Perhaps a boycott is in order.

It seems that the page numbering system in e-books that bothered me so much when I wrote about last month, is unique to Kindle-formatted books from Amazon.com. I’ll probably get all my e-books through Google now just so that I can cite them easily if I need to until Amazon addresses this totally unnecessary inconvenience.

In praise of required drafts.

Tenured Radical has a very useful post up on designing writing assignments and grading them. The discussion from the top down to the bottom of the comments on the relationship between bad writing and the testing culture in secondary schools is particularly fascinating.

However, what I want to do here is focus on two of the parts that post that deal with grading. She’s asking and answering questions that I’ll answer too:

Do you write comments on the paper? Or just grade it? Do you make yourself available to discuss students’ work with them after you hand the papers back? I can’t tell you how many of my advisees show up in my office hours with a paper in their hand that has no comments on it at all, just a grade, students who also can’t get the professor to met with them. Rarely do they express anger or resentment at the grade: they want to do better and they don’t know how.

Yup, I’ve seen that too. That strikes me as academic malpractice. It makes us all look bad if students think we’re just pulling grades out of a hat. I’ll add that another form of academic malpractice would be handing students an assignment sheet and basically saying “See you in two months with a paper.” I always make time on the researching/writing process somewhere in every course in which I assign a paper, which, come to think of it, is every course I teach!

That process discussion is part of my answer to the second section of that Tenured Radical post that I wanted to recopy here:

Do you write lots and lots of marginal notes on the paper, spending hours correcting everything and re-diagramming their sentences? The truth is, although you are trying to be the opposite of the teacher I describe above, this freaks students out. Although you have spent maybe an hour on this, feeling like you are a really caring teacher, the student may see them as a blur, as grammatical correction collides with interpretive questions, typos, basic misunderstanding of the text and long-winded attempts not to utilize the first person or appear “biased.” If a paper is really muddled, it is a waste of your time to do this: far better to sit down with the student, ask a couple questions about what s/he intended, and describe how s/he might have gone about writing such a paper.

I am a big margin note-writer, but I think the big difference between Tenured Radical’s hypothetical professor and I is that I do my margin note-writing on required drafts rather than final papers (which get substantially fewer, but not an inconsiderable amount of comments).

Required drafts, usually half the required size of the final paper, force students to start thinking about the assignment early. Equally importantly, I require them to come in via e-mail so that my comments are done with the “add comment” section of Microsoft Word. This means I don’t have to wait until the next class period to get student papers back to them. More importantly, this means we can go back and forth several times before a paper is finally done.

Yes, I’ve heard shudders from students when I’ve cut huge sections of draft papers. That’s when I do what Tenured Radical suggests and bring them into office hours for a talk. Besides, the shock is never that bad when there’s no grade at the bottom.

Tenured Radical also asks:

Do you talk to students about your own writing, and testify to the ongoing vulnerability of putting your own writing out there to be criticized by others?

Hopefully that’s what keeps me humble. Was it Bobby Knight who once said that coaches should never shoot baskets in front of their players? The opposite reasoning applies here as students need to know that everybody gets beat up in the writing process.

I edit them the same way I edit myself. I often talk about the great pain I feel when I have to cut a great historical nugget that just doesn’t help me make my overall point. I also talk about the joys of finding the best pieces possible to make that point, even when it didn’t look that way at first.

Teaching research and writing are just about the most fun I have doing my job precisely because I have so much fun doing it myself. I think I get much better papers as a result.

While we’re at it, shouldn’t history professors give up reading?

John Fea got me to read an IHE article that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have clicked upon otherwise.  Its premise is that no job market exists to reward good teaching.  I wouldn’t have read it otherwise because I know it’s wrong.  I work at a teaching institution, so when we interview job candidates it’s practically the only thing we ask them about.  And I dare anyone interviewing at a community college to tell them all about their dissertation.

