expected to make before Calc III. (And, as I point out almost every term, I make my way through these topics more slowly than any of my colleagues do. I know my department chair's section of Calc II is about three sections ahead of us right now.)

There are ways to make the pace and workload feel less stressful:

Do you feel like you're having a hard time keeping up with notes in class? Come to class with my "skeletal" notes already printed out: you'll have less to write and can focus more on the ideas. I strongly recommend this route. I know it's helped a lot of people in previous semesters.

Do you feel overwhelmed by the homework load? Get started on the homework as soon as it's assigned, and identify immediately any potential problems you think you might encounter. Ask me about these problems right away, so that you're not stuck asking them on Friday afternoon, an hour before the homework is due. (Things always feel more stressful right before the deadline.)

Do you feel like you're getting the ideas as we talk about them, but that they're just not sinking in as well as you'd like them to? Talk them out with your friends in the class. Draw lots of pictures as you explain the ideas to your friends. Puzzle through the pictures together and make sure you can tie the conceptual ideas to the computations that go hand-in-hand with them. Not only do your friends sometimes do a better job than I do in explaining these concepts; moreover often the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. (I honestly didn't truly understand Calc II until I started teaching it as a graduate student.)

Above all else, remember that you're not alone. We have an overwhelmingly friendly class, and I've seen how wonderfully you're all working together. Take advantage of that sense of togetherness and help each other out. You're making a great team.

Oh, and this Friday beat out next Friday, 17 to 12 (with 1 abstention). I believe I will pass out the exam this week, but please recall that you'll have a week in which to do it.

From Greenville

My first visit to East Carolina University (ECU) has been a successful one so far, at least from my point of view. (You can ask my interlocutors in the Math Department and the university’s current WAC [Writing Across the Curriculum] Academy if they feel otherwise.) I’ve been here for a day and a half now, and it’s been pretty much nonstop action.

I got into town on Wednesday night around 7:30, having left Asheville just minutes after wrapping up my early-afternoon Calc II class. There was still enough time left on the evening to catch a late dinner at Copper & Vine with my wonderful colleagues and hosts Libby and Xavier (holla!), faculty in the ECU Writing Center.

Yesterday morning gave me some free time to finish off a couple more rec letters before the real work began. Over coffee and tea at Starbucks Libby and I went over the feedback she’d written on Chapters 3 and 6 of my book. She seemed to be apologetic about offering her comments with an eye toward reader response, but I assured her that this is exactly what I need. Besides pointing out potential points of confusion, her comments offered up several sources with which I wasn’t familiar before, and easily a dozen new ideas for low-stakes writing activities, methods of providing feedback on writing, and means of making the writing process smoother and more meaningful for student writers.

We bustled off to lunch at the Starlight Café (if nothing else when this trip is done I’ll able to tell you where to eat in Greenville) with a few more folks from the Writing Center, and shortly thereafter it was time for my first performance, a research talk in the Mathematics Department.

I was well-received and my talk was somewhat well-attended…but somehow the energy wasn’t there for me. It’s no secret to people close to me that I’ve recently found myself a little disillusioned by mathematics: there’s little sense of urgency to it, there’s little authenticity to what I do. This isn’t to say that math is pointless and purposeless; it’s simply that lately I fear I find little purpose in it for myself beyond play-like manipulation or action-under-constraint, a sort of glass-bead game or extended Oulipian exercise. I fully recognize that the mathematics I do has little, if any, immediate impact on the world and I feel that on the other hand most other aspects of my career and personal pursuits and passions (teaching, writing, and poetry) have relatively profound impact.

Couple this with the fact that mathematicians are, let’s face it, not the most outgoing or socially “ept” of individuals by and large, and I feel as though I’m alienating myself from my own discipline.

Meanwhile I’m moving closer and closer to another: right now teaching writing to me seems a much more personal, passionate, fulfilling, rich, and worthwhile activity. While one in ten thousand people might need to know what the independence polynomial of a path-like graph tells us about that graph’s connectivity, it’s impossible to know too well how best to express oneself. It doesn’t hurt that nearly every one of my colleagues in composition and rhetoric is warm and welcoming. I’m sure the discipline’s got trolls of its own; it may just be that they do a better job of hiding them.

Straight from my math talk I walked across the quad with my Quimby (another of the ECU Writing Center folks…both he and Libby attended my talk in the Math Department, brave souls!) to yesterday evening’s meeting of the WAC Academy. This six-week faculty development series challenges its participants to find more meaningful ways to involve writing in their disciplinary courses. Perhaps unsurprisingly (this is always the case in such workshops) there is a preponderance of younger faculty involved in this program, but the various disciplines are broadly represented in this semester’s group, spanning from psychology and biology at one end to drama and dance at the other.

The focus of the evening was The Writing Process, reverently rendered in capitals. Libby (who just now stopped by where I’m sitting as I write this sentence), the WAC Academy’s fearless leader, started things off by leading a “writing into the day” activity. She asked participants (and me) to illustrate the process they performed when writing their most recent substantial writing project. I portrayed my book-writing project as an Iron Chef-like jumble of too many skillets on too many stoves which gradually became more like an ever-revolving Ferris wheel, one chapter on each of several gondolas that got written on each time it spun past the spot where I stood on the ground. It was an intentionally playful exercise that definitely helped me to pinpoint where and when it is I do my best writing, and what I need to perform that writing.

Unsurprisingly, several others’ writing portraits belied decidedly different processes. One writer combined passion and intellectualization in a picture of a brain with giant red lips: a “brainkiss.” (This is the same man whose list of New Year’s resolutions included the perfection of the “cloud hug.”) A scholar in child development portrayed her writing of a grant proposal as a regular succession of polygons, signifying a step-by-step process which began with an idea and ultimately ends by branching into new ideas (represented by the same circle which symbolize the initial idea). Cyclic and circular, linear and direct, all manner of processes were represented. Surely this variety in the final product is expected, and the “discovery” of such manifold means of writing is one of the take-home points of the exercise.

My portion of the evening’s activities gave the participants a taste of the textbook writing exercise I’ve used in MATH 280 and, with less success, in Topology. (I find it interesting that as I type this sentence my 280 students are hard at work, I hope, in outlining the first chapter! I just texted Iris to see if all is well there.) I asked the participants to brainstorm ideas for the first “chapter” of a text on the ideas they’ve encountered in the first week and a half of the Academy, select five topics on which to base “sections” for the text, and then in pairs write two or three sentences on each of those topics. The emphasis through and through was on the underlying process. Though we didn’t have time to review and revise the writing they’d done, I believe the exercise was well-received and helpful.

