Constraint and contemplation

I thought I might mention a couple of the activities I asked my students to take part in today.

The first was a simple freewrite, with an even simpler summative exercise at the end. I asked my Oulipo students to freewrite for five minutes on the ways in which they've noticed their writing to be affected by constraint. Once they'd completed this freewrite I asked them each to identify three words which gave some indication of their freewrite's content and tone. They then shared these words on the board:

I joined the students in this exercise. I was intrigued that my three words ended up being "pattern," "unknown," and "death." The first was unsurprising but the last two were unexpected. I reasoned (if one can call analysis through freewriting "reason") roughly as follows: "we seek patterns in everything we see, including heavily constrained literature, because patterns have predictive power and allow us to extrapolate from the known present and past to the unknown future; perhaps the most compelling unknown is death...can the patterns we find in constrained poetry help us understand even this ultimate unknown?"

We'll have a chance on Friday to discuss the words above more thoroughly. So far we've only talked briefly in pairs about our ideas. I'm looking forward to these upcoming conversations.

The other activity I wanted to mention is a contemplative exercise I asked students in both classes to complete. Knowing full well that Wednesday is the longest and most stressful day for many folks in academia (students, faculty, and staff alike), I wanted to do something to help alleviate the stress. Yesterday, while sitting in the first session of my first faculty/staff learning circle since Fall 2011 (it's been too long!), I thought up the following activity, though I'm sure it's not original to me:

1. Take out two scraps of paper.
2. On one of them, write something that's stressing you out or bringing you down.
3. On the other, write something that's bringing you joy or making you smile.
4. Ball the first scrap up into a tiny origami boulder and chuck it into the recycling bin lovingly provided in the middle of the room.
5. Fold the second scrap neatly and tuck it into your pocket, where you're likely to find it once, twice, thrice, throughout the rest of the day, a gentle reminder of something you should be happy about.

It's a simple exercise, but in both classes it elicited a great response. People in both classes gleefully threw their stressors into the recycling bin in a hail of discarded worry. ("This feels really therapeutic," said one of my Oulipo students.) I noticed smiles and nods from many folks as they put their happy thoughts away. The activity took three minutes out of class time, but I believe it went a long way to establishing a sense of community and a more relaxed state of mind in which we would all be a bit more receptive to new ideas. I might have to make this, or something like it, a regular Wednesday occurrence.

CRTF and Ikea

A segment on NPR's Morning Edition this morning summarized my thoughts on the ongoing curriculum review perfectly. The "Ikea Effect" refers to the observation "that people attach greater value to things they built than if the very same product was built by someone else" (see the linked-to article).

I think I've been blind to the current CRTF proposal's shortcomings largely because I've been very intimately involved in the process that's led to its crafting. Late last week I "came out" as a non-believer to one of my most trusted colleagues (after having come out here a few days sooner), letting her know that I no longer feel that our proposed curriculum is an improvement on the current one. It's less complicated, but simplicity is not superiority, and it's not even clear that the simplicity will result in gain to faculty (in terms, for instance, of lighter workload or reduced faculty oversight).

It is clear, however, that the simplicity will likely result in loss to students: the proposed curriculum is decidedly less interdisciplinary and intentional. Though I don't believe we should prescribe every student's course exactly, I believe some prescription is important. For instance, I feel strongly that the outcomes of the ILS Intensives be met, no matter the way in which they are met. My ideal curriculum would be one in which every department, without exception, structures its major concentrations in such a manner that every student completing a concentration would automatically take two writing-intensive courses and one information-literacy-intensive course. The proposed curriculum, once we've reinstated the requirement of a second course in a science (quite broadly defined) and once we've reinstated the requirement that every student complete every course in the Humanities sequence, will look little different from the existing one. The only changes will be the removal of intensive requirements, the removal of ILS Topical Clusters, and the removal of LS 379, the transfer colloquia that help students transferring to UNC Asheville adjust to our campus and its functioning. These are all at least somewhat significant losses, in my view.

But, as it is, it looks like we may be heading forward to implementation quite soon. It may very well be that when the documents are drawn up and sent to the Faculty Senate's Academic Policies Committee, that body will shoot them down. (Hope springs eternal...) We'll see, probably sooner rather than later. By me, I'd rather take another year to put something prettier together, something more focused on students' needs than on faculty members' perceptions of efficiency. I'd love to see a curriculum where we look closely at the sacred calf of Humanities (it ain't perfect, people; far from it!) and where we ask all departments to seriously reevaluate their major curricula and not simply say "we ain't budging."

A guy can dream, can't he?

