So far, so good

Halfway through the second day, and the semester's chugging along nicely.

The first meeting of my Complex Variables class came off without a hitch yesterday. I've got a relatively small group (15 students), comprising math, physics, and engineering majors. We had a lively first class, in which, after a brief review of operations on and properties of real numbers, we encountered the basic definition of a complex number. Tomorrow will tell if the structure I've designed for this course will work out well. I'm doing a sort of "flipped Moore method," wherein the students will be presenting only certain of the problems they're assigned, while they'll be submitting written solutions to them all. From the second problem set on, they'll be required to submit their solutions in LaTeX, and I'll be giving them all the option of taking part in the study my colleague Beatrice and I have put together for this coming year's Conference on College Composition and Communication (viva, Las Vegas!). Our goal will be to understand the effect that using LaTeX has on students' composition processes.

Meanwhile, I'm busy settling into the Honors office and meeting with Honors students as they drop in. I'm beginning to realize that much of this job entails putting out the dozens of little range fires that pop up on an almost hourly basis. (Welcome to administration, I suppose...?) It's not often the same thing twice, so far, so there's enough variety to make the job interesting. Moreover, the students are fantastic. I'm particularly enjoying meeting majors from departments very far removed from my own (Accounting, Health and Wellness Promotion, etc.).

It's going smoothly. Things are settling quickly enough that I'm already starting to look ahead to my next round of trips. First I'm off to Texas A&M International University in Laredo, where I'll be leading a day and a half of faculty development workshops centering on writing in the disciplines. Next, it's up the mountain to the Wildacres Retreat Center for my fifth Carolinas Writing Program Administrators fall conference (love those people!). Finally, a week later I'm off to my first North Carolina English Teachers Association conference (featuring my first official book signing!). I've got a couple more weeks to get ready, but need to get on it, especially for that first trip.

Speaking of which, let me get back to it...

Moore ain't less

Back in January at the Boston Joint Mathematics Meetings my frolleague Stanislaus told me my name had come up in a conversation about plenary speakers for this year’s Legacy of R.L. Moore conference, an annual celebration of inquiry-based learning (IBL) sponsored by the Educational Advancement Foundation and the Mathematical Association of America. I was honored: this conference is well-known and reasonably high-profile. I wasn’t sure I was the best person for the job, though, for although I practice IBL in every course I teach, I generally do so in moderation. Only rarely do I use techniques that even closely approximate all-out Moore method, as I did this past semester in my two sections of Calc III. (Not having taught in Moore’s style for several years, I was a bit rusty at it, and I think the results were mixed.)

Nevertheless, I accepted the invitation.

I warned Stanislaus that I felt like something of a charlatan, for not only did I use Moore’s method infrequently, I had never even attended the conference before this past week. Stanislaus and others on the conference’s program committee reassured me and insisted that I might have something to say about inquiry and undergraduate research, something about which I do know a bit more.

So I set to work on my talk. It took me a while to decide how to pitch it. Should I focus on the act of research itself, and the role that inquiry plays therein, or should I try to tie research back to the classroom, where we’re more used to finding IBL more explicitly articulated? I settled on the latter approach, putting together an interactive presentation that would, I hoped, call attention to the parallel learning outcomes we encounter both in classroom teaching and in authentic disciplinary research, and highlighting the ways in which IBL helps us achieve those outcomes in whatever setting we might make them.

Early on Thursday afternoon, not an hour before my talk was scheduled to start, I was chatting with another frolleague, Ephigenia, whom I’d met during my postdoc at Illinois (she’d been a graduate student then). “I’m not sure I’m going to be saying anything new to anyone here,” I admitted. After all, I was smack-dab in the middle of IBL central. That research takes inquiry, and that research is in many ways no more than an extension of an interactive inquiry-based classroom, are not new ideas.

“This is sometimes a bit of a feel-good exercise,” Ephigenia assured me. (Boy, have I been a needy Nadine!) Makes sense: many of the folks at the conference are coming from colleges where no one else practices any sort of intentional IBL, and these folks need to find some kind of community. Hey, I’m not one to pooh-pooh the role that affect plays in teaching and learning.

I went ahead with my presentation, and as far as I can tell it was pretty uniformly well-received. It’s not likely that someone’s going to come up to my face and tell me that it sucked, but I had many tell me quite the opposite. I still don’t think I said anything new, though I hope it helped to give concrete examples of inquiry activities that don’t quite fit the Moore-shaped mold (the birdhouse exercise from last fall’s precalculus classes and the conversation on claw-free graph powers that took place between me and this year’s REU students about a week ago now). I might not be justified in feeling like a fake.