As always, the informal and after-hours activities provided as meaningful a learning experience as the formal ones. Dinner at Wasabi 88 gave me a chance to swap traveler’s tales of disciplinary dragons, budgetary woes, and ideas for potential future collaboration. Several of my writing colleagues came, as did three of the brand new ECU faculty. Boudica, Irving, and Monica talked about the frustrations and felicitations they’ve felt during their first year at a new school. They dream big, talking about cross-listed courses they’d like to teach and plans they have for using collaborative learning and boundary-blurring pedagogies in their classes. (Think “theater of the oppressed” and “literature of the wilderness.”) The future is in good hands.

After dinner I spent a couple more hours putting together materials for my final performance at ECU, a presentation I’ll be giving in about two hours to the ECU Writing Intensive faculty. I’ll be hitting the highlights of writing-to-learn, indicating several useful types of WTL activities and letting participants play with a few of them. (I’m toying with the idea of assigning a lipogram…)

It’s been a busy, but bountiful, trip. I’ll be glad to be home, and I’ll have returned a richer man.

Everything you always wanted to know about UNCA (but were afraid to ask)

Today's MATH 179 class was the most fun yet...at least for me. I felt both major activities went pretty well, and I finally get the sense that the students in that class are opening up to and relaxing around one another, and that they're acknowledging and understanding the sort of work that I'm expecting of them.

Our reading today treated three examples of calendars that reconcile lunar cycles with solar cycles (including the very hard-to-understand Jewish calendar). As an entry into discussing the calendars, I used a low-stakes writing activity I've been developing for a bit now: "Intrigue, Confusion, and Confidence." I ask each student to write three sentences: in the first the student indicates something in the reading which intrigued or excited her; in the second she indicates something she was confused about; in the third she indicates something she feels confident she could explain well to someone else.

After writing for five minutes, I have the students pair off and compare their lists. I ask them to fill one another in if one is confused about something the other knows confidently. I ask them to come up with at least one point they'd like to bring up in discussion.

Five more minutes later, we come together as a class and compare the things we've all come up with which are intriguing, confusing, or inspiring of confidence. Students are heartened to see how similar their lists often are: they all have trouble on the same things. (Like the Jewish calendar!)

The second half of class was devoted to an activity I called "Everything you always wanted to know about UNCA (but were afraid to ask)." I passed around identical index cards and asked each student to write down any questions they had about our school to which they wanted to find answers. "I know how it can be embarrassing asking your friends or professors. Some questions seem like silly ones, and you don't want people to think 'he doesn't know that!?' " After I collected the cards, I read them aloud, one by one, pausing so that anyone in the room who had a response could pose an answer.

The ensuing discussion was fantastic. Two or three of the students proved to be particularly knowledgeable about our campus, and I feel they'll make excellent mentors as the semester goes by. It was an empowering conversation, I felt:

1. the students realized lightning bolts would not smite them for asking questions;

2. the students realized that their peers had many of the same questions they did (thereby making those questions by definition "not dumb"); and

3. the students realized that they personally often had the answers to questions their peers might pose, making them the authorities.

I'll definitely repeat this exercise several times this semester, and I'll probably use it in other courses, about course content, too.

Times is hard

As I hinted a couple of posts back, things could look a bit rosier for our campus, budget-wise.

Word around the campfire is that the state legislature's looking at cutting us back 5% for this fiscal year, rather than the 3.5% we'd anticipated and planned for. This is on top of substantial cutbacks during the past couple of years, the last round of which left our entire campus pretty must adjunctless, jeopardizing even year-to-year (and not-so-year-to-year) lecturers. Tenure tracks are safe, but even seasoned teachers who've been with the school for many, many years may find themselves cut loose if they've not got such security.

Meanwhile, despite tuition hikes, enrollment is high (I'm sure in no small part because our public-school price tag is drawing some students who might otherwise go to our private competitors), resource availability is low, and everything is tight, from copier paper and computers to classroom space. It's not simply cliché to say that last dollar counts.

So what's next for our school?

The Integrative Liberal Studies program (ILS) is the crown of UNCA's curriculum, a rich array of courses including a four-year Humanities sequence (the jewel in the crown, if you ask some...tarnished silver and dusty stones if you ask others), topically clustered courses, four intensives, first-year and transfer "welcome to a liberal arts college" colloquia, and various other supporting cast members. (For the past year and a half I've been the faculty chair of the committee charged with overseeing several of these components; I've felt honored to work with a half-dozen or so wonderful people on this body.) Several of the sorts of courses ILS comprises, including the last-mentioned colloquia and the Humanities course, are taught by faculty from across the campus. In times of plenty the departments these faculty call home can spare the folks who traipse off to teach ILS courses, for adjuncts are available to carry the load of the "service" (I hate that word: it's condescending and debasing) courses in the meantime.

No more. Right now it's all-on-hands-on-deck time, and every department on campus is drawing up plans to make sure they can cover their own course offerings before sparing people to teach ILS courses. It's looking more and more like the ILS program may have to be trimmed back, though it's unclear where exactly the cuts might come.

Clusters? The faculty perceptions survey put out a couple of years ago showed that the ILS Topical Clusters program is the most poorly understood and most unappreciated aspect of ILS. Though there is rhyme and reason to its arrangement, many faculty (even many of those who are on board with the rest of ILS) perceive its restrictions as arbitrary and its organization as byzantine. To many faculty and many more students it's a labyrinth of requirements and checkboxes standing between convocation and commencement. In these persons' defense, several of the clusters are exquisitely mismanaged, and several others, though put together with good intentions, fall short of their lofty goal of giving students an interdisciplinary analysis of a single topic.

Intensives? This segment of the ILS program is pretty well-thought-of by faculty, and even if students grumble about having to take one more QI course than they'd like to, at least they understand the theory behind the requirement. Besides, the requirements are easy to understand, at least in comparison with those for the ILS Clusters. Moreover, for most departments, most of the intensive requirements (diversity, information literacy, quantitative, and writing) are met through required major courses. The most vulnerable of the intensives from this point of view are the Diversity Intensives, but the political implications of cutting those back are liable to keep them off the chopping block.

The ILS Colloquia? Many (myself included) consider these the most vulnerable ILS courses overall, especially the transfer colloquia, the LSIC 379s. Some of my colleagues have argued that much of what these courses do can be done in a one-hour "welcome to UNCA" seminar which would meet once every other week in a lecture hall full of 100 or more students. The LSIC 179s (for first-year students) have more, and more critical functions, not the least of which is providing a first-year writing-intensive experience to supplement LANG 120, our one-semester first-year composition course. Historically we had a full-year composition sequence, but like many schools we cut this back to a single semester, meanwhile asking 179 instructors to provide a rich writing experience to replace that once offered by the second semester of composition. Were the 179s eliminated, students would have to seek out another writing-intensive course elsewhere, since the Language and Literature Department is in no position to offer once again a full year of composition to every student. (They're barely able to cover enough sections of their single semester comp course.)

