Feeling Some Excitement for a Change

Classes start tomorrow, and I'm more excited about the start of the semester than I've been in a long time.  Perhaps it's because the start of the last semester was so rough.  I had some administrative issues sapping all of my energy, the kinds of things I could do nothing about but that I had to handle the results of.  You add all the drama from buying the new place, and I think back to last August and feel my stomach tighten up just a tad still.

This semester, though, I feel much more on target (knock on wood).  I'm really excited about the two classes I'm teaching (blogs are here and here).  I've taught each one once before, and they went extremely well.  I decided to keep things pretty much the same, which means a lot of my prep is done.  I feel like I can concentrate on actually teaching as well as deepening my own learning of the course materials.  That should also feed into a couple of research projects I hope to make some serious headway on these next few months, too.

I'm also excited that I have no conferences this semester.  That may sound odd, but I think I need a bit of a travel break.  It's not like I've been traveling lately, but it is nice to have a semester where I will be in class everyday (barring anything unforseen) and where I can do my own thing on my own schedule.  I've got a couple of articles coming out this semester, so I feel like I have something to show for scholarship.

Yeah, I might be tempting fate, and I know the mood won't last forever, but it's nice to feel excited about things for a change.

If you missed yesterday's Prof. Hacker post where I posted the track list for this semester's mix-CD, check it out.  I'm even looking forward to the commute!

A Novel or Memoir by a Woman in an International Context?

Next semester, I'm teaching Intro to Gender Studies, and I'd love to find a novel or memoir written by a woman from outside the United States that I can teach for the section on Gender in International Contexts. I'd like something relatively contemporary, and if it's non-western, even better.

I'm not going with I, Rigoberta Menchu because there's too much controversy surrounding the book that I don't want to get into in this course for the time we have available. Last time, I taught In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. I love the book, and it went over well, but I'd really like to teach something not written by someone form the United States, and I'd like to expose them to a place outside the Caribbean, so that cuts out Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid, too (though I might still go with one of them). Malika Oufkir's Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail? Sara Suleri's Meatless Days? Slavenka Drakulic's The Balkan Express? Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (though still by an American, but I do love that book)? Reading Lolita in Tehran still feels too much like a western book. Do I want to go with Persepolis? Ken Bugel's The Abandoned Baobab?

Why in the wold is The Abandonded Baobab listed on Amazon's bestselling literary books about Latin America? Are Senegal and Brussels in Latin America?

Just typing this out is making me think of pairing Perseoplis and The Abandoned Baobab, but I could be convinced otherwise. Oh, and I've got to teach bell hooks' "Eating the Other," too.

These are all ideas that hit me right away, but none are really sticking right now. Anyone have any new ideas? Anyone want to argue for anything I've already mentioned?

"That's Not Britney Spears on My iPod. It's Antonin Scalia!"

Do non-lawyers out there know about The Oyez Project? It's a geek's dream. They say that they try "to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the [Supreme] Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955." You can download mp3s of the oral arguments heard by the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Why have I never heard about this before? For the class I'm auditing at NYU, we listen to the oral arguments of various cases. For this Monday, it's NEA v. Finley, which is the case that goes along with my Wojnarowicz research. I just downloaded the audio file so I can listen to it tomorrow.

I've already tried to think of cases I can start including more explicitly in my classes. Sure, I talk about Eisenstadt v. Baird, but now I could have them listen to the oral arguments. I'm sure that would excite them as much as reading the case, but the thought gets me excited. And isn't that a vital step to making anything we do in the classroom work?

Starbucks References

The purpose of this post is mainly as a place for my students to have one place where they can find links they might want to use for their formal report on the rhetorics of Starbucks.

*Their official website is going to prove invaluable to most of you. You may also want to check their official Twitter feed, Facebook page, or YouTube channel. You may want to check out My Starbucks Idea, which is a site for people to share their thoughts with people at the Starbucks corporation.

*There are also the sites that are not affiliated with Starbucks, such as Starbucks Gossip and I Hate Starbucks. This blog entry makes some points worth exploring, too. This site is the one mentioned in class that is a guide to ordering at SB.

*Don't forget our own library's list of databases in business and economics. I always recommend LexisNexis Academic for any research project.

