I just flew in from Laredo, and boy...

Highlights from the past week or so (craziness)...

Last Monday through Wednesday I attended the 10th annual fall meeting of the Carolinas Writing Program Administrators at Wildacres. It was my 7th (!) such meeting. I'm getting old. We hosted Doug Hesse, fantastic scholar and teacher of writing and all-around good guy. He led us in a morning of low-stakes reflective writing activities challenging us to rediscover the personal in our professional writing. It was refreshing and calming and fun...fun enough for a few of us (including me) to give up our afternoon speaking slots to free up more time for writing and reflecting.

Who wants to hear me natter on about the effect of LaTeX use on math students' writing rhythms, anyway?

I was then back home (well, in Asheville, anyway) for about 48 hours before leaving town again, but not before helping to host the Honors Program's first world café, an event attended by 66 of our 80 first-year Honors students. Students had conversations about questions we'd designed to elicit thoughtful responses ("What events have shaped your life? Your parents' lives? What events will shape your children's lives?" "What defines community?"). After considering these questions the students were asked to generate questions of their own for other groups to answer...and then we asked them to do it again, leaving each others' company after the final round of student-generated questions were asked.

Late the next morning I left for Texas. I spent a day and a half in Laredo running a workshop on writing in the STEM disciplines at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU). I'd done a similar workshop at TAMIU almost exactly a year before though last year's group was a bunch of middle-school and high-school math educators and this year I worked mostly with TAMIU faculty, with a few Laredo Community College folks thrown in for good measure. I have to say that I'm thoroughly impressed: both workshops were among the most engaged and engaging I've ever led. This last group in particular was stellar, 24 people clearly dedicated to learning more about authentic disciplinary writing. I was particularly excited to speak with Quinaria, a writing instructor who serves the university as one of their first-year experience (FYE) coordinators. Their FYE courses are tied to introductory-level disciplinary courses (like Calc I and General Chemistry), each of which is housed in a designated first-year learning community. There are some course-to-course articulation issues, but it seems like they're dedicated to making their system work. It can't be any crazier than out 179 system.

Back at home for a couple of weeks now. Two weeks from this past Saturday I head up the mountain to Boone for the NC Honors Association conference where my colleague Samuel joins me in speaking about our 179/479 crossover. Samuel and I each have a student presenting, too. I'm excited to see how well my student's talk goes over; Fawn will be speaking about her final project from Oulipo back in the spring, for which she crafted randomly-generated dictionary entries in an effort to satirize the most lofty lexicon ever written. After that it's back to Laredo for a few days, and then to Wilmington for this year's NC English Teachers Association conference...

...always more in store!

Just flew in from Little Switzerland, and...

This year's CWPA was, as always, fulfilling, friendly, and enlightening in the extreme.

The focus was on grant writing and all it entails, from planning projects, to finding funding sources, and on to starting and polishing proposals. Several new ideas for medium- to long-range plans popped up, not the least of which involves finding financial support for the rhetorical analysis Bella and Damian are still performing on REU students' research writing.

Beyond the professional fulfillment the conference gave me, I benefited from the trip personally, as well. Once again the warmth and welcome of my colleagues in composition and rhetoric reinforced my belief that I've made the right decision in moving my career in this direction.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm really enjoying both courses I'm teaching this semester. As is to be expected of a course in which everyone in the room knows well ten or more of the others, my Abstract class is often rowdy, but engaged. The same can be said of the second section of Precalc. I made the mistake of calling them "squirrelly" the other day, in response to their giggliness, and this only made them giggle more. It's a good group, though, and they work hard. Their primary strength as a class, as I told them today, is their willingness to ask questions: they're completely unafraid to "look dumb" in front of one another, and this fact often makes them quick and effective learners. In contrast, my early morning section is quiet and focused, different but equally bright.

I'm going to take a few minutes at the end of class tomorrow to do a one-third-of-the-way class survey, to get the goods on the students' point of view. We'll see how much my take on our classes matches up with theirs.

Also: too early to tell what'll happen for sure, but there are some big opportunities drifting my way. More to come as time permits...

Math...who needs it?

As a low-stakes exercise at the end of my first section of Precalc this morning I asked students to write down the most math-related activity in which they took part over the weekend. I got several quotidian responses ("I attempted to complete HW #5," "Chemistry HW," and the like) but I got some more exotic ones, too:

"I explained what a TI-83 was to a 6 yr old"

"The most math related thing I did this weekend was weigh the amount of almonds I wanted at Earthfare and calculate the price in my head."

"Calculated my availability for a client given all my meetings and classes that I have this week."