So now I’ve been to the Legacy conference. Will I go again? It’s good people, and I always like an excuse to get to Austin. But this time of year’s a busy conference season, and I’m pulled a hundred different ways these days.

We’ll see.

Re-visioning revision-ing

After dedicating several hours of my morning to reviewing teaching award files, I've turned my afternoon attention to the exciting task of coding drafts of past years' REU students' drafts, preparing for the panel on mathematical rhetoric I'll be presenting with my Charleston friends at this year's very-fast-approaching Conference on College Composition and Communication. While our panel will offer an overview of our earlier work on the rhetorical moves REU students make in crafting disciplinary writing, we'll also offer a sneak peak of the analysis we're doing on revision.

Regarding that analysis: this shit is hard, y'all. At least, it's time consuming. Back in December I spent a full day with my Charleston peeps Bella and Damian making qualitative observations on each of the seven drafts written by a single student author. We're taking this route because we found that existing revision coding strategies (like a classical one due to Faigley and Witte in their 1981 paper "Analyzing revision") don't adequately capture the richness of the students' rhetorical moves as they revise their drafts of authentic disciplinary writing: while Faigley and Witte applied their schema to somewhat tightly-constrained writing produced in an artificial setting with strongly-controlled revision protocols, my REU students were writing in order to elaborate on their ongoing original research projects. The complexity of the latter students' writing (both products and processes) defies easy microscopic analysis, and we quickly abandoned such analytical methods.

That's not to say that we're not getting some "quantitative" data: we're tracking measures like number of pages, number of paragraphs, number of citations and references, etc., with the hope that we can glean some interesting conclusion from this info, if nothing more than trends that roughly parallel our qualitative observations.

We'll see.

For now, back to coding...

CCCC, Vol. 4: Putting the Paper Down?

Today a couple hundred UNC Asheville students took part in a longstanding school tradition, the Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium. I took in five of my students' talks, all skilfully prepared and delivered, in topics including health care in Bolivia, foraging of endangered spiraea shrubs by beavers, and the role of the anagram in constrained poetry. Love it!

The talks I attended reminded me of a phenomenon I wanted to blog about after my first Conference on College Composition and Communication a couple of weeks back. At this wonderful conference Amherst's Joseph Berenguel delivered his talk (about which I posted here), on markers of anxiety, in a manner that offered an explicit challenge to the dominant style of delivery in humanistic disciplines. Rather than read his paper verbatim from a hard copy held in front of his nose, Berenguel instead spoke extemporaneously, delivering his presentation in a manner much more akin to that found in the natural sciences (and mathematics!). His talk was very well-organized, engaging, and clear...and its delivery was fluid and dynamic.

Berenguel was aware of the distance between the expected and the actual; he comments on my previous post (by the way, thanks for reading, Joseph! I'm sorry that I've not yet had a chance to respond to you personally): "I was quite aware of the difference between my style and the expected style. I tried to work it to my advantage. All that stuff is mostly in my head anyway." No doubt this truly was the case, for the process of writing the paper in the first place surely seared most of the thoughts (his own in the first place) into his skull...and further practice in presenting his paper further propped up the permanence of those thoughts.

Given this familiarity, why bother reading straight from the page at all? I've wondered at the divergence between the delivery styles in different disciplines for quite some time now. One of my colleagues in the Language & Literature Department here speculated (though she didn't know for sure) that the practice of word-for-word reading stems from an allegiance to the very carefully-chosen words the presenter has taken the trouble to pen in the first place: why risk a few seconds' worth of brain farting deleting the hours of careful reflection that led to the precise phrasing contained in the paper itself?

If this is the case, though, why isn't it a sauce-for-the-goose-is-sauce-for-the-gander situation? That is, aren't word choice and phrasing equally important (and equally tenuous and susceptible to on-the-spot memory lapses) in the natural sciences? Or could it be that the relatively image- and graphic-dependent nature of presentation in these fields drive down the dominance of verbal discourse?

This last argument seems unlikely to me. I'm not sure I buy the "careful choice" claim. But there ought to be a better explanation than simply calling out all humanitarians as "traditionalists" and all natural scientists as "innovators." Does anyone out there have any idea why this divergence still exists?

