Pobject?!?

For more than five years (since this blog's inception in Summer 2006), regular readers have known me as "DocTurtle," a riff on my academic qualifications and my "totem animal," for lack of a better term. (Incidentally, I don't take pains to hide my real identity...most of you know that my DocTurtle's Bruce Wayne is a mild-manner happy-go-lucky Pollyanna of a mathematician known as Patrick Bahls.)

So why is it that my screen name has suddenly changed to "Pobject"?

At the recent 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication, two of my wonderful friends and colleagues in rhetoric and composition studies, whose names I'll withhold here (I'm not sure how broadly they want them disseminated) took in a panel discussion led by Doug Hesse, Nancy Sommers, and Kathleen Blake Yancey, three of the leaders in the academic rhet-comp community. That discussion focused on a writing exercise they'd assigned themselves: for an hour a day on each of thirty days, these three scholars reflected in writing on a different everyday object each day. In their conference abstract, the scholars ask "What may be learned about the evocative power of objects from a sustained attention to them? How do objects reveal or conceal their origins? And what may we learn about the acts of composing from a sustained project over thirty days?" As they put it, the activity challenged the "traditional boundaries between personal and academic writing."

The three of us (my colleagues and I), all engaged in academic writing in some way, were energized by the idea of this activity and decided to try it out for ourselves. Therefore, on each day in April 2012 each of us will write (under the names "Kobject," "Lobject," and "Pobject," nods to our first initials) for at least 30 minutes on one of the 30 objects we've chosen in advance. We'll be chronicling our ongoing work on a new blog, 3 friends, 30 things, 90 stories. In that blog's first post (to appear later today), I'll say a bit more about the parameters of our exercise.

I hope you'll follow along...we're hoping this will offer us a powerful and consciousness-raising experience.

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...

Blowing up the interwebs

I'm not sure this won't cause a cataclysmic loop of self-reference, but here's a link to a very nice little Chronicle write-up on this past Wednesday's JMM talk on our rhetorical analysis of the REU students' writing.

Nice.

I hope the folks that make it here from that site will take the time to poke around a little bit and read a bit more about my work with math and writing. Please think about picking up a copy of my forthcoming book, Student writing in the quantitative disciplines: A guide for college faculty, available in March from Jossey-Bass.

I hope once I'm settled back in at home tonight or tomorrow to write a run-down on my whole JMM experience (minus much of the after-hours goings-on), but for now I've got a few more talks to make.

Just flew in from Little Switzerland, and...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Dialectical driver's ed

How's it going?

Three days into Calc I, and it 's difficult to say which way the class is going to break this term: the students are still strongly engaged in class and contributing well to the problem-centered classes, but I think a few are hesitant about the rather non-traditional format of the class. As yet we've not done a great deal of computation, haven't derived or delved into any formulas, haven't stated any theorems. A number of the students are used to doing all of these things within the first couple of days of a math class and so they've got a sort of deer-in-headlights, "WTF?" sort of look in their eyes.

The formulas will come soon, I'm certain, and I hope that with them a sense of familiarity and comfort: we're about to enter into a discussion of tangent lines and secant lines and their slopes, a discussion will include a great deal of computation and review (and practice) with algebra.

I'm not sure quite how quickly we'll get there: it really all depends on the pace at which the students end up driving the course. As I mentioned to my first section this morning, they're sitting in the driver's seat, working the pedals, holding the wheel. Every now and then, as instructor, I'll reach over and grab the wheel with one hand to steady it or add a few degrees to a particularly too-tight turn.

So far the structure of the course is "dialectical," an exercise in turn-taking: I've proposed an initial course heading, and now we've walked for a while. Now, at the end of the first day of hardcore hiking, having surveyed the site at which we've made camp, I've worked out an itinerary for our next day's travel together. We'll see where that takes us. We'll make camp again, make some next-day plans, and set out again in the morning. I know the stops we need to make, and we'll make them all, but it's up to the students to figure out which we hit when, and in what order.

We'll figure it out.

Meanwhile, I am loving Linear. The class is huge (the largest I've yet taught at UNCA), but has great cohesion. The students are eager to work and are making great progress, and I feel that I'm doing a much better job of structuring the discovery process than I did the last time I taught the class. I've put a lot more thought into precisely which skills are needed to solve which problems, and we're making a (long) beeline toward our first major goal: analyzing the long-term behavior of a simple Markov process (like the game we played on the first day).

Today we figured out how row operations mirror the operations needed to solve a system of linear equations. Next, after posing and solving a couple of realistic problems requiring the solution of a linear system, we'll motivate and move toward matrix multiplication. From there, it's on to matrix inverses, invertibility, determinants, eigenvalues, and, at last, an analysis of Markov processes like those we began with. At every stop we'll solve another real-world problem or two, get some practice with computation, and write a bit about what each concept really means.

I figure it should take us something like 5-7 weeks to get where we're going. After that, we'll talk about linear transformations, vector spaces, changes of basis, etc.

Exciting!

Meanwhile, I'm reading some fascinating works on writing and rhetoric in preparation for various parts of my book. Most recently I've begun Deirdre McCloskey's The rhetoric of economics (2nd edition, 1998, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press), a delightful rhetorical analysis of economic discourse in which she dissects the ways in which economists convince one another and others of the truth of their assertions. According to McCloskey, much of what many economists consider unassailable scientific truth is really rhetorical "smoke and mirrors."

Not that there's anything wrong with "rhetoric," a word which McCloskey takes pains to save from those who would use it only in a pejorative sense: rhetoric is ubiquitous and unavoidable, and McCloskey merely asks that we be intentional with the rhetoric we use. We all use metaphors and other rhetorical devices; it's simply important that we be aware of the devices we employ. As one might put it, extending the tried-and-true "lens" metaphor, it's no crime to have poor eyesight, as long as you can admit that you need to put your glasses on in order to see properly.

Her opening chapter, which begins with a close reading of passages from canonical articles in economics, has made me think about the way in which I begin some of my own mathematical papers: what sense of authority am I conveying though my choice of words? What world am I building? What agent is acting? What am I asserting about the truth? I'd like to look into my own writing to do a careful reflective analysis.

But with all that I've got on my plate right now, such an analysis has got to wait for a little while. I hope to finish off the first draft of the introduction to More Than Numbers tomorrow, and set to work on the slightly slanted history of WAC, WID, and WTL which will make up much of Chapter 1.

Much to do, much to do, and so little time...but so much fun!