Killing for Coal: The video.

My friend Thomas Andrews is on YouTube:

And if you don’t believe me when I tell you that you should read his book, then maybe you’ll believe the Bancroft Prize committee.

The Nell Irvin Painter reference is a big giveaway.

It’s easy to tell that the author of this letter to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish is an historian just from the reference to Standing at Armageddon:

Having looked at the Simon Johnson piece and the excerpt from the Dish, I found a strange resonance with my current studies in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era from 1877 to 1919. What especially struck me was this particular quotation: “the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington”. Its eerily familiar to the term “identity of interest” used by Nell Irvin Painter to describe a common view amongst American capitalists and particularly the Republican Party at the end of the nineteenth century.

This was a supposed common interest shared by both the masses who worked and the capitalists who owned the mines, factories, and mills in the continued prosperity and development of American industry. The result was a government that did not intervene with Johnson-chart the workings of industry in the fear that by doing so it would imperil not only the capitalists but working America as well. It was, in short, about prosperity, not equity. Fast-forward a little over a century and we seem to have come full circle, but instead of industry, we have financial institutions ‘developing wealth’.

That same part of that Johnson article makes me think of the efforts of manufacturers to establish an “identity of interest” with their employees, both yesterday and today. Vote Republican. Don’t organize or support the Employee Free Choice Act because we know what’s best for you, not those outsiders/hoods who’ll take your dues money and leave you nothing in return.

Of course, that strategy works great during periods of prosperity, but now I hope they have another thing coming.

Oh Bully!

I just realized that Theodore Roosevelt is of just the right age that I can find everything he ever wrote on Google Books.

The winning of the West By Theodore Roosevelt

And a special welcome to any of my students who might be reading this…

I was saddened to read yesterday morning that the identity of AK Muckraker, the blogger behind Mudflats, had be exposed by an Alaskan State Representative. People who want to blog anonymously should be able to blog anonymously. That includes professors, as Hilzoy explains at Political Animal:

My reasons for blogging under a pseudonym are pretty trivial: while I have never minded the idea that someone reading my posts could figure out who wrote them, I would rather that people, and in particular my students, not be able to google my name and find my collected political opinions. (I learned, to my surprise, that some students do google their professors around the time I started writing for Obsidian Wings.)

I never read her until she got to Political Animal, so I actually had no idea that Hilzoy is a professor. If she wants to remain anonymous, she should have that option. I, on the other hand, would be thrilled if any of my students bothered to read this blog. Here’s why:

My position is that we can’t help but reveal our politics in the classroom (in the broad sense of the word, at least). They are indicated in what aspects of our subjects we choose to teach. Teachers teach particular things in a particular way because are all a product of who we are – our gender, our race, where we come from, and, of course, our political priorities (which are largely a product of the earlier traits listed in that sentence). Even if we teach in a way that appears objective to us, to quote Thomas Haskell, “Objectivity is not neutrality.”

So if everyone is political by definition, how should we proceed? I think the key is not to proselytize in class. Always remain open-minded. Grade on the basis of how arguments are constructed rather than on what the arguments are. Always ask follow-up questions, even of students with political opinions with which you agree. I am of the school that it is better to acknowledge your biases so that students can take them with a grain of salt rather than to inflict them upon your students subtly. I still remember how my undergraduate adviser, Bob Engs, would put authors’ names and books up on the board each class and say something to the effect of, “If you want to see what someone else thinks about this topic, read these.” It was my first lesson in historiography.

Reading this blog would be another way for students, if they are so inclined, to see where my biases are. There are buttons on my home page here (and to our much more political Walmart blog) so I don’t hide what I write, but I don’t push it either. Besides, I actually require blogging in one class. [That's actually why I started this blog; to make the mechanics of that assignment go easier.] This space is labeled in the blogroll there as “Professor Rees’ Personal Blog,” and that’s what it is. It’s an example if anyone needs one.

So my students are as welcome to visit here as anyone else is. If you are one, I’m delighted that you’ve decided to read this far.

How to thwart students who buy their work online.

This CHE article (via Andrew Sullivan) is an absolutely amazing examination of student paper mills (in other words, places to buy your writing assignments online):

In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you’ll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work.

Mumbai? Somewhere Tom Friedman must be smiling.