Whatever the reason for its being, I'm not sure the divergence has much life left in it. Several of the other talks I attended at CCCC were of the extemporaneous variety, as was one of the three talks in humanities or social sciences I attended today. (This one was a talk in an economics session; the "traditional" talks today were in film studies and poetry.) Intrigued that I'd seen so many maverick ad libbers (I'd expected few, if any, before going to CCCC), I'd asked my Charleston college Bella if she felt the traditional approach had long to live. She couldn't say definitively, though she indicated she's noticed the trend in recent years towards a more on-the-spot style of delivery.

Time will tell, I suppose.

I'm not sure I have anything more meaningful to say about this topic, so I'll let it rest. If you have insights of your own, please feel free to bring them up in the comments.

CCCC, Vol. 3: Take 2

This is the third of several posts I hope to write over the next few days hitting highlights of my first Conference on College Composition and Communication, which took place a few days back in Atlanta. I want here to say a few words about the next phase of the rhetorical analysis of REU students' writing I'm currently performing with my friends at the College of Charleston.

We're moving ahead. Last Friday we met to plan our next moves, which include a session proposal for next year's CCCC in Saint Louis and a plan for our next data-gathering session, to take place during the second week of this coming summer's REU. As we did last year, we'll spend some time interviewing the student participants about their past writing instruction and their experience with writing in mathematics. We also plan on reworking the prompt for the students' weekly journaling to include more intentional language regarding writing.

Our goal? To begin to understand how students develop as disciplinary writers in mathematics by examining (1) their progress along the axes we laid out in the first phase of our research (use of sources, contextualization in the existing body of knowledge, etc.), and (2) their own reported perceptions of their growth as writers over the course of the summer program.

As of the end of the coming summer we'll have four years of data (at least four drafts, often many more, of roughly 6-8 papers per year), and analyzing these data is going to be an arduous task. To help us out with the reading we brought aboard three more Charleston-based writing folks (all former grad students at the College of Charleston). It's going to be a regular party.

Exciting stuff! Further bulletins as events warrant.

CCCC, Vol. 2: The Citation Project

This is the second of several posts I hope to write over the next few days hitting highlights of my first Conference on College Composition and Communication, which took place a few days ago in Atlanta. Here I'd like to focus on a comprehensive 16-school analysis of students' use of citations in first-year composition (FYC) courses, called by its investigators "The Citation Project."

For this project, Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard worked with faculty at over a dozen institutions to collect data on several hundred FYC students' papers, analyzing the way in which the student authors drew on the sources they cited. Four types of source use were coded and carefully tabulated. In order from least sophisticated to most, these types are as follows:

1. Direct quotation (cited or not): the student pulls a quote from the source.

2. Patchwriting: this occurs when the student "patches" together pieces of the source's text with her own. It may involve rearranging phrases here and there, or replacing some words with synonyms. Jamieson and Howard characterize patchwriting as failed paraphrasing: the student attempts to paraphrase the source author's explanations, but falls back on the original phraseology when she encounter difficult passages.

3. Paraphrase: in paraphrasing, the student expresses isolated ideas from the source in her own words. To do this requires a relatively sophisticated understanding of the source.

4. Summary: summarizing requires deeper understanding still, as the student, in her own words once more, creates a snapshot of the source as a whole, tying together disparate ideas and weaving them into a coherent piece.

Jamieson and Howard pointed out a number of significant findings, and though I hate to reduce this post to a simple series of bullet points, it's the easiest way to highlight a few of the findings I found most interesting.

1. Almost all of the students' uses of sources offered anything but summary. Over 90% of the use of sources fell into one of the other three categories.

2. Most sources students drew upon were short, unreliable, web-based sources. Although the investigators admitted they'd not looked into the matter, they agreed with the claim several audience members made that most of the sources of this type likely rank highly in a simple relevant Google search. (This was the case in my Calc I class last semester, when this source, an essay likely penned by a moderately intelligent high school student, was the most-oft cited by students working on the Newton v. Leibniz project.)

3. Students' citations peaked in the middle of their writing projects, with direct quotations dominating in this area.

4. Most text from sources students pulled from the first pages of whatever source is being used.

Jamieson and Howard raised the question of the extent to which we ourselves our guilty of the same practices in our own work...or whether we're aware of the ways in which we teach our students to make use of sources. They fear that we may have lost the forest in the trees, showing overmuch concern for proper citation and citation style while we fail to see how the sources cited are really being used.