There are complicating factors beyond those I've mentioned above. Some of the smaller departments would likely cease to exist were the ILS courses their faculty teach to disappear. Some have few (if any) majors, weak upper-level offerings, and what offerings they have often don't make enrollment. Faculty in some of these departments make a living (literally) off of teaching Humanities courses, and without such courses they'd have a hard time, from a financial standpoint, justifying their positions. The argument has been made aloud (not by me, I should say) that these programs, and not ILS, should be the first to go should the budget force some out into the streets.

I ask again: what's next?

I have no idea. I hesitate to speculate further than I already have here. We're sure to get news soon. Meanwhile, I intend to keep doing what I do well, and what I love doing: writing my book, working away at my research, and above all else, enjoying the company of my students. Yesterday (Friday) afternoon as I stood at the door of the Math Lab and watched a dozen or so of my Calc II and 280 students hammering away at their homework, it hit me how much I love my job. Despite the relatively low pay and the laughably long hours, I've got the best gig on Earth.

Colleagues, how's your school being hit? Students, are you feeling it, too? I'm curious to know you stories. Please take a few minutes to check in in the comments, even anonymously, and let me know where you are right now. Please let me know I'm not alone.

Status report

Almost daily now I find myself explaining just what it is I'm working on, to Facebook friends and students who've caught an oblique comment or passing mention of my book, making me realize I've not been nearly so forthcoming as I ought to be. Regular readers of this blog will likely know, but newbies may as likely not, that I'm under contract with Jossey-Bass to complete a text on teaching writing and using writing as a learning tool in math-based fields. The working title is More than number: writing in the disciplines and writing-to-learn in the quantitative sciences.

As of this moment I've written somewhere on the order of 42,000 or 43,000 words of the book, comprising nearly four finished chapters, a halfway-decent outline for a fifth, and the very beginnings of a sixth. (My original outline called for seven chapters, but I suspect the first two will be folded into one.) As it becomes more and more fully formed, I'm becoming increasingly aware of the things that it will do well, and the things it will not do so well. Fortunately, I believe that the things it won't do well are things that are done well elsewhere, and which I never intended to do well in the first place.

Namely, it will not offer extensive treatment of more "traditional" discipline-specific genres like research papers, technical reports, and literature reviews. Those forms of writing are addressed at length by authors who have come before, and who are most definitely more qualified than I am to speak on those forms. It will not offer a ready-made blueprint for making writing work in this course or the other: the reader cannot expect to be able to read the book and become an expert overnight, capable of guiding her students through numerous complex writing activities on the first day of the new semester. As important as knowledge is practice, and this I cannot offer.

It will (and, in fact, does) give a great deal of direction in teaching writing in the quantitative classroom, offering advice on sequencing and structuring writing activities, assessing student writing, delivering feedback on writing, and helping students use writing to help them think, learn, and explore, rather than simply to communicate. It will (and does) involve new contributions to writing instruction from me, my colleagues, and my students. I'm particularly proud of the exemplary samples of student writing I'll be able to include.

I'm quite happy with the book so far, despite occasional nighttime anxiety that drives me out of bed to work on the damned thing at two in the morning. I'm sure it'll only get better as I get more and more feedback from my friends and editors.

I've got two more months before the first draft is due in completed form, at which time it'll get shipped off to various reviewers. Between now and then if I look sleepless and haggard, if I stumble past you in the hall or mumble something to myself before scribbling something frantically on the back of a campus mail envelope, forgive me: I'm likely lost in a literary world hovering somewhere several feet off of the ground.

Tired? Yeah. Nervous? Hell, yeah. But excited.

So far

So far, though it took a little while to build up steam, this semester's been great.

After three straight days of canceled classes and (and a couple more late starts thrown in the next couple of weeks), we got enough ground to get some traction, and I'm starting to feel like I'm in the groove.

Both my Calc II and 280 classes are large...I'd even call the 280 class huge: 33 in Calc II and 36 in 280. Yes: three, six. I'm always anxious about classes this large (I seem to attract them), but the students in both have set my mind at ease: they're all very engaged, outgoing, and willing to both ask and answer questions, in both classes. I've got fantastic students in both, and they're making the classrooms' atmosphere lively, spirited, safe, and fun.

I think I've done a good job in encouraging a healthy learning environment so far this term, downplaying grades, up-playing collaboration, throwing in a good number of writing-to-learn opportunities...the students are receiving this well. I sense a greater-than average willingness to learn on these students' parts. It's going to work out well.

I was particularly excited about today's 280 class. This morning we had our "LaTeX seminar," in preparation for which I asked everyone to install a compiler and a text editor on their computers and bring them, if possible, to class. Roughly three quarters of the students had laptops with them, and most of these (after a few fits and starts and glitches involving flavors of Texmaker and odd configuration settings) were able to get LaTeX up and running within five or six minutes. And they liked it. Comments like "This is so cool!" were fairly frequent. It's the best reception LaTeX has ever gotten in a 280 course.

Meanwhile Ethnomathematics is steaming along, picking out a course through the Marshall Islands. Literally, actually. We've spend the last week talking about the mathematical aspects of the mattang, the stick charts used by traditional Marshall Islander navigators in order to plot their path from one atoll to another in the sprawling and sparse archipelago. The students have even been working on building their own mattang out of various materials, including everything from pipe cleaners to pretzel sticks.

Late last week I tried to get the students to cast aside their "Western" assumptions about the make-up of maps by asking them to create maps from our classroom to various important offices and organizations on campus, maps which could not make reference to human-made objects, could not use any sort of reference to fixed units of distance (feet, miles, paces, etc.), and would be followable by someone who had not had a hand in creating the map in the first place. I realized after the fact that I should have included additional stipulations: no text, and mandatory use of "nontraditional" materials: the vast majority of the texts included copious textual commentary and were drawn on paper. (I admit that I'd hoped to see more "tactile" map-like objects like the mattang.)

Nevertheless, the students are doing well in what I think is a highly nontraditional course. I'm eager to see what they come up with for the brochures I'm asking them to make, one for each of several important campus services (like the Math Lab and the Student Health Center).

That's all I'll say for now. I'm sorry this is a bit of a banal post, but I've had nothing heinous happen so far this term. I could say something about the book (coming along, in bits and pieces) or the state's budget situation (in a word, bleak...think "how in the hell can we keep providing the quality of education we pretend to provide?"), or even about my upcoming visits to various writing programs around the state, but I'll leave those for other posts to come soon.

Confuzzled

At the end of class yesterday I asked each of my Calc II students to write down two things: the single topic (of all those we've addressed so far) about which she feels most confused, and the single topic about which she feels most confident.

The results?

Ambiguous.

What are you confused about?

1. Antiderivatives: 3
2. Riemann sums and finding area: 6
3. Basics from Calc I: 7
4. Trigonometry: 7
5. u-substitution: 10

What do you feel good about?

