Build me up

Today the focus in 479 was on bell hook's Teaching Community, the current read. Three students delivered presentations relating the reading to some aspect of their lives; one spoke on the portrayal of American Indians in film and another gave a crash course on feminism while their friend talked about the ways in which community theater can help to build a democratic community. In her follow-up discussion, this last student led the class in a round of communal singing (The Foundations' "Build Me Up, Buttercup"), citing studies showing the sense of community such a simple act can help to build.

Liberal arts education, folks. Isn't it awesome?

One of the HON 179 students visiting the classroom (today was the last class meeting for which I've got such students signed up! sadness...) asked "so, why exactly does bell hooks not capitalize her name?" My students posited several potential answers, most of which came back to one core hypothesis: she's making an intentional move to diminish her authoritarian status. "There are a lot of professors who are really laid back and don't go by 'Dr.' or 'Professor,'" one student remarked.

Yet still there are those who are keenly interested in maintaining a remarkable distance between their students and themselves. I dealt with several such colleagues last week when I took part in a round-table discussion on career opportunities for students in the traditional "humanities" fields. Of the eight panelists, I was the only one from outside of such a field, and four were first- or second-year faculty, fresh out of grad school and a few of them still very clearly vested in making sure their students knew just how smart they (the faculty) are.

After twenty minutes of hearing my colleagues pontificate about how graduate school is the most arduous and intellectually challenging undertaking and how only the most intelligent, the most assiduous, the most dedicated, devoted, and perspicacious survive (the unsaid unsaid: those of us on the panel are not only survivors but thrivers), I had had enough and I finally spoke up. "You know, grad school is hard and it will challenge you," I said, "but honestly I had a ton of fun and enjoyed it immensely. It was a rich time of my life, socially as well as academically. It's not all hard work."

In the end, you have a choice. What'll it be?: build a better community and live in it, or build a taller tower and live above it?

We are the champions

The semester's over and commencement has passed, which means we're all hip-deep in a morass of faculty development workshops, hastily crammed into the two- or three-week-long period before half the faculty take the rest of the summer "off."

This past Monday-through-Wednesday (Monday afternoon, all day Tuesday, and Wednesday morning) found me in two full days' worth of workshops dedicated to diversity and inclusion. UNC Asheville's faculty, staff, and student bodies are not representative of the overall population in many respects, particularly racially and ethnically. And what diversity we do have (in terms of age, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and sexuality, etc.) often goes unrecognized and underappreciated. The result is a lack of diversity in some regards and a lack of attention paid to issues faced by members of certain underrepresented groups in others. To address this important matter (and believe me, I do believe it is of prime importance), UNCA's Diversity Action Council brought in a pair of outsider consultants to coach about 30 faculty and staff in becoming "Diversity and Inclusion Champions" ("DICs," for short?). This unfortunate acronym is, sadly, about the best thing to come of the workshop.

Well, not so...I'll start with the positives.

1. Community. The workshop involved a couple of administrators, about a dozen faculty, and maybe 15 or 16 members of the staff, from departments ranging from Housekeeping through the Office of University Advancement (basically a fancy name for the people in charge of building up the school's endowment). These are folks who generally have very little opportunity to interact, and their stories often go unshared. It was wonderful to me to talk to colleagues from Accounts Payable, Admissions, and Athletics, folks I'd never have met in the course of my day-to-day duties, folks whose perspectives are as valid as my own and who face a broad array of diversity-related issues in their work. This aspect of the workshop was enlightening, enriching, and invigorating.

2. Conversations. Similarly, the stories we shared, many of which had nothing to do with diversity and inclusion, ultimately, gave us a chance to get to know one another authentically.

3. Communication. Many of the exercises we completed reminded us of important communication skills: active and compassionate listening, empathy and understanding, deliberation in discourse, etc. Though these skills have little to do with diversity, per se, they are good things to keep in mind in having future multilogues around important issues like diversity.

4. ...? I'm dyin' over here...

So what went wrong? First of all, as my last positive point suggests, the workshop was misnamed. If it had been called something like "Creating community and carrying on conversations," I wouldn't have found as much fault with it. (Note: "as much"; see discussion below.) As it was, though, I kept expecting there to be much more attention paid to diversity issues. I recognize that diversity and inclusion are incredibly complicated issues and that there's no magic pill the university can swallow to make it all better, but as it was there was practically no content directly related to diversity, whether in theory or in practice. Moreover, what content there was was overly-diluted, simplistic, superficial, and unreflective.

Part of the problem (perhaps the largest part) was the facilitators' utterly tone-deaf delivery. It was evident almost from the get-go that these two folks are used, almost exclusively (though they tried to deny it), to dealing with corporate audiences. Their manner of speaking was facile, reductive, and puerilizing. They dumbed things down, universalized, and made frequent superficial statements about complicated issues. The materials they used (handouts, videos, etc.) were similarly over-simplified and ill-suited for the audience they were speaking to. Sometimes the materials were simply misleading or untenable.

Example: the facilitators showed a 10-minute segment from Dateline NBC on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), an instrument used to help uncover persons' hidden biases. The IAT has been shown to be somewhat credible and most folks generally accept its reliability and validity. However, the Dateline segment, in an obvious attempt at dramatization, brought a dozen or so people into a studio to take a version of the test in front of one another and and in front of television cameras, thus placing the test-takers under enormous stereotype threat, a condition well-known to introduce substantial and problematic variation in test results. This condition rendered this piece essentially baseless, little more than a completely unreliable media stunt that undermined the credibility of a well-established psychometric instrument. When a couple of us pointed this out after the segment was shown, one of the facilitators acknowledged this shortcoming. "Then why in the hell did you show it anyway?" I thought.

