Entering a New World

So, grading papers was a little bit of a bummer this weekend.  While one student who struggled with the last assignment worked extraordinarily hard to produce an A paper this time around (after one of the most productive workshop sessions I’ve ever moderated, meetings during office hours, and three complete overhauls of his rough draft), a few of my students who had previously done well took a few steps back, committing some of the same errors that I had previously thought were limited to three or four individuals.  Namely, they are using their chosen texts as excuses to talk about their personal views on a subject rather than producing an analytical argument based on clear evidence from that chosen text.

A few of these students came after me after class to say that they recognized the mistakes that they had made, that they didn’t like the papers that they had written either (which is encouraging) and that they would spend more time on the assignment going forward.  But I do think that a number of my students are laboring under that common misconception that the study of literature is essentially a free for all, that the “subjectivity” of interpretation means that interpretation is essentially personal, that there are no wrong answers, that anything can mean anything.  So, I brought in Vladimir Nabokov’s essay “Good Readers and Good Writers” today in order to talk about what the first task of any reader or observer of a work of art is:  to fully understand what the creator of a work was trying to communicate.  This means setting preconceptions aside and allowing oneself to be transported into a particular world with particular protocols, particular rules and causes and effects that may or may not have direct correlaries in the real world:

If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.  Nothing is more boring or ore unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.  We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so the first thing we should do is study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know.  When this new world has been closely studied , then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.

For Nobokov and for philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, this is a moral and pedagogical imperative:  art and the effort to faithfully understand what the author is trying to communicate is how we learn to come into sympathy with other perspectives.  Upon re-reading this essay, I was surprised at how much I resist this way of reading, how suspicious I am, in fact, of looking at a work of art as a contained body of meaning, hermetically sealed off from its context.  The good postmodernist in me believes that meaning are unstable, that artists, in many ways, do not control what their works mean for each individual who encounters it.  The feminist in me is inherently suspicious of author’s motives and of the way in which the realities contained in texts are both socially constructed and participate in the construction of contingent knowledge as historically transcendent.  In other words, in my own work, I reflexively attend to everything that comes after “then and only then” in that paragraph and perhaps do a poor job of helping my students master everything that comes before it.  Because while I still hold that meaning is unstable and contingent and that artists are not infallible, I have to get my students to a place where they can see that while there are multiple available interpretations for any given work of art, the number of interpretations is, in fact, limited.  Otherwise, I get papers on why the Will Smith character in I Am Legend is a Christ figure based on a criteria so loose that it could apply to almost any protagonist in any narrative in Western literature.  I also wind up getting papers that tend to read, say, sections of Paradise Lost as an object lesson or a sermon–no matter which character is speaking at any given time–rather than a Milton’s particular entry point into theological and political debates about the nature of freedom and its relationship to both divine and civil law.

Thus, at the moment, I am trying to summon up the good little Formalist in me and disciplining myself to ensure that my students understand, first and foremost, what the author means before moving on to any historicist or postmodernist critique, though this is the first class in six years where I’ve really felt the necessity of doing so.  Either I’m becoming more aware, or I’ve just been dealt a class that is particularly in need of work at the level of reading comprehension.  It’s probably a little of both.

 

Teacher Complains about Students on the Internet. America Loses Its Collective Shit.

Editorial Note:  I have revised my thinking on the Natalie Munroe case somewhat after coming across some new information.  I will let the original post stand but encourage readers to look at the follow up.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one:

“Be careful what you post on the Internet,” Natalie Munroe told her students year after year.

Maybe if she had listened to her own advice, she wouldn’t be where she is right now: Suspended and at risk of losing her teaching job at Central Bucks East High School.

Munroe, who has taught English at CB East since 2006 and has a salary of $54,500 this year, wrote a blog called “Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?” for more than a year. In between blog posts about muffins, Food Network stars and her favorite movies, she posted long, profanity-peppered rants about Central Bucks administrators, her co-workers and her students.

“My students are out of control. They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners,” she wrote in one post dated Oct. 27, 2009. “They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire and are just generally annoying.”

Munroe wrote multiple posts in the year that followed in which she talked about her own boredom and used profanity to describe her students.

Ok, so let me get this straight:  over a year ago, a high school English teacher ranted about students in general (using no names or identifying information) on an anonymous personal blog, using such slanderous language as “rude, disengaged, and lazy” as well as unspecified swear words, and the internet has taken to its fainting couch, called for its smelling salts, and demanded that Munroe be taken to the village stocks and flogged for her misbehavior.

Oh yes, and evidently she has been suspended with pay, and her job is potentially in danger. If you go wade through the comments at some of those links (tread carefully) and hell, even some of the actual reporting, you’ll note that a number of depressing assumptions and stereotypes about educators:

That good teachers are long-suffering and eternally compassionate and never ever ever complain about their students and that teachers who complain are bad teachers who hate their jobs. I am here to tell you that I am married to an award-winning high school teacher.  We regularly hang out with other high school teachers, and they bitch about their jobs all of the time, including their students.  And most of them still qualify as excellent teachers with strong testing records and a legion of adoring students.  Because here is the thing:  teaching is not missionary work, even though state legislatures seem to want to make it so.  Teaching is a job, and sometimes people have bad days at work.  Teaching is also a job that involves a lot of interaction with people, and as a rule, people sort of suck.  Teaching is also a job that requires the job-holder to negotiate an often needlessly complex and even hostile bureaucracy.  And teaching, much like parenting, is a job that carries with it enormous unrealistic expectations that no human being could possibly fulfill.  So sometimes they need a safe space to tell it like it is.