If anyone (in our class or not) has anything to add, please leave a comment. Based on our discussion on Tuesday, I'm really excited by what students might produce with this project.

The Rhetorics of Starbucks

I'm wondering if any of my academic peeps might have some useful sources for me.

In my Introduction to Professional Writing course, I'm asking my students to produce a formal report where they take two articles about Starbucks from peer-reviewed rhetoric journals--Paula Mathieu's "Economic Citizenship and the Rhetoric of Gourmet Coffee" (Rhetoric Review, Fall 1999) and Greg Dickinson's "Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Fall 2002)--and create an argument about the extent to which the arguments in those articles are still relevant today. Obviously, they'll have to do some research into Starbucks and its rhetorics today, and I'm wondering if anyone has anything that might be useful for my students to explore. I'm especially wondering if there are any blogs out there that offer critiques of Starbucks that are well-argued. I remember one from a few years ago but can't find it now. I've got the official Twitter feed noted, but there are a lot of other Twitter feeds related to Starbucks. Are any of them useful?

I want to give my students a range of sources they can analyze, so if anyone has anything that might be useful, I'd love to hear it.

Late, Late, Late

There's a rather lively discussion going on at Historiann in response to my post at Prof. Hacker on policies for late assignments, which apparently is getting a larger life because it was mentioned at Inside Higher Ed. For those who are interested in the topic, you might want to check out that discussion. I'm not sure how to read the tone of some of the comments. It's hard to know if people are saying, "That policy won't work for me; I have to do it this way." Or, "That guy is an idiot."

Foundations Giving Grants to Nonprofits

This is a post just for my students in Rhetoric and Professional Writing 312: Reports, Proposals, and Grants. I wanted a quick way to give them a list of links to which I want them to have access during class tonight. Regular readers, please ignore, unless you want to find grant opportunities for nonprofits, then this might help you, too!

• Wachovia's List of Private Foundations
  
• The Ford Foundation
• The Playboy Foundation
• The Compton Foundation
• Hartford Foundation for Public Giving
  

You're Reading Prof. Hacker, Right?

I hope all interested academics who read me are also keeping up with Prof. Hacker. We had our official launch last week, and I say "we" because I've joined the team of writers. You can check out the list of posts I've written, which will hopefully grow longer each week. The site is filling a need for academics, and I hope you let us know what you think and what you'd like to see us cover.

More Thoughts on Online Grading

Jason has a great post about online grading, and I thought I'd add to it. I don't necessarily feel like I have anything new to add to the discussion, and I've talked about some of this before, but I do think it's valuable when more people talk about what they do so that we can each decide what will work for us. I do think that it's important that no instructor try to follow what other people do simply out of a desire for consensus. I do think that students actually benefit greatly when instructors have different submission guidelines. I always tell my students that they need to learn how to adjust to different parameters because they can expect that one boss they'll have will want one thing while another boss will want another. They can expect to be working on a project where they have to submit weekly reports by email for the first few weeks but then, when supervisors change midstream, they will be working on the same final product but have to skip the weekly emails and commit to twice-weekly face-to-face meetings. They have to know how to adjust to different parameters.

So don't take anything I say as advice for what anyone else should do. It's just what I've been doing for the past few years. I've already written a bit about why and how I grade electronic submissions, but I can certainly expand on that.

First, on the point about file formats, I require that students submit everything to me in either .rtf or .doc. Yes, I have a widget on my computer that will convert .docx documents. In fact, it's pretty easy for me to convert documents, but that's not the point. Students have to learn how to convert documents because they will have to submit documents in certain formats when they apply for scholarships, internships, and jobs. I've had students in our professional writing program come to me in a bit of a panic because they are applying for something that asks for documents in a format they've never heard of (there are some strange requests out there, let me tell you). The more experience they have with working in different formats, the better. If a student emails a document to me in the wrong format, I write back and remind them what format it needs to be in, sometimes giving them a deadline for when I need to have it in the right format. I have never had a student not get it to me in the right format pretty quickly. And if anyone thinks that students will intentionally send things in the wrong format to get more time, remember that I have been able to open just about every document I've ever received. Therefore, I can check to make sure that the document in the right format that came a little late matches the document sent in the wrong format on time. And no one has ever sent a different document.

