Calm

Late this morning I stopped for about a minute on the landing midway between the ground and the second floor in the stairwell at the far east end of Robinson Hall. I leaned against the wall and let the cold yellow brick rub into my back. I breathed deeply, hung my head, and closed my eyes. For a few minutes then I felt like crying. Then it passed.

I've often felt overwhelmed lately, what with four preps (i.e., teaching four different courses this term), a book draft due in dwindlingly few weeks, and an ever-growing glut of REU applications piling up in my in-box...the budget situation doesn't help, and I'm increasingly annoyed by the website migration, committee governance responsibilities, and the almost farcically bureaucratic assessment-related demands on my time brought about by the university's upcoming reaccreditation site visit. (Do I really need to write another impact statement? How long before we've simply assessed ourselves to death?)

I think perhaps what's most stressing and distressing to me lately (and may even be the root cause of the passionlessness I've lately expressed for my discipline?) is the distance I seem to have drifted from the aspect of my job I enjoy the most: hands-on, one-on-one work with my students. I don't feel like I get as much of that work as I used to, but when I do it's effect is as if godsent.

I had a few refreshing moments today. Kip, Kamryn, and Miriam all took me up on the offer I made my 280 students yesterday: I encouraged them each to come by and conference with me about the comments I made on their most recent homework assignments. Such conferences give me a chance to contextualize the issues I found in their writing, and to offer them more substantial guidance as they develop as writers and provers. The conferences also give them a chance to ask questions, to probe more deeply the problems I posed to them, and to get help on putting together new proofs that build on the old ones they've put in place before.

Every one of the conferences I had today was a helpful one, at least for me. Every one helped me normalize my expectations with those of the student I met; every one helped me better understand each student's weaknesses and strengths. (For instance, one fears being a "fraud" or an "impostor" because her strongest proof mimicked one we'd done together as a class.) I now feel as though I know each student who met with me just a little bit better than I know any of their classmates.

Moreover, as I hinted above, these conferences gave me a much-needed connection to the most meaningful aspect of my work I've too often felt missing lately. Meeting with these 280 folks, and strolling through the Math Lab and helping out with the odd trig-sub integral, really helped me get over my morning's mini-breakdown. I hope I was able to help a few other folks to wrestle down a few of their own personal demons.

We're all stressed, I can tell. But we're none of us alone. Let's all lean on each other. I'll slay your dragons if you slay mine. Together we'll make it through.

More about less

I know very few details, but apparently the latest move is to ramp down the Dance program at UNCA, letting students finish up the courses they'll need to complete a minor before letting it drift.

UNCA readers: I don't know how effectual it'll prove, but there's a petition at the dance marathon going on outside of Phillips Hall protesting cuts to the Dance program.

I'll update if I learn more.

Recent developments

Breaking news: the administration has asked that our department cut six core mathematics courses from our fall schedule (including Calc I, Precalc, and STAT 185, our introductory non-calc-based statistics course) in order that we can free up people to teach in the Humanities program and LSIC courses (like the 179 I'm teaching right now).

Leaving aside the question of the relative value of the courses in question here (how much do we as a university value the Humanities program and our ILS Colloquia?), this is pure asininity, plain and simple. It's wrongheaded.

The effects would be staggering: already-huge sections of the classes mentioned above would get larger. We're already teaching with caps of 32 in Calc I and Precalc (effectively pushing numbers up to 35 or so for these courses when flexible instructors let a few folks in over the line) and 28 in STAT 185. The classrooms we're given barely hold those numbers, if they hold them at all. Cutting even a single section of Calc I would push numbers in the remaining sections up by about 5-6 students. We're now talking 40-person sections of Calc I and Precalc, and perhaps 35-person sections of STAT 185 (computer shortage is an issue there).

It is impossible to provide the meaningful student-centered instruction expected at a liberal arts institution in a course with that many students. My suspicion is that the powers that be who are mandating this move are operating under the impression that mathematics instruction is unidirectional and purely lecture-based. They run the danger of turning mathematics instruction at UNCA into something akin to the large-lecture methods employed at our giant sister schools down the road. Despite innovations like classroom response systems, this arrangement's still got nothing on one-on-one interaction between teacher and student.