That individuals who do not find the teenage propensity toward laziness and narcissism occasionally frustrating do not belong in teaching. If that were true, our list of eligible teachers would be desperately slim indeed.  Some commenters on this story have said something to the effect of:  “I hate teenagers, but I didn’t sign up to work with them everyday.  She shouldn’t be a teacher, because she clearly hates children.”  I would submit that there is a vast difference between having flashes of sublimated rage toward the teenager who tells you to “fuck off” under his breath after you’ve asked him for his homework and “hating children.”  It means that occasionally, some teenagers are disrespectful asshats, and like most emotionally healthy individuals, and most teachers have a appropriate emotional responses that may or may not get vented once said asshat has been sent to the Vice Principal’s office and said teacher has entered the sanctum of the Teacher’s Lounge.  Hell, if we applied this “you must find all minors uniformly adorably under all circumstances in order to interact with minors on a daily basis” rule fairly, we as a species would have to stop reproducing.

That teachers should never, ever communicate a general displeasure with students or her job in any form that could be detected by her students. Many have seen this incident as an object lesson in using discretion on the internet, and while I think the point is somewhat valid, I also think that insofar as Munroe’s blog was anonymous and never once named any students, administrators, or even the school, district, or state in which she was teaching, and given the sheer vastness of the internet, Munroe was reasonable to expect that no student would ever come across what she had written unless they were looking.  And I find compelling her claim that some student or parent may, in fact, have been cyberstalking her in order to find incriminating information.

That teachers whom students dislike are invariably bad teachers. There was a teacher at my high school who I hated but who I now recognize was an excellent teacher.  She was ballsy enough to teach evolution in a biology department at a Christian school in a state that barely teaches it in the public schools, and she expected the utmost from her students.  Considering that this was a college prep curriculum, I think she understood that she was not getting paid to coddle anyone, that she had a right–in her Honors class–to expect students to rise to the standard she had set based on two decades of prior experience.  She was also frequently accused of “hating kids,” despite the fact that she was raising a developmentally disabled child to whom she showed nothing but compassion.  She just did not have a warm, motherly, nurturing personality, and students who were used to making A’s made B’s in her class, and as a result, she was the target of numerous campaigns by students and parents to get her fired.  Luckily, her administration backed her up every time.  Anyone with a passing acquaintance with children can tell you that they resist and often resent being challenged.  And parents all too often over-identify with students who think they are being treated unfairly and are often unwilling to see their child as part of the problem.

Now, it would appear that not everyone is calling for Munroe to be drawn and quartered, and sympathy for Munroe has been rising ever since she began blogging again, revealing herself to be articulate and lucid when it comes to the issues facing public education today.  And one of those issues she has correctly identified is the fact that when we talk about improving education, we’re almost always talking about teachers:  teacher’s unions, teacher tenure, teacher qualifications, merit pay, how to deal with failing teachers, etc.  The conversation is always about holding teachers accountable.

And yet, with all of that specialized training, people second-guess and blame teachers for so many of the problems that exist in education today. Do we go to our doctors and lawyers and tell them how to do their jobs, and second-guess everything they do? Do we stand alongside chefs at restaurants and tell them we think the boulliabaisse looks like it needs some more saffron? No. We trust them to do what they’ve been trained to do. Of course it’s ok to ask questions along the way so we can know why something is happening or understand the process–but at the end of the day, some trust needs to come into play, too. Let’s let teachers do their jobs.

I doubt anyone could possibly disagree that accountability must be a part of teaching, but accountability in recent years has increasingly meant sucking all of the creativity, art, and dynamism out of teaching.  And it has increasingly been used as a way for politicians to look like they’re doing something without admitting that we as a society seem either unwilling or unable to hold students, parents, and communities accountable as well.  Any teacher will tell you that she can pour all the love and creativity she possesses into her teaching, but it doesn’t amount to squat if the student isn’t showing up regularly enough to receive it, and it doesn’t translate into better numbers if the student refuses to hand in an assignment despite being given every opportunity to do so.

The trend among administrations has been to avoid telling parents and students difficult truths.  One of the items that made Munroe’s detractors so irate was a list of fantasy responses she made up as replacements for the “canned comments” her administration insists teachers use on report cards:

At report card time, we are obliged to add a comment to supplement and/or expand on the letter grades. We are strongly encouraged to use the “canned comments” option, which have a limited number of comments from which teachers may choose to explain students. However, much like options on those magazine quizzes where you sit there scratching your head and mumbling, “Well, I’m a little bit A, but somewhat D, too… um, I wonder what I should pick,” some of the options don’t work for some of the kids. Some of the students don’t fit within the canned comments. And none of them allow teachers to truly reflect any sort of behavior or academic deficiency in any truly negative way. Examples of canned comments are: “cooperative in class,” “achieving at ability level,” “needs to complete homework,” “needs to increase study time,” “doesn’t take advantage of second chance learning.” So I took the opportunity for myself and the possible amusement of my friends–since I was content and expected for everything to stay low-key with only my 7 pals reading my ramblings–to list those real behaviors that exist but that you just aren’t allowed to write. (Parents don’t want to hear the truth; administrators don’t want us to share the truth.) But regardless, they weren’t comments meant to fit all students, and nor were they even for every student I wrote “cooperative in class” about–I was just being pithy when I made that joke.

In a very real way, Munroe’s “offensive” post on this matter vividly illuminates the utter disingenuousness with which teachers are asked to evaluate their students.  Spared difficult news about themselves, students (and their parents) can proceed blithely from high school to college without ever learning hard lessons about either the subject matter they are supposed to be learning or about the realities of entering the world as an adult.  And then they wind up in my classroom, incredulous that they are receiving mediocre marks for mediocre work.