"I worked at the hospital all weekend, and at my job, I utilized math to calculate the number of calories and carbohydrates patients had been consuming."

"Averaging pace/mph/minutes per mile while running 1/2-marathon."

"I got kinda bored, so I figured out every time of the day where the angle of the clock hands were exactly the same as those of 4:00"

Fun times! We'll see what my second section can come up with.

On another topic, this afternoon I'm off to my fourth Carolinas Writing Program Administrators conference at the Wildacres Retreat Center just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. This year's theme is seeking external funding, and participants will spend a bit of time hammering out grant proposals as they bounce ideas off of one another. (Our current Writing Center director and I are planning some sort of regional writing-themed conference that would bring in not only university students and faculty but also K-12 educators and their students, and members of the community at large.) Of course, I'm sure I'll find time to work on my ongoing research with the College of Charleston crew (we're presenting this work at the Four Cs in March), and to cut loose with my comp-rhet buddies from all over the Carolinas.

Further bulletins as events warrant!

UPDATE!

Because I know you've all been on tenterhooks since my last post, here are some of the most interesting weekend uses of math from my second section:

"I built a table and had to measure where to cut. I also wired a dimmer switch which required me to use some math."

"The most mathematical thing that I did this weekend was to figure out how many CDs my band sold based upon how much money we had in our 'money jar' at $15 an album. Also in figuring how much we owe our bass player when paying her 22% revenue earned per gig."

"I was playing a power chord on a mandolin and my friend asked me, how do you do that? I told him it was the same as a power chord on a guitar but reflected over the origin."

"I was actually bitching last thursday about how I would probably never use the research from our homework ever, but this weekend I got into a discussion about Dow Jones & was proven wrong. I laughed and will no longer bitch. :)"

Progress! :)

On your marks, get set...

It's been a while, huh?

As you might suspect, I've had a lot going on, keeping me from posting here for the past, oh...two months? Ouch.

What's going on?

The REU's over, but the work has really just begun: the students this year were fantastic. They were smart, fun, and funny, and they worked tremendously hard, producing a ton of interesting mathematics. (We should get at least five papers out of it in the next couple of months, and maybe more beyond that in the follow-up.) And this year it was "buy eight weeks, get one free": six of the eight students ended up traveling to MathFest in Pittsburgh, PA to present on their summer research.

The REU took up much of my time, but I've had a number of other things going on, as well, among them: (1) working on student learning outcomes for both the Mathematics Department and the Writing Intensive program, (2) putting together the ILS Oversight Committee's report to the Academic Policy Committee (still not submitted, but finally almost finished), (3) planning my contribution to the short course I was helping run at MathFest, (4) working with my College of Charleston peeps on our paper on the rhetoric of mathematical writing, (5) looking ahead to my round table discussion of program assessment for this year's CWPA (coming up in a few weeks), (6) laying the groundwork for the book I'm now slated to write for Jossey-Bass (w00t), and (7) trying to get ready for my Fall classes, which start on Monday.

(1) Student learning outcomes: although I see the purpose, ultimately, of programmatic assessment, too highly institutionalized assessment tends to become bureaucratic and corporate. I don't want to say more about my role in this university-wide process this past summer other than that it was frustrating at times, had its minor joys, and though it was ultimately fulfilling in that I feel like some good will come of it, I worry about the intentions some people in administration may have for codifying the university's student learning outcomes as rigidly as is being done. 'Nuff said.

(2) The ILSOC report to the APC: this is more of the same. I see the purpose, and the writing of this document is a worthwhile activity, but one which runs the risk of being overly parliamentary and pro se. 'Nuff said.

(3) MathFest short course on Sage (an open-source computer algebra system): I actually wrote to my colleague Oscar (one of the co-organizers of the short course) in mid-July, a few weeks before the course was to take place, expressing my insecurities about putting together an hour or two of meaningful material.

"Nonsense," was the substance of his reply; "you'll do fine. Write about what you know." So I threw together several worksheets full of Sage code purporting to implement a number of higher-level graph theoretical algorithms and called it good. The worksheets actually went over really well in the short course and filled a rather comfy niche in the program. I felt good about what I'd done.

The moral of the story: just do it.

(MathFest, by the way, was a blast. Pittsburgh's a nice city with lots of pretty runs and nice architecture, the REU students were fun to hang out with, as always, and the MathFest program was replete with fun stuff to see and do. A good time had by all.)