The work of The Citation Project is purely textual analysis, with little rhetorical analysis done yet. I chatted with Jamieson for a bit after their talk, and she confirmed that it was largely the nature of the analysis that's driven the direction of their study, including their choice of source uses. I shared with her the uses for sources Damian, Bella, and Nicola came up with in our rhetorical analyses (to support the author's claims, to contextualize the author's work, to indicate results to be extended or improved, and to find other sources) of REU students' writing. She was interested in learning more, and would like to stay in touch. I would too: The Citation Project is heading in new, and surely exciting, directions.

CCCC, Vol. 1: Emotions and Authority

This is the first of several posts I hope to write over the next few days hitting highlights of my first Conference on College Composition and Communication, which took place over the past days in Atlanta. The conference was absolutely fantastic. Not only did I get a chance to engage more fully with the professional composition and rhetoric community; I also got to hang out (on my birthday!) with incredible friends and colleagues. Best conference in a long, long time.

Here I'd like to focus on one of the most interesting sessions I attended, titled "Emotions and Authority in Academic Writing." Joseph Berenguel (Amherst)'s talk about writers' anxiety examined the ways in which students make certain rhetorical moves in order to cover up their anxiety. For instance, when they paraphrase (or patch-write, a move I'll talk about in the next post), they often do so not because they're lazy (as we many instructors assume), but rather in order to mask their anxiety over a lack of authentic understanding. After all, when the topic you're writing about eludes your understanding, it's difficult to "put it into your own words": sometimes the only recourse you have is paraphrasing.

I believe it would be interesting to undertake a similar study in mathematics: do students resort to purely formulaic or computational explanations not because they're lazy, or because this is what they think is expected (which many instructors would likely claim), but because they really don't possess an intuitive understanding of the ideas they're discussing? That is, whenever our students slip into purely formulaic language, might they likely do so because they cannot do otherwise, and they're anxious about letting their masks slip and showing that they don't possess a full understanding of the topics they're studying?

If this is the case, I believe it argues (yet more forcefully than even I have before) for writing-to-learn activities in mathematics classes. After all, low-stakes writing is exploratory, pressure-free, and safe. Many low-stakes techniques are designed to minimize the writer's anxiety while they help him sort through the pieces of whatever mental puzzle he's trying to put together.

Equally fascinating was Heather Robinson's talk about the rhetorical differences between the articles "a/an" and "the." She argued persuasively that in using the definite article "the," the writer is asserting a common ground with the reader. That is, when the writer says "The effects of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds are complex," in effect she hints to the reader that those effects are well-studied, and moreover that the reader ought to be aware of them before proceeding. It's a sort of hifalutin' version of "RTFM." As a simple example, she began her talk by indicating that she herself was "the authority," referring to the word "authority" appearing in the title of the session she was speaking in. It could be assumed that all present were familiar with that title, and therefore that her referent would be understood.

On the other hand, when the writer chooses to use the indefinite article, she inflects her writing with judgment, evaluation, discussion, or analysis. "A possible consequence of gamma ray exposure is the following..." says to the reader, "you may not know about this consequence, but I do, and I'm about to let you in on the action." When the writer uses an indefinite article, she asserts her own attitude an analyst or evaluator; when she uses a definite article, she instead assumes an authoritative role as member of a discourse community with a shared common body of knowledge.

In another post on this conference's goings-on I'll come back to say a bit about Berenguel's talk, as its whole style of delivery is remarkable for a few different reasons: it was delivered in unconventional (for his discipline) style, it was ironically anxiously delivered, and it was superbly well-organized.

What a difference six years make

The last time I was in this hotel (The Marriott Marquis in Atlanta) was January of 2005. The Joint Meetings were in full swing. I'd crashed the party, masquerading as a registered attendee by slipping my 2002 JMM badge into a recycled badge holder and hoping no one would look too carefully at the logo on the badge's corner. No one gave me any trouble, probably because I kept a low profile and didn't try to duck into the heavily-guarded exhibit hall. After all, I'd come only for three first-round interviews (Seattle University, Carleton College, and UNCA) and a couple of dinners and lunches with Vandy friends.

The first two interviews were a bust. The third...well, you can guess how that one turned out.

Here I am again, six years later. The 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication gets underway tomorrow. It's met since 1949, but this is my first. I'm thrilled to be here; I feel like I'm diving yet more deeply into the academic writing community, a very warm and welcoming pool of teachers and scholars.

I spent an hour or two over dinner perusing the program, planning my schedule for tomorrow. I'll never tire of the clever and insightful wordplay in which this community revels, play that goes beyond mere punnery: words like "ecopreneurship" and "hypermediacy" pepper the presentation titles, and boundaries of every variety (ethnic, national, racial, sexual, gender, etc.) are broken as presenters assert their selves unabashedly: "I write myself; this is who I am."