Assignment Design and Making Your Grading Sessions Less Mind-numbing

Tenured Radical has a fantastic post up today about designing assignments in a way that encourages students to write scintillating analysis instead of boring dreck:

Whose fault was this?  My fault, that’s who.  I had given a highly conventional assignment that signaled to the students (correctly) that they were being tested (without being honest about saying so), and so the vast majority of them stayed in the right-hand lane and drove slightly under the speed limit (metaphorically speaking.)  Furthermore, I had failed for years to attend to this whole business of what students were talking about when they referred to a “prompt”:  hence I had given one assignment, and they had essentially received a different one than I intended.  So the next time around, lest I should be tempted to drive a pencil into my ear while grading, I gave them complete and utter freedom.  I asked them to choose their own document and to choose it based on something they were passionate about now.  I asked them to compare their own enthusiasm for this topic to the enthusiasm expressed in the document, and to use the document to understand better how their own passion was rooted in a history of other people who cared about this thing too.  When students asked me if it was OK to write about something they didn’t really care about, I said no.  Then I took the time to talk with them about what they did care about, and urged them to write about it.

I’m probably stating the obvious, but the way an assignment is designed and presented will, for better or for worse, greatly impact the quality of student’s output.  As TR argues, a rote, conventional assignment that suggests that a student is being tested on course content will inevitably generate rote, conventional regurgitations of that content.  If the major objective of that class is to get students to memorize and apply content, then that may be perfectly fine.  But if the major objective of your class is to get students to practice the analytical skills relevant to your discipline–as it is with many introductory humanities courses–then it pays to allow a bit more room for creativity, and it can be a good thing to get students to practice those skills on objects that appeal to them.

I’ve been using a literary studies version of this assignment for the past two years, and I have been thrilled with the results.  Since the Writing Flag program at my university requires me to assign a variety of assignments with varied lengths (which is something I would probably do anyway), I determined that reading one hundred odd essays on course texts would probably bore me and my students to death, so I have them produce a conventional literary analysis on a course text at the end of the semester, but before that, they write three short (1000 word) analyses of artifacts they find outside of class employing one of the critical methods we discuss.  They can pick a painting, a song, a poem, a novel, a film, a television show, a video game–pretty much anything is up for grabs.  And the results are not only twenty entirely unique essays for each assignment but essays that are actually fun to read.  For one thing, while many students feel intimidated by Literature with a big L and mistrust their abilities to even understand them, much less say something new and interesting, many of them are capable of producing erudite readings of texts and artifacts with which they are more immediately familiar.  And no, I do not receive sixty essays on television shows each semester.  In fact, current pop culture makes up a surprisingly slim percentage of the topics chosen, and even when it is the selected topic, we’re usually talking about sophisticated and original assessments of the movie Pulp Fiction from an RTF major who bothered to do secondary research.  Last year, I also had a student who wrote three essays on paintings from the escuela cuzquena school, a student who wrote about a Czech shrine, and a student who compared an Obama speech to John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity.

My class is actually a topics course in Literature and Religion, and other teachers frequently express surprise that I’m willing to talk about religion in my class, since the potential for controversy is so high (made a bit worse due to the fact that our state legislature now reviews our syllabi).  However, I have yet to encounter a problem, and I suspect that this assignment is part of the reason.  While I insist that their analyses avoid confessionalism or polemic, there appears to be something both cathartic and educational about getting them to talk about cultural productions that are important to them and allowing them small space for sorting out their own beliefs relative to a much bigger world of ideas without ever having to debate Biblical literalism in class or argue about whose god can beat up all of the other gods.  In other words, while the essays are academic essays, they allow some small space for self-expression and creativity as well as critical thinking.  And that’s pretty much what any assignment in a course like this should be designed to do.

Finally, while there’s no way to scientifically prove it, I do think that making this the dominant writing activity for the lion’s share of the semester makes the end-of-term essays on a course text more original and more interesting.  The short essays do seem to make students more sensitive to the context in which texts are produced and build confidence in their own abilities to tease out an author’s agenda.  At the very least, the short assignments seem to demystify the whole notion of authorship and of Literature as a monolithic, impenetrable body of signs by encouraging them to use the same tools of analysis that they use to unpack more familiar, more accessible cultural products.

“Cultural” Problems and Structural Roots

Thomas Benton’s recent post on the Chronicle post on the hostility toward professors currently flowing through the media had a link back to a previous article about anti-intellectualism in the U.S. more broadly.  In this article, he reviews the arguments of many writers on the topic, from Richard Hofstader to Susan Jacoby and reflects on the symptoms of anti-intellectualism that seem to pervade his classroom:

As someone involved in education, I take the concerns of all of those writers quite seriously: The abilities and attitudes of students affect my life on a daily basis. It is my job, as I see it, to combat ignorance and foster the skills and knowledge needed to produce intelligent, ethical, and productive citizens. I see too many students who are:

• Primarily focused on their own emotions — on the primacy of their “feelings” — rather than on analysis supported by evidence.
• Uncertain what constitutes reliable evidence, thus tending to use the most easily found sources uncritically.
• Convinced that no opinion is worth more than another: All views are equal.
• Uncertain about academic honesty and what constitutes plagiarism. (I recently had a student defend herself by claiming that her paper was more than 50 percent original, so she should receive that much credit, at least.)
• Unable to follow or make a sustained argument.
• Uncertain about spelling and punctuation (and skeptical that such skills matter).
• Hostile to anything that is not directly relevant to their career goals, which are vaguely understood.
• Increasingly interested in the social and athletic above the academic, while “needing” to receive very high grades.
• Not really embarrassed at their lack of knowledge and skills.
• Certain that any academic failure is the fault of the professor rather than the student.

About half of the concerns I’ve listed — punctuation, plagiarism, argumentation, evaluation of evidence — can be effectively addressed in the classroom. But the other half make it increasingly difficult to do so without considerable institutional support: small classes, high standards, and full-time faculty members who are backed by the administration.

His assessment is avowedly subjective, though there are many items on that list that I think most college instructors would recognize in their own students.  He also does an excellent job of connecting the pedagogical solutions to these problems to larger structural problems within the university:  the increasing reliance on contingent labor and enormous class sizes even in freshman comp classes, to name a couple.