Go to Google and type “buy an essay.” Among the top results will be Best Essays, whose slogan is “Providing Students with Original Papers since 1997.” It’s a professional-looking site with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver “quality custom written papers” by writers with either a master’s degree or a Ph.D. Prices range from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.

To place an order, you describe your assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in. Simple.

Sounds scary for us education-types, but do these people actually read the book for you? I doubt it. Therefore, the easiest way to thwart students who want to go this route would be to assign papers that are actually based on the readings you assign. If you’re an English professor, and you suspect there are 30,000 papers on Jane Eyre floating out there, then assign comparison papers. I tend to do so for history texts anyway because they require more thought.

Of course, I’m assuming the papers buy online are actually good and that seems to be a pretty big assumption:

The writers for essay mills are anonymous and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week, hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to $40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose. Others have no college degree and limited English skills.

Along the same lines, this has got to be my favorite paragraph of the whole piece:

Mr. [Charles} Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well. He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of his papers was too high. “People would come back to me and say, ‘It’s a great paper, but my professor will never believe it’s me,’” says Mr. Parmenter. “I had to dumb them down.”

So how do you thwart students who don’t care if they’re handing in bad, plagiarized work? Here’s the solution in the article:

So what’s a professor to do? Thomas Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow writers to bid on students’ projects. Their paper concludes that because there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and disciplining students is the exception.

In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they’re doing. “You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within hours of it being released to them,” he says. “Which has to mean that they were intending to cheat from the beginning.”

What he recommends, and what he does himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or project they’ve just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and shrugged shoulders, there’s a chance they haven’t read, much less written, their own paper.

OK, but isn’t that a little late? I require drafts. In my Historiography Class, I even require multiple stages of the key paper assignment to be turned in before the final paper arrives. That way, I can get a good idea of how students’ thinking develops and if they’re not thinking at all, I’ll fail them for not completing the necessary portions of the assignment in a timely manner rather than wait to see what someone in Mumbai has turned out.

I know this is more work for me, but I get better writing this way and it helps avoid those horrible conversations which both parties involved absolutely dread.

“That’s no ordinary rabbit.”

If you have to do assessment, this seems like a pretty good way to do it.

My department has been deep in the throes of discussing assessment at regularly-scheduled department for some weeks now. As a historian, I used to contend that assessment is evil. As this recent post from RYS puts it so well:

After we developed the learning outcomes, we were told that our grades did not measure whether or not the students had achieved the outcomes. So then we all had to go to special training to learn how to evaluate our students’ outcome-based learning on a grid that lists each student, each learning outcome, and the activity we used to determine whether the student met the outcome. We not-so-jokingly called this The Matrix training.

We were told that we had to do all this because otherwise we would lose our accreditation. We redid every single syllabus in our college in less than a month and then created The Matrix in a couple of weeks. The result is a steaming pile of busy work at the end of each semester to satisfy those who believe that more paperwork somehow equates with quality.

I still think there’s something to this, but if somebody is going to make you assess whether your students are learning anything you might as well try to do it in the least evil way possible. I think David Scobey of Bates College, writing at Inside Higher Ed (via AHA Today) may have something here:

What, then, would a robust assessment practice look like? It would embody the qualities that typify humanities learning itself. It would be iterative: gathering and evaluating portfolios of material from the whole arc of the student’s career. It would be exploratory and integrative: asking students to include in those portfolios materials in which they are not only learning about the humanities in their course of study, but also using it in their civic, ethical, vocational, and personal development.

It would be autobiographical: requiring students to narrate and thematize that development, to frame their portfolios with their own, small versions of Obama’s memoir. And it would be reflective: calling on them at threshold-moments to plan and take stock, to evaluate their successes and failures, and (equally important) to make explicit what they count as success and failure in their education. This last point is crucial: humanities assessment (like humanities learning) is intrinsically dialogical and open-ended. Indeed the sine qua non of a successful humanities education may be precisely that it equips students to discuss and contest the question, “Has my education been a success?” with their teachers and their peers.

While the whole autobiographical Obama thing seems pretty goofy, I think what he means is simply that students should be able to describe the process by which they reached they’re conclusions. Who can be against that?