Even from a simple human resources standpoint this move is silly: it takes faculty away from courses capped at 32 to courses capped at 22, at a time when we need to make the most of every faculty member's time and energy. Of course, in most departments this would be an even trade-off, since (according to a senior colleague down the hall who ran the numbers this morning) our department teaches more 30-plus-student sections than the rest of the university combined.

That same colleague and my department chair are now at a meaning at which they hope to try to reverse this request. I'll update later.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: after further negotiations this morning, we've managed to keep Calc I and Precalc intact, compromising by scrapping one section of STAT 185 and taking on two sections of Humanities. We've also pulled one of the longtime administrators (a former regular member of our department before leaving us mortals behind) to teach one section of our Nature of Mathematics (the name for our "general education" math course). I'm actually very heartened by this gesture, for I know how busy this woman is anyway. I'm grateful to her.

This should be doable. Further bulletins as events warrant...

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.

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.

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.

Insomnia sucks

Why am I still up?

I went to bed about three hours ago, but woke up worrying about the current shitstorm involving SGA and ILSOC. I got up to get a glass of water and hammer out a short list of talking points I'd like to address when I meet with the SGA Academic Affairs Committee's chair tomorrow afternoon. I want the points on this list said, not mis-said. I want to be clear and forthright, I want to be honest. I want no more bullshit. I want continued and ongoing discussion between our respective groups. That's all I want. I don't think it's too much to ask for.

I realized earlier this evening that I've gotten older and wiser, and concomitantly more pragmatic and less idealistic, than I once was: fifteen years ago when I was these students' age, I was just as impetuous and hot-headed, just as incapable of seeing things in anything other than black and white. I was just as committed to lofty, unrealistic and unattainable ideals. I was much more excited by storming the castle walls than I was by sitting in the boring committee meetings taking place in the castle's keep.

Case in point: it was much more exciting to deliver my valedictory address in high school than it was to serve as a student representative on the committee to hire a new principal for my high school (a position that was no doubt granted me on account of said valedictory address).

More context? My valedictory address wasn't the standard saccharine "here we all are now and now we're off to somewhere else to bigger and better things, but wasn't it fun, y'all?" It was essentially a scathing report on what I felt were shortcomings in the public educational system I had gone through. (It's worth noting that, knowing much more about the state of K-12 education in this country now than I did then, I feel even more strongly about some of those shortcomings now.)

After delivering this opus magnum to the assembled crowd of a thousand or so students, friends, and family, I was given the chance to serve on the committee I mentioned above. Not having been overly involved in many student organizations in high school (I am what I am, and I have no regrets, but I wish I'd been more involved back then), I was unaccustomed to committee work, and I found my day-or-two-long involvement with this hiring committee to be dull, dry, and uneventful.

However, as I realize now, it was a far more effective means of enacting change than delivering a rousing and rafter-raising speech to a bunch of pimply-faced teens and their parents. As a member of that committee, I was getting involved meaningfully in the institutional process; I had a role, and I had a voice.

There was an interesting parallel that took place yesterday: on my way from a conversation with a colleague who's visiting my department to study our program's successes, I walked past a walk-out sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society (yes, they still exist). The walk-out's organizers stood on a stage at the foot of the library steps, shouting slogans with which I agree ("education is a right, and not a privilege!") and calling for laudable goals ("Affordable educations! Reasonable demands on faculty!").

I couldn't stay and listen, though I would have liked to: I was on my way to the first of three discussion sessions whose purpose is to decide on our school's QEP (Quality Enhancement Plan...Number 7 in this sampler; you'll be seeing me write much more about it in the coming months). The QEP session was not fantastically well-attended. There were perhaps twenty people present for most of the session, and most of these (12 to 15) were students involved with SGA. I was happy to see them there, but I was chagrined that there weren't more faculty present.

About ten minutes into the session, we heard shouting outside in the halls: SDS had moved their protest to the student union.