Perverbs

Today's Oulipo class started off with Didi leading us in a constraint she'd read about for today. According to the Oulipo Compendium, a perverb (created by Oulipian Maxine Groffsky) is "the result obtained by crossing proverbs." For example, "if we join the first part of 'Red sky at night, sailor's delight' to the second part of 'It never rains but it pours,' we obtain the proverb 'Red sky at night, but it pours."

We spent a little time making up a few of our own perverbs, building off of a list of proverbs we brainstormed at the outset. Here's a list of several we came up with, including some extremely twisted (lexically and topically) ones:

Sailor’s delight, horse in the mouth.
It never rains, but houses shouldn’t throw stones.
An apple a day shouldn’t throw stones.
Loose lips gather no moss.
A bird in the hand keeps the doctor away.
Spare the rod and sink ships.
Early to bed, early to rise, sinks ships.
A stitch in time catches worms.
You can lead a horse to water, but he catches the worm.
Spare the red sky rod and at night spoil the child; sailor’s delight.
An apple a day is worth two in the bush.
An ounce of prevention is a penny earned.
An ounce of bird catches the worm.
Keep calm and spoil the child.
Those who live in a penny spoil the child.
Haste makes moss.
Haste makes worms.
Loose lips gather sailors.

The students' task for Monday: write a holorhyme and a snowball.

My task: find a good .txt file full of profanity to use for the homovocalism generator I wrote in Mathematica.

You're welcome.

No slow news day

This morning's News & Observer featured an article detailing North Carolina's recently-elected GOP Governor Pat McCrory's views on our state's system of higher education. Never mind that his party has done and is doing all that it can to undercut job growth in any meaningful way, never mind that employers almost uniformly profess to wanting students who can think critically, solve problems, and communicate effectively (all skills best instilled at a liberal arts institution), never mind that his comments are short-sighted, misogynistic, and just downright mean...

...to add insult to injury, hours later the President of the UNC system shot back with a halfhearted response that does little to instill confidence in anyone who cares about higher education in this state. His response is itself a paean to high-stakes standardized testing, homogenization of higher ed, and efficiency at the expense of actual erudition. Ross apotheosizes economy and pledges to "work with" McCrory as the latter goes about his task of eviscerating one of the nation's premier university systems.

Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.

Here's Ross's statement, in full:

“The University of North Carolina has partnered with business and government to build the state’s economy.  We pledge to continue to work with the Governor and the General Assembly to ensure North Carolina has the strong talent pool needed to fill the jobs of today and tomorrow, some of which haven’t yet been invented.  Our campuses are committed to academic quality and to graduating students who are adaptable, creative, innovative, and equipped to succeed in the workforce and to conduct the cutting-edge research that enables North Carolina to develop, attract, and retain industry, businesses, and good-paying jobs.

“Of course, we understand that state resources are limited and agree that there must be many pathways to jobs in the modern economy.  We are completing a Strategic Plan that involved business leaders from across the state, the president of the Community College System, and legislators in our efforts to set degree attainment goals for our state that are responsive to the talent needs of the future economy.  UNC is already transitioning from a campus funding model focused solely on enrollment changes to a model that considers campus performance on key measures related to student success and academic and operational efficiencies.  We believe this funding model sets the right direction for our University and our state.

“The University’s value to North Carolina should not be measured by jobs filled alone.  Our three-part mission of teaching, research, and public service requires that we prepare students with the talent and abilities to succeed in the workforce, because talent will be the key to economic growth.  We must also continue to serve the state through our agricultural and industrial extension programs, our Small Business and Technology Development Centers, our Area Health Education Centers, and through the many other ways our faculty and students are engaged in our communities.  Higher education plays a key role in ensuring a higher quality of life for all North Carolinians. 

“North Carolina’s economy is in transition, and we must position the state to compete nationally and internationally in the years ahead.  We look forward to working with Governor McCrory to develop the well educated and skilled talent pool that North Carolina will need to compete and win.” 

Buckle up, folks. It's gonna be a rough ride.

CLARIFICATION: additional information for those out-of-the-loop on the Strategic Plan (o, venerable capitals!) Ross mentions: said plan is the one whose draft calls for reliance on a single assessment instrument (the CLA, College Learning Assessment) to determine "value added" over the course of a student's college career, the one whose draft calls for homogenization of campus-level curricula to the point that permission would have to be sought from general administration to modify core courses or propose new ones, the one whose draft has had pretty much the entirety of the UNC system's faculty up in arms over the past few weeks. Yeah, that plan.

Whither? Wither?

Today we (the members of the Curriculum Review Task Force) offered the faculty their first plenary opportunity to share their views on the current CRTF proposal, in the form of a "faculty listening session." I joined my colleague Warren in making a few short remarks to lay out the context for the meeting, but said little else. As I put it at the meeting's outset, I truly wanted this to be what we claimed it to be: a faculty listening session.