But Benton still commits a problematic fallacy that is ever so common in discussions of educational reform:  the assignment of blame to broad cultural forces rather than to specific problems in the way education is dispensed in this country.  The issues he identifies–lack of intellectual curiosity, unwillingness to perform effective research, inability to evaluate sources, and inability to produce effective, premeditated argument–could, in fact, be a product of the anti-intellectualism of the Bush era or the advancement of social media.  But as Tenured Radical so brilliantly argued a few weeks ago, there is peril in mislabeling problems as “cultural” when doing so effectively dismisses the issue as someone else’s fault, someone else’s problem:

In a college or university setting, however, when someone starts talking about “culture” it is too frequently the end of the discussion, an explanation for why things must be as they are and/or a way of distancing from something nettlesome. You will most frequently hear the notion of culture being invoked by administrators and faculty when what is being addressed is a problem, or set of problems, that either no one wants to name or can name — at least, not without opening a can of worms that general consensus dictates ought not to be opened.

Benton is, in fact, repeating a complaint so often heard among those who teach college freshman, some of whom suffer from a lack of exposure to college-level research and writing than a blanket contempt for learning.  So the real target for these sorts of complaints is actually high schools, who have failed to prepare their graduates for the kind of work they’ll be expected to do in a college classroom, presumably relieving the prof who teaches them of the burden of having to cover “fundamentals.”  The problem isn’t so much the fact that students are so goddamn anti-intellectual and lack the attention span God gave a goldfish as the fact that many students–particularly those from the poorly funded high schools where an enormous chunk of class time is spent teaching to standardized tests–sometimes aren’t as prepared as we would like them to be.

And the issue isn’t really about teachers, though I would love to see more incentives for public school English teachers to earn Masters degrees in Rhet/Comp and related fields.  Rather, teachers seem to be hamstrung by an educational system that favors standardized tests as the essential component of assessment rather than the research essays they’ll be expected to produce in college.  These are timed essays (students are usually given 45 minutes) in which students must simply bounce off the prompt and provide some sort of argument without having a chance to search for authoritative sources or really do much else but provide a gut-level response to the problem.  And this isn’t just the case in state-level proficiency exams.  This is what happens in the AP and SAT tests as well.  My first few weeks in any freshman comp class is usually spent deprogramming the types of skills they’ve honed in order to perform well on those tests:  the ability to instantly formulate a response to a question and spit out a 5-paragraph first draft that they will never look at again.

It doesn’t help that this is also the assessment model favored in many college lecture courses in the form of the short answer essay test.  While those essays are presumably informed by a semester’s worth of material, these tests do not teach the skills of research, source evaluation, and revision that produces good writing out in the real world.  As Benton says, this may simply be an artifact of ridiculously huge class sizes brought on by insufficient staffing, but I have to scratch my head when I see (and these do exist) profs who use these sorts of tests and then complain about the poor quality of freshman writing, when they themselves have offered no meaningful opportunities for students to reflect on and respond to feedback, much less revise their essays. Furthermore, there is a serious problem when a 3 or 4 on the AP test is taken as prima facie evidence of a student’s competence, when, for all of the reasons listed above, it does no such thing.  Yet students who earn such a score are frequently exempt from freshman composition classes or discouraged from taking them.

So we need reform at the high school level, obviously, but I would also like to see a better conversation among college instructors about precisely what sort of instruction students are getting in English classrooms in high school and what implications those conditions have for the way we conduct ourselves with today’s freshmen.  Rather than writing them off as lazy and high school English teachers as mere Ed majors who can never understand the nuances and complexities of our field, we would do better to simply understand the conditions under which both teachers and students are laboring and respond to them.  That doesn’t necessarily mean “lowering standards” (though these contentless, non-specific references to “higher standards” are another big problem in debates about education).  It means recognizing that these are skills that need to be taught and reinforced over and over again whenever we have the opportunity.  Teaching the fundamentals of writing and argumentation is the job of a college professor, whether any particular prof wants it to be or not.

But I would also like to see a better conversation take place among college and high school instructors.  I had the opportunity to be part of a ground-breaking program that paired college-level rhetoric courses with AP English classes in under-performing high schools.  The college students mentored the high school kids online and during campus visits, and I worked with the high school teacher to provide rigorous instruction in the fundamentals of argumentation, including evaluation of sources.  The high school kids ultimately produced two essays:  a rhetorical analysis and a researched position paper.  On paper, this sort of curriculum sounds like a dream, but in practice, we learned that there are some ridiculous logistical complications.  It is very difficult to get “buy-in” from both college and high school administrators on this sort of thing, especially in a recession, and any instruction that might be relevant to this program had to inevitably give way to the school’s testing schedule, which, I discovered, took up an enormous amount of time.  My final visit to the high school class had to be canceled thanks to changes in the testing schedule, and some other collaborations completely fell apart because the high school teacher could not give students enough in-class time to work on their projects. Nevertheless, that experience radically changed the way I teach college freshmen.

It’s comforting to think that problems with student writing these days can be traced to their generation’s inherent laziness or recalcitrance or their inability to communicate anything in over 140 characters, when their are structural problems behind those deficiencies that really aren’t their fault.  Furthermore, there are actual things that can be done to remedy these problems in the classroom, even if conditions aren’t completely ideal.

The Millenial Whisperers

Over at The Chronicle, a forum post on using technology to teach Millenials has been sitting at the top of the queue for quite a while.  The discussion is interesting to me, as I happen to be a bit of a tech geek, but there’s something curious about the way the conversation is often framed both in this thread and elsewhere.  The OP posits that “Millennials are supposed to be quite different from the previous generation” in their use of technology.  The video linked to the post describes them as “digital natives,” a generation that has grown up amid digital technologies and social media, but as a member of a tech-saturated generation myself (different rubrics label me either as a Millenial or as Gen-Y, though I think those terms are sometimes used interchangably), I’m not sure that this relative comfort with communications media implies specific imperatives for the classroom.  I’m not sure that this generation is so profoundly “different” that technology must be used to “reach” them.