Here's where the parallel begins: the folks who had assembled in order to help identify and reify what meaningful institutional change looks like, with the ultimate goal of enacting that change (and we will, because we must!) were getting drowned out by people shouting about their desire for change. I respect the point of view the SDS students were expressing, and for the most part I agree with it. I feel, however, that they could have accomplished more by joining us in our relatively stodgy and conventional discussion than by shouting in the halls.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

Meh. I'm going to have another crack at sleep. I'll see you on the sunny side.

Open it up

Ugh.

The conflagration which sprang up a couple of weeks ago between the representatives of ILSOC and the Student Government Association, and which was later checked (see this initial post, and this, more upbeat, one) has found new life, and I hope that calm and diplomacy will prevail.

Let me simply say I hope that all parties involved truly have the best interest of the students (and the campus community as a whole) at heart. I know that I do.

I wish everyone were as open as I am.

I realized this evening as I was wandering the aisles at Ingles, picking up ingredients for risotto and mojitos, that I've never really been afraid of opening myself up, professionally speaking. I've never feared showing my true intentions, I've never feared making my methods known, never feared that people might find fault and call me on it. I've always been up to dealing fairly and openly with others. (This blog, nearly 450 posts strong and personal as hell, is a living testament to that fearless openness. I want every one of my students and colleagues to know what it is I'm thinking as I enter into my dealings with them.) This was true even before I received tenure, and it's certainly true now that tenure has been granted to me.

And it puzzles me, and sometimes perplexes me, when others fail to offer the same openness.

As annoyed as I am with certain members of the SGA right now, in some ways I can understand their annoyance with me as well. I made a promise (of unrestrained openness) to them that I might not be able to keep (because it wasn't really my promise to make in the first place, I'm afraid), and in not keeping that promise I may have fed their perception that the faculty are not ultimately concerned with their well-being.

We do care, though. The current members of ILSOC are workaholics like me, accustomed to 60-plus-hour work weeks, unrewarding and thankless tasks which affect only incremental (and seldom truly meaningful) change, and the slow, slow inexorable grind of institutional change that takes years, if not decades, to accomplish. We do all of this on top of teaching, and I know personally that all of the current members of ILSOC are exemplary teachers who give their students their all, day in and day out. Their efforts are tireless, and their concern is real and unaffected.

We wouldn't do what we do, and for as little extrinsic reward as we do it, if we didn't care. And I hope that the students don't lost sight of that.

Okay, I can't think of anything coherent or meaningful to say to top that, so I'm off to bed. Tomorrow promises to be interesting...

Be yourself

I can only be the person that I am.

I have to remember that.

Fresh off of a post in which I wax elegiacal over the stresslessness of grading in Calc I this semester, I find myself stressing out over the stultifying quiet of my two sections of that course. The morning section is a bit on the shy side, but they're coping and coming out of their shells a little bit. The afternoon session is borderline catatonic. I can't recall the last time I had a class this reluctant to speak up, to volunteer, to interact, to show any signs of life.

Let's break it down:

1. There are three or four students who have had calculus before and who are therefore pretty comfortable with the material but who (bless them!) hold off from blurting out the answers and volunteering to work something out on the board...at least not until someone else has had a chance. I have a feeling that these few folks, though, are beginning to grow self-conscious, since it's becoming apparent that they're about the only ones who are volunteering themselves at all. (Notably, these folks are mostly male.)

2. There are another seven or eight students (most of whom are female) who clearly know what's going on most of the time but who are painfully shy about it. Generally they telegraph signs of understanding to me (smiles, nods, even a little laughter), indicating that they're grasping what's going on...and they almost unfailingly come to the right conclusion on any in-class exercise we perform (and typically well before anyone else in the class), but they're beyond reluctant when it comes to sharing their ideas, even when those ideas are spot on.

3. There are about ten more folks who may not get at the right answer right away, but are happy to actively work to get at it, and these folks work really well with one another on group activities. Here they'll speak up, and they'll share ideas. There are signs of life, but not very vivid ones. I'm not particularly concerned about these people, as quiet as they are. (These people are of mixed gender.)