1. Setting up problems: 1
2. Riemann sums: 1
3. Derivatives: 2
4. Antiderivatives: 8
5. Finding area: 10
6. u-substitution: 10

I find it funny that equally many people find u-substitution confusing as find it fine. More people are okay with both antidifferentiation and area-finding than aren't, and there seems to be more uncertainty about carry-over from Calc I than there is about anything else.

Bottom line? I don't think any adjustments are necessary at this point. I'll just keep in mind that people are going to want reminders about tricksy twists in trig and algebra as those twists appear (as they did today in the form of 30-60-90 right triangles).

Having identified several students in this class who are accomplished writers, I'm including in this course a greater-than-even-I-generally-include number of writing-to-learn exercises. Today we ended class with a two-minute reflection on the process of finding volumes using integrals; I hope it helped.

In other news, I've now finished three of the tentatively-six chapters of my book. This weekend I hope to make a dent in Chapter 4, which deals with assessing and responding to student writing. The current draft's largely complete but is still rather ellipsis-ridden...

Update on the update, or, The Squeaky Wheel

Well, I squeaked, and I got greased. Beginning on Wednesday, the Monday-Wednesday-Friday meetings of my Calc II course will take place in a room in my own building, and with

1. ten more desks,
2. much more boardspace, and
3. a much more open, workable configuration.

Whew.

The only question remaining is...why didn't they give me this classroom in the first place?

Okay, y'all...this s**t is weak.

I am apoplectic, and my students aren't far behind.

My section of Calc II currently has 33 students enrolled in it, just one over the cap. I think it's going to stabilize at that number.

The room they've stuck us in had only 25 desks when I got to the classroom this afternoon; every one of them was taken. We fashioned two more seats out of a spare table and some stray chairs, but they had to be placed off to the side, in this small "alcove" formed by the wall that separates a roughly 10-by-10-foot section of the room from the entryway (don't get me started on the floorplan). From this place, the two students sitting at the table couldn't see the whiteboard because of the acuteness of the angle their lines of sight formed to it. The whiteboard's not all that big to begin with (maybe 12 feet long?), and though there's a blackboard of about the same length, it's placed off at the back of the "alcove" I described above, so that only half of the class would be able to see it at all.

This is ridiculous. I refuse to believe that this is the only room available to me at that time, especially when there are classrooms on campus which are simply going unused. Yeah, there's a "classroom," a spacious one at that, in a portion of the science building next door which is allocated to the Chemistry Department, which is currently being used to store desks, from what I can tell. There are no classes scheduled in it this semester. I don't know if there's even a writing surface in it, but this begs the question:

Why on Earth is there a large department scrounging to find rooms to accommodate its courses, when there are much smaller departments wasting the (much larger) space they've been given?

I'm going to try to snag that unused classroom, if it's at all usable.

To be continued...

Day One...finally

Well, yesterday was our first day of classes. I knew we'd get there eventually, but Snowpocalypse 2011 gave us three days of canceled classes before we finally got things underway with a two-hour delay.

My "first class" therefore turned out to be the first meeting of my first-ever first-year seminar, on ethnomathematics. Although we were a bit rushed (trying to take care of two days' worth of business in a single day), I think things went well. At 14 students, the class is the smallest I've taught in years (not counting, perhaps, one or two sessions of the senior seminar); this is going to offer me a welcome relief. It'll also make my student-centered teaching techniques more effective.

After introductions and bureaucratic whatnot, we got started with a "Think/Three/Share" on campus services, offices, et cetera. (One of the purposes of the course is to introduce students to the university and to academic life, and to help students understand the purpose of a liberal arts institution.) Unprompted, the students came up with a substantial list of university offerings, including everything from the Health and Wellness Center to the many offices lining the student union. In a few weeks I'll be asking them to go around to each of these points of interest, interviewing employees there, and designing brochures to advertise those offices' services to prospective students.

After this exercise, we got the mathematical ball rolling with an activity I thought might help the students to identify certain mathematical "conceits" we hold. I showed a clip from the movie Contact (1997), in which Jodie Foster (as Carl Sagan's Eleanor Arroway) and friends are first contacted by an alien intelligence. The alien transmits a series of radio pulses their way, consisting of 2 bursts, then a pause; 3 bursts, then a pause; 5 bursts, then a pause...the first few dozen primes are pulsed out, and from this nonrandom behavior the scientists infer that whatever's sending the message must be a smart cookie.

Of course, there are several assumptions here that are arrogant and "humanocentric." Ranging from the most specific to the most broad:

1. The pulses are sent assuming knowledge about (and concern for) divisibility, the conceptual underpinning of prime numbers),
2. the pulses are meant to be interpreted in base-10 arithmetic, and
3. the pulses are broadcast with the assumption that we use a discrete number system in the first place.

The students didn't catch the first of these, but they caught the second two. I was impressed! We didn't have a whole lot of time to follow up on this exercise before we had to go. I only had a small bit of time to explain their first writing assignment, an "ethnomathematical autobiography," which, besides having the most Greek I've ever fit into a single assignment title, will challenge them to speculate on the ways in which one's upbringing might affect one's perception of mathematics, in the context of their own lives. We'll do some writing exercises on Tuesday (peer review and metacognitive writing), and Thursday will see us begin talking about math in other cultures.

My second class was the first meeting of my Calc II kiddoes. This class is packed! The room's designed to max out around 30 students; I've got 34 in the class now, and one or two more who'd like to get in. It was almost standing-room-only: once the desks ran out we had just enough chairs (and a single stool) to accommodate every last tush in the room. Moreover, the room itself is rather small and cramped. Fortunately we meet in a different room on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; I hope this other room is larger.

However, this begs a pedagogical point: what effect does it have on learning, moving the class from room to room on different days of the week? It can't help but have a noticeable impact, I would think. I've got to be open about this: I'm becoming increasingly ticked about the lack of respect the administration has shown the Mathematics Department here, in the form of allocation of space and resources. Every single semester we teach with too few rooms and too few seats. Despite serving more students (as measured by face-time equivalents) than any other department except perhaps Literature and Language, we always get the short end of the stick when it comes to classroom space.

It's verging on the absurd now. I teach in four different buildings this semester. Four. There's one day of the week (Wednesday) on which I'll teach in three different buildings in one day. I understand if occasionally one might need to be sent out into some far-flung corner of campus for one class or another, but considering most departments teach courses which meet almost exclusively in that department's faculty's home building, I can't help but feel we're being slighted. (I just did a quick survey of our course offerings; at a glance most departments teach either one or no sections outside of their home buildings.)

At the risk of sounding crass, that shit ain't right. Can you imagine the holy hell that would be raised if the chemists were asked to teach their small upper-level courses in the basement of New Hall, where all of the foreign language people dwell?

Anyway....

Aside from being cramped, the first day of Calc II came off rather well. No major kinks. We spent much of the class time building a rough concept map of Calc I, which I hope to include in my book.