As this post at Historiann indicates (as well as this post on Not of General Interest, which Historiann links), universities and school systems are exerting increasing pressure upon instructors to implement new media and tech in the classroom:

Administrators love technology, because people think it’s doing something magically special for education so they buy it and want professors to use it regardless of its actual strengths and powers.

The belief that technology has magical powers in the classroom extends to this idea that using social media makes one a sort of Millenial Whisperer, as if this generation were a different species or culture (digital “native?”) communicating in foreign ways.  There’s a strange way in which this effort at bridging a generational gap has become decidedly othering.  What makes it worse is the way in which an affinity for new media has increasingly been depicted as a dependency or pathology.  (For what I think is a truly balanced looked at internet addiction see the work of research psychologist Nick Yee, who prefers the term “problematic usage” to addiction.)   While it’s true that you can hardly turn around without seeing an alarmist article about a kid who spontaneously combusted because his parents took away his World of Warcraft account, most Millenials actually are capable of functioning without the mediation of a computing device.

Most students are, in fact, quite accustomed to traditional classrooms, given that most public schools cannot afford to equip every class with state of the art equipment.  Last fall, I was assigned a classroom that was like a portal to 1985, with a chalkboard and an overhead projector, and we all did just fine.  As a rule, I think that students appreciate an instructor who genuinely cares about their progress more than they care about whether you tried to incorporate Facebook into your course.  Be a good teacher first, then figure out how to use technology creatively and effectively, but only if it is going to a) make your life easier, or b) help you achieve some specific pedagogical goal.  And stick to tools that are comfortable to you.  If it seems like an unnecessary hassle or a poor fit to you, I guarantee it will feel that way to your students, who can smell pandering insincerity a mile away.

As for me, I’ve found that a class website, whether you manage it through Blackboard, a wiki, Facebook, or some other means, can be an invaluable tool, and next Spring, I am going to look at using WordPress blogs in order to help students think about writing for broader public rather than just writing what they think the teacher wants to read.  I am skeptical about the use of texting, because not everyone has an unlimited plan, and I suspect that being charge 10 cents to receive updates from your instructor probably isn’t much fun.  Using stuff that students can access for free in their home or in a lab is essential for me.

Technology can be incredibly useful for educators, but it is not a magical tool that will make you relevant to the generation you’re teaching.  Sincerity and genuine investment in what you’re doing, as it turns out, is pretty timeless.

Using PBworks for Paperless Classrooms: A How-to Guide

The benefits of running a paperless classroom are many and obvious:  reduced environmental impact, lighter bags, no students running in late on the day a paper is due because the lab printer was down, etc.  While many instructors are comfortable using institutionally based software like Blackboard for this purpose, I’ve come to prefer the free wiki site called PBworks due to its simplicity, intuitive interface, and friendliness to collaboration.

PBworks runs on a wiki software, which means that each page can be edited by anyone approved by the site administrator.  This makes it ideal for group projects, peer review, sign-up sheets, and generating things like collaborative vocabulary or source lists.  While not terribly fancy, you can effectively store and organize all of your class materials on it and use it as your class home page if you so desire.  On student evaluations, students consistently cite the wiki as one of their favorite things about my class.

Getting Started: When you first visit the site, you’ll want to select “For Education” and “Sign Up Now.”  You’ll then be given three options at varying costs.  Our department has its own paid-for account, but most people will want to simply choose the free “Basic” option.  You’ll then be prompted to name your site.  Pick something like “americanlitfall10.pbworks.com.”  Keep in mind that you can create as many unique workspaces as you want, so you can have “americanlitspring11.pbworks.com,” etc. in the future.  I usually elect to keep my class sites private.

This is what your wiki will look like when you first create it (click to embiggen any of these screenshots).  Note the four tabs at the top left of the page and the two tabs underneath.  Each page in your wiki will have a “View” and an “Edit” tab.  Remind your students that you have to be in “Edit” to change anything.  They will inevitably forget and get frustrated.  The first thing you will probably want to do is change your front page.  I usually put my vital course and instructor info in there.  Just for reference, here is a screenshot of my latest wiki (with my personal information blacked out).

There are two fields on the right that you’ll want to make note of:  The Pages and Folder list and the Sidebar.  You can edit the Sidebar like any other page just by clicking “Edit the Sidebar” at the bottom.  The edit interface features all of the standard items in a MS Word, Blogger, or WordPress interface.  You can add hypertext links, images, and video.  You can also provide links to documents that you’ve uploaded to the site.  I use my sidebar for links to important class documents like the grading policy and reading schedule.

Next, you’ll want to look at the file management system.  There are shortcuts to all of your files and folders on the right hand side of every page, but you can also look at everything on your wiki by clicking “Pages and Files” on the top left.  This interface will allow you to upload files and create folders for each of your students (or they can create the folders themselves).  Here’s a view of one student’s folder, with the folder list on the side (last names have been erased for privacy purposes).

Paperless Submissions: Students can either upload assignments as Word files or cut and paste text into the standard page fields.  Both methods offer different advantages, which I’ll discuss in a moment.  You’ll want to make sure, however, that in any case, students give their documents and pages unique names that designate their name, the assignment, and the current draft.  Files that are uploaded with duplicate names will overwrite one another, and having unique names makes it easier to find an assignment that hasn’t been put in the proper folder.  You’ll note that each page/file is also time stamped, which is handy if you are a stickler about enforcing deadlines.

If you return to the main page, you’ll notice a field called “Recent Activity” at the very bottom.  It’s a short list of the last several things that were done on the site.  If you click “More Activity,” you can see every action performed on the site in order.  This is part of what makes my oddball late policy doable.  This feature allows me to grade papers in the order in which they were received and save papers that did not meet the deadline for my next grading period. (Note:  the fact that the site rigorously tracks changes and who makes them is a bit of insurance against any shenanigans.)