Example: one of my "favorite" excerpts from the godawful handout on managing unconscious biases which they handed out for us to read on Tuesday night was a numbered list of the steps one might take to uncover and eliminate such hidden biases. Step 2 was "Identify your unconscious biases"; a number of people quipped "if they're unconscious, how are you supposed to identify them?" Step 6 was "Get rid of your biases." I was reminded of this famous cartoon:

Ah, circularity. This step makes the whole process into an Ouroboros, a serpent devouring its own tail.

Example: the same handout contained "case studies" on diversity initiatives undertaken by major corporations like Weyerhauser and Chubb ( who, I'm sure entirely coincidentally ) cosponsored the organization that produced the handout, but no information on other sorts of institutions. Every aspect of the handout's rhetoric suggested a corporate audience, with bulleted lists, unsubstantiated claims ("Some scientists suggest..."), unreflective appeals to authority ("...researchers at [list of several major universities] tell us..."), anecdotal appeals devoid of any actionable information...as I put it on Facebook just after reading this piece, "The reading for tomorrow's last half-day workshop is a jargony piece of quasi-corporate pap that's so full of syllogisms and so bereft of appropriate citations it's rendered practically baseless. If one of our first-year composition students wrote it, they'd get a C+ on a good day."

The workshop's facilitators were equally oily, hands glad and laughter forced. The whole workshop was clearly an act for them, one they were used to performing in front of people who make far, far, far more money than everyone in our little room put together. At one point, I shit you not, the oilier of the two, Brad, said, to a room in which sat, among others, housekeepers who likely make barely more than the minimum wage, "That's why you all get paid the big bucks!" Tone. Deaf.) I got into a handful of tense exchanges with Brad over the course of our time together. After one exchange in which I called attention to the syllogism inherent in "Step 6" mentioned above, he got out of the conversation by simply saying, "see, what we're having now is a heated agreement!" He could barely contain his annoyance when I and several of my colleagues tagged the term "Diversity and Inclusion Champion" with the label "condescending." "I'm not 10 years old anymore," I said. "I don't have to be called a 'champion.'" One of my colleagues suggested the term "Community Advocate," and for the remaining hour or two of the workshop that phrase stuck.

 Ultimately I was offended by the quality of the workshop, and I left wondering how many thousands of dollars the university had spent bringing these folks into campus. Worse yet, this was not their first visit to campus (it was, in fact, their fifth; four similar workshops have been run in the past couple of years) and it's not likely to be their last. As I mentioned above, the best things to come of it were community, conversations, and a reminder of some solid communication skills. I've learned more, far more, about managing diversity from any one of several learning circles I've taken part in over the past several years than I did from this workshop.

I might add one more positive outcome: during one of our breaks on the last morning of the workshop I was chatting with one of my colleagues from the Education Department, and I boasted that I was confident that by the end of the semester, the HON 479 students I'd worked with in Fall 2012 would have been able to put together a better workshop on diversity and inclusion. It got me thinking: why not ask them to do just this? Thus, I'm now planning to ask my Fall 2013 HON 479 students to design a workshop preparing participants to (1) understand the issues facing the citizen of a multicultural society, (2) interrogate and explain their own views on multiculturalism, and (3) more confidently engage members of multicultural communities. I have no doubt whatsoever that the students' product will exceed this past week's in quality, no matter the measure applied to it.

Ding dong

Well, it's dead...

"First of all, the EC thanks the CRTF for the enormous amount of time, concern and effort that has gone into every phase of this review process. Regardless of the outcome of this review, there is no question of our appreciation of your work."

...two years in, comprising thousands of hours of work spent reading, writing, discussing, debating, data collecting, assimilating, analyzing, synthesizing, scrutinizing every corner of the curriculum and every corner of other colleges' curricula...

"So here’s the thing: you have all seen the results of the survey, and some attempts to organized the responses in helpful ways. The [Senate Executive Committee's] take on the survey is this:

-       It does not provide a ringing endorsement

-       There are many significant and thoughtful concerns that it would be better to address before the proposal comes to [the Senate's Academic Policy Committee] and senate formally

-       The level of opposition is high enough that it signals that there is not enough support for the proposal for it to simply move forward"

...we lost steam somewhere around the time that the subgroups first came together, my Curricular Sustainability Subgroup colliding with the Big Picture Subgroup, a body which had lost sight its goal of providing large-scale parameters for change and instead decided to promulgate its own specific (and, I believe, peculiarly short-sighted) proposals for curricular change...

 

"The [Executive Committee] believes that it would be wise not to try to push forward a change when the campus seems this ambivalent about it. Further, given that documents cannot be brought that would enable changes before fall 2014, at this point it makes sense to consider what can be done to address the concerns that have been brought forth."

...the wheels came off completely by the time the full task force came together again, trying mightily to put together a consensus proposal, passing that job off onto my group over the second summer of the project. Everyone was asked to give something up; it was a true compromise, and no one left the table completely satisfied, but everyone left feeling good about the job they'd done...

"We recognize, of course, that this is frustrating and disappointing to many people, and we are sorry for that. However, it is the [Executive Committee’s] recommendation on the basis of our best judgment about what makes sense for the institution."

...of course, once word got out to the full faculty, everyone asked for their piece of the pie to be put back. The backers of the Humanities Program gave no ground, the natural science departments with laughably large majors insisted that their students needed every last credit...academic nimbyism won out.

Regular readers know well that I myself became disenchanted with our work the proposal it led to, so I can't say I'm entirely disappointed with the outcome, but I'm tremendously disappointed by the way in which some of my colleagues acquitted themselves throughout the process.

Well...onward and upward. Right now I've got the General Education Council to worry about, and about 7 or 8 papers to wrap up over the summer...avanti!

Obligatory whatnots

I've been posting somewhat regularly lately, and though today's not given me considerable fodder for a brand-spankin' new post (cross products in Calc III and an introductory discussion of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler in Oulipo), I thought I might mention a few ongoing whatnots.