Speaking of which: I finished off about 26,000 words over break, and am now about 80% done with a first draft. Draft versions of Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 are nearly done, and 7's coming along as well. Chapters 1 and 2 might end up getting merged into one, and I'll likely get a start on those/that this weekend.

For now, I'm off...in twenty minutes I've got the first meeting of this semester's 280 course. 34 students! The last time I taught it (Fall 2009), I had 15. Crikey.

Wish me luck.

The votes are in...

The results of the Fall 2010 course evaluations (performed on-line for the first time at our school...that a whole 'nother can o' worms I don't want to open right now, but, time permitting, about which I may soon blog) have just been released to faculty.

I'm not surprised by most of what I see in the numbers; my averages on most of the items are where they've been historically...translating the old items roughly into their new equivalents. I'm also not surprised by most of the qualitative responses to the very open-ended "strengths/weaknesses of the instructor/course" questions: very little that I've not seen before. I'm used, by now, to getting negative comments like "he goes very fast through some things..." I find this one particularly risible, since I know that I am the slowest and most methodical teacher in my department: I'd love to see what these students would have to say about some of my colleagues!

Though I take a handful (generally 3 or 4 out of some 80 or so students who responded, all told) of these in stride, and though there was a similar handful of critical but very helpful comments that will help me re-craft my classes in the future, there was one comment that troubled me. A student in one of my classes mentioned that s/he felt I "give different grades for people in different majors."

This, my friends, is out-and-out nonsense. I'm a little taken aback by this insinuation of favoritism. I do all that I can to avoid inconsistency in my grading. I do all that I can to ensure fairness, regardless of major, class rank, age, color, marital status, gender identity, religion...

Although I'm certain that an occasional inconsistency pops up on one item or another on a problem set or an exam (Bob got a 3 out of 5 while Alice got a 4, for essentially the same response), I don't hesitate a second to correct my own error if it's brought to my attention.

During one semester while I was a postdoc at Illinois, I taught a Mathematica-based probability course with about 75 students in it. (Many fun stories there, I can tell you...) Very close to the end of the semester, a student came up to me in the hall after class and said something along the lines of "just so you know, you've been really inconsistent in your grading all semester. My friend and I always give exactly the same answers and you always give him a higher score than me."

I was as taken aback then as I am just now, and said "this is troubling. I definitely don't intend for this to happen. It's hard to grade 75 papers consistently, and mistakes might pop up now and then. Can you bring me your work and show me where I've done this? I'll correct it right away."

He looked at me really sheepishly (or, rather, didn't look at me and looked away, at the wall) and replied: "well, I don't really have any examples on me, but I know it's happened."

My interpretation (especially given the fact that it was on the last day of class that this perception was brought to my attention): "I'm doing really shittily in this class, and rather than owning up to my own lack of effort during the past four months, I'm going to make a vague accusation of favoritism on the part of the professor at the last minute, hoping he'll cave."

Is this the case here? I don't know.

Listen: if this ever, ever, happens to you in one of my classes, let me know. Immediately. I will tend to it. Immediately. I'm a pretty approachable guy, I think, and I'm pretty easy to talk to and receptive of constructive criticism. I can't do a damned thing if you don't let me know how you're perceiving things, though.

I hope I've made myself clear.

Not to be continued, I hope.

In the interest of full disclosure

It's been a busy break.

Winter Break started, effectively, just under three weeks ago. In that time I've been almost completely submerged in writing theory and pedagogy, hard at work on my book. I've written about 17,000 words in the past two and a half weeks, so that I'm now roughly 60% done with a first draft of the damned thing.

I say "damned thing," but of course you know I'm loving every minute of it. Some paragraphs are slow going and take me an hour or more to kill, and others just fly from my fingers. It's all fun, though, and I'm excited about how the book's developing. I'm working away at several chapters simultaneously (I've started every chapter but the second and the seventh), and they're starting to grow and to grow together. By the end of next week I hope to have completed first drafts of Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. (That'll leave 1, 2, and 7 to go.)

While I'm at it, I'd like to give a massive shout-out to my writing colleague Libby of East Carolina University, who gave me fantastic feedback on my introduction, and excellent ideas for later chapters. She's the first of my colleagues in composition and rhetoric to read any substantive portion of the book, and her reading, and her response to it, has encouraged me greatly. Peace!

Unsurprisingly, in working so closely on the book I've begun to think about ways I can model to my students good writing and good writing process to an even greater extent than I already do. I'd like to offer them a window on my own writing process in whatever way I can. I'd like them to see rough drafts, wrong turns, dead-end ideas, reviewers' feedback, and revision, revision, revision.

Obviously they're not going to give a day-old donut about every single version I write of one or another dry math paper. But it can't hurt to show them some of my first-draft research notes that are little more than mathematical freewriting (see below), or the copious comments and suggested emendations my editor offers me on draft chapters of my textbook. If it accomplishes nothing else, at least showing these things to my students will show them that I too am human, that I too make (often very stupid) mistakes, and that I too am continually growing as a writer and a thinker.

Without further ado...here's a sample. Below are the first five out of nine pages of notes I scribbled out the other day as I was working on a paper dealing with the combinatorics of complex polynomials. In these notes, if you look closely (I don't recommend it) you'll see everything I indicated above: wrong turns, dead ends, and idiotic mistakes. (My Facebook friends may even be able to notice on one of these pages the (-1)(-1) = -1 mistake that was the focus of my Facebook status for several hours earlier this week.)

After all, I'm only human.












Coming soon: my thoughts on putting together my first-ever first-year seminar, on Ethnomathematics! This course begins in a little over a week, and I plan on writing my syllabus this weekend. Stay tuned...

On behalf of our esteemed colleague...

Now, I've had students get into the Newton v. Leibniz project in Calc I, but a trio of this term's participants took it to the next level.

Hermione, Nina, and Quinn, played the parts of Newton's colleagues John Collins, Isaac Barrow, and Henry Oldenburg, respectively, in my morning section. During the trial they filled the bill impeccably, offering accurate and convincing portrayals as they went, one by one, to the stand in defense of their colleague. Outside of class, too, they stayed in character as they wrote first-person apologia on Newton's behalf. Not only were these letters among the most creative and clearly-written responses to this exercise I've ever received from students...they were also rendered in startling form.

Executed in three distinct antique hand-like fonts (including "Emily Dickinson," modeled after the poet's actual handwriting) upon nine sheets of artificially-aged paper, the letters come to life in striking fashion.

Gimmicky? Perhaps, but cleverly so! The air of authenticity this medium lends is simply marvelous! See for yourself; here's Collins's letter:




The letters themselves delighted me (especially as I found them waiting for me in my office at the end of a particularly long workday), but more delightful still is knowing that the students had gotten this into the project.