Second, on the point about using macros or copying-and-pasting comments that we make repeatedly, I don't do that. I think it would confuse me to go back and forth between documents like that. And it's important to me that I say things in a way that takes each case into account. I don't want to say, "You could really use an example here." I want to say, "I like this point about the need for more governmental oversight, but can you give an example that would show how this can work effectively?" And it takes me less time to type that out than it would to choose a generic comment from somewhere else. and I think students take my comments a bit more seriously because they feel as though they've been "heard" a bit more than if I'd just sent generic comments. Jason says it's stupid that he doesn't use macros, templates, and the like, but I disagree.

Some other things I've noticed. I like grading at home on the MacBook more than in the office even though the computer in the office has a huge screen and the office itself offers fewer distractions. But I try to like grading (a la Peter Elbow), and it's easier to do that when I have my feet up on the couch and can take breaks to do various other things. I develop a grading schedule where I have to get though a certain number of essays on certain days. I really push myself to stick to it, too. I haven't had to stay up late to grade in years.

I also don't use track changes because I don't make sentence-level comments. I will use the comment feature to put in the balloons in the margins with my comments, but if I want to mark a comma splice or anything like that, then I just highlight the sentence that has an error or other issue. Then, it's up to students to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it, knowing that they can come to my office and we can do it together.

Finally, I keep all of my documents on a flash drive. I have every document of my life on my flash drive. I only revise by pulling up the file from the flash drive. That way, I don't get confused about something being on the office computer or the home computer or the other home computer. That way, my main home laptop is only for back-up (as is the external hard drive). And, since all students email their essays to me and I email their graded copies back, I have everything on gmail, too. I have multiple copies in multiple places of everything.

Now, when it comes to grading, everyone needs to keep in mind that my heavy administrative load of directing two university program and coordinating a third means I teach less than people with 4/4 loads or even my own colleagues with 3/3 loads. This semester, I'm teaching one class. In the fall, I'll be teaching one class. I did all of these things when I was teaching three classes, but it is easier to stick to a grading schedule with just one class, for example.

Oh, one other thing, and I'd be curious what people think about this. In the past few years, I've had my students write shorter and shorter essays. I used to have everyone write papers that were 5-7 pages or 6-8 or 8-10. Now, I usually go with 3-5. Or in the case of what I'm teaching now, no more than six hundred words. I started doing this when I realized that many academic journals are also requesting shorter pieces. I was working on an article once for a journal that wanted pieces to be 5,000-7,000 words. And with the font I was using, I hit five thousand on page fourteen. I ended up with just about seven thousand, and it was still under twenty pages. I thought, why am I asking my students to write papers that approach the length of those we send to academic journals. Should we expect first-year students to write work as long as what we write for our careers? And I do believe that it's a skill to be complete yet concise (even if my blog doesn't represent such thinking). So shorter papers do lead to less grading time.

Everything I do is also grounded in the fact that I allow my students to revise just about everything.

When grading, I average around three an hour when I'm focused, which is about the same as when I graded paper copies. It can take longer when I meander through the process, as I often do when I'm on track. Because of my grading schedule, when I'm on track, I often don't think of the time. I just grade until that day's batch is done, unless I'm behind, of course.

Some people have told me how impressed they are that I have created a grading process that doesn't feel too time consuming or that causes too much stress. I have worked hard to do that. But it doesn't carry over to my research, where I still don't have a process that works. When I am working on a project, I feel like my process is nothing but time consuming and stressful. But, when push comes to shove, I put my teaching first, so it's not a surprise that I found a process that makes that part of my life easier.

Back Home in the Snow

I've posted all the photos I wanted to upload to Flickr, so check them out if you so desire. As much as I dread it, I must move on and prepare for the start of the semester.

For the last post about Puerto Rico, I wanted to say a bit more about the writing that we did because some people have asked. As I said in an earlier entry, he workshop was called Writing from Experience, but we spent a lot of time talking about writing about encounters with the "other," a common phrase for us in academia. The thinking is that, in writing about those who are different from us, we end up saying a lot about ourselves. It's a risky yet energetic kind of wrting. Our workshop leader, Mayra Santos Febres, has a long history of putting different types of people together in her fiction, so her classes and workshops have that kind of angle in mind.

As for the writing we did throughout the week:

1) A description of our trip to Puerto Rico.

