Looking forward/looking back

I’m more sure than ever before that we’re making a mistake, but I feel powerless to stop it.

I’m returning now from a brief visit to Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. There, at the request of my colleague Katarina, I took part in a day of faculty development workshops. That small school’s entire faculty spent two days together in sessions designed to help them craft innovative classroom activities, manage assessment, direct undergraduates in research, and understand the school’s current proposal for curricular change. I’d been invited to give the second day’s keynote, focusing on writing as a means of critical thinking, and to lead two iterations of a brief workshop on mentoring undergraduates in research. Both of these went well, owing more than anything else to Morningside’s very engaged faculty than to anything else. There are a large number of young, as-yet-untenured, faculty at that school, many already making use of progressive pedagogies and eager to learn more.

Most eye-opening for me was the session I attended during the time I wasn’t busy leading my own. The session was led by several faculty who were charged with describing their work in crafting proposals for specific curricular reforms. One faculty member spoke of the school’s new plan to enhance students’ critical thinking. Another spoke on their plan to more intentionally develop students’ communication abilities through a sort of CAC (communication across the curriculum) program. A third focused on the plan to build students’ quantitative literacy. I should note that here, the word “plan” should not be read simply: these plans are robust and elaborate. They include careful vertical integration, course design methodologies, articulation of learning goals, and plans for appropriate multi-stage assessment.

It was the last presentation that struck me most, for it is in stark contrast with particular components of my own school’s current plans for curricular reform. Among the several specific changes the summer working group (SWG) of the Curriculum Reform Task Force (CRTF) has put into its proposal is the out-and-out elimination of a pair of the intensives, including diversity-intensive courses and quantitative-intensive courses. (The information literacy-intensive courses and writing-intensive courses are sliding out from under the axe, receiving a shave but not a grisly end: both of them survive as assessment-driven departmental competencies and not courses approved and overseen by faculty committees.) These intensive programs are victims of our desire to reduce faculty members’ quasi-administrative functions (functions which we see contributing to extraordinarily heavily service expectations) and our attempt to reduce the complexity of the Integrative Liberal Studies (ILS) curriculum, which is indeed very convoluted.

Yet…though I’m all for reducing ILS’s complexity, I worry that the SWG’s strayed too far from our liberal arts ideals. As my wonderful colleague Lexi (also a member of the SWG) pointed out in an email I received while taking part in the listening session at Morningside (oh, irony!), our removal of the DI and QI courses, coupled with our elimination of the ILS’s Topical Cluster requirement and our scaling back in the longstanding Humanities program (requiring only 12 instead of 16 hours of this core common experience), moves us closer to a more generalized model for general education which brings us more in line with the UNC system’s non-liberal arts member schools. What is to distinguish our core curriculum from that of, say, Western Carolina University, or Appalachian State University, the two much larger schools with whom we share the mountainous western region of our state?

Though our move might leave us open to criticism that the new curriculum will too closely resemble that of more “comprehensive” institutions, I’m not sure the political climate at UNC Asheville is such that we could “sell” anything less drastic. The faculty in several of the departments whose majors require a substantial number credit hours have lobbied strongly against the restrictions on majors which would have been necessary to free up the time to save some aspects of the ILS curriculum. Our ultimate decision to cap the size of majors at 60 hours is still unpalatable to members in four or five departments. (Their continued insistence that this number of hours is simply necessary for students to receive a robust disciplinary education is wholly unfounded, in my view, but that’s fodder for an entirely different post.) Mix these faculty members’ objections together with an overall sense that ILS is overly complicated, and you’ve got a recipe for dissent: any attempt to take more hours from the majors and give them back to ILS would send about a third of our faculty into open revolt.

So here we are, bobbing about between Scylla and Charybdis. We’ve got a couple of more details to hammer out (regarding the current and proposed requirements for health and wellness and for foreign [second] languages), but once those are forged we’ll be putting the proposal before first the full CRTF and then the full faculty. Buckle up, y’all. It’s gonna be bumpy.

Coming soon: the skinny on my first day of classes, tomorrow!

Could be worse

Change is in the air. Our Curriculum Review Task Force is currently attempting to overhaul our general education curriculum (the Integrative Liberal Studies [ILS] Program) and provide recommendations and requirements that will guide departments as they redesign their curricula. There's a lot of give-and-take, but mostly give: since our curricular change is being driven by a push for sustainability (faculty simply can't continue to deliver the current curriculum without sacrificing mental or physical health), the curriculum we're proposing will almost certainly be slenderer and more streamlined than the current one.

One potential victim of change is our current "intensives" program. At present we require students to complete intensive courses of four varieties: diversity (1 course), information literacy (2 course), quantitative (1 course), and writing intensives (3 courses). Our tentative plan eliminates all such course requirements. The quantitative intensive requirement will be folded in with the core mathematics requirement, and the fate of the diversity intensive requirement has yet to be decided. Meanwhile, the other two requirements are to be pushed into the departments, made "competency-based" requirements rather than "course-based" ones. More specifically, each department will be asked to design their major programs so that any students completing those program will necessarily complete at least one course treating, intentionally and intensively, discipline-specific information literacy and at least two giving such treatment of discipline-specific writing.

For the past several months I've felt poorly about this move, but several conversations and sessions in which I've taken part here at the 11th Annual International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference (what up, Savannah?) have made me rethink my position. How so?

1. Alignment with departmental learning goals. Under the proposed plan, the courses would be even more closely aligned with departmental learning outcomes, and would involve even more authentic disciplinary writing. Moreover, while several departments currently have only one WI course, forcing their majors to fulfill the WI requirement in part by taking courses from outside the major, under the proposed plan all students would be required to take two writing-competency courses within the discipline: even recalcitrant departments wouldn't be able to escape.

To be sure, currently all proposed WI courses campuswide must meet explicit criteria regarding writing instruction, assessment, and integration into course activities, and we'll lose that in the proposed move. However, now that we've designed careful assessment procedures to keep tabs on writing-intensive courses' efficacy, we'll be able to measure the success of whatever courses department identify as writing-competency courses.

2. Retention of departmental autonomy. It'll be up to the departments to identify the courses they feel offer students the most authentic writing-in-the-disciplines experience. Moreover, we will likely offer leeway to departments in tailoring assessment procedures to their own needs.

3. Campus culture of writing. The proposed plan is a feasible one: almost every department already offers one or two (or more) writing-intensive courses, and I'm certain most departments would have little trouble in identifying one or two more such courses. This feasibility highlights the way in which writing has become a part of the academic culture on campus. Six or seven years ago, when the ILS program was young, there were few WI courses campuswide; now there are many. We've come a long way.

Moreover, moving the WI courses into the departments would likely strengthen writing's presence in the campus academic culture, given its greater proximity to department curricula and learning outcomes.

4. Precedents elsewhere. Chris Anson's keynote address here highlighted several other institutions, big and small, that have implemented or are implementing department-based writing-across-the-curriculum programs. (McDaniel College (MD), the University of Minnesota, and UNC-Charlotte have all adopted some kind of department-based WAC program.) Of course, anyone familiar with Anson's work knows the models he and his colleagues at NC State have promulgated for successful department-based writing and writing assessment. I'd be happy to help UNC Asheville's departments in designing effective WAC programming, drawing heavily on Anson's work.