Whatnot #1, CRTF...WTF? I've begun drafting a "contextualizing" document that might help folks who haven't been intimately involved in the process of crafting the current proposal understand exactly what in the hell those of us who have been intimately involved in the process of crafting the current proposal are thinking. Of course, I've come out semi-publicly (here and elsewhere) as having serious reservations about the proposal as it stands, so it's ironic that it falls to me to explain our reasoning.

I think at this point, the powers that be are concerned that given some of the language of the Strategic Plan (about more below) we're better off streamlining and "standardizing" our curriculum before someone else (*cough* GA? *cough cough*) does it for us.

Whatnot #2, This post by Teacherken of education-related blogging fame. (He's been a fixture in various places, including The Daily Kos.) The writing's on the wall, and it ain't pretty. As if I needed more reason to loathe AP exams. Students, parents, everyone: the AP system is fundamentally fraught with error of every kind. It's a wrongheaded hydra. We need to slay the damned thing. Of course, we're going to have to fight through ETS and friends to even get to it.

Whatnot #1 and Whatnot #2 bring me to...

...Whatnot #3, The Strategic Plan. I'm about 1/6 of the way through reading this sucker. I regaled (read: "bored/annoyed the crap out of") my Facebook friends with a line-by-line response to this damned thing a few days ago when I started reading it, alcoholic beverage in hand. It's awful, folks. It adopts the rhetoric of the corporate community, eyes intently focused on the bottom line, offering one way to the university system, and one way only: make us money or die. It's all about measurable production benchmarks (graduates are "produced," donchano?) and accountability to stakeholders. It's all about uniformity and portability and seamless transfer. It's all about standards. It's NCLB on steroids, repackaged for the 'teens. It's a godawful mess.

But it's the UNC system's lodestone for the next several years. It's our way through the woods. It's the house we have to beat, the inside straight we've got to draw into. It's our future.

I plan on finishing reading it this week sometime, provided I can find enough liquor. I'll post my thoughts about it here as I read it.

No slow news day

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

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

Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.

Here's Ross's statement, in full:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whither? Wither?

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

I listened, and said little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

And that's a story for another day.

In absentia

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

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

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

In brief...

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you all for reading.

Feeling pretty pooped upon

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

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

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

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

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

Shameful self-promotion

One of my editors, Bethany, has urged me to blog more frequently. So here I am.

I understand her point: she’s legitimately concerned that I might not be doing as much as I could to promote my work. Student writing in the quantitative disciplines: A guide for college faculty (Jossey-Bass, 2012) has been out for a few months now, and though I’ve every reason to believe that sales are quite good, they could probably be better, given more ambitious self-marketing. I’m not sure I feel up to this, though.

It’s not that I feel that self-promotion would be beneath me, or would constitute “selling out.” That attitude would be intellectually elitist and unbecoming. Believe me, I’m not against garnering a little fame (and a somewhat smaller fortune) from the book. There’s nothing wrong with showing a little pride in one’s work. It’s just that I’m not sure this blog is the appropriate venue for that self-promotion. Others are doing it, why can’t I?

Bethany mentioned the blog my good friend Erdrick writes, and the one that Maryellen Weimer, who helped me tremendously as my consulting editor for the book, updates regularly. Erdrick’s a wonderful colleague and a superb teacher, and his blog is superlatively good. Maryellen’s blog, too, is a wonderful periodical piece, and a wide-open window on current best practices in teaching at the university level. But I don’t think it’s fair to compare these blogs with my own; they serve different roles. I’ve never meant this space to be an intentional documentation of best practices, or a how-to manual on pedagogy. Though I don’t doubt my own excellence as a teacher (I’ve a great deal of evidence to suggest that I am quite accomplished as an educator), I have been, and I remain, reluctant to take on the task of systematically codifying my thoughts on teaching.

Rather, I’ve always thought of Change of Basis as a safe place to unpack my own teaching activities (and not, though they may frequently coincide, best practices in teaching more generally) in real time, keeping tabs on what goes on in my classroom, in my REU, at my school, in my mind. It’s more made up of notes-to-self than it is directives-to-others. Though I may cite books on teaching, I don’t do so as a careful and intentional review of the literature, but rather as an indicator of what I happen to be reading at any given time. Though I might bring out all the buzzwords (problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, Moore method, writing across the disciplines, writing-to-learn, etc.), I don’t treat them methodically but only as they come up in my own work. How else to put it? I try to teach by example and not rote lecture. My tone is more anecdotal and less comprehensive and directive. It’s “I tried this trick out, and it worked out well” and not “studies show that this trick will reach students most effectively.”

I mentioned to Bethany that one of the reasons I’d not updated lately was that I’d not had much time lately to write. Between near-constant travel to present at conferences, seminars, colloquia, and faculty development workshops; leadership on the Curriculum Review Task Force (a full-time job in itself lately), preparations for the REU (now done with its second day), several ongoing research projects (in both math and composition and rhetoric), assumption of the Honors Program directorship (my administration began officially a few days ago), and teaching a full load of courses, I’ve not had the time I once had to dedicate to this blog…and when I have the time, it’s often directed into other writing projects (notably, 3x30 and poetry).

Honestly, I’m too busy being a dedicated educator to write about being a dedicated educator.

It’s thus that I offer my apologies to you, Bethany. I’m sorry I’m not posting as often as I might, and that my posts aren’t as pointed or focused as they might be. Please know that I wish I had the time and energy to post once, twice, thrice a week, offering some digestible and downloadable 750-to-1000 words of wisdom each time. Please know that I’m not angry with you for asking more of me, and that I do understand, and appreciate, your concern. This just ain’t that kind of blog.

That said, please consider giving Student writing a read. I’m proud of it, and I feel that it’s a very good book. I feel very strongly that writing has much to offer to students and scholars in the quantitative disciplines, and that we do well to pay attention to writing’s potential. I will walk the Earth from end to end to say so, again and again. If you’d like to talk about it, let me know.