4. The remaining ten or so (also of mixed gender)...I just can't read. They neither volunteer to help out at the board nor interact much in groups. They let themselves get moved forward on in-class activities, but I can't tell if they're moving along with understanding or if they're only being pushed forward by their friends. As big as the class is (34 students right now) I don't have enough time to circulate around the room and police every moment of every group interaction to see how they're faring on a day-to-day basis. Truth be told, I'm worried about them.

And overall, I'm frustrated. I'm trying not to be; I'm trying to remember that just as I can only be the person that I am, so it goes for these students as well: many of them are just (a) shy, (b) uncertain, (c) and timorous (if not terrified) when it comes to math. It's the perfect storm of disaffected students. While I've always prided myself on being able to instill self-confidence and self-assertion, even in the most mathphobic of my students, and I've always prided myself on being able to bring students out from their shells, to help them become more outspoken, engaged, and involved...have I met my match in this class? Is this nut just too tough to crack?

I'm going to write notes to a few of the students I'm most worried about tonight, just to see if they can help me to figure out just what it is I can do to help them out. I'm also going to have a brief conversation in class tomorrow about what I'm hoping to see in the second half of the semester...and about what they hope to get out of it.

I want to make it work for all of us. Please help me to do that.

Thoughts?

Clarification

As I was falling asleep at faaaaaaaaar too late an hour last night (technically this morning...aaaaah, bowling night!), I felt a twinge of anxiety over something I'd written in my blog yesterday. I want to speak briefly to that something.

I realized that both in class yesterday (twice!) and then in my last post here I really gave it to that one response: the "0, 1" answer to the homework question on last week's problem sets. True, the answer is a pretty awful one, but what I should have made clear is that though the answer is awful, that says nothing about the talent or intelligence of its author.

I realize that most of you (my Calc I kiddoes) have probably never been asked to write in complete sentences in mathematics before, and most of you are trained to think of "writing" and "math" as two ends of an academic spectrum. (I'm addressing these issues in Chapter 2 of my book.) Therefore I understand that there's a good deal of inertia you're trying to overcome as you're moving toward writing more robust responses to my homework questions.

I appreciate all that you're doing to get things moving in the right direction. All of you, from the most experienced "math writers" to the least, are intelligent people, and I want to make sure you all know that there's a difference between a lousy answer and a lousy mathematician. We all give the former from time to time, but that doesn't mean that any one of us is the latter.

See you in class!

Humbled

It's always humbling to get good (read: "thorough" and "direct") constructive feedback.

Like the feedback I just got back on my first draft of More Than Numbers's intro from my consulting editor.

I plan on using my experience in getting this feedback as a teaching tool for all of my classes: "you think you've got work to do?"

A churl I knew

It's been a rough semester all around.

We're all tired, we're all grumpy, and some of us are acting a bit churlish of late.

I put myself in that last crowd. I know I've been snippier, snottier, and snarkier lately than I typically am, even at the end of a busy semester. (After all, I've lived through busier semesters than this one has been, and have been in less of a foul mood by the end, at that.)

I typically write a post at the end of each semester in which I "grade" myself on my performance in each class during the past term, but I don't feel like doing that just now. I've thought a little bit about why it is that I want to forgo that post, at least for the moment. At first I thought this reluctance to post stems from fear of assigning myself lousy marks...after all, this was definitely a rougher semester pedagogically for me than any semester I can remember...but I don't think this is what makes me hesitate before grading myself.

I think rather the hesitation comes from my state of mind: I don't right now feel like I'm close to the classroom.

This is the first term ever during my academic career during which I've felt less like a teacher and more like an administrator.

And I don't like it.

I don't like what I've become.

It's not that the committee work I've taken on this past year has been overwhelming (I know of others who deal regularly with a far heavier administrative load than the one I've taken on); it's more that I've let myself drift into it too far, into its depths, into its dark waters, and out of sight of the calm cove of the classroom with which I'm most familiar and in which I'm most at home. I fear that I may have too often put my committee work ahead of my students, and this is the most churlish move of all.

I don't like myself for doing that.

I need to get back to where I belong.