I listened, and said little.

The sense I get from the faculty who did most of the speaking today was that they're profoundly dissatisfied with the plans we've drawn up. I'm chagrined by this, and more than a little frustrated. My chagrin and frustration don't stem so much from quality of the resulting proposal or the specific recommendations it makes; I admit that I'm not entirely happy with much of the proposal myself. (I think some of the recommendations, though offering efficiency and sustainability, are facile and reductionist and make too many assumptions about the nature of our students and faculty.) Rather, my chagrin and frustration stem from the failure of the process. I feel like the faculty who are objecting are objecting too late in the game for their objections to make any difference. One of my colleagues in political science expressed reservations so severe that if we were to follow his recommendations we would jettison the whole of what we've done for the past 22 months (yes, it's been that long) and start over again.

If such a move were to guarantee us a superior result, then so be it: I'm all for a process that yields an optimal product. But who would step up to take part in this process if we were to start it from scratch? Probably the same damned people (or a subset of them) who were involved in the process this first time around...and how would this change things? I doubt my dissatisfied friend would involve himself meaningfully in the groundbreaking discussions that got this process moving, that he would have spent the hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of poring over data, comparing curricula, engaging in conversations with colleagues, drafting documents, etc. that I and many others involved in this process have done for the past nearly-two years. It's much easier to sit back and let someone else do the work and criticize it when they're nearly done than to get involved meaningfully early on and work to make the product a better one.

As I see it, there aren't many courses of action left to us here. Generally speaking...

1. We push on with our proposal and manage to make a few incremental moves, dropping the controversial components. In my view some of the proposed moves, even those with strong consensus, are steps back (I've blogged about some of my reservations in the past), and taken as a whole I don't think the incremental changes we would make would be all that salutary. I'm honestly not thrilled with putting our plan into action at this point.

2. We scrap it all and start again. In this case, as I said above, who'll involve themselves this time? I would volunteer myself to take part in good-faith discussions...but only if I could be assured that those discussions are indeed in good faith, and that something good will come of them. I don't know that such assurance could be given. It's not worth the gamble.

3. We scrap it all, period, and stick with what we've got. I think this is the course of action many of today's naysayers favor, given the conservative tone of many of their comments.

Yes, there I said it: I said the "c" word. So many of my colleagues would bristle to hear that word applied to them, but it's often so apt. There is, for instance, this pervasive belief that the Humanities Program as it exists now, that lumbering dinosaur, is the best model for interdisciplinary engagement we might ever devise. The true believers resist calls to rethink, reexamine, or rearrange the program; they resist attempts to embed more truly interdisciplinary material into it; they resist attempts to make it more sustainable. To hear one of my colleagues today you'd think that the Humanities Program is the only insurance we have that interdisciplinarity will survive on our campus, that if we remove but a single course requirement (that's all we're recommending, after all...we're not even dropping the course, just its requirement) from the sequence then we will all retreat into our dark, dank disciplinary silos and never again interact. As you might suspect from my tone here I have no interest, have never had any interest, in teaching in the Humanities Program...but I think I can safely say that I might offer myself as a model for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. I've chosen to make my career an interdisciplinary one; I've not been forced to by an artificial crop of courses. Honestly, I felt personally insulted by my colleague's comments.

But I digress.

So, whither? We'll see. We've got another few weeks during which faculty have been invited to give us their feedback. I honestly don't think we'll hear anything we've not heard before, and I think the more useful ideas we might hear will be drowned out in the sound and fury coming from the other side.

I should relax. It might not matter much in the end if the state legislature ends up forcing a uniform core curriculum on every last campus in the state's system.

And that's a story for another day.

I have a Beau-présent for you!

I'm sitting in my Oulipo class at the moment, updating as my students take part in their first peer review activity of the semester, reading over one another's beaux-présents, poems written using only the letters appearing in the name of the poem's dedicatee (in this case, the author herself or himself). For shits and grins, here's Mathematica's representation of my beau-présent, as a finite-state automaton:

I'm curious to see how these turn out! Perhaps I'll ask permission to share one or two of the resulting poems once they're done.

It's been a bit since I mentioned my other course this term, Calc III. Please know this omission does not indicate dissatisfaction; on the contrary, this section of the course is by far the most engaged and engaging section I've ever taught. (I think the presence of several really eager nontraditional-aged students helps!) I'm just a bit more outspoken regarding the Oulipo class owing to its newness.