Once you have your site organized the way you want it, you can start inviting your students.  If you go up to the Users tab on the top left, you’ll see a button that allows you to add more users.  Simply enter the email addresses of the people you wish to add.  They will be sent a link and prompted to create a PBworks account.  Alternatively, you can send your students the link to your site and allow them to request access.

Peer Review: One of the many activities PBworks allows you to, by virtue of the fact that anyone can edit any page, is virtual peer review.  If you don’t have a computer equipped classroom, this activity can be assigned as homework.  Have each student copy and paste their paper onto a new wiki page.  Then assign two students to read each paper.  Have the peer reviewers go in and enter their comments in a different color and identify their color at the bottom of the page.  Students can also use the comment feature at the bottom to make narrative comments and write into the page itself for line edits or specific comments.  Note the image on the left (from a rhetoric class two years ago).

Paperless Grading: Using the wiki for grading purposes is tricky due to FERPA restrictions.  While the wiki is technically private, it isn’t perfectly secure, so you should never ever post grades or any sort of evaluation on the wiki.  Here is what you can do though:  have students upload their final paper submissions as a Word document.  Download them and use the Word comments feature for marginalia.  Then type up a summary comment either at the top or bottom.  Then use a secure service like Blackboard to email the document to the student.  I don’t even put a grade on it, both out of paranoia and because I think it helps the student engage with the comments rather than worrying about the grade.  I post grades on Blackboard’s gradebook, and students know they can check for it there after they receive their paper.

Paperless Sign-ups: Here’s one more nifty thing.  I have various activities (presentations, one-on-one conferences) that usually require a sign-up sheet.  Not any more.  You can just create one on a wiki page and have students go in and enter their names.

So those are the basics.  There are many, many different ways that you can use this site, especially if you have a networked classroom.  Look here and here for a few assignments that use the wiki for collaborative assignments.

Passive Voice Shenanigans

In the wake of Kathleen Parker’s absurd column on Obama’s use of the passive voice in his speech on the Gulf oil crisis, Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log has been doing blog posts on this much maligned grammatical construction.  His dismaying finding is that many of the people clutching their pearls over the passive voice are completely incapable of correctly identifying it.  The subject of today’s post seems to be completely unaware that the passive voice is a verb construction.

Passive Voice

Many people write in passive voice because that is how we’ve been taught to write “formally” in high school composition and then in freshman college English. It is habit and as a result of the habit, the passive voice is prevalent in self-written resumes. The problem with passive voice, however, is that it is just that — passive! A resume needs to have punch and sparkle and communicate an active, aggressive candidate. Passive voice does not accomplish that. Indicators of the passive voice:

• Responsible for
• Duties included
• Served as
• Actions encompassed

Rather than saying “Responsible for management of three direct reports” change it up to “Managed 3 direct reports.” It is a shorter, more direct mode of writing and adds impact to the way the resume reads.

This is, of course, not the first time I’ve seen or heard people in business combine irritating grammar snobbery with ignorance, and the consequences for students and college graduates entering the professions is disheartening.  As Pullum says:

This is serious business for America’s economy. It does nothing for getting Americans to get into employment, realize their talents, and contribute to tax revenues, if we simply extend into resumé-writing the promotion of nervous cluelessness that seems to be the main strand in English language instruction in the USA. It is so easy to get sensible and intelligent native speakers terrified that their language isn’t good enough. And the business of getting people into that state is being managed by teachers and tutors and advisers and columnists whose lofty opinion of their own expertise is matched only by their utter failure to grasp even the rudiments of sentence structure.

Awesome.  But hold on a sec.  Pullum here picks on “English language instruction in the USA” as if it’s some sort of monolith.  In fact, there’s a substantial body of pedagogical theory on composition, pedagogical theory with real, immediate implications for practice in freshman English classrooms and writing centers.  Many teachers staffing freshman composition classes in Rhetoric and Writing departments are trained to help cultivate fluency, not simply pick apart sentence structures until students become so nervous about their comma placement that they forget about the need to write an arguable thesis.

The problem is that there isn’t much cooperation, from what I can tell, between academic departments that specialize in composition and other parts of the university–including career development services.  Writing Across the Curriculum programs tend to be organized around the principle of getting students to produce a certain volume of writing throughout the semester, without much attention to what kind of writing instruction is being advanced in those classes.

So, you know, the utopian solution to that would be better funding for departments that staff comp classes and more outreach to other parts of the university.  But our department just got cut back by about half while the college that houses and funds it builds a new building.  It also wouldn’t hurt to get all the university faculty that deals with writing in a room and allow some Comp people to box them about the ears with the Clue Stick.  Too far?  Maybe.

On No. 2 Pencils

Historiann has been hosting a lively discussion of helicopter parenting and its impact on student attitudes and performance at the collegiate level that prompted this apropos reflection on “the larger forces that have shaped our students and their approach to higher education before they darken the doors of our unis.”

As Squadratomagico said in response to last week’s post, “Now I better understand the student who inquired, when I asked if there were any questions about the final exam, “Can I use a blue pen?” They’re paralyzed with indecision and fear of making a mistake on their own, because they’ve never had to decide before!”  I too have anecdotal evidence of increasing student apprehension–but I’m not sure if that’s due to parenting or the No Child Left Behind-style of test-driven education, which has put I think too much pressure on children to perform particular skills and not enough on creative problem-solving.

I have very little to say about helicopter parenting.  I’m not a parent myself, and both my parents run their own businesses and have my three sisters to attend to, so I have a hard time getting them to even call me back.  Actually, I sort of adore them for that.  But being married to a public high school teacher and still being temporally close enough to both college and high school to remember the confusion and anguish brought on by pen colors, I have some strong feelings about the degree to which the enforcement of arbitrary standards have hampered the intellectual and social development of many very bright students and discouraged many struggling students from even trying in the first place.  If I had to make a list in my head of the top questions I field in emails from students, it read something like:

• How do I cite a corporate-authored website in MLA format?
• Is it ok if I use loose leaf paper in a binder for my journal instead of a composition book?
• What should the header on my paper look like?
• Do our papers need to have a title?
• Where should the page numbers appear on our paper?