The thing is, I also publish and I firmly believe that my research improves my teaching.  Where’s my evidence?  The smart ass answer to that question is that I teach both the undergraduate and graduate research classes in my department.  But it’s more than just that.  We all lecture about what we know, and since my research interests are rather broad I know that I talk often about the topics that I’ve eventually published upon.

It’s worth noting that that assessment includes both primary and secondary source research.  Just to give you an example, I have a contract to produce a general survey text on late American industrialization (which I really need to finish soon as its way past its deadline).  That’s why I picked up a copy of H.W. Brands’ American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900.  [It's good, by the way.  A little disorganized perhaps, but a really fun read.]  The topics he covers (big business, immigration, the West, etc.) are the same ones I’m lecturing on in survey now and I’ve literally been tweaking my lectures with his quotes as I go.

If teaching college precludes us from doing anything else, why shouldn’t we just give up on reading too?  My reading, like my research, informs both.  Is that evidence that it makes me a better teacher?  The ed guys cited in that IHE article seem to rely on teaching evaluations as their measure of teaching effectiveness.  I don’t trust that measure as far as I can throw it, but I do know that I’m a better informed teacher doing things my way.

Is that a bad thing?

Teaching the history survey without a textbook: Episode 2.

Episode 1 is here, if you don’t remember what this is all about.

I realized two things during week two of teaching survey without a textbook that I think are both pretty important:

1. Because I’m substituting a subscription web site for a textbook, I can actually tell who’s subscribed and who hasn’t since Milestone Documents has promised to get me a list of everyone who’s subscribed from my class by Monday. This is excellent news! You certainly can’t get that kind of accountability from a paper textbook.

2. Say what you will about the typical history textbook, but even if they didn’t read it students could always start at the index and use it as an encyclopedia. While many of the terms I’ll be quizzing them on line up nicely with documents that I’m forcing my students to read, others will only be covered in lecture.  That means I’ll have to give time before each quiz to take questions about terms that they might not have gotten the first time around.  This could be good reinforcement, but it will be interesting to see how many questions I actually get.

The wired classroom as sweatshop.

Last week, I wrote:

“If somebody told me they’re teaching history with Twitter, I’d hope I could keep an open mind about what could be a great pedagogical idea, but in truth I’d probably abuse them mercilessly.”

Via ProfHacker, I get my first example of how this can be done:

While the video does not offer all of the specifics about how Monica Rankin has structured her class at the University of Texas at Dallas, I can say for certain that I’m not laughing and will not be abusing her mercilessly in this post or in any other venue. Nonetheless, something bothers me about this, and it has little to do with Twitter’s 140 character limit.

Judging from the video, it appears that Rankin is running discussions through Twitter while all of her ninety history students are in the room with her and projecting them on the screen at the front of the class. The students interviewed seem to like it as they might otherwise be afraid to speak up in front of so many people. No mention is made whether the students tweet (or even talk) outside of class.

I mention talking here because the class has a teaching assistant. So what happened to sections? Rankin mentions that when she was away at one point the TA led the Twitter discussion, but I can’t for the life of me understand why they don’t have time at UT – Dallas allocated to talk in smaller groups than ninety people. Even if there’s no extra time allocated outside the normal class hours for TA-led discussion (perhaps an hour a week out of four?), why not just split the group in half and talk to each other that way?

In other words, why does the conversation have to be moderated through Twitter? Seriously, in the great scheme of things, ninety isn’t all that big a class these days. Get Rankin two TAs and the size of a regular discussion group would be eminently manageable. UD has convinced me that laptops and cell phones in the classroom are more trouble than they’re worth. In this case, I’m not even convinced that the technology is worth any educational benefit at all compared to doing things the old-fashioned way.

As usual in higher education these days, I suspect it all comes down to money. Tweeting is cheaper than hiring another TA so tweeting it is. I don’t fault Professor Rankin for trying to make the best of the less than optimal educational situation that her employer has given her, but what if using technology this way will eventually turn us all into that guy at Central Florida with 600 students?