5. It could be worse. WAC is getting cut back everywhere in the face of budget cuts (here, Sue Doe spoke of defunding at Colorado State University, home of the WAC Clearinghouse), and at least we're not facing system-wide mandates for standardized benchmarks (here, Ohio State's Kay Halasek told horror stories of mandatory granting of credit for certain AP scores and placement for certain ACT scores). We've retained a good deal of autonomy in this regard. Moreover, I'm confident that most of our students, and most of our faculty, recognize the important part writing plays in education...and the particularly important part it plays in our QEP (which focuses on developing critical thinking through inquiry into, application of, reflection on, and communication of course content). Given the recognized centrality of writing, it's unlikely to go away anytime soon.

So...we'll labor on. I'm not so bummed about our situation anymore. We'll see how things work out as we move forward with our plans. Further bulletins as events warrant.

JaMMin' in 2012

Aside from a brief post on my presentation on writing research, I've not yet had a chance to say anything about this year's Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM), from which I returned a little over a week ago. It was a fruitful affair, marking my first ever JMM where I spent more time in meetings than I did at talks. (Avoiding administration: ur doin it wrong.)

My first full day at JMM began with a two-hour meeting of the MAA's Committee on Undergraduate Programs in Mathematics (CUPM). I was recently appointed to this body, a group charged (as you might expect from its name) with making recommendations regarding the form and content of undergraduate mathematics programs across the country. Of course, this is a very loosely-defined directive, and mission-creep inevitably sneaks in. We spent a good deal of time talking not only about the undergraduate programs themselves but also their interface with K-12 education.

What struck me most about this meeting was my sense by its end that even the most well-informed of college mathematics educators are at a loss when it comes to solving some of the biggest problems facing math education today. Why is this? It's not like the problems are new ones: for decades we've dealt with student recruitment and retention, students' transition to higher mathematics, and imperfect transfer of skills from AP coursework to college coursework. It's not that we don't have proven pedagogies and time-tested methods of math education at our disposal...and it's not that we have a shortage of talented teachers to put those pedagogies and methods into practice. Maybe it's simply that the student body we're dealing with is diverse enough to foil any attempt at applying one-size-fits-all panaceas: more than ever before we serve a population whose members differ from one another ethnically, economically, socially, spiritually, intellectually, and in every other way we can think of...to extremes heretofore unimaginable.

The next meeting I had to make was a one-on-one with one of my colleagues in the AMS. After receiving a note I'd sent a few months ago to the Project NExT list regarding my forthcoming book, Flora had expressed interest in meeting with me at the Joint Meetings to talk about it in a bit more detail. It seems that earlier in her career she'd gone down a path much like the one I've followed recently, leading WAC and WID efforts at her home campus (DePauw University) before heading over to the AMS full-time. Flora and I shared an hour or so together talking about the importance of writing (and other modes of communication) in the teaching and learning of mathematics, and before long she invited me to take part in a morning meeting of the AMS's counterpart to the CUPM a couple of days later. Though she couldn't guarantee me the floor, she mentioned that one of the members of the committee had brought up writing as a potential topic for further elaboration by the AMS's Committee on Education (CoE). Topics selected for such elaboration become the focus of discussions and workshops at the CoE's fall meetings.

So I made it to that Friday morning meeting (still bleary-eyed after a night of revelry with several of my Vanderbilt friends). Less focused than the CUPM meeting had been, this one consisted of a loosely-knit (and often heated) conversation on several topics related to undergraduate math education. We spent about twenty minutes each topic: potential certification (by the MAA, AMS, or both jointly) of undergraduate mathematics programs, facilitating students' success in calculus courses, and the necessity for upper-level "elective" coursework like point-set topology.

The first of these was the most controversial issue, on which there was much disagreement. For my part, I brought up a concern that's faced the members of the Curriculum Review Task Force this past year: those major programs which face accreditation by a professional body are among the most rigid and time-consuming, placing heavy demands on both students and faculty. In this way they are unsustainable and resource-intensive. One of the other folks present at the AMS meeting countered that the "accredited" majors at her school are the ones that receive the most attention and resources from administration, and that this alone is reason enough to pursue the adoption some sort of certification procedure.

As you might suspect, I disagree. From the point of view of a math department member, this move might make sense: why not try to carve out a bigger chunk of the pie by forcing your school to support your attainment of accreditation benchmarks? But from the point of an administrator, the move appears more questionable: the pie's only so big, and with the economy the way it is, it's likely to get any bigger. If every department's trying to carve out bigger and bigger pieces for themselves, there's not going to be much to go around. We'll starve each other out if we don't cooperate more meaningfully at higher levels than the department.

To be continued, I'm sure.

The conference wasn't just one meeting after another. I had a lovely time reconnecting with several past REU students (including Wilhelmina, from way back in 2007!), grad school friends, Project NExT buddies, and a bajillion other people I'd not seen in a long time. I spread the word everywhere I could about my book, shamelessly leaving flyers on tables all over the convention center. I made it to a dozen or so talks on graph theory and group theory...and to several posters and presentations by my students, past and present. Most outstanding was Ino's and Ned's talk on their ongoing research into nutrition, given in the MAA's session on the mathematics of sustainability. They nailed it. Several folks had great questions afterward, and they received at least three invitations for collaboration and further presentation. We'll be following up on those shortly. Well done!

Much more work to do! But it's great fun. I'm looking forward to seeing what the coming weeks and months bring. 2012's gonna be a good one.

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.

Editing is underway

As I write this the first MATH 280 "editing party" of the semester is going on in the Math Lab. Six of the class's 36 students showed up to look over one anothers' submissions for Chapter 1 of the textbook.

I'm eager to see how well the students receive this assignment this term, especially in such a large class!

UPDATE: ten people have now shown up, and the party is hoppin':

Ahem...

Despite the late start (again!), yesterday was a full day, pedagogically speaking.

Things got underway in earnest with presentations by my 179 students, on the campus offices and organizations they were to investigate and report upon. Though I've not yet looked at them closely, the brochures they came up with to "advertise" these offices' services look quite good. They're creative and colorful, and some of them almost look professionally done. The presentations showed signs of nervousness and trepidation, which is natural with students at this point in their careers. As I always remind them, getting up and speaking in front of other is hard, no matter how often or how many times you do it. I admired both their willingness to get up and speak and the respect they showed one another as audience members.

I am not, on the other hand, admiring their highly imperfect attendance. Though there's a core of students (15 or so of the 21 now registered for the course) who come unfailingly, the remaining students come only to one out of every three or four class meetings. I've never seen such nonchalance in my courses before.

It's easy to come up with reasons for this. Even I have to admit that the course's subject may not be one which is inherently engaging for students not already interested in math, so many students may find it hard to get excited about the course for its own sake. Since mine is the only 179 course running this semester, several students are in it simply because they have to be, and no one wants to do something on compulsion alone. Finally, 179 courses in general (not just mine) are sometimes seen as "throwaway" courses that students expect to do well in with minimal effort. This is in part because many instructors fail to motivate the class by making its purposes clear.