2) A description of our secret where we either fictionalize ourselves or consciously reflect on our perspective. See, after we spent an hour introducing ourselves, Mayra asked us to tell the one secret that we would rather die in a firey hell than tell. Yep, you read that right. She says she always starts her classes that way on the first day, that everyone who takes her classes knows they'll be asked to do it.

3) A description of the face of the person sitting next to us. She put us in pairs, and we had to look at that person and find the feature that makes them unique and base our descripiton around it. The historians and psychologists in the room really responded well to this, talking about the potential for this exercise in their teaching.

4) A description of a body part other than our face.

5) A description of the market at Rio Piedras. On Wednesday, we visited this market near campus. We wandered for about thirty minutes just observing and taking things in. Then we wrote about it.

6) A stream-of-consciousness response to the tarot card we pulled out of her deck. We were to take a card, start with an objective description, and then let it "speak to us." And it all had to be stream of consciousness. I have to say, I produced my best piece of writing with this one, and I think most of the group would agree.

7) A recap in dialogue form of a discussion we had with a partner on a specific topic. We drew a topic out of her hands--doctors and healers, the beach, lovers, water, Obama, teachers--and talked about it with a partner. Then we tried to capture what we talked about in a written dialogue. We had dancing as our topic.

The point of this workshop was to help us improve our scholarship and/or our teaching. We talked about how to use these in our various types of classes, and we talked about what to do with our own writing that we'd produced. It was a great week, and I hope I can maintain the momentum.

I'll certainly try.

What They Learned This Semester

Borrowing from Jo(e), I asked students in both classes to take one of my infamous index cards and write down one thing they learned this semester. It could be from our class or another class, from living in the dorms or living at home. I just wanted that first, gut reaction to the question of what they learned. They wrote them anonymously, but I did say I would probably post them online.

From my first-year seminar on graphic memoirs:

Comics don't have to be funny or exciting; they can be sorrowful or serious stories.

I learned that even if you're working a 30+ hour weekend, you can still be broke everyday.

I've learned that you should always be yourself and sometimes people won't like that because it's intimidating but you should never let it get you down.

To not listen to others on important subjects.

How to manage life without my parents dictating my every move.

I learned that writing can be expressed in different forms and that stories can be told in various ways.

I never thought I was a good writer until my teachers told me I was. So I learned that I am a good writer.

From my upper-level honors seminar on pain:

I learned how to get models to pose outside in half-frozen water for my photography.

How to write a script in first person.

I learned how to be a more efficient reader and writer.

I have learned that if I actually study history, I can pass an entire semester.

I learned to fuck the clock.

That what I thought was "normal" family interactions were an attempt to survive against extreme pain and a few possible suicides. I also learned that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

This semester, I learned that I rely entirely too much on other people.

I have learned that I can't continue to do what I am doing, but I can't stop.

Psychology is a farce. 60% of people with problems who see a psychologist are "cured." 60% of people with problems who don't see a psychologist are "cured" in time.

Speak independently to others and not be laughed at or mocked for my thoughts.

I learned that I'm not in the wrong major(s) and how to hot wire a car.

I learned to drop classes if there are any group projects.

My Podcast for My Honors Seminar

In my honors seminar on pain, the students are creating podcasts. I told them I would do one with them, and it's below. Sometimes, I think it's good for us to do what we ask our students to do. This helped me figure out a few little things that may throw them off.

Blogger doesn't allow you to upload audio, however. But you can upload video. So I pulled up iMovie, plugged in a photo, and transformed it into a video. I know some readers are fans of Six Feet Under, so you may appreciate it. I know it's not perfect. I should re-record some of the audio. But I just wanted to show my students ways to integrate other pieces of auido with their own voices.

It needs work, but it was kinda fun, I'll admit!

Deadlines and Late Policies

Over at Twitter and Facebook, I made comments about students not getting work to me by the noon deadline I'd set up for today, and a few people asked questions about the policies I'd mentioned in brief. So, a blog entry seemed to be in order.