More soon!

n + 7: variations

Today's Oulipo class began with an (n+7)-like exercise: I chose a single sentence from Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea (the first of the books we're reading for the course) and generated a number between 1 and 50 using Mathematica. (The number 24 was chosen.) I then asked students to turn to that page in a book other than Ella Minnow Pea (I provided such a book to those who didn't have one on them, including Peggy Meszaros's Self-authorship: Advancing students' intellectual growth and Carl Sagan's The cosmic connection) and perform the following algorithm: for the kth noun in the original sentence beginning with a given letter x, find the kth noun in the other text beginning with x and replace the original noun with this new one. The sentence I selected to start with had two words starting with "p" and three starting with "c," necessitating a little searching (a couple of students had to look long and hard for a "w" word, too).

We let ourselves modify number in order to preserve grammatical correctness. Other than this, we made all changes verbatim. The results are below, beginning with the original sentence as it appears in Dunn. See if you can tell which one came from a calculus textbook, and which from the Bible. Carl Sagan's led to the most mirthful replacements, I think.


Parents: you may wish to help your children absorb these new words by turning the process into a game of some sort, simple flash cards also constituting a tried and efficient course.

Policies: you may wish to help your chapters absorb these new welfares by turning the precedent into a government of some setting, simple flash congruences also constituting a tried and efficient care.

Partnerships: you may wish to help your conisiderations absorb these new ways by turning the professor into a going of some script, simple flash cases also constituting a tried and efficient challenge.

Privileges: you may wish to help your challenges absorb these new works by turning the partner into a group of some story, simple flash cars also constituting a tried and efficient claim.

People: you may wish to help your city absorb these new ways by turning the presence into a gateway of some sake, simple flash catastrophes also constituting a tried and efficient condition.

Packages: you may wish to help your courses absorb these new worlds by turning the place into a Georgia of some sorrow, simple flash clouds also constituting a tried and efficient child.

Paths: you may wish to help your c(t) absorb these new ways by turning the planet into a graph of some set, simple flash curves also constituting a tried and efficient cos(t).

Planets: you may wish to help your chapters absorb these new ways by turning the purpose into a generalization of some size, simple flash circles also constituting a tried and efficient confusion.

Points: you may wish to help your ciphers absorb these new writings by turning the place into a gear of some solution, simple flash cases also constituting a tried and efficient change.

Pies: you may wish to help your charts absorb these new ways by turning the passenger into a group of some slice, simple flash classes also constituting a tried and efficient category.

Pioneers: you may wish to help your criticism absorb these new women by turning the president into a genitalia of some salutation, simple flash Chicagos also constituting a tried and efficient castration.


By the way, I managed to get this class moved; starting this coming Wednesday we'll be meeting in the Honors seminar room, a windowless affair about fifty feet from my office door. It's bit dark and dreary for my tastes, but the kids seem to like it. It'll be nice to have a room where we can actually sit in a circle.

Time's up!

The prompt for the first reading response I assigned my Oulipo students asked them to consider the nature of constraint and the impact one constraint in particular has on their individual lives: "pick some sort of constraint that governs your work life, your school life, or your personal life, and write about the way in which it affects your perception of and action in the world we share together."

Should I be surprised that four of the nine students whose reflections I've read so far zeroed in on "time" as a constraint, complaining that they've not got enough time in the day to do all they feel they need to do? I know these kids, Honors students all, are the driven, the determined, the year-after-year best-and-brightest, but I'm beginning to worry about them. Admittedly, it's taken me a long time to learn this lesson, but I know it now (though I don't always heed it): productivity makes a poor yardstick when it comes to measuring how well the day's been done.

Maybe tomorrow I'll bring a carafe of white Russians and a copy of The Big Lebowski to class.

Day Three

Calc III's now met thrice (love that word!), and Oulipo twice. I've learned a lot in both, already.

The second meeting of the latter offered a great discussion on the many ways we can construe "constraint," and how constraint affects us. "What kinds of constraints do we see in our lives?" I asked. One student spoke of the way her anxiety constrains her actions: she must choose to do or not do certain things for fear her anxiety will overwhelm her. Another student talked about physical constraints, explaining how the perspectives we take on, constrained by the routes we take when we travel and the modes of transportation we use, affect our engagement with the world. While much of our discussion focused on the negative aspects of constraint and the ways in which removal of constraints liberates us, I asked the students to indicate some positive effects, too.

Regarding constrained literature, one student brought up a point an Oulipian might make: by constraining the words you're allowed to use or the way you're allowed to use them, though you you may find yourself with an impoverished list, you can nevertheless focus your attention on this list and make more astute, intentional choices as you write. Indeed, much the same can be said in other forms of art: as one of the Honors Program's star musicians pointed out, once free jazz hit the scene and all bets were off, one could argue that music became meaningless and it was only with the reinstitution of constraint that meaning was restored. Though we find pleasure in flouting constraint, as another student pointed out, that pleasure is unobtainable if constraint does not exist: how can we break the rules if there are no rules to break?