It makes me feel as though scholarship in my own discipline, even the scholarship of teaching and learning in math, is soft soap in comparison. A simplistic response would be to claim that considerations such as gender, ethnicity, etc., are irrelevant in the mathematics classroom. Yet this assertion is craven and evasive. Why are we (mathematicians) not so bold as to confront those issues of identity which surely affect our students' performance in our courses? Why are we afraid of letting ourselves and our students proclaim their own identity in their work? Are we afraid of losing what Scott Montgomery (in The scientific voice) calls "heroic objectivity"? Isn't hypermediacy as important in our field as it is in composition, if not more so ("hyperimmediacy")?

Anyway, I'm sure I'll head home in a few days with a boatload of new ideas to think about. For now, I'm going to head down to the hotel bar and have a drink while looking over the paper I wrote with the Charleston crew. I'm sure at some point in the next couple of days Damian and Bella and I will sit down to hash out the next stage of the project, and I want to be ready.

The end is near

I sure hope so, anyway. An already-short semester made nearly a week shorter by three snow days to start it off has meant that nearly every faculty member on campus has been piling on the work, making up for lost time. Everyone, faculty and students alike, is overworked this semester. The stress level is extraordinary.

This is one reason I felt bad effectively asking many of my 280 students to redo their last homework set even as they bear into the next one...and get ready for the next take home exam, to be handed out tomorrow. They took it well, though, and judging from the revisions I've seen since yesterday morning, they've made good on the opportunity: the revisions look great! I think it was the right move.

I hope this coming weekend's conference will be a welcome relief to the handful of faculty and ten or so students who are going. (Danielle, who was in my Linear class last term, jumped at the chance to go and get away from her dreaded CSCI 273 course for a little while.) This year's MAA Southeastern Sectional meeting, in Tuscaloosa, will be the second for several of the students and the first for a few others. My student Tonio is presenting on the work he did with me a year ago, we're fielding a Jeopardy! team for the second year running, and our department's faculty are presenting on everything from low-stakes writing activities (guess who?) to peer mentoring programs for Calc I courses. I'm just looking forward to the drive and a night or two to sort out some of the last revisions on the book before submitting it.

I've got one more conference coming up, at the end of next week. The annual Conference on College Composition and Communication ("Cs," as the comp/rhet people call it) takes place next week in Atlanta. It's my first. I'm looking forward to hammering out the next step on the research on REU writing Bella, Damian, and Nicola and I will be taking again this summer, and to meeting a few more folks in the composition community. (Moreover, from what I've heard, the publishers' receptions are pretty much the bomb...I've already been told about Bedford/St. Martin's shindig at Turner Field.)

Almost there...almost there...hang in there, my friends; we're almost there.

Sometimes dreams do come true

I'm on cloud nine plus seven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great expectations

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

We are one

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

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

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

We are free, we veterans.
We are one.

Bragging on my students is a full-time job

Before I scooted off to the 2010 Carolinas Writing Program Administrators conference (also known as "the best damned conference on the planet") at Wildacres the past few days I entrusted my Linear students with a task to perform in my absence on Monday, and all signs show that they pulled it off wonderfully.

Their job was to meet as a class, brainstorm topics from linear algebra which would be placed under broader "general headings" (also brainstormed), and assign themselves, in whatever way they felt effective and appropriate, to teams each of which would be tasked with writing a "section" of a review manual on one of the general headings decided upon earlier.

Apparently Ino, never one to let chaos cramp her style, enlisted Iris's help in leading the class through the brainstorming exercise, and they had it all done in short order. She later e-mailed me the list of headings, each with three or four students assigned to it.

I'm delighted that I was able to trust my students to meet without me and get the job done, and I'd like to think that the effort they showed in finishing this job was payback to me for showing them that trust in the first place. I think there's something to be said for the benefits that mutual trust can bestow both on teacher and on students. I trust this particular batch of students fully. They're great.

As I hinted above, I got back in town early this morning (in plenty of time for my 8:00 a.m. Calc I class) from CWPA. As ever, it was a fantastically productive experience. This year's get-together wisely eschewed rigid structure, offering instead ample opportunities for participants to meet in whatever groups and subgroups they felt they needed to.