I'm glad for the end of this semester, for it can be made to be a turning point, a terminus, a full stop before the next sentence begins: "After the summer was over, ..."

I promise I'll be back next fall, my friends. I promise to be in-the-moment in the classroom, to be on-the-spot during office hours, and to be less snippy, snotty, and snarky wherever you find me.

Before ending this post I'd like to apologize to any of my colleagues and students who've found themselves the objects of my churlishness and frustration, and to thank you all for helping me to make the most we can out of a term during which we've all found ourselves overworked, overtired, and out-of-sync after a string of freakish snowstorms.

To my students: nothing I've ever done gives me greater fulfillment than working with you all on a daily basis. Nothing. Your dedication is indefatigable, and your curiosity infectious. You are almost uniformly the most honest, open, warm, welcoming, intelligent, and human group of human beings I've ever known.

To my colleagues: in your own individual ways you all offer support that sometimes goes unnoticed and unrecognized, yet you keep on offering that support anyway. Without your ideas and your inventiveness I'd be stagnant, and without your help I'd be nowhere. I appreciate all that you do.

Thank you all! I'll be seeing you all soon. And I'll look forward to it.

Wha...? A new post!? (Complete with interrobang...)

Yeah, yeah. I know it's been a while.

It's been a crazy semester.

I've lost track of the number of snow days (three?) and late starts (four? or five?) we've had...there was one point at which I met with each of my classes precisely once in the span of 14 days: in the week prior to Spring Break I'd canceled Monday's Calc II classes for some reason I've since forgotten, and Tuesday and Wednesday ended up both being snow days, so I met with my Topology class and one of the Calc II sections only on Thursday, and with the other Calc II section only on Friday...and then Spring Break came.

Needless to say, this threw everyone's trains of thought off the rails, and in the subsequent weeks (the last couple) we've all been running around like mad trying to pick up the pieces.

I've made a number of mid-course adjustments in order to try to compensate for the craziness. I've scrapped several "less critical" sections from the Calc II calendar, and I've changed up the syllabus for Topology: having found from several of the most dedicated students in that class that the textbook assignments were not proving to be an effective means of learning the material, I ditched those. Many of the concepts were proving very difficult for the students to paraphrase, so that only a handful of the students were producing textbook submissions which were anything more than reiterations of my own course notes. Moreover, the homework assignments have been difficult enough to demand substantial amounts of the students' attention. In return for scrubbing the textbook project, I've asked the students to redouble their efforts at revising their homework, and so far they've kept up their end of the bargain.

I feel strongly that flexibility, both on the part of the teacher and on the part of the students, is critical in designing an effective learning environment. I've never been able to fathom faculty members who use the same rigid note sets semester after semester, or who plan precisely which exercises they'll assign to their classes for the duration of the term on the term's very first day.

Yeah, Topology could be moving a bit more smoothly, but as this is the first time I've taught the course, a few fits and starts are inevitable, I suppose. I appreciate my students' patience as I figure out what works and what doesn't.

Calc II, on the other hand, is cruising over smooth seas.

What else is new?

Um...

...I'm still waiting to hear back from Jossey-Bass regarding my book proposal. I'm hopeful that the proposal will get picked up...although I'm not sure where I'm going to find the time to finish the two chapters I'd promised by May. I've got an outline for the first chapter worked up, but little more than that right now.

There's been little movement on the rhetorical analysis of REU students' writing I began several weeks ago with the Charleston folks. Last I knew, Bella was planning on making some revisions to the initial version I posted on our Google site a few weeks back. Nothin' new there, though.

The Writing Intensive Subcommittee's knocking off new proposals left and right...moving to the Google Docs platform has made our work dramatically simpler and more streamlined. And right now ILSOC's workload has been relatively light as we've all hunkered down in our respective subcommittees to put together faculty development workshops (WI's planning one on writing instruction for ESL students, based on a workshop run at this year's Meeting in the Middle, the Carolina Writing Program Administrators' spring conference) and hammer out assessment plans. WI's assessment plan's been in the works for over a year now, and many of the materials have been collected already...it's just a matter of sitting down, establishing inter-rater reliability for the rubric (say that three times really quickly), and making our way through the students' writing samples.