Day of Higher Ed, part 1

My colleague Casie tipped me off that today is The Chronicle of Higher Education's Day of Higher Ed, a day on which those of us who work in higher education are supposed to raise awareness of what we do, and how much of it we're doing. Contrary to the perception of some (mostly conservative, in my experience) suit-types who view higher education with disdain and its employees as fat and fatuous sinecurists, most of us actually work quite hard.

More forcefully, most of us work our asses off.

So, what's in store for me today? (Keep in mind that I'm coming off of a weekend on which I spent roughly 12 hours grading Calc III exams...) Though I can't guarantee I'll get to it all, here's the medium-term docket:

1. Write an end-of-year project report for the National Science Foundation for my 2011 REU (estimated time to complete this: 5-6 hours)

2. Draft a welcome and informational letter to this year's crop of REU students (time to complete: 1-2 hours)

3. Send out rejection letters to the nearly 300 students who didn't get into this year's REU (time to complete: 1 hour)

4. Grade exams for my two students who are taking Abstract Algebra II as a reading course (time to complete: 1 hour)

5. Respond to final drafts of MLA students' latest written projects (time to complete: 3-4 hours)

6. Write three or four rec letters, including an incredibly urgent one for which the requesting student gave me less than a week's notice (time to complete: 2-3 hours)

7. Plan workshop materials for an upcoming writing workshop I'm leading at NC State (time to complete: 3-5 hours)

8. Review and respond to proposed Abstract Algebra curricula floated by other members of the Mathematical Association of America's Committee on Undergraduate Programs in Mathematics (time to complete: 3-5 hours)

9. Generate open problems list for this year's REU (time to complete: 2-3 hours)

10. Begin housing and payroll paperwork for this year's REU students (time to complete: 1-2 hours)

11. Draft a precis for on the latest curricular proposal by the Curriculum Review Task Force's Curricular Sustainability Subgroup (time to complete: 2-3 hours)

12. Complete drafts of research articles currently underway with three different sets of undergraduate coauthors (time to complete: 10-20 hours)

13. Oh yeah...teach!

Anyway, I'd better get to work on that list, me with my oodles of free time. More later, perhaps...

Politics

Who knew there was so much of it in academic administration?

Seriously, though, I have a hunch I'm going to have to practice a good deal of diplomacy in the coming years as I inch closer to administration.

Week Two's been a blast, with Moore-method Calc III moving right along (no major hitches so far!), the second meeting of my MLA course in about two hours (one student withdrew after Week One, and I'm curious to see what the others think of Dehaene), and my first crack at putting together the Honors Program's course schedule underway. That last one's a balancing act, but I can't imagine it's nearly as hard as programming a large department's schedule. Let's just say I appreciate the work my chair's done on that task for the past several years.

One of my lovely Charleston colleagues just gave me a tip on the following book on delivery, apropos of our conversation about the role LaTeX plays in mathematical writing: Rhetorical delivery as technological discourse: A cross-historical study, by Ben McCorkle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012). I ordered a copy. Just call me Mr. Spontaneity.

Okay, off to prepare for a meeting to discuss funding for this year's Conference on Constrained Poetry!

History lesson

Some might say this is not a "teaching" post.

They would be wrong.

I was chagrined several weeks ago when I learned how ahistorically many of my students live their lives: one of my brightest students showed her historical ignorance by not knowing, within ten years or so, when the second world war was fought.

So it is that I worry that my students might not know what's going on around them now.

I join the chorus of academic voices expressing not disappointment, not chagrin, not tut-tutting and head-shaking sadness, but rather disgust and horror at the events taking place recently at campuses in the University of California system.

All that I might say has been said more fully and more eloquently than I can here (here, for instance, and here), so I'll say little more then to say that Chancellors Linda Katehi and Robert Birgeneau must resign...as should any other academic "leader" who condones or supports the actions (or inactions) they've taken.

I cannot say more that's not been said already. I want only for my students not to miss this moment.

To them I say: this is what history looks like.

More big picture stuff

In regards to another recent post, it looks like we're about to beat up on the student body again. I say once more: what in the hell are we doing?

I don't usually get political here (because my pedagogy, writ small, doesn't generally intersect directly with politics outside of my own institution), but I can't help it now: if you support any leader opposed to fair taxation and rational government spending and stimulus, you support the eventual decay of our educational system. Don't re-elect these fools who are destroying our future.

Big, big picture

For several years now, I've been a "big picture" kind of guy: I paint in broad strokes. I see forests and not trees. I'm more satisfied with hand-waving proofs than most of my colleagues would be. I'm more concerned that I and my students get the overall idea, the intuition, the gut-level understanding, than that we get every last detail right.

I'm not sure when I took this viewpoint on, but I think it's a relatively recent phenomenon. After all, I'm not sure you can make it through a graduate program in mathematics without punctilious attention paid to the merest minutiae of theorems and their proofs. It's come on more recently, as I've grown as a teacher and scholar, and as I've come to grips with bigger and bigger problems. It's gotten "worse" lately. I mentioned only half-jokingly to the Associate Provost for Academic Administration, with whom I've been doing a lot of work this semester for CRTF, that I'm starting to think like an administrator. For good or for ill I no longer consider curricular issues as they'll affect a single instructor or even a single department, but rather as they'll affect the school as a whole.

Perhaps the widest view one can take I took for a moment today, and it scared me: if you look at our nation's higher educational system as a whole, there are terrifying trends.

One incident: this morning I got an email from a student who's having to take a break from it all to maintain sanity. Literally. This person is going off the map for a little while and heading home to be with friends and family and to deal with mental health issues.

A second: yesterday I spent a tearful half hour with another student who's clearly dealing with stressors beyond finishing up an essay for Humanities or prepping for this week's coming Abstract Algebra exam. This is a very good student, one I know well, one whose performance this semester has declined noticeably from past semesters. There's much more going on behind the scenes.