I spent Tuesday morning talking assessment with folks from Elon, Mars Hill, and Charleston Southern. Our conversation helped me to tease out the issue at the root of what was puzzling me most about our current writing-intensive assessment plan. Namely, what do we do with the assessment data once we've got them? There must be more in store for them than a place in a forgotten file cabinet or a SACS reviewer's dossier. Yet for assessment data to mean much more, they must be highly esteemed by the faculty to whom they're given.

I realized about halfway through the day that faculty need to be helped to see the intrinsic value of both the assessment data and the assessment process itself. If faculty can learn to see assessment as a formative, reflective, and dialogic process involving many inter-interested parties, rather than as a summative, unidirectional, and punitive process instituted from above, they may come to understand its usefulness. As I said to a few of my colleagues at CWPA, it would be great if we could get them to the point where they'd say, "hot damn, data!"

I can dream, can't I?

Although I'd like to think that faculty development workshops can solve all problems, it would be great to come up with a more exciting means of changing faculty perceptions regarding assessment...any thoughts?

Speaking of workshops, I've got a great idea for what I think could be a fun faculty writing workshop, but I'll save that for another post. Now, it's bedtime: tomorrow's another long one.

Trust me

Elon's over.

At last.

And after several months of planning, it came off all right. And the planning was worth it, as annoying as it often was: the students (particularly the younger ones!) got a lot out of it.

The drive out was a pleasant one (with only a light spray of rain), and the three-hour trip to the conference site gave the students (several of whom didn't yet know each other well) open up a bit and build bridges. As I told them then, for the first of several times during the next 48 hours or so, "you don't really know someone until you've got to a conference with them."

Obligatory alcohol-induced first-night revelry out of the way, the conference began on a high note. After an hour at the Project NExT session, I headed over to the first round of Math Jeopardy! in which our school has ever fielded a team. The Asheville team faced off against three others, and though our folks stumbled a bit at first (with a score at one point dipping into negative numbers), they quickly rebounded. Georgia Southern's team ran through the differential equations category, but with those questions depleted the UNCA team blazed through the category on "trans" words, pulling ahead, the ten or so of us in the audience exultantly pumping our fists with each right answer. A brief slump put them in second place going into Final Jeopardy, and it was only because of conservative wagering that our team came in second in the round...and ultimately ninth out of thirty-four teams. I was floored, and beaming with pride.

The conference itself began with a plenary talk on female mathematicians in the time of Euler. One of the central figures in the talk was the Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi (of "Witch" fame), a topic I knew would be of interest to Ino, a student I've come to know as something of an Italophile. Sitting behind her, I tried to judge her level of enthusiasm during the talk. My suspicions were confirmed when I talked to her after the lecture was over, noting the excitement in her eyes. I've since suggested she might look into the possibility of translating the work of some other classical Italian mathematician as a research project straddling math and her beloved language.

The REU panel my colleague Lancelot and I put together was well-received, with nearly 100 people attending the panels and talks. I most enjoyed the student panel, on which three UNCA students, each of whom had taken part in a very different summer research experience, and one of the participants in my 2009 REU led a discussion regarding the aspects of a successful REU program. The discussion was open and frank, touching on negative aspects of summer programs as well as positive ones. As Lancelot said, our panels (both the faculty-led one and the student-led one) each could have been an hour long, and the conversations would have remained as rich at the end as at the beginning.

My new department-mate Kelli and I had a chance to catch up for a bit after the REU session ended, and after she and I and Lancelot hung out for a bit shooting the breeze I headed back to the hotel to lead our entire UNCA contingent to a Thai restaurant I happened to spy on the hotel's dining list: most of us trekked halfway across town to enjoy a surprisingly lovely dinner together in the company of twenty or so of our closest friends.

I spent most of last night putting the finishing touches on my talk for this morning, a fifteen-minute piece titled "The role of trust in teaching and learning." Here I had a few words to say about the ways in which the affective effects our learning environments as strongly as does the cognitive. More engaging to me than my talk were the conversations with my students that led up to it, in which I asked them to offer me their own views on trust in teaching. In every one of these conversations (ones similar to which I would recommend my fellow teachers to have with their own students) the students were lively and animated. I suspect that students may be so animated because they're not often asked questions like "how do you feel about the work you're doing in class?" or "how might your professors most easily earn your respect and trust?"

I think my talk was somewhat well-received, judging from comments people made to me afterward. I was a little worried that its rather unorthodox topic and methodology (highly qualitative, empirical, and anecdotal) would rub some of the more traditionalists the wrong way, but I'm not overly concerned. I feel strongly about what it is I had to say, and I can live with whatever discomfiture it may have caused a few of the gray-beards.