This class is going to be a good one, I think. The only complaint I have is that the classroom stinks, as I explained in a previous post.

More on my Calc III class, and curriculum-review goings-on, Honors Program whatnot, etc., soon. For now, I've got to get to dinner.

Day One, Spring 2013, Part II

My Oulipo (HON 373) class didn't have quite the zing I was hoping it would have, but it could be because everyone was a bit tired. We'll see how it turns out.

As planned, I started off by asking all the students to join me in writing for ten minutes or so about what they did over break. After this, I gave them each (each of 9) one of the 9 most common letters in the alphabet (giving myself the last of the most common 10, out of ETAOINSHRD) and asked them to revise what they'd written and, retaining the same meaning and tone, omit the letter they'd been given. Hilarity ensued.

Well, for some it did. I'm not sure what folks thought of this first exercise in constraint. Admittedly it was a bit contrived, but it was a nice introduction, I thought. We'll unpack it some more on Wednesday, before which I've asked them to think about the role constraint plays in everyday life.

Meanwhile, Honors Program nonsense made up most of my day. An incident with the Honors sections of our Humanities courses made me think deeply about the inherently exclusionary nature of the Honors Program. It made me feel a little dirty about the deeds I do.

More on this tomorrow, perhaps. Now I'm off to my first real meal in nearly 8 hours...

P.S. -- for those of you not familiar with Oulipo, check out its Wikipedia page, at least...

Day One, Spring 2013

My first class of 2013 went well! I've got 31 folks enrolled in Calc III, and one more itchin' to get in.

We met today for the first time and began with a brief low-stakes writing activity, a brief version of the now-common object-ive writing activity elaborated in the blog 3 friends, 30 things, 90 stories which I wrote with my colleagues Libby and Mariposa (and yes, we're doing it again this coming April!). This broke the ice, got people talking, and got everyone up to the board to jot a few words down. After that, we had just enough time to go over the syllabus before breaking for the day.

A minor rant: I hate hate HATE the configuration of Rhoades 213, the windowless pit in which I teach both of my courses this term. The "desks" consist of modular table-lets which each accommodate a single chair. They're small and mobile and ideal for gathering together in small groups to form a place for collaborative learning...if only they weren't bolted together, side-to-side, in phalanges of three or four per row. This static and stultifying configuration is nothing short of asinine. Only a pedagogical peewee would think that this structure of classroom is helpful. I am appalled.

How will it work out? Stay tuned...I've got the first meeting of my Honors seminar on Oulipo in that same classroom in about 30 minutes...

Picture this...

In my most recent post I mentioned that I'd try to get permission to post my HON 179 students' illustrations of their writing processes. Well, permission granted! Below I've included those I've been cleared to share. I'm particularly fond of the sand castle builder and Cheez-It girl, but all of them have their own charm. What delightful diversity in the approaches these bright students take on a task we all do every day!

In other news, I've just come back from the last meeting of the Honors senior capstone course (HON 470: Cultivating Global Citizenship). You might recall that though I was not teaching this course this past term, I'll be expected to do so in the near future, so I spent the semester "interning" by coming to class as often as I could and by reading the texts my colleague Sigmund assigned to the students. The conversations these kids had surrounding Bob Moses, Anthony Kwame Appiah, bell hooks, and others were fantastic, and I learned a lot. As I told the students, I especially appreciated their willingness and ability to treat me as a peer, a colearner, and not a faculty member. That attitude helped me to play a more meaningful part in the class discussions. I dug it. I'm looking forward to teaching the course on my own.

What's left to do? I've got the HON 179 students' reflection portfolios (due this coming Monday) and about 2/3 of the Complex Variables students' exams (also due Monday) to grade. Then I'll be looking forward to a nice "break" filled with assessment, research, conference prep, grant-writing, course-planning, poetry-penning, and more!

Wrapping up

The Fall 2012 semester's nearly at its end. Today is "reading day," so things are a bit quiet over here in the Honors Program offices. So far I've spent the morning reading over my HON 179 students' latest daybook writings, including their illustrations of their personal writing processes (more on those in a minute), their lists of characteristics of a liberal arts education, their reflections on the lasts couple of chapters of Ong's Orality and literacy, and their "final thoughts" for the term.

These final thoughts are surprising ones. Quiet as many of the students are (it's one of those classes where I've had to say, not infrequently, "anyone not named 'X,' 'Y,' or 'Z,' please chime in!"), it's been hard for me to judge just how they've felt about our readings, our conversations, our world cafés (more about those in a moment, too). Overwhelmingly, though, the final thoughts suggest solid engagement, satisfaction with the way the course has gone, and great strides in learning and self-awareness. I'm gratified!