First, electronic sumbissions. For my first-year seminar this semester, all major essays are due as an attachment to an email message by noon on Sundays. I've been doing electronic submission for a few years now because 1) I like to have the ability to type longer comments in the margins and 2) I like to be able to keep copies of each and every essay I receive and grade. I think my comments are much clearer than before. Also, I can highlight sentences with errors or glitches in them, showing students that there is a problem and encouraging them to find the solution on their own (or come to me later so we can discuss it in person). Sure, I could do that with a regular highlighter, but doing it on the computer feels smoother to me. And having the essays on hand has worked for me and my students. More than once, I've received an email from a student who had a computer crash and needed a writing sample for a job or scholarship application. I'm able to forward their previous work to them in just a few seconds. Gmail makes storage really easy; in twenty-nine months of doing this, I have used only seventeen percent of my storage capacity (yeah, I keep just about every email I receive and/or send).

Second, deadlines. When I switched to electronic submission, it didn't make sense to have the deadline be the start of class. Also, I always hated how, the day an essay was due, it was pointless to have students do any serious reading. When I was an undergrad, I never read what was assigned the day an essay was due. Sometimes, I would cancel class and wait in my office for students to turn things in, but that felt like too many lost days. Having the deadline on a weekend made sense because I would never start grading until the weekend. Why have them turn in work when I know I'm not going to touch it until Saturday or Sunday? I used to make the deadlines noon on Saturday, but several evaluations last year recommended pushing them to Sunday. That sounded fine to me, so I made the change. I'm thinking of revising how I talk about deadlines, though, to say that essays are due within a time frame, like from noon on Thursday to noon on Sunday. Students used to turn in essays early, but now they seem to wait until the last minute. Some have told me that they do not want to turn things in early because they don't want to look like a suck-up.

Third, late policies. I do not dock students who turn in late work as long as they turn it in within a week after the deadline (I won't take work at all when it's more than a week late). Why no penalty? Well, I read What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain, and he argues that everthing we do in class should be motivated by pedagogy and not punishment. That got me thinking how, for me, grade penalties were done more to punish and less to teach. So, I tried to create a situation where students would be motivated to stick to deadlines because it would improve their learning. Therefore, I take work up to a week past a deadline, but I don't comment on it. I email them with a grade and nothing else. Since I usually allow revision on major assignments, this really hurts them. Of course, I offer to meet with them in my office. I'm not going to leave them stranded. But I think they lose out when they get no comments from me at all, just an email with a C+ on it. It usually works, too. Some students panic more about deadlines than before. It also helps good students make choices. I had an honors student who had the proverbial hell week. For me, she put off the essay by a few days and concentrated on her exams. She still earned an A from me. But that's the exception, not the rule.

Now, these strategies work only for me. I'm not advocating them for everyone. I do think some people follow some policies more out of habit. I've had colleagues say that they never thought it was possible to do anything other than decrease the grade on late assignments. Not all of them have switched to my style, but I hope people think a bit more about why they do what they do. Da Man has now been teaching for a couple of years, and he does the exact opposite of me. He forbids electronic submissions and decreases the grade on all late assignments. To meet his class objectives, these guidelines work best for him. These strategies I describe here fit my goals more fully. Frankly, I think students need to be exposed to as many techniques and "rules" as possible. I think they learn more by having to negotiate different expecations for different people. That seems to be one of the greatest life lessons we can offer them.

As for my first-year studens who led to this particular discussion on this particualr day, ten out of fifteen have not turned in their essays yet, and the deadline was over five hours ago. I've never had more than a couple miss before, and many of them did get their first essays to me on time last month. There are many reasons why this could be happening, and I'll ask them about it on Tuesday. The first essay was an narrative portrait, and this essay is a standard interpretive analysis. This essay is harder, and some of them have be struggling. Some did not keep up with the reading and realized that mistake too late. Some may be struggling with college and deadlines in general. It is midterm season, after all! And some might be truly apathetic.

I've been teaching long enough not to be upset about it. Hey, I've graded the five essays that came in on time and have returned them already. A few hours have now opened up for me this week! It's annoying, but I know I did a lot to help them get this essay done, including a week of in-class writing workshops. I've posted information about revisions, so they know they have to get something to me in the next week. After all, you can't revise what you never wrote in the first place. There are a few things I can still do to help them complete the next essay more easily. They still have to write it and get it to me on time, though!

I'd love to hear what people think about these strategies and what works for them. The more ideas and options we have circulating, the better for our students, I think.