I hope that in this I'm succeeding. I'm trying to strike a balance between writing instruction (to meet the course's WI goal), overview of the campus and its surrounding community, and actual course "content." It's a precarious balance, and sometimes I feel as though I'm making it up as I go along, and this worries me. However, several activities have seemed to work well ("Everything you always wanted to know about UNCA..." was well-received, and the students seemed to have fun making their meddos). I hope it proves meaningful in the end.

Speaking of public speaking...I ended my workday at Mars Hill College, a small school about 20 minutes north of here. The director of their nascent writing program had invited me to come and lead a workshop for the faculty who are spearheading efforts to get their writing-intensive course program off the ground. There was good disciplinary variety in the participant pool, with social work, journalism, history, literature and composition, religion, and philosophy well-represented. Given that Mars Hill can't possible have more than a hundred or so faculty members, I'm guessing that I met with something like 15% of the school's faculty yesterday. However, I must admit that I was a little chagrined, as were several of the attendants, that the sciences didn't send any of their folks over. (There's talk of me coming back to work with them specifically.)

There was energy in the room: given that Mars Hill's QEP is focused on writing and information literacy, there's strong institutional buy-in for their new WAC program, which features phased-in writing-intensive courses and student writing-fellows. The campus is outwardly stoked about the QEP: banners hang from lampposts exhorting "Write! QEP 2010-2013." It's clearly not just a "top-down" mandate, though; the people I met with yesterday were very much on board with the idea of writing across the curriculum. Their energy was authentic and intrinsic, not simply something generated by an administrative fiat.

Owing to this energy, the workshop was a fruitful one, with active (sometimes even fervent, but always friendly) discussion and idea-sharing. We talked about identifying roles for writing, coming up with learning goals writing could help to meet, structuring writing, using low-stakes writing activities, and responding to writing (while guiding students to do the same, through peer review). We packed a lot into two hours! Judging from the exit slips I received from the participants at the end (thanks for this idea, Libby! I'm going to do this from now on), most people were most interested in learning more about low-stakes writing and its uses in the classroom. The most interesting were the technology-driven (and very game-like) "constrained" forms like tweets and texts, as well as my newly-minted "Intrigue, Confusion, and Confidence."

I picked up some ideas, too. One of the conference participants offered a low-stakes writing activity he's used to help his shyer students get their say in in-class discussions. Rather than requiring them to speak up in front of a couple dozen of their peers, he asks students who are hesitant about contributing talking points to email their ideas ahead of time so that he can collect these ideas and share them with the class on the overhead. Those students' discussion points are on display, anonymously, when the class comes in, and in this way even the less outgoing students are able to make their voices heard. I asked if this method of starting the class conversation has helped the shy students come out of their shells (as, for instance, they might be called on to defend the points they've made via email), and he indicated that this is the case.

At the end of the workshop I had a chance to dish about the reception on the part of faculty of UNCA's own WI program. I said that I think it's generally good, and that though there was resistance when ILS was first phased in several years ago, most of the younger faculty have bought into it authentically and this has led to a campus culture in which writing-intensive courses are broadly accepted. I honestly think that this is the case: there are grumblers and groaners, but for the most part the mission of the intensives is unquestioned, and teaching WI courses is a valued activity.

Thoughts?

From Greenville

My first visit to East Carolina University (ECU) has been a successful one so far, at least from my point of view. (You can ask my interlocutors in the Math Department and the university’s current WAC [Writing Across the Curriculum] Academy if they feel otherwise.) I’ve been here for a day and a half now, and it’s been pretty much nonstop action.

I got into town on Wednesday night around 7:30, having left Asheville just minutes after wrapping up my early-afternoon Calc II class. There was still enough time left on the evening to catch a late dinner at Copper & Vine with my wonderful colleagues and hosts Libby and Xavier (holla!), faculty in the ECU Writing Center.

Yesterday morning gave me some free time to finish off a couple more rec letters before the real work began. Over coffee and tea at Starbucks Libby and I went over the feedback she’d written on Chapters 3 and 6 of my book. She seemed to be apologetic about offering her comments with an eye toward reader response, but I assured her that this is exactly what I need. Besides pointing out potential points of confusion, her comments offered up several sources with which I wasn’t familiar before, and easily a dozen new ideas for low-stakes writing activities, methods of providing feedback on writing, and means of making the writing process smoother and more meaningful for student writers.

We bustled off to lunch at the Starlight Café (if nothing else when this trip is done I’ll able to tell you where to eat in Greenville) with a few more folks from the Writing Center, and shortly thereafter it was time for my first performance, a research talk in the Mathematics Department.

I was well-received and my talk was somewhat well-attended…but somehow the energy wasn’t there for me. It’s no secret to people close to me that I’ve recently found myself a little disillusioned by mathematics: there’s little sense of urgency to it, there’s little authenticity to what I do. This isn’t to say that math is pointless and purposeless; it’s simply that lately I fear I find little purpose in it for myself beyond play-like manipulation or action-under-constraint, a sort of glass-bead game or extended Oulipian exercise. I fully recognize that the mathematics I do has little, if any, immediate impact on the world and I feel that on the other hand most other aspects of my career and personal pursuits and passions (teaching, writing, and poetry) have relatively profound impact.

Couple this with the fact that mathematicians are, let’s face it, not the most outgoing or socially “ept” of individuals by and large, and I feel as though I’m alienating myself from my own discipline.

Meanwhile I’m moving closer and closer to another: right now teaching writing to me seems a much more personal, passionate, fulfilling, rich, and worthwhile activity. While one in ten thousand people might need to know what the independence polynomial of a path-like graph tells us about that graph’s connectivity, it’s impossible to know too well how best to express oneself. It doesn’t hurt that nearly every one of my colleagues in composition and rhetoric is warm and welcoming. I’m sure the discipline’s got trolls of its own; it may just be that they do a better job of hiding them.

Straight from my math talk I walked across the quad with my Quimby (another of the ECU Writing Center folks…both he and Libby attended my talk in the Math Department, brave souls!) to yesterday evening’s meeting of the WAC Academy. This six-week faculty development series challenges its participants to find more meaningful ways to involve writing in their disciplinary courses. Perhaps unsurprisingly (this is always the case in such workshops) there is a preponderance of younger faculty involved in this program, but the various disciplines are broadly represented in this semester’s group, spanning from psychology and biology at one end to drama and dance at the other.

The focus of the evening was The Writing Process, reverently rendered in capitals. Libby (who just now stopped by where I’m sitting as I write this sentence), the WAC Academy’s fearless leader, started things off by leading a “writing into the day” activity. She asked participants (and me) to illustrate the process they performed when writing their most recent substantial writing project. I portrayed my book-writing project as an Iron Chef-like jumble of too many skillets on too many stoves which gradually became more like an ever-revolving Ferris wheel, one chapter on each of several gondolas that got written on each time it spun past the spot where I stood on the ground. It was an intentionally playful exercise that definitely helped me to pinpoint where and when it is I do my best writing, and what I need to perform that writing.