What else?

Tomorrow I'm truckin' over to the 2010 MAA Southeast Sectional Meetings at Elon University with a boatload (well, a vanload, anyway) of our students. We've got 23 students attending, several of whom are giving talks or posters or serving on panels. Several first-year students are going (props, Iris, Ino! What's up, Ulysses?), and they're particularly stoked. I'm glad I put forth a strong recruiting effort...I don't mind saying that it's been a ridiculous amount of work to organize transportation, housing, special events, et cetera, but I think it'll be worth it. I'm particularly proud of my most recent research students, Siegfried and Tonio, who'll both be presenting their work in the undergraduate talk sessions; and Ulrich, Uriah, and LaDonna, whose presentation late on Saturday morning will showcase their views on the 280 textbook project.

Oh...oh...oh...OHHHHH! And after two weeks or so of intense paring and picking, my colleague Tip and I plowed through the 268 REU applications we received and came up with a list of participants for this year's program. Only three students to whom we offered positions turned us down, so we got most of our top choices. I'm excited to have them all on board. I've got a good feeling about this year.

What else?

The Tenth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference is quickly coming closer...and plans are moving ahead for the celebration of Oulipo's 50th birthday I'm helping to put together in November. We've now got a tentative list of invited speakers, informal promises of financial support, and a rough schedule of activities. Once we've confirmed our speakers list we can begin to advertise to the campus and other communities.

I've got a few more trips coming up (two in April and two in May), but once those are over I'll be looking forward to settling in for the summer.

And I'm still waiting to find out the decision on my tenure application. Should come any day now. Fingers crossed.

That's about it, pedagogically speaking. I'll be sure to check in if anything noteworthy happens, maybe from Elon.

Fare thee well!

No excuses

I have no good excuse for not posting on this blog in a long, long time.

Besides being busy as hell.

Lots of exciting stuff going on (book proposals, projects in rhetorical analysis, advances in inquiry-based learning, hiring committee hijinx, REU applications up the wazoo, more speaking invitations, etc.), but I'm off to Charleston for a working weekend with the good folks in the College of Charleston Department of English.

I'll check in again soon!

First Day Jitters™

Yup.

Here they are again.

A day early, in fact. Those First Day Jitters™ have returned for another encore performance.

I've no reason for jitters, of course, but that doesn't stop 'em.

I'm prepared through next Tuesday in both of my courses (through next Thursday, likely, in Topology); I already know roughly 2/3 of my 90-odd students, and the faces of those students I don't know are now committed to memory; I'm coming off of a really good semester and looking forward to another good one.

Nope, I still don't feel quite there.

It's the newness.

It's the adventure.

It's the embarkation.

I've been doing this for almost 15 years now, but it never gets any less exciting.

God, I love my job.

Please know, my friends, that when class begins tomorrow I'll be just as nervous (probably more so) than you are.

So be gentle.

Let's make this one a semester for the ages, shall we? Let's teach one another, let's learn from one another. Let's complete compelling projects. Let's prove powerful theorems. Let's plan eye-popping conference talks. Let's give it our all. Let's get out there and make each other proud.

Let's do it, huh?

A simple observation

Boy, it's been a hell of a week, hasn't it?

At the corner of stress and frustration

There was something in the air today.

Everyone (and I mean everyone) I dealt with today seemed beaten, defeated, on the verge of tears.

Including me.

What have the students got to be down about?

There's a bad case of Multiple Exam Syndrome going around campus.

Tuition money's scarce.

Time is scarcer.

And relations are a bitch, aren't they?

They're tricky, they're terrifying...but they're downright beautiful once you start to get the hang of them.

My 280 students did really well on the first go-through of Exam 2, getting caught up on 2 of the 5 questions, both of the bugbears having to do with equivalence relations. Those that took them nice 'n' slow and wrote out everything precisely and explicitly had no difficulties; those who just kind of threw some stuff down on the page fared more poorly.

I get the feeling that several of them were about ready to kill me by about 2:30 this afternoon.