Here's Oldenburg's offering, in bold diagonal strokes and terminating in a huge Hancockian signature:




Barrow's script is smaller and more timid, becoming the sort of man who would cede his chair as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge to his promising young pupil:




Who said there's no room for artistic creativity in the calculus classroom? Well done! (Incidentally, I did indeed get permission from my students to post their work.)

Making waves

I'm still unclear as to how it happened (something having to do with Reddit), but I'll soon be appearing in an article in The Pipedream, the student-run school newspaper at SUNY-Binghamton. One of their reporters, Zelda, got a hold of my recent post on in-class exams and found it interesting enough to start a conversation around it. She and I had a very pleasant discussion this morning about the pros and cons of various assessment techniques, including in-class and take-home exams.

She raised good questions, and I hope I gave good answers. Many of my responses were much in line with the ideas I've put forth in the above-linked-to post and in the comments to that post, but there was one point I'd like to elaborate a little more thoroughly.

At one time Zelda raised a concern an unnamed faculty member at her own university had discussed with her when asked about elimination of take-home exams. In essence, the concern is as follows: "getting rid of in-class exams might work well in upper-level courses where students are familiar with the great responsibility placed on them by being granted a take-home exam, but first-year students simply don't have the maturity or the sense of responsibility to realize the gravity of an act of academic dishonesty. How can these students be trusted to take on this responsibility?"

My response was largely in line with elements of the above post and of my teaching philosophy: if we show our students that we trust them and respect them as adults and as co-learners, they will have a harder time betraying that trust. "Won't there always be temptation to cheat, on the part of the students given a take-home exam?" Zelda asked in follow-up. "Indeed," I agreed, "but if they've been made to feel respected, understood, and appreciated, they'll be less likely to follow through on temptation."

To be sure, this establishment of mutual trust, respect, and understanding is not foolproof: there will always be those who cannot resist the temptation to cheat and who therefore abuse the trust being placed in them, but I'm not convinced that the relatively few cases of cheating one might encounter make it worth abandoning take-home exams.

Moreover (and here's the point I didn't make clear in my interview), how are students ever to learn about mutual trust, respect, and understanding if not given an opportunity to demonstrate that trust, respect, and understanding? Put another way, how else will students develop the maturity we ascribe to upper-level students but by demonstrating that they can acquit themselves in a mature fashion when given tasks like take-home exams in courses like Calc I? It seems to me something of a Catch-22 to say that students aren't mature enough to handle take-home exams, while at the same time they can't develop the sort of maturity we're looking for without being given such opportunities.

That said, and as I told Zelda this morning, I don't believe that take-home exams are appropriate in just any class: it takes pedagogical skill, time, and a considerable amount of practice and patience to design and develop the sorts of learning environments in which young students feel trusted, respected, and understood. It takes just as much skill, time, practice, and patience to develop the robust assignments and assessments that abrogate the need for in-class exams. The course I'm plotting is not for everyone, as I indicated to Zelda when she asked if I'd support a campus-wide "no in-class exams" policy. "No," I said. "Not only do faculty as a rule not like to be told what to do (a fact which would make implementation of the policy horrifically difficult), but the policy isn't appropriate for every instructor."

Anyhow, that's the scoop. I'll post a link to the article in The Pipedream when it appears. I'll also soon be posting some delightful documents three of my students produced as part of their Newton v. Leibniz project (I've just gotten permission from all three to post). Stay tuned!

Observations: a follow-up

[Note: I first wrote much of this post as a comment in response to a comment one of my colleagues from grad school left on my last post; I thought it was strong enough to stand as a follow-up post in its own right. Meredith there left a link to an NPR story on teen neurochemistry some might find interesting.]

My colleague Meredith left the following comment on my last post:

A bit more about those non-traditional students. I would love to see a push on research on the neuroscience of the teenage brain and the "wisdom" of pushing ever-more high school students to take Calculus, at the expense of time spent on functions, trig, etc.

As I hinted in my previous post, it's really no surprise that the nontraditional students are outperforming the younger ones: it happens every semester. The relatively high percentage of such older students at UNCA is one of the things that makes our school such a fun place to teach. Because of the relative affordability of UNCA we get far more than our share of returning students (something one couldn't count on at schools like Davidson, Drake, or Bucknell), and I can't count the number of more mature students I've had whose presence has measurably improved the dynamic of whatever class they're in.

"Measurable"? This semester offers an extreme case: my morning section of Calc I has about three times as many "returning" students as does my afternoon section. Yesterday I noticed that every single one of the fifteen or so questions (every one of them reasonable and deep) raised by students in my morning section during our discussion of integrals was asked by a nontraditional student. Every one. They're simply less fearful of appearing "stupid."

It's this fearlessness that's helped deepen the level of the discussion that goes on in that course and that has ultimately, I really believe, helped lead to the startling difference in grades between the two sections: my morning section's overall course average is almost a full letter grade higher than my afternoon section's. There are other factors which contribute to this differential, to be sure, but it's difficult to discount the involvement of so many older, more mature students.

I absolutely agree with Meredith's placement of priority, and I'll bet she'd agree that we need to stop pushing kids straight into college after high school unless they're truly intrinsically motivated to pursue college coursework on their own. Some kids (even very, very smart ones) simply are not ready for college, and go there only because they've been told by their teachers, their parents, and their guidance counselors that it's the "next step."

Often, though, the best next step is to burn off some energy taking a full-time job for a few years, traveling (perhaps in service of a humanitarian organization like AmeriCorps or Peace Corps), or even joining the military for a tour or two. Though I'm not a fan of many of the things the military is called on to do for our country, I believe one of its most beneficial functions is providing order and structure to kids who sorely need order and structure in their lives.

Observations

A few random observations about my courses this semester:

1. Ever since our department implemented a writing component in the Senior Seminar, the overall quality of the students' oral presentations has gone up as well. Of course, this makes perfect sense for anyone who understands the concept of writing-to-learn: the students are using writing as a means of engaging meaningfully the topics on which they'll later present...moreover, they're making that engagement earlier in the semester than they normally would, asked as they are to complete a rough draft of their written report by the halfway point of the term, at least a week or two before they must present.

2. As in every semester that's ever been and every semester that ever will be, the "nontraditional" students in my Calc I class are outperforming the young 'uns. The more mature folks (juniors, seniors, and returning students) are the first and most frequent askers of questions and the strongest showers on exams, and they make up the majority of those still completing the homework regularly, despite the fact that it's been optional for a week or more by now.

Though there are a couple dozen Cs and Ds scattered throughout my two sections of Calc I, none of the 15 (out of 65) older students has a grade below a B going into the final exam. While they might not have quite as fresh of math skills (or even intrinsic mathematical aptitude) as do the first-year students, the older folks have vastly superior time management techniques, study habits, self-direction, commitment, and sense of purpose. Those skills and attributes (among the most important ones learned or acquired in college) help them to be, by and large, far more successful than their younger peers in most of their courses.