Granted, you may think that only someone teaching at a college as small as Bates could come up with such a scheme, but Scobey mentions online versions of this already up and running at bigger schools like Portland State. The whole discussion reminds me of the last set of articles I read on re-writing the history curriculum to emphasize skills rather than facts. Stick with factual knowledge as a student learning outcome and there’s no way you can avoid those stupid multiple-choice tests.

As Scobey recognizes, this is not the kind of assessment that makes edu-crats happy:

I am mindful that the model I am sketching is bound to give the assessment reformers heartburn. Portfolios framed (like the pages of the Talmud) by autobiographies, reflection statements, and contestatory dialogue; student work assembled in narratives of meaning-making, rather than being measured as evidence of mastery — this is surely not what the Spellings Commission meant when it called on academics to take assessment seriously. For the reformers want an efficient, transparent, portable metric of effective teaching and learning: a tool that can quantify the value-added of a college education, of skills learned and knowledge deployed, in comparative rankings.

So if someone is going to make you do assessment anyway you might as well do it in a way that suits you and your discipline. At least with this way you’ll have a leg to stand on when you can’t avoid it any longer.

“Knowledge is, therefore, evil like candy.”

This is brilliant. However, I have to imagine that bankers will serve this country quite well for a long while to come.

Throwing out the history curriculum and starting over again.

I recently dug into the new Journal of American History and started with the Textbooks and Teaching section (subs. required for all links in the post, but I’m guessing anyone who cares enough to click through already has access one way or another). To suggest that it was a mind-expanding experience does not do teh articles justice. The goal of the section is to “reimagine the history curriculum,” by which, to quote the first article in the section, seems to mean something I had never thought of as an historical artifact before:

The traditional pyramidal structure, in which students are expected to move from broad acquisition of information toward mastery of a particular subject, has long been the standard format of history instruction.

This author, Stephen Andrews is suggesting an entirely different model, a skills-based curriculum, and he has a pretty good set of justifications if you ask me:

Often, the model of increasing specificity—in which students gradually and consistently increase their knowledge—does not, in fact, reflect the actual experiences of students. For example, a registration and enrollment system that does not require students to complete classes in a particular order can foil the progressive accumulation of knowledge. In the traditional structure, instructors in upper-level classes can assume that the students are already familiar with material taught in introductory classes. However, without any guarantee that students have previously taken particular classes, teachers in even advanced classes must often assume that their students have little content background and no training in historical thinking.

The second article here that’s definitely worth reading, by John Savagian of Alverno College, explains how his department has integrated a college-wide ability-based curriculum into the teaching of history:

At a beginning level, Alverno students are taught the ability we call analysis, or what others might call critical thinking. Alverno’s analysis department defines the first two levels of analysis as making accurate observations from material studied and drawing reasonable inferences from those observations. In the discipline of history, we teach students this ability through their reading and interpretation of primary sources as well as instruction on how to “read” historical monographs, films, and ephemera. For our students as they begin to learn about their own thinking process, “accurate observations” may mean simply clarity in knowing who said what and when. At the intermediate levels of analysis, we stress the more complicated concepts of interpretation and historical truth. Thus when students take the American survey in their second year, they begin to apply disciplinary concepts and frameworks with growing understanding.

I’ve advocated the de-emphasis of teaching any specific facts for a considerable period of time. Some of that comes from my acute hatred of standardized tests. Why should students’ specific factual knowledge be a tool for assessment of your course if you teach or they happen to remember different facts than they’re being asked about? Besides, the vast majority of the specific factual knowledge that even the best instructor teaches them will likely have disappeared six months after the final exam and will certainly be gone six years later. Skills, on the other hand, are forever.

At the same time, the notion of completely de-emphasizing factual knowledge scares me. Since I teach American history, deep down in my heart I do believe that I’m helping to mold better citizens. Granted, my citizens will learn about labor unions and the importance of dissent alongside Abe Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, but they’ll learn facts nonetheless. Maybe, just maybe, someone I taught ten years ago is remembering the history of the Great Depression I taught them because it seems newly relevant. I hate to skip anything, but skipping whole eras in order to emphasize skills doesn’t seem smart.

I guess when it comes to throwing out the history curriculum and starting over again you can put me down as conflicted.

Richard Nixon appeals to the “great silent majority.”