Am I working right now?

Yesterday’s early thirsty at College Misery is about the working hours that we proffies put in. It references an interesting series of posts from the late, lamented Rate Your Students and then asks “How Much Do You Work?” Read the comments there and you’ll see that some people are very dedicated to their jobs, while others appear to be putting one over on their administrations and giving the rest of us a bad name.

Personally, I object to the premise of the question. Thanks to committee work (mostly), I’m literally putting in a twelve hour day today (8:30AM-8:30PM). Does that mean I’m on the clock every second of the day? Today’s the campus Christmas party. Does that count? How about if I read a history book because I enjoy it?

More importantly, am I working right now as I write this post? If you ever bother to look at the very early posts on this blog, you’d see that it didn’t have much point in the great scheme of things. Over time though, the general rantings of a liberal academic have become a much more focused series of posts on history, historical pedagogy and, of course, academic labor.

Blogging about history may not end up on my c.v., but it’s certainly taught me more than a few things that have improved my knowledge of the subject and improved the quality of my classes. In fact, I think I made one of the most important pedagogical decisions in ten years of teaching solely because of this blog. So it’s kind of like work, but it kind of isn’t. This is the basis of my objection: There is no bright line between work and everything else. Work is (mostly) fun, and a lot of my fun is work-related. The most important thing about my job though is that as long as I make it to class on time, my schedule is my own.

There are good and bad things about this. On the one hand, I usually have to work at least some on weekends (particularly if I ever want to publish anything) and the more than occasional weekday evening. On the other hand, I can almost always schedule time to take my son to karate class, watch at least some TV from the DVR with the rest of my family or hit the gym at 8:30AM.

When I do hit the gym in the morning, the guy behind the desk who takes my keys always asks me if I’m working today and I haven’t bothered to object to the premise of that question yet. However, the fact that a lot of professors themselves don’t seem to understand the root of my objection to counting hours really worries me as it bodes badly for all of us the next time anti-higher education state legislators start looking around for a new scapegoat.

How to make yourself obsolete.

My new favorite blog, ProfHacker, tackles an issue that Historiann and I were discussing before the break: the “cheating” scandal at the University of Central Florida. Neither of us is particularly sympathetic to the professor involved here, but I think Jason Jones’ post at ProfHacker adds a new dimension to the argument:

Many students complain, or, at least, faculty worry that students will complain, that their final exam was unfairly arbitrary or idiosyncratic, and doesn’t really reflect the student’s knowledge of the subject. Outsourcing exam writing to textbook publishers appears to solve this problem: an exam drawn up by the publisher of the course textbook will (hopefully!) reflect that book and its material accurately. But the disadvantage of this process is pretty clear–it reduces the faculty member to an appendage of the textbook. Indeed, on such a model it’s a bit hard to understand what the need for PhDs really is.

[Emphasis added]

Bingo. I’m not mad at the guy for being lazy per se. I’m mad at that guy because he gives overzealous administrators everywhere an opening to stick 600 students in everyone’s class or replace all of us with contingent faculty who don’t have Ph.Ds or perhaps even both.

Certainly I have great sympathy with contingent faculty who feel the need to cut corners to survive. I don’t condone it. [The fact that you're being exploited is no excuse to fail at one of the basic prerequisites of your job.] I just have sympathy. However, full-time faculty have no excuse whatsoever for not writing their own exam questions. Even in Florida I strongly suspect this guy makes much more money than almost anyone teaching in the humanities today. He could at least pretend to care.

Jason also links to another post on this same subject that summarizes the situation well along the lines that Historiann did originally:

[T]he more this situation unfolds, the more unhealthy it makes the whole educational environment surrounding it seem. Class sizes in the multiple hundreds: Check. Courses taught mainly through lecture: Check. Professor at a remove from the students: Check. Exams taken off the rack rather than tuned to the specific student population: Check. And on it goes. I know this is how it works at many large universities and there’s little that one can do to change things; but with all due respect to my colleagues at such places, I just can’t see what students find appealing about these places, and I wonder if students at UCF are thinking the same thing nowadays.

Any professor who sacrifices pedagogy for convenience to the degree of relying on a test bank for their exam questions is writing their discipline’s professional obituary. Take a stand against this now, or the University of Central Florida will be everybody’s future whether we teach in Florida or not.

How do you handle texting in class?

Inspired by the guy from Syracuse mentioned here who walked out of his giant philosophy class, SEK offers a rather intense post on the subject at Lawyers, Guns and Money. I bookmarked it yesterday so that I could get back to the comments today, and they did not disappoint.

There seems to be two schools of thought on this. #1:

Could we go back to square zero and clearly state why texting in class is bad? If someone decides not to pay attention, I’d rather he or she spends class inconspicuously texting as opposed to passing notes, whispering, etc. Having a no texting policy during exams I get – you want to discourage cheating. However, trying to ban texting during regular lectures doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than punishing students for not paying attention (which, in theory, a bad grade/lack of knowledge is supposed to do anyway).