A third: last week one student spoke of a narrow escape from dropping out and returning to military service just to make ends meet. Fortunately the financial aid office and the counseling center were able to help make an end-run around a vindictive ex-spouse whose uncooperativeness was preventing disbursement of much-needed funds.

These aren't just isolated events. Dozens of my students, in addition to managing a full load of difficult classes (often in excess of 18 hours dominated by high-level mathematics coursework) also work 20, 30, even 40 hours a week, and deal with manifold family issues (I can think of several students whose entire families depend on them for nearly everything), and still manage to keep it together...or not, as the case may be. The cracks are showing: I've had more people cry in my office than in any other semester I can remember. It ain't getting better.

These students shouldn't have to deal with all they're dealing with today. They should be free to be students, to be free from having to support themselves with back-breaking (or at least time-sucking) labor.

It hasn't always been like this. I speak from experience.

I had it far easier than these folks, barely more than a decade ago. I had student loans and a scholarship, and my family'd done well in socking some away to help me go to school, so the only work I needed to find to get me through my college years was as a work-study assistant in the Math and C&S Department's computer lab. Big. Deal. This was a sinecure. I "worked" 10, maybe 20, hours a week, passing out boot-up disks (yes, we still used those back then), trouble-shooting simple software problems (usually involving nothing harder than MS Excel), and shooting the shit with my geeky friends. Most of the time I got paid to do my homework. The rest of my time (that not devoted to hanging out, eating pizza, running, and annoying the crap out of my dorm mates by playing Pink Floyd's "One of These Days" really frickin' loudly on my monster tower speakers) was spent on schoolwork. I managed to make straight As (aside from a couple of stray minuses) and learn a lot. I was a slacker my first year of college, because I could afford to be: I quickly learned that I didn't need to put too much effort in in order to do well, so I took it easy. My second year I started taking courses that offered legitimate challenge, so I buckled down. That's also when I first realized that I could teach myself as much as anyone else could teach me, so I started studying on my own, everything from additional math and physics and computer science to philosophy, literature, languages, and history. On my free time. (Holy crap...free time! What's that, again?)

I could reminisce forever, but let me get to my point: I'd love to launch into a cliché and crotchety "kids these days" diatribe, but I can't. I had it easier than these kids. Far easier. I didn't have to work my ass off just to stay warm and well-fed, let alone well-educated, and I had time enough (and more) to do well in and learn from all of my classes.

Many of my students have no such luxury. They have to work, and often work hard, just to afford the modest cost of the education my public school provides to them. (It may be worth noting that I went to a pricey private school for college.) If they don't work (and often even if they do) they have to go into debt up to their eyeballs to pay the bills, for they cannot always rely on family to help them out (many of these students are first-generation college students and come from families who can ill-afford to give financial aid). Moreover, they face dim job prospects on graduation, with the economy lagging the way it is. There are no sure signs of long-term improvement. Thus many of my students are going to saddled with crushing student-loan debt and little opportunity to find the work they'll need to get to help pay it back.

Do you think a student with 18 hours a week of coursework and a 40-hour-a-week job who's drawing several hundred dollars per term in student loans and trying her best to hold her family together really has time to learn (or care) what a derivative is? Do you think such a student is going to be completing her homework in full, passing her exams, and finishing her oral presentation on subgroups of groups of symmetry? Even if she's meeting these superficial measures of academic achievement, do you really think she's going to be getting much meaningful out of it?

It's become cliché to put someone in "The 99%," but my students, almost every last one of them, belong there. Bless 'em all, they belong there.

And my students amaze me. Even with 18 hours of coursework and 40 hours on midnight shifts at motel desks and family foibles and student loans and squabbles with landlords over week-late rent checks, they do still learn what a derivative is. And they do still care. They don't just finish their homework, they polish it to perfection. They don't just pass their exams, they ace them. They do incredible work, and they do it without complaint. Somehow, despite having to do everything else we demand that they do, they're learning, and they're helping each other to learn. They're there for each other, even when the system's left them behind.

But this can't go on forever. A college education can't be what it used to be if we don't give these people a bit more breathing room. What in the hell are we doing to them?

The system needs to change. Otherwise, in ten or twenty years we'll look back and notice that though we've stocked our universities with the brightest scholars and the best teachers, and though we've built the shiniest classroom buildings and equipped them with the sleekest high-tech gadgetry, we've miseducated an entire generation simply because we asked too much of them while they were trying to do what we want them to be doing before they do anything else. We just wanted them to learn.

Well...I'll keep doing all that I can, and I'm sure I can count on my students and colleagues (some of the most admirable people on Earth) to do the same. It's a mountain we've got to move, and the only way we're going to move it is if we all get behind it together.

Grades, schmades

Tonight I talked for several hours with one of my best friends on Earth, and one of my most reflective fellow teachers of mathematics, Griselda. (Tired of this and that, and longing to move closer to friends and family in the Northeast, Griselda recently left her job teaching at a public liberal arts college in a nearby state to teach at a boarding school in Pennsylvania.) As usual, our conversation was broad and far-reaching, and dealt with issues in every corner of education.

My most meaningful self-realization of the evening: the only reason I still give grades in my courses is because I have to; the school requires them from me at the end of the term. And the only reason I give grades throughout the semester is to provide substantive justification for those end-of-term grades.

Don't get me wrong: I love responding to my students' work. My responses make up my half of a conversation with the students about the discoveries they're making. It's an ongoing dialogue, and often an exciting one. They say something to me, I say something back, and after one or two iterations we might make some sense of what it is the other is trying to convey. Eventually we'll come to a consensus regarding the meaning of whatever matter we're faced with. I love these conversations. They're where learning takes place.

But grading? Uh uh. I'm over it. I'm tired of this competitive academic economy based on artificial and extrinsic rewards.

How can I break the cycle? Maybe if I rebel and refuse to assign grades...?

Something to think about...