(4) Math rhetoric: as I mentioned in my last post, oh so long ago, Bella and Damian came up from the coast to spend a couple of days with me, hammering out a plan to finish the paper we'd begun (with Nicola, who couldn't make it) on the rhetoric of the writing my REU students had produced in 2008 and 2009. They had a lovely time while here, visiting with and interviewing the REU students from this past year, working on our draft at the time, and just hanging out. I'm happy to say that as of last night we have a draft that's nearly ready to submit to the comp/rhet journal Across the Disciplines. It's the first of what we hope will be...well...at least more than one article on the rhetoric of mathematics and its learning, and the role writing plays in inducting students into the scholarly mathematical community.

(5) CWPA: I'm already looking forward to the Wildacres retreat! It's going to a be a full house this year, several dozen of us crowding into the nooks and niches of the Wildacres North Lodge to join in round table discussions of assessment with various forms and functions. I plan on presenting a brief "natural history" of the assessment that's gone on in our WI program during the past three years, exposing to public view the layers of rock comprising the "pilot" assessment Lulabelle headed up in AY 2007-8, the refinement she and I performed in the following year, the plans for assessment she and I laid out in the lead-up to the university's reaffirmation of accreditation (notice I haven't mentioned SACS yet in this post...), and the modifications those plans underwent as I limned the WI program's assessment of student learning outcomes this past summer.

It's sure to be riveting.

Actually, I'm more looking forward to hanging out with Damian and Bella, and with them planning the next phase of our study of the REU students' writing.

(6) Book: Oh yeah...I'm now under contract to write a text (working title: More Than Numbers) on the role of writing (specifically, writing to learn and writing in the disciplines) in mathematics and the mathematical sciences. Jossey-Bass received well the proposal I pitched to them several months back (in March, I think?), and after some fine-tuning of the project, I was brought on board. I'm excited, but at the same time terrified. I'm confident it'll all work out well, though. I've already done a ton of enlightening reading (if you get a chance, check out Scott L. Montgomery's The scientific voice...it's a fascinating read that, along with several other sources, has helped me put together a theory of the schizophrenic nature of undergraduate mathematical writing), and I have some great ideas. Furthermore, my consulting editor for the project is someone a few of whose books I've read and whom I respect very much; I'm sure she'll be very helpful to me.

I will say this, however: if between now and next March I start randomly babbling to you about reader response theory or the role of writing in the mathematical finance classroom, just smile and nod your head.

(7) Fall 2010: yup, we get underway in two days. Yikes. I'm actually really excited: I've got the first week mapped out in all three of my courses, and I've plotted out what I think are clear and navigable problem-centered paths for both of the lower-level courses (Calc I and Linear Algebra I) to follow.

Calc I is going to begin with a brief review, and then the students will work toward developing the skills needed to solve an optimization problem from economics. They'll need to "invent" the method of secants and tangents, the definition of a limit, and the definition of the derivative; and they'll need to learn how to compute some simple derivatives in order to solve this problem. Once all of that groundwork is laid, we'll spend some time working with the textbook and picking up some useful formulas for limits and derivatives, but everything we do is going to be application-driven and learner-centered. I hope to not have to lecture for more than 10 minutes at a time for the whole damned semester.

Linear's going to be the same: Day One features a variation on the "Markov Dance" that started the semester off the last time I taught this course, in the semi-mythical beginnings of this blog. The limiting behavior of this system is going to be the motivating problem for everything we do in the first half of the course, as we work our way through everything we'll need to do to get to the fun and useful stuff (eigenvalues, diagonalization, and Markov processes): solving linear systems, inversion of matrices, solvability criteria, and finally eigenvalues. I'm going to downplay theory and upplay (what a cool word!) functionality. I hope to get to the fun stuff by the sixth or seventh week, at which time we can spend almost all of our time on applications. It's going to be fun.

I should mention that I've modified my grading schemata somewhat, but not substantially, from last semester: students in both of the above courses will still have an opportunity to perform potentially unlimited revision on most things they hand in, but I'm tempering the grading scale so that it's no longer possible to earn full points back with each revision. I think the system I've set up is a generous and reasonable one, though, and I believe it'll still serve to motivate students to learn rather than to grub for a good grade.

Meanwhile, the Senior Seminar's speaker schedule is chocked full, with four visitors (all versed in speaking to undergraduate audiences) coming to share their knowledge and spend a little time with the students. It's going to be a good semester in that course.

Okay, that's all for now...I'm going to try to post more regularly during the coming semester, although I can't promise it'll be more than anxiety-tinged stream-of-consciousness rambling about this or that idea for the book.

Fare thee well!