3. This semester's end-of-term presentations in Linear (the first three of nine given today) are far and away better than those the students put together for the course the last time I taught it...and they students have had less time to prepare them than they'd had the last time, too. Though this is a particularly strong class, I humbly give myself some credit for doing a better job overall in leading this course than I did last time. The exercises and activities I've put together are more authentic and robust, and the ways in which the various components of the course were fitted together simply made more logical sense.

Incidentally, one of the presentations will very likely lead to a rich research project. Ino and I have already discussed (at great length) our plans to parlay her team's presentation on linear analysis of nutritional data into a full-scale publishable project. The sky's the limit, and I'm really looking forward to directing what will likely be my first-ever truly applied math research project.

4. As early as I can next term I need to make a point of helping students get past their own pride when it comes to asking questions in class. Students (especially younger ones) often have a morbid fear of "looking dumb" in front of their peers, and of course asking questions makes one appear ignorant. (As opposed to remaining silent, which leads not to appearing ignorant but simply to being ignorant.) I've got to more actively help students overcome that fear.

To that end, I made some remarks in my second (the quiet) section of Calc I today that seemed to have a positive effect on students' querulousness: before proceeding from a specific example of a definite integral computation to a general one, I said something along the lines of "any questions before we move on? This idea is a crucial one, and it's very important that you have a good grasp on it before we proceed. [Silence. Pause.] How many people are there in here? [Count out loud.] Thirty or so? In a class this size, I fully expect more than half of you, probably 15 to 20 of you, don't understand something about what we just did. I expect that. Typically at this point half of the class doesn't fully know what's going on. I expect that. I'm sure you've got questions. I'm just not sure why you're not asking them. But I really can't do anything about it if you don't ask, so we'll just move on."

Move on I did, and within a minute or so two or three people who almost never ask questions posed a few. I was ecstatic! It's the first time this semester that some of these people have come out of their shells.

I've got to remember that trick.

5. I will never ceased to be amazed by how wonderful are the students I work with on a daily basis. Our students are incredible. They're intelligent, devoted, hard-working, honest, and down-to-earth. They're smart, sassy, funny, and fun. They're some of my favorite people on the planet, and I cherish every moment in working with them. I am the luckiest man on Earth for getting to do what I do, and getting paid for it.

Shift, paradigm, shift!

This morning was painful.

I had the uncomfortable task of watching 30 of the students in my morning Calc I section puzzle their way through a difficult (but fair, I feel) exam, their last "mid-term" exam of the semester and a traditionally hard one (on applications of the derivative). This awful duty was the last straw.

The penultimate one came yesterday: I was called upon to help adjudicate a case of "academic dishonesty" (to use the lovely euphemism) in a colleague's class. This colleague wanted to know if the students in question had indeed "cheated" (to stop beating around the bush). After cursory (and then more in-depth) inspection, I agreed that yes, indeed they had.

However, to me the incident said more about the culture of the academy than it did about the "dishonesty" in which the students were involved. More specifically, the students were clearly guilty of "cheating," but to me the more crucial issue concerned why it is they felt the need to "cheat" in the first place.

To "cheat" requires that there be a "game," and that it matter that people follow the rules of that game, and further that it matter that in order to succeed at the game one must "do better" than anyone else playing the game. This was definitely the case in this particular course: the students had been given a (very) high-stakes exam, which to them was more than an assessment instrument; it was moreover one of a very small few means of receiving feedback on the degree to which they were mastering the concepts of the course the exam was given in. To them, "cheating" on the exam was a natural response, given the way in which they've been acculturated to consider the exam a must-win game in which success is measured by high marks.

The point I'm getting at is the following: the more we as educators eliminate, or to the greatest extent possible downplay, the competitive aspect of education (high-stakes testing, rigid and number-driven grading schemata, individualistic learning paradigms, etc.), the less likely we are to find our students "gaming" the system by engaging in "cheating." In some regards, "cheating" will cease to exist, as it simply will have been defined away.

As I hinted above, most "cheating" (I truly believe) is undertaken as an act of desperation, a means of coping with failure as measured by receipt of lower-than-average academic grades. "Cheating" is a means of striving to succeed within a system which provides extrinsic rewards for optimal performance rather than intrinsic rewards for authentic mastery and authorship. I cannot but believe that the vast majority of students would welcome an academic system in which the goal is not to earn high marks but rather to learn, and that students accustomed to this system would see no need to game the system by "cheating." I'm not so naive as to suppose that every student will respond well: there will always be those so acculturated by thirteen-plus years of a largely competitive educational system that it's in their blood to fight tooth and nail for every last percentage point that might tip them from a B+ to an A-...but I believe that even those who are very comfortable with this traditional system will abandon it if given the chance to do so.

All of this gets me back to this morning, and the thoughts I had as I watched my Calc I students (even the strongest of them) wiggle and squirm in completing their in-class exam, stressing out not over whether or not they'd really learned the concepts we've been working on together for the past few weeks, but rather over the grades that will unmercifully adorn their papers when they get them back tomorrow morning.

My thoughts can be boiled down into two short words: no more.

No more in-class exams. Ever. I'm through with them. The one I gave this morning (and will give again in a couple of hours) will be my last.

For quite some time now I've not given in-class exams in my upper-level courses, feeling that little meaningful could be asked on such exams, aside from requiring students to parrot already-proven theorems or give short answers to requests for definitions. In these courses, in-class exams offer none of the opportunity offered by take-home exams to ask authentically engaging and probative questions, and therefore I've found them pointless time-sinks.

For quite some time now I've resisted the banishment of in-class exams from my first-year courses, thinking, I suppose, as I've heard some of my colleagues to think: "there are certain computational techniques the students will have to learn to perform, and to perform quickly." True, but even the most straightforward computational skills will be as well developed (and much more readily understood) if performed in the service of completing the more meaningful, authentically engaging exercises included on take-home exams. This is as true in Precalc or Calc I as it is in Abstract Algebra I or Topology. Even in lower-level courses take-home exams offer a much more meaningful sort of assessment, and even if those exams are still meant as individual exercises and not collaborative ones (of the sort with which I've been experimenting in Linear Algebra this semester) they go much further than do in-class exams in encouraging a culture of collaborative engagement, simply by downplaying high-stakes individualistic assessment.

Keep in mind that I'm not boo-hissing exams entirely: exams offer students a means of reflecting on the ideas they've learned for the past ___ weeks, and if properly responded to they're fantastic tools for giving students feedback. Well-designed and well-delivered exams give students a healthy way of furthering their learning and assimilating their knowledge as they think critically about it. Exams are here to stay.

In-class exams, however, for me will soon be a thing of the past.

I've already responded to a couple of concerns I anticipate colleagues (and even some students...very bright ones, in fact) might have about this decision of mine, but let me respond to a couple more hypotheticals.

Colleague/student: "If you de-emphasize high-stakes individualistic exercises like in-class exams, some students will game the system and prop themselves up on others' work without really learning anything themselves."