One student caught me in transit as we headed to and from our respective classes, claiming dibs on my time once she got out of her Calc III class. "I've got three advising appointments between now and 5:00," I told her.

"Oh."

"Come on by, and I'll see what we can do."

"I don't know why you keep saying this exam is easy," she told me. "I'm finding it really hard, and you calling it easy makes me that much more frustrated."

"Maybe it's not so much easy as it is basic...or elementary. Meaning that you don't have to use complicated concepts to finish it...everything goes back to the definitions."

She stared at me somewhat icily.

Minutes later, another student cornered me in my office and confessed she'd not started the exam until that morning. She's a senior with a full course load, and had three papers due that week. I thought she was going to cry, and I knew for damn sure that if she started to cry, I'd start crying, too. We shared a candid conversation about how much was expected of us, and I'd like to think that we both left the office feeling a little better about where we are right now. (I did.)

Another student still admitted that she's simply no longer motivated about the class. She's a non-major who's recently come to the conclusion that, once she drops her math minor, she has no reason whatever for taking the class, except for the Writing-Intensive credit she'd be able to get from a major course anyway. She's enjoyed taking math classes, but when faced with the likelihood of being here for more than four years just to finish up her major (minors notwithstanding), she's finding it hard to get into the mathematical swing of things. "I hate to drop all of this on you," she told me.

"I really appreciate your honesty," I said. "I've always liked the fact that you're not going to bullshit me or hand me a line."

Things started to pick up a bit once Calc III got out (several of my 280 students are in that class) and the students drifted on over, one at a time, almost continually until just shy of 5:30. I noticed that the students weren't doing nearly as poorly as they thought they were doing, and I began handing out a few hints here and there to encourage them to keep moving in promising directions. One by one, the exams came in, most of them complete.

"I really, really understand relations now," one student confessed to me. He was fairly glowing with the excitement of understanding. "And that's really cool, because I didn't understand them at all before this exam."

Sweet. What I hope most for my exams is that they'll prove to be effective means of strengthening student understanding, offering yet one more chance for students to explore, to analyze, and to synthesize. Exams in upper-division classes are more for me than merely assessment tools; they're means for making better thinkers of my students.

In that regard, I think this exam succeeded.

As of 12:45 a.m., seven hours later and 40 minutes ago, I finished grading the exams.

They did all right.

Actually, they did quite a bit better than all right. Granted, I gave them a couple of different extra credit opportunities, but even so the class average was higher than I'd expected, roughly 79.1%, before the revisions I'll allow until next Friday. Aside from the two tricky problems dealing with equivalence relations, the exam proved to be a walk in the park.

They'll get the hang of it. It's all good.

And now I must away to bed; I've got to be up in about 5 hours in order to get to Super Saturday tomorrow (on the syllabus: Euclid versus Lobachevsky!) and to get a head start on grading Calc homework.

Something in the air (oh, and...verdicts!)

Second things first, here are the verdicts:

Section 1: Leibniz, by a vote of 3 to 1.

Section 3: Newton, by a vote of 4 to 1.

The second section could have gone either way, if you ask me; both sides were similarly well-prepared. In the first section, though Newton's team did very well, Nora, as Leibniz's lead attorney, was so on top of things that I think she stole the show. (She told me that she was on the debate team in high school. It showed.) Well done, Nora, if you're reading this!

The Calc I students are now setting out on their personal reflections on the project. As usual, I'm all anxious and atwitter as I wait to see how they've been affected by it.

Meanwhile...

...there must be something in the air they pump into Rhoades/Robinson. During the past week I've had no fewer than four current students and advisees come to me and profess some sort of passionlessness, dissatisfaction, or ennui with the courses they're currently taking. (For two of the students, it was the same class.)

One of my 280 students is wondering if the math major is the right decision for her. I'm not convinced that it is, and it won't break my heart if it isn't, especially since she's not declared yet and has promised to pursue at least a minor.

One of my advisees is just generally glum about her current courses. I'm a little worried about her.

Two others (a current 280 student and one of my brightest advisees) have diverse concerns about an education class they're both enrolled in right now...and it's not a course I've heard students complain about before. What's up with that?