Liveblogging CWPA 2009: Part 3

1:46: Heavy with lunch, we enter our afternoon session, a recap of this morning's small-group breakout sessions on various topics of concern to WPAs and other practitioners of writing (sustaining programs, organizing writing centers, organizing WAC/WI programs, and designing and directing sophomore writing courses).

1:48: Chris Warnick and Jessie Moore update everyone on sustainability and writing centers.

One issue is setting aside time for reflecting on objectives and successes.

Very poorly developed in many WPAs is the ability to say "no," and this attribute can effect program sustainability: if the precedent is set that a few people will do it all, then once those people are gone, the program may falter.

There is substantial dovetailing of both expertise and responsibility in working with other departments and programs on common writing-related goals.

1:52: The WI group (the one in which I played a part this morning) reports back. Much of our discussion focused on faculty development, achieving faculty buy-in, and managing WAC/WI programs with minimal mission, resources, and oversight. We also recognized that the bridge between first-year composition courses and more advanced disciplinary writing courses is built on the backs of writing centers and sophomore-level writing courses.

2:07: Will Banks (East Carolina University) directs his sophomore-writing group members to share their ideas.

Tony Atkins (UNC Wilmington) speaks on the idea of bringing in folks from other disciplines to teach more discipline-specific writing courses as sophomore-level offerings: not only does it help to stretch a tight budget, but it also helps to involve faculty from areas not typically involved with teaching lower-level general education courses. Moreover, it helps faculty to avoid the academic stagnation that can occur when a person teaches the same course year after year after year.

2:12: Jessie Moore returns to ask people to center themselves on some patches of common ground: (1) the issue of sustainability, (2) the encouragement of principled decision-making rather than purely logistical or fiduciary decision-making, (3) the need for physical space for meeting, planning, and reflecting, (4) the need for cross-program conversations, (5) the issue of expertise: who brings what to the conversation, and how can everyone feel and be needed?, and (6) the need for time for faculty to pursue other academic interests without feeling their lives are dedicated solely to oversight of unwieldy programs.

2:16: Our own Dee James discusses UNC Asheville's Lorena Russell's idea of instituting an "expertise barter" system by means of which area colleges and universities can effect short-term exchanges of faculty in order to more widely spread faculty expertise around the region. Jessie and Mary Alm (UNC Asheville) follow up by indicating other ways in which expertise can be exchanged.

2:24: Jessie Moore asks what CWPA can do to encourage this sort of cross-fertilization.

Liveblogging CWPA 2009: Part 2

9:06: The folks from the College of Charleston are describing their adjustment of the first-year writing requirements. Chris Warnick begins...

The new program replaces a two-semester FYC sequence with a single semester course. Problems with this set-up? The second semester often saw too much focus on literature and de-emphasis of composition. Students often perceived it as redundant.

The new set up features a one-semester, four-hour course, streamlined for pedagogical and financial reasons. It is hoped that this one-semester course will see more intentional instruction of composition, and it's certainly helped financially: the college's dependence on adjuncts has been greatly reduced by the drastic reduction in the number of required instructors.

They've had to face and conquer various myths about writing instruction, including (1) the notion that writing skills "transfer" from one discipline to others (reality: this is nonsense) and (2) the notion that two semesters of writing instruction are better than one (reality: no number of first-year courses will adequately prepare students for disciplinary writing).

9:17: Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger continues, playing "Negative Nancy," addressing challenges faced with the changes they've made...

The appearance on the surface is that the department is very much on the same page with regards to writing instruction. However, there are always different perceptions of the nature and effectiveness of curricular change, and in reality there has been a good deal of resistance to the changes, and the WAC component concomitant their overhaul has yet to take hold.

There's a leadership vacuum, with no one there to oversee the program directly, resulting in inconsistent quality of instruction. In particular, one could not assume that students in the second-semester course had been taught particular skills in the first semester-course.

There's very little training and faculty development, and since the responsibility for maintaining the courses is shared throughout and governed by the entire English Department, when pivotal decisions are made regarding composition instruction, the votes of the "non-experts" get swamped by those of the "experts."

There's no centralized place (physically speaking), leading to a defocused existence in space and a lack of coherence program-wide.

There's the notion that writing about literature is superior in some way to basic composition, and the notion that students will "learn to write by reading."

There are antiquated grading systems still in place that punish students for almost arbitrary, acontextual compositional errors.

The nature and quality of thesis-driven research-based writing is highly inconsistent from section to section.

There's fear on the part of faculty that they're being micromanaged, being told what to teach. In reality, a well-designed, shared curriculum ensures that faculty don't have to start at zero, and can benefit from a well-developed and standardized curriculum. Students, too, can be assured that they will receive similar instruction, no matter who their instructor is.