...Griselda always leaves me something to think about.

Thank you, my friend.

NIMBY (academic edition)

[WARNING: what follows is an administration-heavy post that will likely bore most readers to tears. Faculty, please read on only if you're masochistic. Students, please read on only if you want to learn faaaaaar more about the inner workings of your university than you ever dreamed you'd know.]

I've been serving on the Curriculum Review Task Force since its inception back in March. In the half-year since this project got off the ground, I've probably been involved in three dozen meetings (some two or more hours long), written fifty pages of position papers, policy statements, memos, information requests, findings summaries, and spreadsheets. I've read two or three hundred pages of curricular data and carefully scanned the websites of two dozen peer institutions whose programs serve in some way as a model for our own. After all of this work, I feel like we might finally be near to having something to show for our effort.

To be sure, there's more work to be done, but for the first time I feel like we might have reached the point where we'll start rolling downhill again. We've got the information on department curricula we asked for from chairs and program directors, and as we begin sifting through that info we'll be writing our responses to the departments, even while we collect a little bit more data on ILS components before writing similar responses there.

We were intentional in our move to address departments and degree-granting programs first: since several powerful people first got involved in the task force specifically because they perceived its function to be to mount an assault on ILS, we wanted to make clear early and often that we would consider just as carefully the efficiency and the sustainability of departments and programs as well. It would be unacceptable, we wanted known, simply to chuck aside ILS and retreat to the cozy confines of our disciplinary silos.

From the get-go, aside from the usual (and expected) assortment of trolls who got on board the ILS-bashing bandwagon when it first rolled into town, my impression was that folks were behind us. With times as hard as they are (and faculty as overworked), we'd look for efficiency in whatever place we could. ILS, though certainly not a sacred cow, would be considered no more carefully or critically than would the departments.

But when it comes to paying the bills, everyone seems to be busted.

Evidence showed that, expressed in terms of required courses, our degree programs are larger across the board, on average, than their corresponding programs at peer institutions. Our students, not surprisingly, take longer than their peers elsewhere take to complete these programs. Therefore we asked departments to identify ways they might move to make their programs more sustainable: might they remove unpopular concentrations? cut back on course requirements? improve opportunities for "double-dipping" courses?

What we're discovering is shocking: while the curriculum in general is in disarray, every department, on its own, is doing a fantastic job.

The story goes something like this: "our university's curriculum is clearly unsustainable. Students aren't graduating on time, and that's scaring away students, so our retention suffers. My students have a hard time figuring out how to put their schedules in order so that they can graduate in four years, and I have a hard time advising them. But...

"...my department is functioning fine. We offer a premier program, the likes of which you'll find nowhere else in this state, no matter the price." At this point the story follows one of two paths. Either (a) "our program is efficient and sustainable: the number of hours we require is well below the university average, and our students graduate on time far more often than their peers in other programs" (admittedly, this is sometimes true: there are a small number of very sustainable program on campus) or (b) "we recognize that our program makes excessive demands on our students' time, but these demands are in line with the rigors of our discipline and with the accreditation standards laid out by our discipline's professional governing body."

So where's the breakdown, folks? Who's to blame? Are we going to pick up the switch and start thrashing away at ILS, the same old whipping boy we've been beating since I got here over six years ago? (This approach is puerile, people: though ILS could be better, it's not entirely broken...and as a liberal arts institution that purports to take that mission seriously, we need some sort of ILS-like program in order to maintain our street cred.) Or are we going to waste more time pointing every finger we've got at our colleagues in other corners?

Or maybe...just maybe...we'll get the balls to ask ourselves tough questions: do we really need that extra concentration or those curiously complicated course requirements? Can we serve our students as easily through advising as we can through administrative fiat, thus making their schedules more flexible? Just what do our students gain by being forced to take these specific six courses, and not simply six from among ten or twelve, chosen according to their individual interests and aptitudes?

I can't end this post without a note of thanks to the folks in my own department. I've been at odds with many (most, perhaps?) of them on the matter of reducing our concentrations (we could easily, I feel, stand to combine our pure and applied concentrations into a single one), but I like the moves that were made today in our department meeting to make more flexible the applied concentration. I appreciate their willingness to move in that direction.

Compromise, folks, compromise. It's how shit gets done.

I apologize for the pottymouthery. I've been hard at work since 7:00 this morning (it's now nearly 11:00), and my internal filter fell off a long time ago. I'm off to bed.

(Oh, from the "it gets much more fun from here on in" department: I'm tremendously excited about the next few days in both of my classes. Applications of quadratics in Precalc...and symmetric group silliness in Abstract!)

Cause 'n' effect

I've already heard from several former students who are now in K-12 education that the scenario depicted by my friend Kyle is more than ever a reality. I've always known the high-stakes testing, NCLB, and all that nonsense were driving our public schools off of a cliff, but I don't think I was ever aware of just how bad it had become...and Buncombe County's schools are by no means among the nation's "worst."

What in the hell are we doing? I see two immediate and profoundly negative effects to this shortsightedness.

First, by drilling our students on "basic skills" (i.e., reading and math) to the exclusion of all else, we're ensuring that our students will grow to loathe those subjects more than they already do. Many but the most math-motivated students come out of high school hating math and reading little, and being unable to do more than solve pointless decontextualized machine-gradable math problems and extract topic sentences from unchallenging tendentious passages of "literature." This isn't an inevitable outcome: my experience in working with my department's Super Saturday "Math Discoveries" program has taught me that there are many bright 8- and 9-year-olds of all backgrounds who positively love math, and that if that love is nurtured they'll stay focused on it for a long time. Moreover, my experience in teaching Calc I, Calc II, and even Precalculus has taught me that it's not impossible to reawaken dormant affinities for math if it's presented in a way that makes it interesting, challenging, relevant, and fun. But drills and standardized tests are neither interesting nor challenging nor relevant, and they're certainly not fun.