#2:

I find that the classroom dynamic matters in ways I never really thought it would before I became a teacher. A few students deliberatively not paying attention or respecting what the rest of us are trying to do can change the energy and atmosphere of a classroom in a way that’s not conducive to the goals of the classroom. It’s harder to get a good discussion going, other students get annoyed or follow suit and pay less attention, etc. Furthermore, I tend to do a better job when there aren’t disengaged students ignoring me. THat’s not deliberate, I try to do as well as I can regardless, but there’s no denying I’m more successful when I’m not being ignored by a portion of the students.

I’m definitely in the #2 camp here because it really does bother me. For the last few semesters I’ve started giving a five minute speech on the first day of class explaining how much it bothers me, along with the rather obvious point that my survey classes (40 people tops) are small enough that I can see you do it. That last part always gets a laugh, which tells me that most people don’t quite realize it. I used to think I’d be in the kick ‘em out of the room camp, but I now realize that I don’t have it in me.

My other anti-texting strategy wasn’t supposed to be an anti-texting strategy, but I’m convinced it helps. As I’ve written before, I’ve made a great effort to reorganize my survey lectures so that I’m doing far less reading. While I would do this for pedagogical reasons alone, I’m convinced that by actually looking at the people I’m talking to their fingers are much less likely to stray to their phones (based on the “I can see you” principle mentioned above).

Yes, I can still see a few people with their hands churning away far underneath the table every once in a while, but it bothers me far less when it’s done in a way that is less disruptive and at least lets me know that they know it’s wrong. And by the way, this never happens in my upper-level classes (who are generally motivated and obviously deterred by the very small class size) – just the surveys with people who don’t want to be there.

How do you handle texting in class? Got any other good ideas?

Where left and right agree about history.

I’ve been tempted to say something about this new conservative Thanksgiving-as-celebration-of-failed-socialism obsession, but others have handled that better than I ever could. However, I think this part of the argument is noteworthy because of what it gets right:

And despite his problems evaluating the recent Manhattan real estate market, [Rush] Limbaugh had another look at the one from 1626. “We got shafted when we bought Manhattan,” he claimed, saying that European settlers initially paid a Long Island tribe that didn’t own the land, then had to repurchase it from the actual owners. “We got scammed … we got hosed … we paid for Manna-hata twice because a bunch of Native Americans scammed us.”

Compare that to this from James Loewen’s revisionist classic Lies My Teacher Told Me (p. 121):

“What a bargain! What foolish indians not to recognize the potential of the island! Not one book points out that the Dutch paid the wrong tribe for Manhattan. Doubtless the Canarsees, native to Brooklyn, were quite pleased with the deal…The Wekquaesgeeks, who lived on Manhattan and really owned it, weren’t so happy.”

Of course, Limbaugh thinks the people who bought Manhattan were Pilgrims (rather than Dutch) so maybe I should be more circumspect with my praise.

A Thanksgiving treat.

Via the Scout Report, it’s the menu collection at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas. While the wonderfully tacky Vegas menus are there, there are at least a few lovely old New York menus too.

Bon appetit, everyone.

An opportunity for improvement.

This is some pretty stunning stuff:

For-profit colleges graduated an average of 22 percent of their students in 2008, according to a new report from Education Trust.

That average palls in comparison to bachelor’s-seeking graduation rates at public and private non-profit colleges and universities for the same year, which averaged 55 percent and 65 percent, respectively.

We all knew that for-profit higher ed, especially online for-profit higher ed, is a gigantic Ponzi Scheme designed to divert student loans from needy functional institutions, so that 22% figure doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s just confirmation of the painfully obvious.

It’s those 55% and 65% figures that surprise me a bit. In the same way that stocks and ponzi schemes both have inherent risks when you buy into them, the graduate rates at non-profit and for-profit colleges will only differ by degree. I just figured the spread would be bigger. After all, the Powers That Be will still come after you with all they have if you default on your student loans no matter what kind of college you took them out to attend.

I believe my institution’s graduation rate is a little above that 65%. That would make us pretty good, but we (rightfully) treat that figure as an opportunity for improvement rather accept it as the average. I fear that too many public colleges are ramping up their full time enrollment as a revenue-seeking measure rather than lobbying harder for the state aid. Too many administrators and state legislators see college dropouts as figures on a balance sheet. I see them as faces (at least for the first six or seven weeks of every fall semester), so I tend to take this a lot more personally.

It’s the inequality, stupid.

There’s an incredible graph here that compares the real cost of a college education to the real cost of dental care between 1947 and 2006. The two track perfectly together. This doesn’t mean that I’m crazy to fear the arrival my daughter’s imminent college bills. As the two economists who made that graph suggest:

[T]he upward trend of college cost has been accelerated by changes in income distribution over the last 30 years. People with high levels of education have seen big income gains. Universities rely on highly educated people, as do hospitals, law offices and dental practices, to name a few. Rising income inequality is a force for rising cost in any industry like higher education. And rising income inequality also drives affordability problems.