With the latter advisee I had a long and at times laborious conversation in the wee foggy hours of Thursday morning. For various reasons she's not sure that she wants to stay in the teaching licensure concentration, and I'm not convinced she should, unless she's fair and squarely dedicated to it. For just as many reasons I suspect she'd be better off, from the point of view of personal satisfaction and fulfillment, if she went to graduate school in education (doing something like middle-grades learning or curricular development or educational policy) and became a superintendent or other high-level administrator: I think she wants to be in education, but she could affect so much more meaningful change if she were involved at a higher level.

Or, as I told her, she could go to grad school in math or math ed. She's got the chops to do just about anything she wants to.

We'll see how things go.

I just want her to be happy. I just want her to find something she's passionate about, something to which she'll dedicate enough time to do it well, something at which she can shine.

That's all I want for all of them.

Okay, I've got to be off. My father's visiting from out of town (I see him about once every other year) and the only time I've got to grade is right now.

Does not compute

No time like the first day of class for the campus internet system to go farfufket. Connectivity to off-campus sites has been spotty since noon, and it's wreaked havoc with class activities, e-mail, and class prep as I'm trying to put out the fires set during the first section of Calc I this morning.

So what happened in that today that got my ever-lovin' panties in a big ol' knot?

My colleague who directs our Math Lab came in to give his Math Lab spiel, and to give the students pretty explicit instructions regarding the precalculus review "pretests" we've asked them to complete for placement purposes. These instructions, detailed and demonstrative as they were, took a good deal of time, and by the time I finished going over the syllabus (in what I felt were fairly broad strokes), there were precisely three minutes of class time left.

I didn't get a chance to solicit contact/background info from the students, and I didn't get a chance to ask them to sign up for a "meet 'n' greet" interview with me sometime in the first couple of weeks. This may not seem like that much of a big deal, but those of you who know my teaching style can vouch for me when I say that it's crucial to me to establish a good rapport and simpatico (for lack of a better term) with my students, right out of the gate. Both teaching and learning are optimally done in an environment of familiarity, support, comfort, and mutual respect, and such an environment is built by early and frequent efforts on the part of both instructor and students to meet one another on common ground.

Like I said, farfufket.

Moreover, we had no time for review, as it took all of the measly amount of time we had left simply to explain the homework for Wednesday. (Doing this was of paramount importance, as they simply have to be prepared for Wednesday's class if we're going to get anything out of it.)

The second section of Calc I ran much more smoothly: the Math Lab/pretest spiel was dramatically abridged due to the aforementioned network outage (silver lining, anyone?), leaving more time to answer student questions and then proceed more leisurely to the homework for Wednesday.

Nevertheless, though I'm much more satisfied with my experience in the second section today, it was still far from ideal.

If I had to rate the first day, I'd give myself a B for 280, a C for Calc I, Section 1, and an A- for Calc I, Section 3. Combine that with an A for damage control and coping with chaos, and I might just make a B so far.

It'll all be calmer on Wednesday, folks, believe you me!

P.S.: I've already had a few very pleasant out-of-class exchanges with new students, and I've no doubt they'll be joined by myriad more as the semester goes on. Keep at it, my friends, keep at it!

29 minutes, give or take

Ugh...I slept like crap last night.

Just a few hours before my date with the Teaching Company. I'll be happy to have this damned thing behind me.

After a few practice runs, I've got it down to about 29 minutes, give or take a minute or two, which is smack dab in the right range, so I'm pleased. I'm going to do one more run-through of the last half (modular arithmetic and the RSA cryptosystem) in a few minutes, and then call it good.

A word about classwork: I'm in the middle of my reading of the Calc I students' final drafts of their derivative "paperlets," and as one might expect there's a broad range of quality. Some are adequate, and others are positively fantastic. The best are distinguished not only by the completeness of their treatment and the correctness of their computations and statements, but also by the composition of their exposition: the ideal narrative offers smooth transitions from topic to topic that highlight rather than downplay the interrelation of those topics.

I hope to finish grading those over breakfast this morning.

Then it's off to the races.

Nearly there, my friends, nearly there!