Unsurprisingly, several others’ writing portraits belied decidedly different processes. One writer combined passion and intellectualization in a picture of a brain with giant red lips: a “brainkiss.” (This is the same man whose list of New Year’s resolutions included the perfection of the “cloud hug.”) A scholar in child development portrayed her writing of a grant proposal as a regular succession of polygons, signifying a step-by-step process which began with an idea and ultimately ends by branching into new ideas (represented by the same circle which symbolize the initial idea). Cyclic and circular, linear and direct, all manner of processes were represented. Surely this variety in the final product is expected, and the “discovery” of such manifold means of writing is one of the take-home points of the exercise.

My portion of the evening’s activities gave the participants a taste of the textbook writing exercise I’ve used in MATH 280 and, with less success, in Topology. (I find it interesting that as I type this sentence my 280 students are hard at work, I hope, in outlining the first chapter! I just texted Iris to see if all is well there.) I asked the participants to brainstorm ideas for the first “chapter” of a text on the ideas they’ve encountered in the first week and a half of the Academy, select five topics on which to base “sections” for the text, and then in pairs write two or three sentences on each of those topics. The emphasis through and through was on the underlying process. Though we didn’t have time to review and revise the writing they’d done, I believe the exercise was well-received and helpful.

As always, the informal and after-hours activities provided as meaningful a learning experience as the formal ones. Dinner at Wasabi 88 gave me a chance to swap traveler’s tales of disciplinary dragons, budgetary woes, and ideas for potential future collaboration. Several of my writing colleagues came, as did three of the brand new ECU faculty. Boudica, Irving, and Monica talked about the frustrations and felicitations they’ve felt during their first year at a new school. They dream big, talking about cross-listed courses they’d like to teach and plans they have for using collaborative learning and boundary-blurring pedagogies in their classes. (Think “theater of the oppressed” and “literature of the wilderness.”) The future is in good hands.

After dinner I spent a couple more hours putting together materials for my final performance at ECU, a presentation I’ll be giving in about two hours to the ECU Writing Intensive faculty. I’ll be hitting the highlights of writing-to-learn, indicating several useful types of WTL activities and letting participants play with a few of them. (I’m toying with the idea of assigning a lipogram…)

It’s been a busy, but bountiful, trip. I’ll be glad to be home, and I’ll have returned a richer man.

What's it worth to me?

19 hours, apparently.

19 hours, 7200 words in response to students' drafts, several follow-up e-mails looking for students' sources (ah, unintentional plagiarism!), countless handwritten notes (sorry for the scrawl, y'all), and, it must be said, a good number of sighs and head-shakes...but a few smiles as well.

This weekend was the perfect storm of grading. I had a look-see at the roughly 25 first drafts of Newton v. Leibniz papers my Calc I students produced, the 9 "sections" from Linear Algebra for Dummies the Linear students wrote, as well as two problems sets from the former class and one from the latter, and assorted exam revisions and older homework sets. There were times during the past 48 hours at which I cursed myself for setting a precedent for such quick turnaround, at which I thought, "is it really work it to me?"

The answer, I think, now that I've finally got a few hours of free time before things start up again tomorrow, is...yes.

That's a simple answer which masks the earnest reflection I've done over the last couple of days on a number of weighty pedagogical issues: (1) meaningful instruction of authentic disciplinary writing (or even basic academic writing at the collegiate level), (2) the role played by homework completion (and feedback received on same) in the learning process, (3) the relative uselessness of computer-generated/computer-graded homework in providing meaningful conceptual instruction, (4) the role of numerical grades, especially as they pertain to the establishment of an extrinsic rewards system that encourages students to become number-crunchers at the expense of real learning.

Et cetera.

How've these issues come up?

Newton v. Leibniz offers students an imposing and unanticipated challenge: most of my students don't expect to do much writing for a math class, and I'm quite certain that (whether they admit it or not) they don't expect their math professor to be a stickler when it comes to writing. My suspicion is that if they've ever had to write much for a math class in the past (and they likely haven't), whatever writing instruction they've gotten from their math teacher was half-assed and half-baked.

So maybe I shouldn't be surprised when I receive inchoate two- or three-page drafts in which ideas are scattered and half-formed, or reference lists peppered with websites whose authorship is unidentifiable and with textbooks which are (literally!) over a century old. Four or five of the drafts were marvelous: well-researched and well-organized, clear, correct, and easy-to-follow. Five or six others have obvious potential, and rest on a foundation of appropriately-chosen references. These might make a few slips compositionally, and they may have a few logical lacnuae here and there, but they'll be solid with a few more sources and some good ol'-fashioned elbow grease. The rest (another five or six) have a ways to go.

I've been playing this game long enough that I know almost exactly what's happened as the students put those last few together. Eight days into the nine-day period they've been given to get their shit together, the members of the group putting one of these papers together met after class (seven hours to the due date) and said, "hey, when are we going to work on this?"

By this time it's too late to make use of the fifteen-odd recent and well-reviewed books on Newton and Leibniz and their fellow-travelers I put on hold at the library, so they opt for the next-best...er...well, still a halfway-decen...um...well, at least an okay...well, all right...a pretty piss-poor stopgap solution: Google.

Pulling up the first two websites they can find when they put "Newton versus Leibniz" into the Google search field, they read.

Of course, one of those websites (this one, written by someone I can only refer to as Mr. Angelfire) is utter crap:

1. It's impossible to tell who wrote it, although it's likely a term paper written by a high school or college (I'm betting on the former) student with limited skills for selecting references:

2. the only print references it cites are at least (not kidding...wish I were!) 40 years old, including one that's over a hundred, and

3. the only relatively recent source is a website...it's a good one, but it's a website nonetheless, and unless you're familiar with that site (I am; my students are not), you wouldn't know this from the way it's cited (incorrectly).

4. It's a perfect example of that boilerplate "five-paragraph essay" nonsense they teach kids how to write (for some godawful reason) in high school these days. It takes no stance, it offers nothing real. It has no voice. I want my students to take a stand, stake a claim, and fight for it tooth-and-nail. This essay is a lousy model for this sort of behavior.

The second-most-cited website is this one. It takes a little effort, but you can find the author of this site, one Robin Jordan, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Florida Atlantic University, whose website (featuring marvelous animated .gifs written, no doubt, circa 1998) makes him seem to be a pretty decent teacher, actually. Not only is Jordan's paper much more well-written than the other, but it's richer and relies on stronger sources. I'm okay with my students drawing on Jordan's paper, but I'd still rather they use him as a stepping stone to get back to the print sources on which he himself draws.

All of that aside, what's the next step in our hypothetical students' last-minute writing process?

Reference (singular) found, they devour it, in a matter of...well, minutes...because that's all the time that's left to them during the lunch period on this last day. A few choice quotes plucked from the "paper" they've just read, they begin writing.

At this point it's too late to develop a thesis of their own, so the students opt for that old standby, "we just can't tell who it is who invented calculus, doncha know?" Asserting that there's just not enough evidence to tell which man has the greater claim (or a claim at all), the students hammer out two or three pages in which they eventually get around to saying that Newton did it first, but maybe Leibniz did it on his own anyway, who's to say?