While I agree that the general cost increase in college education is more reasonable than most suppose, what I don’t buy here is the notion that I’m somehow driving this cart. I feel a lot more as if I’m at the bottom of the inequality curve, not the top. The increased cost of college education has come despite the fact that salaries for many of us doesn’t even match the rate of inflation anymore. On the matter of starting salaries, consider this post from College Misery that made my jaw drop. Throw contingent faculty into the mix here and obviously this position gets even stronger.

I have dental insurance (thank goodness). I don’t have college insurance, despite the fact that I teach at one. Some places may end up out of reach for my child not because they’re too expensive in the objective sense, but because my income makes it much harder for me to contribute as much to her education as I think I should.

Staying power.

You can now read my book on a device that I don’t own.

Amazon started selling a Kindle edition of Representation and Rebellion last week. My wife asked me if this was good news. The press thinks so. I said it certainly isn’t bad news, but I do feel strangely ambivalent about the whole thing.

This has nothing to do with money. I’ve been told that the electronic versions of academic books often do a land office business (at least by academic standards), and often significantly outsell hardbacks. I haven’t bothered to check my contract yet, but even if it turns out that I get less royalties from electronic copies I strongly suspect the difference will be more than made up for by the increase in volume. The fact that my work is getting read should be the important thing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in print or pixels.

I think the thing that bugs me about this as an author is the question of permanence. Since I don’t own a Kindle, I’m not entirely sure how many books one of those things holds at one time. However, I know that number is finite. A book is something you leave behind for the long run, long after most people outside of your immediate family have forgotten that you ever existed. I’m not sure Kindles will have that kind of staying power, let alone the electronic edition of a book like mine.

Say what you will about paper, but it’s a format that hasn’t gone out of style for six hundred odd years. I suspect people will still be reading books somewhere six hundred years down the line. And if anyone is still interested in the Rockefeller Plan that far in the future, it’s not the Kindle edition that they will be reading.

Tell me something I don’t already know.

There is a gigantic article in today’s Times about secondary school students being distracted by technology. I have kids. I have students. Absolutely none of it was news to me. This part near the end, however, is at least very well spoken:

To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.

“How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.

She adds: “You can’t become a good writer by watching YouTube, texting and e-mailing a bunch of abbreviations.”

As the group-reading effort winds down, she says gently: “I hope this will motivate you to read on your own.”

Those of us who teach at college really need to draw a line in the sand. Don’t read, don’t pass. And I’m not just talking about those of us who teach in the humanities. Anything else is a terrible disservice to the future job prospects of our students.

Professorial candid camera.

I’ve been following with horror the spate of stories lately about professors who find themselves stars on YouTube for something they said or did while teaching class. I’m certain that some of them deserve our condemnation. I’m also pretty sure that some of them don’t. Like this guy, for instance:

A Louisiana State University professor, accused in a video circulating on the Internet of “mocking” conservative students during his class, says the video tells only half the story: He was actually challenging all of his students, both liberal and conservative, he says, and not chastising any of them for their beliefs. An unedited version of the video gives some support to his claims, though it still troubles his department chair….

“I was very intentionally going off and challenging all sides. That’s my job,” he said. “If they wanted to, the Young Democrats of Louisiana could have edited it to make me look conservative.”

The lesson here is, obviously, that context is key. The notion of anyone taking some line out of your lecture to make you look stupid doesn’t give the whole picture of what you want students to know. It kind of reminds me of those trackers who follow candidates around now who try to record the gaffes they make. The similarity is that these kinds of comments play to prevailing stereotypes: liberal academics or heartless Republicans. The difference is that the vast majority of us professors aren’t running for anything.

The other kind of context that should temper this kind of hysteria is the professor’s entire institutional record. I remember when I first started out how scared I was that I’d say something off-the-cuff during class that would horribly offend someone. I’ve grown much less-so over time not so much because of tenure (I just know if the firestorm was big enough that certainly wouldn’t save me), but because of my experience. Ten plus years of successful teaching at a single institution ought to mean something compared to whatever anyone can possibly say during a single lecture.

And while we’re talking about the comparative oppression of contingent faculty, this stands as another pretty good example of why their position will always be worse than mine. Most people who don’t work full time don’t have the opportunity to stay in one place long enough to build up the kind of record that would protect them if they were ever on the receiving end of something like this. Indeed, academic freedom for contingent faculty is practically a contradiction in terms when they can lose next semester’s teaching contract at any time without cause. I don’t think the geniuses who came up with the idea for the casualization of academic labor had that in mind when they began the process oh so many years ago (they were thinking about the money instead), but there’s no way to argue that the denial of academic freedom to a huge chunk of the professoriate has been one of its most important side effects.