About those process drawings: Libby, one of my awesome colleagues at East Carolina University, introduced me to this activity a couple of years ago when I went to ECU to take part in the "WACademy" faculty development series she's been running down there for a few years. Respondents are asked to draw their writing processes in pictures: what is it they do when they set themselves up for a major writing project? What's the next step, the next, the next, and the last (if a last step really exists)? (Incidentally, Libby's also the one who first turned me onto daybooks. Many thanks, Libby!)

I loved my students' responses to this in-class activity! Of course, they are Honors students, so they're bright and inventive and yadda yadda yadda, but wow! were these process drawings incredible. Some were little more than sketches with sparsely-drawn stick figures, heavily annotated with explanatory text (including "Cheez Its," "brain," and "blank document"). Others were highly elaborated cartoons of world-making wordsmithery. Some students offered strongly constrained step-by-step processes, and others were more amorphous, one "step" blending into another seamlessly. The variety was fantastic. I hope to gain some of the students' permission to repost their work here.

About those world cafés: I've been involved in a few of these events in the past and have always gotten a lot out of them (enlightenment, amusement, and new friendships), but until this term I'd yet to use them in class. However, I ran two in HON 179 this term (the first on truth and proof, the second on the nature of a liberal arts education), and both seemed to go well. In particular, the conversations the two generated were more open and robust than those occurring in any other class meeting. The world café format got the students' juices flowing. I'm definitely going to use the method in all future classes (math classes included!).

For now, I'm going to get a start on reading the final drafts of the HON 179 students' research papers. Writing on the roots of Ebonics, the benefits of restorative justice, the parallels between epic heroes and comic book superheroes, and many more topics, these papers have proven fascinating.

In absentia

It's been a long, long day, and I'm in a particularly honest mood.

I'd like to I apologize for being somewhat gone from this space; I've got no excuse, only explanation. Namely, there's a lot going on, both in my personal life and in my professional life. One or the other I can handle, singly; when the two come together...well, there you have it...

I've much, much more to say about a great many things, including the Honors Program (going well; it's a lot of fun), my two classes (also both going well, I feel, with some ups and downs), the curriculum review (grrrr...), several trips I've made since my last post (lots of fun, and lots learned, on all of them)...but given my mood at present I don't think it would be wise to say much more.

In brief...

Honors Program: I'm learning as I'm going, but having a blast. The students are great. I'm growing into the job, but I hope it can't be said that I'm afraid of making a few changes where changes are called for. The tone I'm trying to strike is one of anti-elitism.

My two classes: my HON 179 is quiet. I'm working on that. My Complex Variables class is fun, a mix of math majors, physics majors, and a few odd engineers and chemists. We're making our way through Churchill and Ward, slowly but surely. It's not the smoothest run I've ever made, but it's the first time I've taught the course (ever!), so I'm willing to make a few mistakes here and there.

The curriculum review: in the words of the late, great Rodney King: can't we all just get along? Into this program (over the past 19 months or so) I've put several hundreds (if not thousands) of hours; I've written hundreds of pages of proposals, meeting minutes, and position papers; I've attended god knows how many meetings...and I fear the entire process may amount to nothing because a few folks seems unwilling to compromise. Color me disappointed right now. We'll see what happens next...

Trips: since posting last, I've been to Laredo, Wildacres, Charlotte, Roanoke, and DC (am I missing anything), doing faculty development for high school math teachers and university faculty, speaking on 3x30, and trying to convince the American Mathematical Society's Committee on Education that yes, we should be trying to get our students to write more. Et cetera. I'm tired of traveling. It's time I stayed home.

More later. Much more. For now, I'd best be off to bed.

Thank you all for reading.

Feeling pretty pooped upon

Only a few folks have had a chance to comment on the final draft of the CRTF Summer Working Group proposal for which I was the chief author (but by no means the sole contributor; "scribe" might be a better term). So far the feedback has been resoundingly negative...and highly selective.

So far my prediction is being borne out: 100% of the people on campus will be okay with 90% of the proposal...but the objectionable 10% will differ from person to person, with little perfect overlap.

A question to my friends at other institutions who have been involved in very large-scale curricular reforms: do you still have friends after it's all said and done? I'm glad that I'm generally well-trusted and well-liked on campus, because I think I'm going to be trading in some of that political capital in the coming weeks.

Incidentally, I chose the title for this post intentionally, to include the word "pooped": as one of my HON 179 students pointed out in her reflection on language change, it's a tremendously fun word to say...and fun words stick around longer than their less-fun compatriots.

So I say in closing: poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop!

Memes!