Well, you're to say.

One thing these last-minute Larrys and Lauries don't do is say anything, at least not anything meaningful. But I so much want you to do this, my young friends! More than anything, this is what I want from you: I want to hear your voice.

Make a claim...make a bold claim. If you feel like putting it in boldface letters 18 points high, then do that. But make a claim, and make it your own. Make it your own by finding the sources that help you say what you want to say, that help to prove that, by goodness, you're right. Find the sources which lend support to your claim, and lead me through an analysis of those sources, step by step. Prove to me that you're right, sentence by sentence, page by page.

I don't want to know what Dr. Robin Jordan thinks, I sure as hell don't want to know what Mr. Angelfire thinks...I want to know what you think, and why you think it. That, my young colleagues, is the essence of academic writing (and, indeed, academic thinking of any kind): saying something intelligent, and saying it in an intelligent way as you insert it meaningfully into conversation with all of the other thinkers who have come before you.

Is it worth 6 hours of poring over drafts and 7200 words (that's 27 pages of 12-point, double-spaced text, by the way) of responding to those drafts, if it helps you all become better academic writers?

Hell, yeah. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. And I'd be delighted to look over further drafts if any of my students care to hand me some between now and the due date next Friday.

The rest, the other 13 hours? Problem sets, problem sets...yeah. The Linear problem sets were fine, and those for Calculus I...were great, actually. I put 'em through the wringer, computationally. I've no one but myself to blame if I go blind from having to puzzle through the first six or more derivatives of e^x sin(x). The extra work is worth it to me, if only so I don't have to read through thirty or forty poorly-transcribed copies of the solutions manual because I made the mistake of assigning problems from the textbook (a pedagogical practice I'll never again adopt as long as solutions manuals are readily available).

Indeed, in the end the students did really well on the two problem sets (one on the Product and Quotient Rules, the other on trig derivatives), given their relative difficulty. The only gripe I might make about them concerns, as above, evident procrastination: if you don't get going until Friday, a few hours before they're due, you're not going to do that well.

All in all, though, these problem sets too are worth the time I put into grading them: I feel strongly that feedback (frequent and full) is essential at this stage in the students' engagement of higher mathematics, and I feel strongly that graded homework is the best way to provide that feedback. (Students know this, too: almost without exception my former students remark to me how helpful graded homework is once they've gone on to a class with one of my colleagues who doesn't require it...and when given a chance to assign their own grading weights to the various activities we take part in in my classes, they always give homework a substantial boost.)

This post, which began with a gripe, now draws to a close with acceptance and contentment. I've lost a weekend, in some regards (although I did take in several really good college football games yesterday), but I've come through to the other side a better teacher, having reflected a bit more carefully on, and asked myself to remember, the reasons I do the things I do.

Before I go, here's a postscript for my Linear students (in particular, for Ino and Iris, to whom I was complaining on Friday, about having to assign numerical grades to their written projects): I plan on asking you all to assign your own grades to your Linear Algebra for Dummies sections. FYI.

The importance of being earnest

Doomsday averted.

This morning's Writing Intensive Subcommittee meeting was wonderfully productive (we plowed through a TON of tasks), and the pre-meeting conversation I had with the Student Government Association (SGA) rep who's been in conversation with me for the past few weeks (let's call him Kenyon) was even more productive.

I think we're on the same page now. I had a bit of a "come to Jesus meetin'" with this young man, and we were both very honest and open about our concerns. I realized early on that he's more the messenger than the source, and that his intentions are good ones. "We have to be open with each other," I insisted. "We can't sneak around, we can't take part in romantic revolutions are crusades. We have a number of common concerns, I'm sure, and we can work on them together...if we choose to talk to one another about them." He agreed.

He sat in on our meeting, and though I think he's got a thing or two to learn about note-taking, I admire him for following fairly well the course of a rather convoluted proceedings. We hit everything under the sun, from the minutiae of WI proposal wording to the philosophical underpinnings of the WI mission itself...and faculty development and assessment in between. A real trouper!

We agreed by the end of the meeting that it would be worthwhile to establish some sort of "liaisonship" between SGA and ILSOC (or some of the willing subcommittees thereof) in order to open, maintain, and benefit from a dialogue between faculty and students on issues pertaining to ILS and other academic affairs which affect us all. He invited me to attend this evening's meeting of the Academic Affairs Committee of SGA (on which he serves, and for which he's been running his little end-runs).

So I went. I'm glad that I did.

The meeting, held in the SGA offices in the student union, was attended by six members of SGA and me. It was unassuming and informal, as Kenyon assured me it would be. The students took turns reporting on their progress on their individual "homework assignments" from the previous week. One had been sent to data-mine various sets of statistics concerning the ILS Clusters, in the hopes of finding correlation between students' choice of topical clusters and their majors. (Undoubtedly such correlation exists...and as it happens this is one of the students' primary concerns, to which I'll return in a bit.) Another reported on the SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, our accreditation agency) meeting he had attended. I commended him for his ability to bust out all of the buzzwords.

Kenyon discussed his meeting with me and his attendance of the WI meeting, and I took a moment to explain our feelings about establishing a "liaisonship" between SGA and ILSOC. I'm not sure that everyone at the table was sold about the efficacy of establishing such a dialogue, but one of the student leaders (the Vice President, Samantha), was totally on board. She pleaded vigorously and eloquently for our case, and I'm glad that she did. I think her advocacy helped the case considerably.

As the meeting went on I became a little more annoyed by the continued reluctance of the students simply to come out and say what concerns they were having, and it soon came to the fore why it is they have this reluctance. Historically, it appears, every time they've brought complaints to faculty, they've either (a) been blown off or (b) been told that they need "data" to back up their claims.

So they've been gathering data.

I let them know that they were likely talking to the wrong faculty back then, but that they should feel safe in talking to me and to the other members of ILSOC. At this time, ILSOC consists of very active, engaged, and motivated faculty who are heavily invested in meaningful interdisciplinary learning and fully committed to the spirit of the ILS program. They won't need to sell their story; we've bought it already, and we're eager to talk. I assured the students that we are the people they need to talk to. Samantha was resold, and once again Kenyon put himself forward as a liaison.

After the meeting I lingered a bit and talked some more with Samantha. At long last I learned a bit more about their specific grievances. For instance, it became evident that their primary concern with the LSIC Colloquia is strongly related to our own: uniformity of the quality of instruction across all colloquia. Knowing this, we can talk about it openly and brainstorm ideas together.

It also became evident that the students' primary concern with ILS Clusters is that students aren't getting enough incentive to be daring in their choice of clusters: because they're so pressed to finish their majors with the number of credit hours they're given (lest they pay egregious overage charges), they find they have to select topical clusters focused on topics cognate to their majors. These students would like to see greater incentives (more flexible rules for "double-dipping" courses? Elimination or lowering of overage fees?) offered to students to try out clusters more distant from the safety of their majors, thereby engaging in a richer interdisciplinary learning experience.