Me: "No matter how you set the system up, students are always going to find a way to game it. Gaming the system I propose means cheating themselves out of learning. Gaming the system as it currently stands involves engaging in a behavior that's viewed as sociopathic but is really little more than a symptom of deeper systemic problems. I find the former course far less pernicious. Sure, there'll always be students who frankly don't give a shit, but we're not going to serve them well in any system, and with a system more conducive to authentic learning, they might just pick up a thing or two along the way."

Colleague/student: "You can tilt at as many windmills as you'd like to in your own little class, but you've got to assign grades at the semester's end, anyway. Won't the system you propose result in massive grade inflation?"

Me: "My response to this concern is twofold. First, in courses in which I've begun doing away almost entirely with individualistic activities (begun in Foundations, Topology, and Abstract Algebra I and II in previous semesters, and taken to the extreme in my Linear course this semester), I've seen little noticeable change in the final grades for the courses. This was true even in Topology, in which students had unlimited opportunity to revise and resubmit all work, with no constraint on collaboration. I simply don't see evidence for grade inflation. Second, even if there were grade inflation, so what? It would be incredibly difficult to determine whether students' grades were made higher because they were bracing themselves on each other ("gaming" the system in the sense expected by my first colleague above), or simply because they'd actually managed to more richly and more fully understand the ideas addressed by the course. That is, maybe the grades are higher for a reason: the students are actually, for the first time in their lives, getting it."

I truly feel this way.

Moreover, I truly feel that I've become proficient enough as an educator that my courses offer the sort of rich collaborative learning environment wherein in-class exams no longer serve a meaningful purpose. They're simply anathema to my teaching philosophy, and they're counterproductive to my goal of establishing a safe, stressless, and supportive setting in which we can all learn from one another in robust and authentic ways. From here on out, they're gone.

Before I leave, let me pass my apologies on to the students currently enrolled in my Calc I course: I'm sorry that you had to suffer through the last iteration of this practice. I know how hard the topics you're being tested on are, and I'll keep that in mind as I respond to the exams tonight. I'll respond to them not with an eye toward giving you a grade, but with an eye toward letting you know how well you're learning. I hope you'll receive them back from me with the same thoughts in mind.

One last note: I should point the interested reader in the direction of Alfie Kohn's No contest: the case against competition, about which I've blogged before, and which over the years has probably proven to be the single book which has exerted the greatest influence on me as a teacher. It should be required reading for all educators, at every level.

Sometimes dreams do come true

I'm on cloud nine plus seven.

I think it's fair to say that putting on the conference that concluded yesterday evening around 5:00 p.m. was one of my greatest dreams since coming to UNC Asheville over five years ago. Not only did we put the conference on, but almost everyone involved seems to have had a fantastic time and gotten a lot out of it. Moreover, I've already gotten some good feedback on how to make the event a better one, and a bigger one, next year.

I typically use pseudonyms on this site, but as published poets (for the most part) the principals involved in this conference are used to seeing their names in print, and I'm sure they won't mind me thanking them by name.

My heartiest thanks, then, go to Kristen Prevallet, for her marvelous midday performance and morning workshop, and to Michael Leong, for an eye-opening presentation and a delightful chapbook of occasional poems.

My thanks go to my colleagues Curt Cloninger, Sloan Despeaux, and Merritt Moseley, for offering their own idiosyncratic takes on the intersections between mathematics and art: Merritt ably introduced attendees to Oulipo, Sloan showed them how poetry can be used to communicate mathematical ideas, and Curt demonstrated a dizzying palette of generative visual art.

My thanks go to the quirky, catchy, and wonderful poet Lee Ann Brown, whose work was the centerpiece of the conference. Her presence brought interested parties from several states, and her presentation brought Oulipo and its works to a broad audience on Friday night.

My thanks go to my partner-in-crime in organizing all of this, my colleague Richard Chess, whose indefatigable spirit and helpful organizational skills helped make the event possible in the first place. Without his connections to the literary world, a dream come true would still be a dream.

At last, my thanks go to, collectively, the remarkable students at UNC Asheville, for taking the time to contribute their own work, to help with arrangements in advance, to spread the word, to generate interest, and simply to show up and participate on the day of the event itself. I am well aware that not every school has such dedicated students (here they made up roughly half of those attending), and this is a treasure I would miss were I elsewhere.

You're all wonderful people! I'm lucky to know and get to work with you all.

Great expectations

It's been a bit since I wrote anything truly original on this here site; I fear things have been rather hectic in Patrickland.

I've had a few straight weeks of mind-boggling busyness, but every one of them has been good, almost to a day. Seriously: things have been chugging along furiously but swimmingly, and I've been enjoying all of my classes immensely.

As you can tell from the two most recent posts (this one and this one), Newton v. Leibniz came off without a hitch. Both sections of my Calc I class prepared well and performed well. Though the debate wasn't as heated as I've seen it in the past, both sides were ready and the back-and-forth was steady and confident. I was particularly impressed with the woman playing John Collins in the second section, and the woman playing Henry Oldenburg in the first. The lead attorneys all did splendidly, with well-prepared arguments and clear questions. Objections were at a minimum, and everything was civil (for the most part...there was one somewhat heated exchange in the second section). I enjoyed it a lot. Judging from a preliminary reading ("skimming" would be more apt) of the students' reflection papers dealing with the project, they got a lot out of it, too.

Since then (that was a week ago this past Tuesday), my primary occupation has been getting ready for the Conference on Constrained Poetry. Everything's in order now, with all of our speakers in town (aside from my colleague who's driving over from the Sylva-Cullowhee area tomorrow morning), almost 80 conference-goers pre-registered, recently-run articles on the event in the campus literary mag and the local free weekly, and a well-known journal (Critiphoria) ready to print attendees' creations. Not bad for a first time event. I'm quite sanguine about our chances of repeating next year.

Mimicking our guest Michael Leong's construction of occasional constrained poems in honor of our conference (check out his chapbook, The Hoax of Contagion...also, my thanks to Michael for linking to a handy on-line n + 7 generator), I applied my finite-state automatatistic (what a wonderful word!) constraint to the list of last names of students in my Linear class, obtaining the following automaton:


The word list I obtained from this constraint was short enough to offer a challenge and long enough to give me a rich source of words to describe the joy I've had in working with the students in this course, one of my favorites since coming to this school five and a half years ago.

I'll leave you with the resulting poem, but I'll be sure to check in again soon to let you know how things go tomorrow (because I know you give a damn).

We are one

Here we were married.
We were wedded,
welded
one to one
on a vessel on a charted curve
etched in every memory
in marked meter.

We were battered hard
at intervals,
in imagined rain,
in grey tones.

We are free, we veterans,
sores patched, keels buried,
meet, reserved, nerves set.

We are free, we veterans.
We are one.