During the next couple of hours I had a chance to catch up with previous years' REU students (Dione from 2008 and Daria from 2009, who'd already spoken and served on a panel in the REU session the day before) and take in a couple of talks given by a few of my Asheville students: Siegfried's discussion of logarithmic concavity was breezy and easygoing, and Uriah and Ulrich's overview of last semester's textbook assignment in 280 was fantastic. Not only did they offer a full and accurate picture of the assignment's structure; they also highlighted the ways in which the assignment served as an extremal example of a writing-to-learn project and the ways in which bridges to other aspects of mathematics could be built from the abutments it offered. (Ulrich mentioned his discovery of the software package Geogebra, inspired by his need to create attractive graphics for the textbook. Reminder: the latest version of the textbook can be found by following this this link.)

The conference over, we hit the road again. I wish I'd had the van miked on the way home: Uriah, Iris, and Ino and I spent much of the drive back to Asheville talking about various things, including AP exams, life plans, Southern accents, and, yet again, trust in teaching. By the time we'd returned to the parking lot we'd left a little over two days before, several of the students were zombified from over-stimulation and lack of sleep, but everyone seemed happy and all professed to have been stimulated by the past days' goings-on. The younger students in particular, including those who may still have been on the fence regarding the pursuit of a math degree, were sold. Several are already ready for their next conference.

I'm tired. But happy. And proud. They're wonderful people.

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!

Liveblogging CWPA 2009: Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liveblogging CWPA 2009: Part 1

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

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

So here we go...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why things work the way they do

Recipe for a successful undergraduate research conference

Easily navigated, centrally located venue
Five to ten (5-10) dedicated faculty
Committed students, proportional to faculty
Animated and understandable plenary speakers (one to three, time permitting)
Inexpensive food and unpresuming (pizza, potato chips, potato soup)
Hospitably hosted game night
Student presentations (with reasonable expectations)
Willingness to let the students run the show

Begin with a generous serving of inexpensive and unpresuming food, mix in the bulk of the students and faculty and add a plenary speaker. Cover with a game night and more inexpensive food, and let sit overnight.

Come morning, begin with a warm welcome from a dedicated faculty member and another plenary speaker. Add student talks, a few at a time, making sure the students control the content and pace of their own talks and oversee the talks’ timing and question-and-answer periods. Be sure not to overheat. Cover with another serving of unpresuming food. Repeat this layering process two or three times.

Coat the top with generous closing remarks from one of the dedicated faculty (door prizes optional).

Serve warm.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow!

19 hours until my first class of the Spring 2009 semester begins.

At 9:00 it's 75 minutes of Calc I.

At 12:45 MATH 280 takes over.

At 2:45, Abstract Algebra II.

And at 4:10 we'll convene the semester's first meeting of MATH 480.

One of the myriad things I somehow managed to get done in Washington was arrange for the first guest speaker of the semester in MATH 480: my new colleague from Clemson, Nikos, offered to speak on the semester's third Wednesday, two weeks hence. Much appreciated, Nikos!

What else went on at this year's JMM?

Six of our sixteen REU students from the past two years were present, and all were presenting research in some form or another. Two of them, Nestor and Norton, won prizes for their contributions to the undergraduate poster session (Nestor's poster dealt with work he completed at his second REU this past summer). Most of us got together for a lovely dinner on Tuesday night of the conference.

The Fifth Annual Semi-Official Vanderbilt Mathematics Department Reunion Dinner had five attendees this year, the smallest it's been since its inception. Timing the dinner was a pain in the patoot: there were three other mathematicians and assorted hangers-on present at the meetings, but they were unable to reconcile their schedules with everyone else's. Bummer.

I managed to make a few new contacts in the math/poetry community, including a number of other readers in the Wednesday night poetry reading (good to meet you, Kaz, if you're reading this, and thank you for all of your organizational ability, Katarina!) and a fellow faculty member who, like me, is using poetry in her classrooms in order to instill confidence in struggling students (props, Lorena!). Incidentally, if you're at all intrigued (as a poet, as a mathematician, or as both) by math poetry, you should do yourself a favor and find a copy of Strange Attractors (available from A.K. Peters Press, edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney), from which a number of last week's readings came.

Tip and I and Klaus, our colleague from Chemistry (hereinafte known as "The Shepherd"), made it over the river to Virginia to hold a highly productive meeting with one of the nabobs of the NSF. We got a number of practical suggestions regarding our still-in-progress vertically-integrated U/K-12 community outreach program proposal. Progress! Ah, elusive thing...