Honestly, this perspective is far more mature than that of many members of the faculty, who simply want to scrap the clusters altogether. (Admittedly, this contingent of curmudgeonly academic extremists is getting smaller each year, as the fogyish stalwarts retire one by one.) I was thoroughly impressed with the students' position, and I told them so. We can definitely work with them on this.

Ultimately, as I said above, I'm glad that I went to the meeting. A lot was accomplished, and I'm excited to see the directions in which this heads.

Before I go I should mention one more (not wholly unrelated) incident. Late this afternoon, while sitting in my office, I overheard a couple of my Linear students (sitting in the near end of the Math Lab) quietly voicing their frustrations about not being able to keep up in class because of the way we'd plowed through the definition and derivation of eigenvalues and eigenvectors. I guess we'd been moving a bit too fast. Although I felt a bit uneasy about admitting to my eavesdropping, I sneaked across the hall and joined in the conversation.

"You've got to let me know," I told them, "if you're having trouble with something."

"I'm just not one of those people who can pick it up really fast," one of them said. "I have to think about it and let it sink in before I understand it."

Although at first the conversation was a bit strained and awkward (I had been eavesdropping, after all), after a bit it warmed up. I agreed to keep tabs on the pace, and to throw in a few more examples and explanations here when needed. They agreed to let me know if things get moving too quickly again.

"I understand that you can't change the way you teach the class for just one person," the more outspoken student said.

"True," I admited. "That's what makes it hard, hearing, as I do, from all of you all of the time. It's awfully hard to teach a course at any sort of pace when I don't want to leave anyone behind. On the other hand, though, I can take your perspective into account and use it, along with everyone else's, to come up with a sort of 'normalized' perspective. If I only hear from the people who are chugging on ahead, I can't help but think everyone's all right with the way things are going. I need to hear from folks like you."

I know it took courage for them to have that conversation with me, and I'm really impressed with that courage. I told them how much I appreciated their earnestness and forthrightness. I think that conversation, a difficult one for both sides, was a fruitful one.

Students, please remember this: there's no shame in taking a little more time to learn something than some of your peers. It's okay to be confused. If anything, there's shame in not owning up to your confusion in the first place.

I guess the moral of the story (by now a twice-told tale) is: if you've got a tale to tell, tell it. Someone will be willing to listen.

How adults do it

I'm pissed.

One of my colleagues on ILS (Integrative Liberal Studies) Oversight Committee with me met with a student representative from SGA (the Student Government Association) about two weeks ago. He met with us because he "had some questions about the clusters [topically clustered courses] as they're implemented" as part of the ILS program. Lexi (my ILSOC colleague) and I left the roughly half-hour meeting suspecting that the kid was looking for some dirt.

Since then it's become apparent, from the minutes of their meetings and various other campus goings-on, that SGA's sending its student representatives to a number of faculty and staff on campus trying to get information on the following components of the ILS program: Humanities, the LSIC colloquia, the ILS Clusters, and the Writing and Diversity Intensive programs. The minutes I've read make it clear that the students are hoping to bring about change in these components of the program. The minutes don't make clear exactly what issue SGA has with these components.

This is what's pissing me off.

The child Lexi and I met with (I'm sorry for the condescension, but that's how he acted, and not at all like adult he was trying to be) had an obligation to speak up and be forthcoming about his purpose for meeting with us. He had an obligation to let us know that the student body has concerns about various aspects of the ILS program, and that they would like to dialogue with us about possible ways to ameliorate any shortcomings they think need addressing.

He was not at all forthcoming about his motives, even as Lexi and I pointed the way to every bit of information about the ILS program that SGA could ever want to read...even as I invited him to the next meeting of the WI Subcommittee (we meet tomorrow morning; I suspect I'll have something more to say after that meeting) and said, in nearly these words precisely: "we have nothing to hide. Every step of the process is transparent. I hope that you'll take a look."

Apparently there is to be no return of the favor.

Pardon my French, but let's cut the juvenile, passive-aggressive cloak 'n' dagger bullshit. You're adults now...or at least that's how we'd prefer to deal with you. Institutional change is not best affected by sneaking around, "gathering evidence," and dramatically confronting your opponent with that evidence in a highly public place. Rather, such change is affected by openness, plain-dealing, and compromise. If you have a problem with the system as it stands, tell us. Tell us, so that we may meet and discuss it. So that we may meet and hash out a plan to deal with your concerns. So that we may make our concerns and motives plainer to you, in the hope that you can see our points of view as we begin to see yours.

Why all of the secrecy and sneaking around? Maybe they're suffering from a romanticized notion of "fighting the good fight" or "leading a revolution"? Committee meetings might be boring as hell, and change at the university level may be glacial in its slowness, but the compromises hammered out in such meetings are far more lasting than ramrodded fiats and ultimatums.

Look, I have problems with the ILS program. It's not perfect, and I can admit that. It's a system designed by dozens of people, overseen by other dozens, and implemented by literally hundreds. Though I feel that for the most part it's working quite well (better than comparable programs at other universities), it's got its flaws.

What do I do about those flaws? I meet with my colleagues, I brainstorm ideas of ways we might address those flaws, I work with my colleagues to workshop a few of those ideas into more robust plans of action, and I help to implement those plans. In other words, I work with everyone else on campus together in order to fix the flaws I and others might see in the system.

That's how adults do it.

To be continued, I'm sure.

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.

Live, from Wildacres, it's 2010's CWPA!

Yes, it's that time of year again, folks. I find myself up in the woods-covered mountains of Western North Carolina, spittin' distance from the Blue Ridge Parkway, hanging out with a gaggle of composition theorists and rhetoricians with only nominal control of their drinking impulses.

Seriously, these are wonderful people, and as was the case with the previous two years of this shindig (my first time was in 2008), by the dawn of the first full day (now) I've already had a dozen wonderful and insightful conversations. I've gotten a few pointers for my book from the point of view of my friends in writing centers and first-year composition programs, having asked several of them pointedly "so...what would you want to get out of such a book?" I've gotten a few nibbles of interest for the poetry conference, including a few from the writers' workshop that's going on across from us in the other lodge. Mostly, though, I've been talking assessment. (w00t.)

Assessment is the theme of this year's get-together, and we started things off last night with a keynote presentation from none other than Chris Anson, writing assessor extraordinaire. Of course, ever in teaching mode, all through the conversation he instigated I thought not only of the programmatic assessment we're undertaking with the Writing Intensive program but also my own assessment of my students' performance. Am I assessing what I claim to value as learning outcomes for my courses? Am I applying suitable methods in order to help my students achieve those outcomes, both at the micro (assignment) and macro (course) levels? And are my outcomes measurable, reasonable, and meaningful ones in the first place?

I think that the answer to all three of those questions, fortunately, is "yes." I feel confident that I'm doing the right thing, more or less, by this point in my career.

But I could be doing better, and after last night's conversations I am more firmly convinced than ever before that portfolios are the right way to go.