Second, by neglecting less readily-assessable (or at least less readily-assessable-through-machine-graded-standardized-tests) subjects like social science, Earth science, literature, music, etc., we are ensuring that our students will have virtually no ability to contextualize whatever minimal understanding of reading and mathematics they're able to eke out of their loathsome experience with these latter subjects. Their knowledge of math will be disembodied, inapplicable to any other science. "Word problems" will always be "word problems," impenetrable blocks of quasi-mathematical lingo, and not opportunities to apply mathematical understanding in a meaningful setting. Worse yet, reading (and writing) will always be a soulless enterprise, undertaken in order to find a topic sentence, identify three (precisely three) salient pieces of evidence in support of that sentence, and pen a five-paragraph response containing both an introduction and a conclusion (god forbid you forget either).

I'm well aware that there are many more negative effects than these, but I've not got enough time to list them all here...nor am I the most well-trained to make this list. (I'm sure many of my recent grads who now teach in the public schools could do a better job than I could, and I hope they find their way to this post and chime in in the comments section.) I'll close by quoting a colleague/Facebook friend, who said on my link to yesterday's blog post "why is it getting so hot?...why am I in this hand basket"?

[Redacted]

I wrote a brief post in which I offered up more explicit complaints than ever before about the pedagogical practices in one of my school's departments before thinking better of it.

Suffice to say, I was livid this morning on hearing from some of my students about the way one of their courses is being "taught."

Livid, and impotent: what can I do? (Bitch about it on my blog, apparently...)

White screen, white text

[Note: The following is a 10-minute freewrite, performed with my monitor turned off, in order to prevent me from editing. This explains the typos.]

I know what it is that's getting to me. I'm becoming, I feel, something I don't want to be, as a teacher, and I'm resisting it, but it's hard.


I have to absolutely hav ewto know where it is my students stand; I have to keep tabs on their progress, I have to know what it is they know and don't know at any time. It's why I strongly resist automatically graded homework (which I know has some advantages). It's why I teach much more slowly than most of my colleagues, many of whom fly through material without stopping to ask if everyone's on board before the boat leaves the shore.

It also means that I'm painfully aware at every step when someone doesn't understand what's going on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad about this: I'd rather people get it than not. But it means that I'm much more intimately invested in my students' learning than I woudl be otherwise; I feel much more connected them, much more "in the trenches." When they get frustrated, I get rustrated, and when they check out, I get more frsutrated still (you were right, yesterday, by the way...but my frsutration isn't with you, it's with me...why cCAN'T I just let go?).

This semester is the worst.I know it, I feel it: it's the worst. And not just for me. Everyone's stressed, eeveryone's tired, and everyone's angry. Everyone's taking it out on each other, with tempers short and sniping and grousing in every class.

It hasn't helped that I've not been around. I don't think my absence (freuent absence) the last few weeks...I don't know if it is itself toblame for any of the ennui, malaise, or ill will in any of my classes (I don't think so)...but I feel...I FEEL absent. I feel "not there." I don't like feeling that way.

I want you to kno wthat I haven't checked out. I'm still here.

I think I've become too much of an "administrator" this semester (something I blogged about a bit ago). Enough so that when I'm not in the classroom, there's a bit more distance than I'd like there to be. I only feel it (or at least feel it most acutely) when I'm sitting with my students in the math lab when I'm in the math lab working with them on one or another problem in Calc II or some kind of of problem for 280...that's when I feel it, because it's then that I realize that THAT'S where I need to be. Not on the road, talking about how to be a good teacher, but in the classroom, actually BEING a good teacher. In the Math Lab, helping students struggle with the most basic concepts. Not...I don't know.

I don;'t know.

I overbooked myself....I don't likw this.

What's up for next semester?

I'm off of the writing intensive committee...I'm ff of ILSOC. I'm stepping back (or at least I'll try to) from the leadership of the Sectional Project NExT. I've already shuffled off the coil of Supoer Saturday (if I'd had to deal with that this semester I'd have gone insane). I should be freer.

The book won't be coming out until early in 2012, I'm guessing, which means I won't have to do a lot of hobnobbing and hooliganism to tout that thing.

I'll have time to settle back in the center, where I belong. I've got to come home. I'm getting tired of this.

I need to be somwhere that I'm not.

I'm getting tired of this. I'm tired.

And it's not you, it's not me, it's all of us. We'rd tired.


I realize how repetitive this post must sound, given the frequent similar posts I've written in the past few weeks, but there it is. It's what some would call a thpattern.

There it is.

Here we are.

Let's try to make the best of the rest of the term.

CRTF?!

For the past two years I've served as Chair both of our university's Writing Intensive (WI) Subcommittee and of its Integrative Liberal Studies Oversight Committee (ILSOC; the body of which WI is a component). I was on WI for two years before chairing it, and during that time did a good deal of assessment and faculty development work for the body before coming to its head.

I've enjoyed all of this work: as anyone who reads this blog even casually (or anyone who's talked to me for more than a few minutes about my teaching) knows, I'm passionate about writing across the curriculum in all of its manifestations, and I consider myself duty-bound to evangelize and elegize.

I've enjoyed the work, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm tired of it. I'd estimate (if I had to pull a number or two out of a hat) that I've put an average of 5-7 hours a week towards WI during the past four years, and probably 3-5 hours a week towards ILSOC during the past two. This includes the summer months, for much of the assessment, faculty development, and reporting I've had to do for both bodies has taken place over the summer. In all this adds up to well over 1000 hours of work...and this is likely a conservative estimate.

I'll be rotating off of WI (my term is up) at the end of this academic year, and thus off of ILSOC, for it's my chairing of the former body that places me on the latter one in the first place. I've had a few good innings, and, to further that metaphor, I might say I've bowled several centuries. It's been fun.