Well, they're in, folks: my HON 179 students have all submitted at least one meme apiece, in response to the assignment I gave them on Monday. Some were funny, and others were really funny. Below I've listed some of those that were cleverest, often so clever owing to their connection to what we've talked about in class (including a couple riffing on Tutu).

"One Does Not Simply" is a big one right now, as you can see from my students' submissions. The first laments English's resistance to being broken:

The next two poke gentle fun at Desmond Tutu:

I couldn't resist making another of my own, referencing a seminal point in English evolution which Crystal highlights in his book:

One student had Condescending Wonka expound on non-standard English's confusing conventions:

Fortunately, Good Guy Greg's around to play Dr. Johnson:

On more general collegey themes, the ever-popular Philosoraptor made an appearance, as in this query about our campus's odd geography:

Other vexations about campus life?

One student wondered at the relevance of her music theory course:

And meme mash-ups? You've got 'em! Bad Advice Cat meets The Most Interesting Man in the World:

And Joseph Ducreux treads with trepidation into Mordor:

I should mention that I received a few that I wasn't able to save as nice images; here are links to a couple of other clever ones, involving Dwight Schrute (speaking to an issue that came up in class on Monday) and "All the" Allie (speaking to the influence French has historically had on English).

Finally, with a mash-up of HON 179 and HON 479, I'll let Anthony Kwame Appiah have the last word:

An interesting observation

A few days back in HON 179 we finished our reading of Desmond Tutu's No future without forgiveness and moved on the David Crystal's The fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left. I'm currently reading the first set of students' reflections on this new reading, and I've made an interesting qualitative observation I'd like to try to make more precise when I have a chance to reflect more deeply on it.

The theme of Crystal's book is the English language, generally speaking, with special attention paid to its uses, misuses, and abuses, to the ways in which we shape the language through our use of it, and to the evolution it's undergone as a consequence. The book is wittily written, a style one might expect of a linguist, and is full of clever wordplay.

This theme contrasts sharply with the theme of our last book, an account of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The language Tutu uses to tell that sad story is often (fittingly) dark and somber, rising to elegaic, even hagiographic, when the time comes to speak of the indomitable human spirit. The language is almost never intentionally witty or playful.

So what am I finding in my students' writing? For the first time all semester they seem to feel comfortable trotting out their own toys to engage in some wordplay of their own. These first reflections on Crystal are cram-packed with metaphors, synecdoche and metonymy, and lively ripostes. Their writing is more personal, but by and large more cohesive; it's as though they each have very coherent personal tales to tell, tales that are much more well-formed than their thoughts on the TRC.

I'm enjoying reading these reflections. I'm getting a better sense, in a single reflection, of their individual writing styles than I did from four on Tutu.

Onward, I must read more.

Incidentally, I've only received a single meme as yet, from a student using Joseph Ducreux. I've gotten requests to post some of the students' work here, and I plan to do that, once I get proper permissions.

The most interesting class in the world

What's my HON 179 class up to this week?

'Nuff said. They've gotta be ready to defend the assumptions they made and the conventions they followed in crafting their memes. I'm excited (read: "terrified") to see what they come up with.

A little WTL

It's Labor Day weekend, and I'm getting a good start on it by responding to my HON 179 students' latest reflections. The prompt for these reflections (ostensibly in response to Chapters 7-9 of Tutu's No Future Without Forgiveness) asked the students to "think about an incident in your past in which actual, literal verbalization of some kind (monologue, dialogue, or multilogue) helped you achieve resolution. What was it about the act of verbalization itself that proved therapeutic? Can you describe how it made you feel, and why it made you feel that way?" I made sure they knew I wasn't trying to pry; I let them know they need not describe the precipitating incident itself, but only the means by which it was resolved.

I'm only halfway through reading these reflections, and already I've made two crucial observations.

1. The students inherently understand the idea behind writing-to-learn (or at least communicating-to-learn), whether or not they're able to put it in those terms. "I actually have to stop and think to figure out exactly what is making me so mad so that I can explain it" says one student about talking things out, "I was able to organize my thoughts on the matter better" says another, and "making your complaints or confessions intelligible allows a more efficient and complete resolution" says a third. Though they've all phrased it in different ways, they've all hit on the fundamental basis of writing-to-learn. As I wrote back to these students, when writing we have to be able to put our thoughts into words and sort those words into meaningful sentences and paragraphs. This very act helps us to explore our thoughts. You don’t just use writing as a means of communication; you use it also as a means of exploration and discovery.

2. The students' writing is dramatically better when they're writing about something deeply personal and not simply academic. Without exception so far, every student's paper has been equal or superior to her or his previous reflections. This observation is nothing new: no doubt the personal stake the students feel in this piece motivates them to perform more ably. It's clearer than at any earlier point this term that I've got some great writers in this class.

On to the second half...