I was complaining to my colleagues Cammie and Nico (both of whom teach rhetoric at Western Carolina University) about how in mathematics assessment of student mastery is all too-often tied to completion of a particular course with a suitably high grade, with little behind that grade other than similarly high performance on exams and quizzes which essentially test rote memorization and unthinking application of various formulas and algorithms. For context: this followed a rather lengthy conversation stemming from Chris's presentation that began with his assertion that it was difficult to assess a student's knowledge of the works of Shakespeare by asking whether the student got a B or better in a course on Shakespeare's writing. Nora (from UNC-Charlotte) countered that such a measure could be an effective one, depending on what exactly you were measuring: it all depends on how it is that B was arrived at.

It was interesting to note that during that earlier conversation Cammie and Nico were musing about how nice it must be in mathematics, where quantifiable outcomes lie so thick you can't but trip over them.

No, portfolios are the way to go. I'm already so repulsed by assigning numerical values to single iterations of students' work that I don't know how much longer I can continue to do it. It almost made me physically ill yesterday to put numbers on the "final" drafts of my Linear students' papers on the geometry of linear systems.

What needs to be done next, if I plan on taking big steps in that direction? I need to convince my students that it's worthwhile and doable (I don't think this will be too hard a sell). I need to firm up each course's learning outcomes (which I already have for most of them) so that they're clear enough to explain to students and solid enough to be measurable. I need to make sure every assignment or activity I craft is explicit in its intentions (I'm already doing this). I need to more cleanly codify the way in which the students' portfolios would be put together, added to, and ultimately assessed.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, much of this I've already done. I just have to be more purposeful about it, take a deep breath, and jump.

Okay, the first bell rang about ten minutes ago...I should get ready for breakfast.

More to come!

Quandary

About an hour ago I said the following out loud: "The last thing I want to do with these papers is grade them, yet the grade is about the only thing many of the students want to get out of it."

"By 'grade,'" I clarified, "I mean rate. I want to respond to them. I wish I could just bring the students in and talk their papers over with them, hand them back, and be done with it, maybe after one or two more rounds of revision."

Maybe I'll do that, after all. Maybe I'll move to a portfolio-style grading system right now.

I don't know.

I'm feeling somewhat cynical about my job right now.

Is the 12-15 hours I'm likely to spend in responding to students' work this weekend worth the reward I'll get for it?

For the roughly 80% of my students who clearly take pride in their work and give it all that they can and are getting a great deal of out of the courses I'm guiding them through, sure: the reward I get from them is a feeling of fulfillment, acknowledgment that I'm doing my job well, and that they're holding up their end of the bargain.

For the other 20%? I'm not so sure about that.

I've received 52 completed "Clock Problems" (the first written assignment of the semester for the Calc I students). Of those, 40 of them clearly put a fair amount of effort into solving the central problem posed to them, applying (with varying degrees of carefulness and correctness) the methods we've developed in class together for the past two weeks. The others...not so much. Of these 12, maybe half of them have some inkling of what it will take to present a reasonable solution to the problem; the other half are clearly out in the cold and have gained little, if anything, from the work we've done in class for the past two weeks.

On these 12 solutions I'm writing "Please come and see me at once: you can do much better than this, and I want to help you do so." I plan on offering them a chance to revise, and strong encouragement to do that.

I feel like I'm talking in circles right now.

I spent the afternoon at the writing across the curriculum workshop my colleague Betty Lou (of nearby Montreat College) and I organized (it was originally scheduled to run in January but was canceled twice on account of weather). It was a wonderful little get-together bringing folks from four different campuses together under one roof. The very convening of this group of people was worthwhile, and the conversations were enlightening and engaging.

The discussions about writing-intensive courses I shared with my colleagues at the workshop helped me to realize how leviathan is the task I've set out for myself: in teaching both Calc I and Linear as though they are writing-intensive courses, I'm effectively teaching writing-intensive courses with an enrollment of 102 students right now.

It's no wonder I'm tired.

Would I be happier teaching at a school where I'd teach two courses per term, each capped at 20? I could make use of every problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, application-based learning, discovery-learning, writing-intensive, student-centered teaching technique I'd like to, and they'd all be effective, simply because the classes would be of manageably small size. And I wouldn't drive myself insane in teaching that way.

I'd find that sort of opportunity at Bucknell, or St. Olaf, or Carleton, or Harvey Mudd. And the students I'd be teaching wouldn't all be working 20-30 hours a week, would likely be more intrinsically motivated, and wouldn't need as much coaxing and cajoling to get them on board with my methods.

Then the populist in me kicks in and says "don't the students who can't afford to go to such schools deserve a crack at learning through the same techniques?"

And I am where I am again.

I feel like I'm just talking in circles again.

I'm going to stop for now, before I begin making even less sense.

I'm going to write "please come and see me" a few more times, and then relax for the night.

Here's to a more upbeat tomorrow.

On your marks, get set...

It's been a while, huh?

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

What's going on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The moral of the story: just do it.

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

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

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

It's sure to be riveting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fare thee well!

Weather's great, wish you were here.

I haven't had much time to write, but I thought I'd send a postcard from this edge.

We've just finished three weeks of the 2010 REU, and things are chugging along smoothly.

Incredibly smoothly.

Wow.

The students' first presentations (yesterday) were masterful, already conference-worthy: their talk mechanics were spot-on, they displayed superb mastery of the concepts and computations they presented, and their slide designs were eminently professional. In every way their presentations were superior than many of those I've seen given at major conferences by seasoned mathematicians.

They're ready for the "minisymposium" we're playing host to next week, to which we've invited the faculty and students from two other area REUs.

I hope that I can take some of the credit for the students' success to this point: I've been yet more intentional in my design of the program's activities than I've ever been in the past, providing even more and more timely instruction on writing, presenting, use of scholarly sources, reading of math papers, etc. than in past iterations of the program.

And I've had help in this, too, that I've not had before: Bella and Damian, two of my Charleston-based partners in composition-theoretic crime, came up the mountain a little over a week ago to talk to the kids about writing and math. The visit was twofold...perhaps even threefold: (1) to give the students the rhetorician's point of view on mathematical writing, (2) to interview (though this term was never used) about their past experiences with academic writing in general and mathematical academic writing in particular, and (3) to get our shit together and make some progress on the paper we began back in February when I joined them for a working weekend down in South Carolina. (To this last point, briefly: I was tasked with coauthoring sections on the students' mastery of visual rhetoric, specifically with regard to the visual effects on the reader of white space and mathematical formulas; and on the students' use of sources. My analysis of the latter was very enlightening to me, and helped me quantify the fact that this year's students are well ahead of their predecessors when it comes to making effective use of the literature they find in the course of their investigations.)

The two-hour-long "interview" with the students was wonderful. In the discussions that arose the students revealed rich and robust histories with writing, including a good deal of relevant and highly intentional instruction I might not have expected. These students are very well-prepared (which helps to explain the success they've had so far in this summer's program!). The interview also gave us a great deal of data we can use as a foundation for our next article, in which we hope (already!) to trace the development of students as communicators of mathematics through the course of a summer research program one of whose foci is on writing in the discipline. Bella's already kicking around the idea of coming back toward the end of the program to interview the students again and see if anything's moved.