What'll I be doing with my free time come next Fall, or even sooner? Lest you think I'll be languishing in a non-administrative lull, I might let you know that I've been placed on the "Curricular Sustainability" subcommittee of the latest chimerical beast dreamed up by our Provost and Faculty Senate Chair, the Curricular Review Task Force, or CRTF, for short.

To be clear: I volunteered to be on CRTF when the call went out a few weeks back. I even asked specifically to be placed on the subcommittee I've been placed on. (I'm delighted to find that several colleagues whom I respect deeply will be on the same subcommittee...many of whom have roughly my tenure, and many of whom I've worked with before.) I'm actually not complaining about this new assignment, as I believe it'll prove interesting, challenging, fulfilling, and (yes, I'm going to say it) fun.

But...

...there's something wrong here.

The Curricular Sustainability Subcommittee (CSS..."cascading style sheet"?) will be tasked with mapping out a proposal to make our school's curriculum deliverable by the current faculty (read: "without the adjuncts we cannot at this time afford") without driving them insane or further abrading their already red, rubbed, and raw morale. Sounds simple enough, right? During the CRTF's organizational meeting this past Friday, I began jotting down a list of related issues as they came to me. One after another they came, a few here, a few there, all interlocking and interacting, one popping up as another is squeezed down, like the flesh of a bulbous balloon.

What's involved?

• Class size
• Number of classes
• Frequency of class meetings
• Physical space available for class meetings
• Student enrollment
• Funding supplied by students' tuition
• "Down time" (release time and sabbatical...the latter now euphemistically called "professional development leave," and before that "off-campus scholarly assignment"; heaven forbid we call it "sabbatical": that would make us sound lazy!)
• Comparability with other institutions' policies
• Accounting of courses (cross-listing, "double-dipping," other accounting tricks)
• Meaningful co-teaching and related pedagogical practices
• Relation of our mission and goals to those of the UNC system as a whole
• Time to perform research
• Time to perform service to the department, university, and community
• Use of technology (especially regarding distance learning and hybrid course designs)
• Faculty development (cost of, and targets of)
• Support for curricular development efforts, for faculty development efforts...support in general
• Reassessment of the roles of graders, UG teaching assistants, and other opportunities for student engagement in pedagogy
• The university's identity and mission as a liberal arts institution
  
• Et cetera

As some sample interpenetrations, working off of the unwritten (but widely stated, including over and over at this past Friday's meeting) aim of ensuring a 3-3 load:

Moving to a 3-3 load without the help of several dozen more faculty will lead to...larger class sizes, creating...greater demands for more (and more frequently unavailable) physical space, requiring...further renovations to existing physical structures, or perhaps extending hours during which regular courses are offered...unless...

...enrollment is forced downward, leading to...a decrease in the tuition monies available to fund the university's efforts across the board, raising...the school's dependence on other sources of funding...or, unless...

...a move is made to offer more and more online and hybrid online/face-to-face courses, for which...faculty will need more professional development (to better acquaint themselves with this pedagogical paradigm) and preparation time (you can teach an old dog new tricks, but not overnight), assuming we can all get over...the damage this move might do to the university's identity as a liberal arts institution, in which meaningful student-instructor engagement and student-led learning (undoubtedly harder to orchestrate from afar) are highly prized.

The astute reader will noticed that I've not yet followed up on the "something's wrong here" I threw out above.

In asking faculty to take on the job of resolving this and other equally immense issues involved with overhauling our curriculum, the administration is adding yet another duty to the already vertiginous tower of tasks it's performing (like QEP design and delivery, assessment for SACS, day-to-day operations of the Humanities, Arts and Ideas, Intensives, Clusters, and ILS Colloquia, and various and sundry other sickeningly corporatized bureaucratic functions). Faculty, most of whom are already teaching three or four increasingly large sections every semester, many of whom are facing increasingly great expectations for service and scholarship, are more and more frequently being asked to take on administrative roles.

Like it or not, we're being turned into quasi-administrators, all of us.

Halfway through Friday's CRTF meeting the question was raised: "well, once we've put all of our recommendations together, then what?" Clearly, as it stands, no single body will have the authority to make all of the changes we're likely to suggest; whatever the faculty can't do on an informal basis will have at least to go through Faculty Senate (or at least its subcommittee, the Academic Policy Committee), if not General Administration (GA) itself, far away in a semi-mythical place called Raleigh (a place where the public liberal arts university is not well-, if ever at all, understood). I imagined the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the ark is trundled off into the bowels of an immense warehouse, presumably never to be seen again...so it would be with our report, no doubt: how many months would be wasted in trying to coordinate the several separate bodies whose work it would be to try to implement whatever suggestions we could come up with?

In a delightful moment of daydream, I thought: "Rebel. Revolt. Take over. Throw the Senate out, screw GA, and rewrite the rulebook, starting with page 1. If we've got the backing of the faculty as a whole [there are some 50 or 60 of us on CRTF, by the way], who's to stop us?" It was a childish thought, to be sure, but it was nice while it lasted.

Just minutes before the meeting on Friday I'd been sitting in the Math Lab working with Didi and Belle, two of my favorite new students this semester. They were working at trying to make their submission for the Calc II Integral Insanity miniproject more fiendish (the goal is to make as difficult an integral as possible, while still making it doable). We were trying to figure out how to build a reasonably challenging integration-by-parts problem backwards, through reverse engineering. I don't think any of the three of us had had much sleep this past week, and we were all slap-happy and silly as hell. Progress was slow, but I think we eventually got there.

It's moments like these that make me remember why I do what I do. I'm a teacher (and scholar) first, and an administrator second...distantly second. As important as WI, ILSOC, CRTF, and all of the other academic acronymic entities are in the abstract, there's nothing more important in concrete terms than making sure that a future mathematician understands induction, or that a future engineer or public health official knows how to analyze a simple mathematical model, or that I keep playing an active role in the generation of new knowledge, for my own sake and for my students'.

I can't lose sight of this.