IHAD it!

This term I'm sitting in on my colleague Sigmund's honors section of HON 479: Cultivating Global Citizenship, our school's interdisciplinary senior capstone course. (As Director of the Honors Program it will often fall to me to teach this class, and I'd like to see how someone else puts the course together before I do it myself.) The course addresses modern ethical systems, exposing students to these systems and helping them to understand how to apply those systems of ethics as they take part in an incredibly diverse and dynamic society.

The honors section of the course features a service learning component, in which the students tutor for an hour and a half each week at the I Have a Dream (IHAD) Foundation, a privately-funded program which gives academic support to at-risk youth, helping them to build the skills they need to succeed in middle and high school and to continue on to college. Last Thursday the class met at the IHAD's center, located in the Pisgah View Apartments (public housing development) in West Asheville, about five blocks from one of my usual running routes. Kieran, IHAD's on-site director, led the tour and Eugenia, his assistant, helped out. On that day the students were asked to complete their volunteer forms. I filled one out, too, deciding that the best way to become fully acquainted with the class would be to get in on the after-hours activities, too.

Yesterday was my first day at the center, working alongside five students in the class. It's been a long time since I've tutored, and a long time since I've worked with at-risk youth. The experience was a wonderful one, and eye-opening.

Each kid has to complete whatever homework she has for the day and then read a specific number of pages. The amount each kid reads depends on her grade level: sixth graders read six pages, seventh graders seven, and so on. Once done with each task the kids receive special marks on the cards they wear around their necks on lanyards, and they can receive "dots" (made with a Sharpie) for exceptional effort; dots can later be traded in for various treats and honors.

I worked with four kids, one at a time. The first student, Efrem, had no homework, so we went right on to the reading. He was an eighth grader, but after glancing at the print size in the book Efrem had chosen (a digested version of Dickens' Great Expectations) Eugenia asked him to read ten pages. This he did, and quite well, actually showing excitement at several points in the story. (He loved the word "idiot." Who doesn't?)

The next student struggled far more mightily: Umberto, another eighth grader, was clearly behind his grade level in reading and writing. He'd had to write a story for his language arts class, and the paragraph he'd produced was rife with errors, mostly in spelling and orthography. "It doesn't have to be perfect," Eugenia had told me as she'd paired me off with Umberto. Nonetheless, I hoped I could hit on some of the major problems. We went through the paragraph carefully, and each time a word didn't read the way he read it aloud to me, I stopped him.

"Are you sure that's what you said?" I'd ask. And we'd work it out. It took a while. The reading took some time, too. He was clearly not confident in his reading ability, stumbling over every fourth or fifth word, simply omitting words he didn't have any idea how to pronounce. We stopped several times per page as I asked him to say a word over again or puzzle a word out. He was very patient about this, and I rewarded him with a dot for his efforts.

The next two students were the most fun ones to work with. Ulysses is one of the IHAD program's most popular students. He's a precocious and bright seventh grader who had to work with me on his math homework and his reading. His math he flew through, reducing fractions like nobody's business. He clearly knew what he was doing, and he even caught his own errors. When it came to reading, too, he was a pro, but it was like pulling teeth to get him to read his allotment. He slogged through six pages before trying to cut a deal with me at the end of every sentence on the seventh page. "Can I stop here?" "No, you need to read another paragraph." "Can I stop here?" Nope, one more..."

The last student, Bertrand, was a great kid. A tall and slender eighth grader, he was struggling with problems none of the other tutors there that day knew how to handle: reducing cube roots. The center was clearing out: nearly every other kid was done with his or her work, and no one had dared help poor Bertrand. Eugenia turned to me; she knew that I teach at UNCA, but she didn't know what subject. "Do you know anything about this?" she implored.

"Um...you do know what I teach?" I told her, and it was as if the clouds parted. I sat down and started to work with Bertrand. The first couple were slow going as he got the hang of what was going on. I tried to explain it intuitively as well as algorithmically, but I didn't know what sort of conceptual basis he had to build on. We worked out four problems of the five he'd been assigned, leaving the last for him to finish later. "Thank you for working with me," he told me. I think it might be one of the slogans they teach the students to use ("I'm sorry for running into you; it was an accident" is another, for instance), but he said it with earnestness and sincerity. I was touched. I shook his hand.

"You're very welcome, Bertrand. It was a pleasure meeting you." I hope I get to work with him again.

I look forward to working with these kids. It was a pleasant an escape from the craziness of campus. It's good to be reminded that education is more than measurable outcomes, curricular reform, and recruitment and retention benchmarks. It can be simple, as simple as helping a student struggle with the word "sputtering" or with reducing 6/8 to lowest terms.

We can all stand a good dose of such simplicity.