Mathematically, the students are fantastic. They're very self-directed and intrinsically motivated. They're displaying superlative creativity and originality of thought, to a greater extent than did many students in previous years of the program. They're making terrific use of the sources they find, plying them effectively to serve multiple purposes: to find other sources, to support their own propositions and theorems, and to situate their work in the context of what's come before. And every one of them has a clear sense of purpose in his or her project: no one of them is "stuck," as I've seen happen in the past.

More important, perhaps: they're getting along exceedingly well with each other. From Day One they've bonded remarkably well. They do almost everything together, not because they feel like they have to or because they're afraid to do thing alone (both of these have been moving forces in previous iterations of the program), but because they want to. They clearly like each other. A lot. It's good to see.

It comes across in simple things, too: yesterday, during the students' first round of talks, this year's group proved themselves to be the most attentive and responsive audience members we've yet had in the program. They listened with clear and unfeigned interest, they gave encouraging nonverbal feedback (nods and smiles) at appropriate moments, and they asked a number of good questions of their peers at the end of every talk. Midway through the talks Tip (my sole faculty partner in running the program this year) and I marveled at the fluency of the students' presentation skills and remarked at how though the students had all chosen to work on individual projects (something we initially bemoaned) it was evident that to a greater extent than in previous years the students are collaborating with one another behind the scenes, sharing ideas, talking about LaTeX and Beamer, and helping each other through rough spots.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have established an effective learning community.

What else is up?

I've only been to one meeting of the Learning Circle (having missed last week's to work the run-off election) I chose to take part in this summer, but I have a good feeling about the direction it seems to be taking.

I've received good feedback on the proposal I sent to Jossey-Bass for a text on writing in mathematics.

I've finally submitted a reasonable draft of an assessment plan for the university's Writing Intensive student learning outcomes to the powers that be. I doubt that's the last I'll hear of that, though.

It's been a busy summer, but a good one. I'm excited to see what the coming week will bring.

For now, I'm going to kick back and watch Ghana get the better of the U.S. soccer team.

Gems

Though not all of them are directly pedagogical, I've done a few things today about which a few words might be here said. They're definitely uncleaned jewels, diamonds in the rough. Extracting these dusty gems from the cracked earth in which they still lie, polishing them, cutting them, and showing them off will give me something to do for the next few months.

Let's see...

...I hurriedly hit "publish" after blogging just an hour or so ago, elliptically, about dinner this evening with a candidate for the University Writing Center Director's position. Obviously it would be inappropriate for me to say more than I already have about the candidate or even our conversations, but suffice it to say the conversations I had with the candidate and with my own colleagues on the search committee taught me much about the university's functions.

This afternoon I spent a few hours in researching the history of the writing across the curriculum movement and the writing-to-learn movement, and in the process put together a few ideas for first-day low-stakes writing activities I might try out in my Calc I course this coming fall. I hope to do a few focused freewrites, the first of which will be designed to let the students write a little bit of a mathematical autobiography, while the subsequent ones will ask them to bring forth from the cobwebbed corners of their brains whatever it is they remember from the last math course they took, whatever and wherever and whenever it was. These latter freewrites can then funnel into a class-wide discussion.

I also spent a couple of hours reading the several remaining LANG 120 essays I've been assigned as a first-round judge in this year's First Year Writing Contest. Not long after telling Maggie that I'd been disappointed that none of them had "popped" for me (there had been several fairly good ones, but none that were clear front-runners), I read three papers, back-to-back, which were strong in every way: compositionally, grammatically, citationally. Their authors had rich vocabularies, a knack for imagery and inventive, challenging sentence structure, and a strong compositional thread along which the reader could pull her/himself from beginning to end. I was happy to find these!

This morning's run gave me the perfect chance to do a bit of self-analysis and self-assessment. I found myself asking, at this point at which the close of the academic year offers the closest thing I'll ever get to the end of one chapter and the beginning of a new one, what it is I like about myself, and what it is I don't like so much: the former, ideally, I can play up and the latter, play down and try to work away...or at least admit and accept with greater awareness.

I don't know what this says about the way in which my brain makes sense of the world around me, but I found that when I wrote them down at the end of my run most of the likes and don't likes fell into dialectical pairs, nestled together like fraternal twins in some sort of psychic womb. I'm not sure, as open as I am, that I'm up for sharing every one of these pairs, but here's one which deals more directly with my role as an educator:

"I like that I'm a good problem-solver. I don't like that I often slip too quickly into problem-solving mode."

I've dealt recently with this issue in my personal life, in incidents in which I've started trying to puzzle out often inchoate and inappropriate solutions to problems about which whatever friend with whom I'm speaking really just wants to bitch. The mathematical, and, some might point out, stereotypically masculine, part of me wants to simply get at the problem and root it from the ground. This isn't always the appropriate course of action: sometimes all my interlocutor wants is for me to shut up and commiserate or empathize. (Another one of my "like/don't like" pairs, closely related to the first: "I like that I'm a good listener. I don't like that I seem to think that gives me license to respond, when often all my partner in conversation wants is someone to listen.")

Pedagogically, I see the effects of premature problem-solving first-hand in many of the interactions I and my colleagues share with our students on a daily basis. (I thought of the following at dinner this evening while we were all discussing the ideal meeting between a writing consultant and a writing center client.)

Imagine that a calculus student has a problem with a run-of-the-mill textbook problem, and he comes to his teacher for help in solving it. He's bravely stepped into his teacher's office, interrupted his teacher's work, and sat himself down heavily in the chair across from the teacher's desk.

At this point the weakest teacher (often eager simply to get back to her work) will simply work the problem out for the student. (Novice teachers are often prone to this.)

The stronger teacher will take the time to ask the student what work he's done so far in trying to solve the problem on his own and try to build on what's already there. (This is where I am most of the time.)

The strongest teacher will ask the student what problem it is that the student's trying to solve in the first place. "Is there a problem at all? What, really, are you being asked to do? Can you articulate it for me, maybe in your own words?"

For a confident student with reasonably strong mathematical skills, a student who's generally on target most of the time and who only occasionally really just needs a little nudge in the right direction, the second teacher's action will have served the intended purpose admirably: after an initial survey of the student's own work, it might take little more than one more step worked out jointly for the student to see where to go next on his own.

Yet the second teacher has instantly leaped into problem-solving mode, presupposing there is a problem in the first place, presupposing that the student knows what in the hell he's being asked to do. Does he? Should the student be a weaker one, a less confident one than his peers, perhaps he's not even sure what's being demanded of him. In jumping at once into problem-solving mode the teacher has missed an opportunity to help the student to develop a perhaps-yet-more-important skill than problem-solving: problem-posing. One cannot hope to become an effective learner if one is adept only at answering questions; one needs also to know how to ask them in the first place.

I'm sorry if this train of thought appears to be riding on rails laid out by a track layer on LSD. I'm really just writing this out in order to better understand it myself; I'm actively (even as I make this next keystroke) engaging in writing-to-learn. (Kids, let this be a lesson to you!)

I'm afraid that's about all I've got right now. It's been a busy Sunday, and it's late. I've got more meetings with our University Writing Center candidate tomorrow, and an early meeting with one of my undergraduate research students, so I've got to hit the hay. Perhaps I'll soon say more about other relevant "like/don't like" pairs. We'll see.