9:35: Meg Scott-Copses continues...

They've amassed a goodly pile of materials in the process of redesigning the curriculum.

A list of student goals for the single-semester course helped reify the intentions of the course's faculty. A list of recommended readers help as well. Rather than mandating a particular reader, they've attempted to standardize an assignment sequence: (1) summary and response, (2) analysis, and (3) synthesis.

They've been partnering with the library in coordinating instruction of research and information literacy skills, and have developed a list of expectations regarding this instruction. These expectations focus on instruction on critical evaluation of sources.

Now, what to do with the fourth hour of the course? Conference with students? If so, in class, in small groups, or individually? This fourth hour gives instructors extra time to fit in instruction they would ordinarily have had to do "on their own time."

But how is it all working? Hard to say. To say something about it,

9:53: Jennifer Burgess continues, on assessment...She's built an assessment program from the ground up. It's a hefty program!

Common ground

I noticed a long time ago that I tend to have better conversations about pedagogy and academic theory in general with people outside of my own discipline than I have with people in it.

It was only tonight as I was talking with a couple of newly-met colleagues in rhetoric and composition that I finally figured out why this likely is: when I'm talking shop with folks from wildly different disciplines, I'm forced to seek out common ground with them, and that ground is usually centered upon academic fundamentals like classroom practices, curricular development, pedagogical theory, and the like.

With the aforementioned colleagues (one of whom teaches at the College of Charleston, and the other at Montreat College) I shared a wide-ranging discussion on college pedagogy, especially as regards writing, and we had what I felt were some excellent insights on college students and their education.

Among them: that first-year college students are delightful people with whom to interact because they're liminal beings in so many ways. They're positively brilliant one minute and downright stupid the next. They're jaded, arrogant, and self-assured in some ways, but naïve, immature, and credulous in others. They're truly passionate about learning, but they don't want to take the time to take it on, and while they've got enough energy and enthusiasm to change the world, their piss-poor time-management skills can barely get them from breakfast to lunch on any given day.

They're awesome people.

And as my new friend Nicola said tonight, whenever you're interacting with them, you've got the power to truly change their lives and offer them an eye-opening, life-changing experience. As lovely as they are, our upper-level majors, as a rule, have drunk the flavor of Kool-Aid we've offered them over and over, and they don't need their hands held any longer. They'll come to class willingly, and they'll often interact passionately once they've done so...but there's something about the wild-eyed eagerness with which freshmen feast on the ideas and concepts of a course which has first inflamed their passions.

"It's always exciting to be the first to spark that flame," Nicola said.

Indeed.

On that note, I'm going to hit the hay. It's a long day tomorrow (on the agenda: a presentation by my new friends from the College of Charleston, and break-out groups on various areas of concern to writing program administrators...and socializing...plenty of socializing...), and an even longer one on Wednesday.

Liveblogging CWPA 2009: Part 1

7:34: I'm sitting in the basement of the North Lodge at the Wildacres Retreat in Little Switzerland, NC, at my second Carolina Writing Program Administrators workshop. As energized as I was by last year's conference, I'm more than eager to see how this year's program shapes up. You may recall that in the wake of last year's workshop I had planned a twelve-part series dedicated to writing-related issues...the realities of the semester set in and only five (?) parts materialized.

If I write as I go, maybe more magic will happen!

So here we go...

7:37: Jessie Moore (Elon University) is introducing "The WPA Game" to help direct us toward our objectives. Who are our allies? What are our resources? "The game is collaborative; everybody is on a single team, working together to achieve an objective." Sounds like fun!

7:46: The party has been momentarily distracted by the presence of a gigantic spider.

8:00: After an introduction to the Retreat, we return to "The WPA Game"...self-introductions now commence.

8:02: Objectives, going around the room: "keep everyone employed," "firm up WAC plans," "developing a writing fellows program," "successfully implement a new WI program," "get tenure for the current writing program co-director," "revise second semester of composition (by introducing interdisciplinary features, for instance)," "retain the second semester of a writing sequence in the face of budgetary cuts and administrative opposition," "keep a writing program afloat," "pass comprehensive exams," "get other programs/schools at the institution to buy into WAC," "pass the torch to the next WPA," "assessment, assessment, assessment," "bringing pedagogy into the 20th century," "implement the new one-semester composition curriculum," create the groundwork for a future writing program," "managing a CAC program without resources or direction," "make IWIn work institutionally," "create a sustainable life, personally, professionally, and in all other dimensions."

8:20: Random observation: it's a young bunch this year compared to last year! The torch is being passed.

8:24: We're about to play the game! More later...