Ok, sometimes students want to run a thesis by me or have a question about comments on a previous draft, but it seems like a great deal of my energy is taken up responding to (and student energy is taken up asking) questions the answers to which go something like:  “I’d have to look it up.”  “Don’t care.”  “Don’t care.”  “Sure, why not.”  “Don’t care.”

I mean sure, I clearly state on each assignment page that papers should come out to so many words, typed and formatted legibly, with MLA documentation, but it seems like in absence of instructions about what astrological sign students ought to write their papers under, some students will still experience panic attacks over what I like to call “No. 2 pencil” issues.  No. 2 pencils, of course, are the required writing implement for all standardized tests that students begin taking soon after they acquire the motor skills to wield one.  And if  use a No. 3 pencil, of course, your test results will be invalid, and something horrible will happen to you.  No. 2 pencils have become the emblem of the bureaucratization (that’s totes a word–my spellchecker says so) of education, of the arbitrary rules that teachers are expected to enforce, rules that have some root in common sense that has been long forgotten.

Why do we use No. 2 pencils?  According to someone who had the time and inclination to do the research, pencil grades have to do with the hardness of the lead, and therefore the darkness of the mark.  No. 2 pencils are the medium grade and the ones usually sold for everyday purposes, like filling out multiple choice bubbles.  They’re dark enough to be read by the scanner and light enough to be effectively erased to avoid scanning errors.  But basically, “No. 2″ pencil is just fancy-talk for “garden variety pencil you buy at Wal-Mart.”  It’s not really that complicated or threatening.  I guess everyone sort of knows that intuitively, but it’s rarely articulated in the presence of, say, anxious second graders, who are only beginning to figure out that horrible things might happen to them if they breach rules that don’t always make complete sense, that don’t have any basis in an objective moral code (or even common sense), that aren’t really tied to academic performance but nevertheless seem to have DIRE IMPLICATIONS for their educational future if breached.

But, of course, that’s how things work in our highly bureaucratized world.  I fork over the $200 to have my tax return done at H&R Block purely because I fear that I will be carted off to prison for tax evasion if I don’t fill out my form properly.  We’ve developed an entire service industry around making sure that we are in compliance with laws we wouldn’t know existed if there weren’t experts to tell us.  And while that’s sort of a nuisance, I get that this is how things have to be in a society this enormous.  Life is complex in the twenty-first century, and I suppose there is some value in teaching students to mind the details, to read the directions, to put their name on the top of the test paper.  But, I don’t know, maybe there’s value in giving students a break every once in a while, or at least not dole out academic punishment for non-academic offenses or oversights?

This is, to a certain degree, what I’m talking about in my diatribes on participation grades and draconian late penalties:  some policies designed to police those details, while well-intentioned, are a distraction from the actual process of learning, critical thinking, and discovery.  While ingraining good habits with regard to direction-reading and punctuality is great, I think it’s far more helpful to simply take the time to make those policies transparent, to explain how they help keep things running smoothly.  It helps to, on the one hand, recognize that students have probably never heard an explanation as to why their paper needs to be double-spaced, while on the other hand treating them like reasonable people who are capable of getting the fact that instructors who grade by hand need room in order to legibly mark a paper.

As another example, let’s think about citations.  Citation, whether it’s in MLA, Chicago, or APA format is designed to do a couple of things:  1) Protect the intellectual property of the person who had that idea or said those words in the first place, and 2) Give people who are interested in your topic a way to find your source.  Once you take those two things into consideration, the format for citation starts making some sense.  In APA, the convention of putting a date in addition to a name in a parenthetical citation is there because in scientific writing, knowledge sort of has a shelf-life, so you want to put the date in there so that people know that you are citing the most recent studies, or, conversely, that you are referencing some classic or foundational work.  Dates tend to be less important in the humanities, but people who do literature are concerned about editions and such, so you need that info in your works cited.  I try to give this little speech to each student who comes into the writing center with citation questions, then I remind them that most people don’t have every single bibliographic format memorized.  This goes for professors too, and the conventions change all the time.  I’ve had professors correct things in my Works Cited that were correct according to the current edition of the MLA handbook.  So, marking off a point for using a comma instead of a period or whatever is distracting for the student and preoccupies them with stuff that, in the end, would get corrected by a copywriter (who might herself be wrong, depending on which edition she’s working from) if they were publishing on a professional level.

The students who get shaky when they forget to bring the right color pen to a test make me shake my head, but the most distressing part of this emphasis punishing people for stuff that really doesn’t matter that much (other than maybe a slight annoyance or inconvenience) is the thought that there are probably some kids who don’t even make it into a college classroom for these very reasons.  There are probably kids who, in the second grade, were shut down because Mom and Dad were working 100 hours a week at minimum wage and couldn’t think about making sure that their kid had the right kind of writing implement or properly ruled notebook paper (OH MY GOD when I think about how hysterical some teachers I had in middle school got about “college-ruled” vs. “whatever-I-can’t-even-remember-ruled”).  There are kids who have enough trouble paying attention to the content itself–for any number of factors ranging from undiagnosed disabilities to hunger–to remember the myriad arbitrary details pertaining to how their notebooks are supposed to be organized.

I mean, yes, teach kids how to get themselves organized.   Teach kids to be punctual.  Teach kids to pay attention.  Teach kids to read the directions, but let’s at least make this stuff transparent.  And let’s quit doling out academic punishment–which has distressingly real implications for students’ long-term opportunities–for non-academic crap.