...and somehow I managed to make it to twenty-odd talks ranging from combinatorics to mathematical biology. That's "twenty-odd" with a hyphen. Although it must be admitted that some of them were odd indeed.

Finally, I should say that shout-outs go to some of my best friends whom I don't see nearly often enough, including the Vandy folks and the stalwart sterling dots who still manage to make it to most of the JMMs no matter where they're held.

So...

...tomorrow, huh?

I think I'm ready.

I'm starting MATH 280 off in the same manner I've started it off the last two times I've taught it: the first activities (both in-class and take-home) are highly intentional writing exercises designed to get students thinking about just what it means to write in mathematics, and it gets them doing peer review right away. Moreover, the exercises always prove immensely fun and popular.

Both Calc I and Abstract II get underway with review exercises. After doing a bit of brainstorming together on the first day of class, Friday will give the students a chance to strut their stuff as I'll be asking them to pair up between tomorrow and Friday and develop brief presentations on various topics from the relevant course material (Precalc and Abstract I, respectively).

And Senior Seminar? I'll figure that out when I get there. I think by 4:10 everyone (including me) is going to be so zombified that I'd be amazed if we get anything fruitful finished. I'll probably just make sure everyone's on board with the format, and maybe lead a discussion on what elements make up a good math talk. My hope is that in the first couple of weeks we can come up with a commonly-created rubric for oral presentations.

What else? Hmmmm...

...I'm going to go for now, and try to enjoy my last hours of relative boredom.

Tomorrow: class-by-class updates, as per custom.

Short short short

This'll likely be one of my shortest posts ever, considering my tiredness it won't be long before I degrade into semi-random stsdofsh kfsd,v...

Yes, I'm most of the way through my first Carolina Writing Program Administrators' Conference, and lemme tell ya...I. Am. Lovin'. It.

I've learned a ton from these folks over the past 24 hours or so, and have had fascinating conversations about just about every aspect of pedagogy you can imagine: communities of learning, discursive practices, applications/pitfalls of technology, issues of resource, economies of scale...you name it. I don't have my notepad in front of me, but I know I've got roughly seven gazillion notes to my self on people to talk to, papers to read, ideas to follow up on...it's going to take several hours just to sort out my scrawl.

The further I go in the academic study of academic writing, the more the parallels between writing/writing instruction and mathematics/mathematics instruction simply leap out at me.

We're not all that different, these folks from me. I'd really like to keep in touch with many of them and follow up on their ideas. (Here's a shout-out to any of you who've tracked me down here!)

Okay, I'm off to bed...it's another early morning tomorrow, and it's all too late tonight.

Back

Damn.

That was productive.

It's going to take me a while to unpack all that I've carried back from Austin.

It's been a long time since I've had a trip that fruitful; I've come away with so many ideas, insights, opportunities for collaboration, connections to new colleagues...what a wonderful crowd these WAC folks make!

It's safe to say that there's a great deal of interest in writing in the math curriculum.

Lucky me.

People were enamored with the work Lulabelle's put together, and with my piece of that project. If anything, though, the writing folks were more interested in hearing about my math poetry project from the Fall 2007 semester. I've already contacted several of the students from that Calc I class and asked if they'd like to work with me by providing me with reflections on their creative process. I'd like to know: what did they get out of the exercise? Did it help them to engage mathematics, and if so, how? I've spent the last hour or so looking over Arthur Young's Poetry Across the Curriculum and other related projects. This is such wonderful work!

As I said, it's going to be a long time before I'm done unpacking the mental baggage I've brought home from that conference. Already, though, I've begun thinking about how I can assess this summer's REU students' writing as they proceed from novice article authors to more seasoned technical mathematical writers, and I've begun puzzling through the process of assessing just how it is that a writing instructor's intentionality leads to students' gains in writing proficiency. And I'm coming up with ways I can use blogs in Abstract Algebra and wikis in Precalc this coming fall. And Lulabelle and I are meeting with Casanova on Thursday to discuss the direction(s) we'll be taking in our follow-on to the last assessment project.

And...

...and...

...and...

...too...much...to...think...about...

...and with only a week to go before the REU begins.

Until I return with a longer and more meaningful post, here's a question for all of you out there who happen upon this blog: would you rather be bored shitless or busy as hell? Discuss. You will be graded on ramblingness, incoherence, and lack of a thesis sentence.

Think 'pon it carefully. Surely your response says more about your personality than a thousand Cosmo quizzes.