It’s reminds me of Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory. Once you show management that you can handle the wrapping line at a reasonable velocity, they’re going to speed it up even more. Unfortunately, most of us are too dedicated to stuff the extra students under our hats. When the people on the line are forced to work harder for the same pay, quality control goes down.

I’m afraid that the 140 character limit might just be the first step on a long march down a slippery slope from which higher education may never recover.

Victorian ephemera at the British Library.

One other cool thing about Twitter is that it gives me yet another place to learn about cool stuff on the web that I probably wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. The Evanion Collection of Ephemera at the British Library got tweeted by J-Store (of all places) this morning, and on the basis of a quick look around it seems quite wonderful.

We all deserve a raise.

This is from a thoroughly depressing IHE article about professors at public universities getting beaten up in ridiculous, Republican-instigated fights about the benefit packages of government employees:

When controlling for levels of education, years of experience, size of organization and other factors, public sector employees with doctorates earn over $31,000 less in total annual wages and benefits as compared to their private sector counterparts (the gap for those with professional degrees was even larger).

The reason I’m not going to quit my job and try my luck in the private sector now that I’ve read this is that there is virtually no public sector for professional historians. [Of course, I know about public history, but those jobs are even more precarious in this recession than mine.] It’s worth noting that this is the reason that economists and business professors make so much more than we humanists do. They have a private sector. We don’t.*

The size of the gap for those other folks, really ought to determine faculty organizing strategy going forward. Economists and business professors are not the enemy. [OK, maybe some of them are, but that's because of their politics rather than their financial position in the academy.] We are all underpaid. We should do our best to raise wages together, rather than demonize each other as we fight for the scraps that the 50 little Hoovers around the country deem to leave us.

* By the way, there’s no private sector for administrators or football coaches. Why do they get paid so much then?

“Look, if you love reading history so much, get a real job and buy all the books you want on Amazon.”

Somehow I missed this the first time around. More on this whole genre here.

“Reading Like a Historian.”

Me and about thirty of Pueblo’s finest social studies teachers got to spend the day listening to Sam Wineburg of Stanford. Besides explaining the teaching philosophy which you can read about in his most excellent book, he introduced us to a new curriculum resource that he and the rest of the Stanford History Education Group have been developing, “Reading Like a Historian.”

If you happen to be a secondary school teacher, you are officially required to hit that link right now. They’ve been counting on word-of-mouth to spread it around. Perhaps I’ll write more about what Sam told us about this and other historical matters at a later date, but for now, just consider yourself informed.

Cutting our own throats.

Via New Faculty Majority, here’s part of a must-read screed at Gin and Tacos:

You do not walk into college, 18 years old and brimming with all the worldly knowledge concomitant with that age, and tell us what we should be teaching you. If the students already know what knowledge and skills they need, then why are they in college? Ah. At last we reach the heart of the matter – they fundamentally believe that the educational aspect of college is little more than a tedious requirement. We are just gatekeepers standing between them and the fabulous, high-paying careers that await them on the other side. “I don’t give a crap about Literature or history or the rules of grammar; just give me my B so I can start making $500,000 per year in advertising or writing Golden Globes fashion articles for Vogue.”

You see, college isn’t about learning anything. It’s merely a multiyear party with a bunch of hoops to jump through, a set of obstacles between each Special Snowflake and the Good Life. And the more they whine about states’ efforts to impose some semblance of a well-rounded education, the more we change things to accommodate them.

While a lot of that quote (and the entire post for that matter) can be chalked up to a run-of-the-mill generation gap, it’s that last part about accommodating them that really scares me.

College is presumably valuable because students learn something in college. If we accommodate students so that they will keep coming to college and therefore learn nothing, nobody will hire them and they will eventually stop coming. Dumbing down the curriculum is in nobody’s best interests: theirs nor ours.