E for Effort

Despite what some of the trolls who come around here may think, I do not actually think everyone deserves a trophy.  I do not award A’s just for showing up to class, and I actually am a pretty tough grader.  That said, I believe that writing is a skill that requires substantial effort and practice, and I do not believe that the predominant grading paradigm does a good enough job of connecting effort and personal achievement.  As I’ve said before, students usually carry around the assumption that people get A’s on papers because they are “good writers,” and people get low C’s and D’s on papers because they are “bad writers,” while the space in between is populated by people who either believe they are good writers but the teacher just hates their style or that they are bad writers who just get lucky some times.

As Marzano, Pickering, and Pollack indicate, students attribute their success or failure at a particular task to one or some combination of four causes:  ability, effort, other people, and luck.

Three of these four beliefs ultimately inhibit achievement.  On the surface, a belief in ability seems relatively useful–if you believe you have ability, you can tackle anything.  Regardless of how much ability you think you have, however, there will inevitably be tasks for which you do not believe you have the requisite skill. [...] Belief that other people are the primary cause of success also has drawbacks, particularly when an individual finds himself or herself alone.  Belief in luck has obvious disadvantages–what if your luck runs out? Belief in effort is clearly the most useful attribution.  If you believe that effort is the most important factor in achievement, you have a motivational tool that can apply to any situation.

I posted previously about a study that showed that children who are praised for ability alone are less likely to take risks and seek out challenges and more likely to collapse in the face of adversity than children who are praised for their hard work.  Marzano et. al. echo what Bronson and Merryman say about praise, but they also highlight the importance of teaching students about the relationship between personal achievement and effort.  While their techniques are aimed at (and are probably most likely to produce long term results with) young children, having students track effort and achievement in the college classroom seems like a relatively easy, efficient, and enormously beneficial way to reinforce the importance of effort.  Marzano et. al. recommend having students engage in periodic self-assessments, in which they grade themselves according to rubrics based on effort and achievement.  The effort one looks like this:

4–I worked on the task until it was completed.  I pushed myself to continue working on the task even when difficulties arose or a solution was not immediately evident.  I viewed difficulties that arose as opportunities to strengthen my understanding.

3–I worked on the task until it was completed.  I pushed myself to continue working on the task even when difficulties arose or a solution was no immediately evident.

2–I put some effort into the task, but I stopped working when difficulties arose.

1–I put very little effort into the task.

The achievement rubric (also on a 1-4 scale), looks like this:

4–I exceeded the objectives of the task or lesson.

3–I met the objectives of the task or lesson.

2–I met a few of the objectives of the task or lesson, but did not meet others.

1–I did not meet the objectives of the task or lesson.

The authors also stress the importance of having students set their own personal goals in the classroom, and even talks about a school that uses a “Personal Best” Honor Roll alongside its regular Honor Roll to recognize students who had met or exceeded their goals (established with the help of a teacher) for the semester along with the students who had earned high grades.  Next year, I plan to adapt these two methods to help my students set individual goals for the semester, predict the effort required to achieve those goals, and assess their progress throughout the semester.  Their first journal assignment for the semester will look like this:

–Being handout–

First Journal Entry

This assignment is designed to help you set goals for achievement and effort in this class.  The audience for your answers to the following questions are for you and you alone, so their is no need to try and come up with an answer you think I will like.

Achievement Goals–In a brief paragraph, describe what would need to happen in order for you to feel that you had experienced success in this class.  That could mean receiving a passing grade, getting an A, improving your writing according to some criteria that you define, or some other achievement measure that you come up with.

Effort Goals–In a few paragraphs, talk about what you will need to do in order to achieve those goals.  Try to be as specific as possible, though there are no strict guidelines for your answer.  You can talk about number of hours spent on each assignment, sticking to the recommended deadlines for first drafts, the number of revisions you will probably have to do to get the grade you desire, coming to office hours every other week, etc.

–End handout–

A few times during the semester (after the first paper is handed back, midterm, end of term, etc.), students would be asked to do self-assessments that refer back to these goals.

–Begin handout–

Self Assessment

The following assignment is designed to help you assess your progress in class thus far according to the objectives set by your instructor and the goals for effort and achievement that you described in your first journal entry.  For each item, circle the number next to the score that best describes your performance in class so far:

Achievement in the Course: score your performance in class based on the objectives described on the syllabus/on the assignment handouts.  You can factor in grades so far as you feel they reflect your performance at this point.

4–I have exceeded the objectives of the course.  I have kept up with the reading, turned in all assignments on a reasonable schedule, have completed at least one revision of a paper, and have been earning primarily A’s and B’s.

3–I have met the objectives of the course.  I have kept up with the reading, turned in most assignments on a reasonable schedule and have been earning primarily C’s and B’s.

2–I have met a few of the objectives of the course.  I have done some of the assigned readings, turned in some of the assignments whose deadlines have past and have earned at least a C.

1–I did not meet the objectives of the course.  I am behind on the reading and/or have not turned in any assignments.

Personal Achievement Goals: score your performance based on the “requirements for success” that you laid out in your first journal entry.  Ex.  If your goal was to get a B in the class, and you have earned B’s on all papers thus far, then you get a 3.

4–I am exceeding my personal goals for the semester.

3–I am meeting my personal goals for this semester

2–I have met some of my personal goals for this semester, but not others.

1–I have not met my personal goals for this semester.

Effort: Score your performance based on the effort goals you described on the first assignment.  If you aren’t sure how to score yourself, reference the longer descriptions that go along with each score.

4–I have exceeded my effort goals for this semester.  (I worked on each assignment until it was completed.  I pushed myself to continue working on the task even when difficulties arose, and I viewed those difficulties as opportunities to strengthen my understanding.  I sought help from my instructor or the writing center when I needed it.  I have turned in assignments according to the schedule that I, the student, established and have done the number of revisions I felt were necessary to exceed my personal achievement goals.)

3–I have met my effort goals for this semester.  (I worked on each assignment until it was completed.  I pushed myself to continue working even when difficulties arose.  I have turned in assignments according to the schedule I established and have done the number of revisions I felt were necessary to meet my personal achievement goals.)

2–I have met some of my effort goals for this semester.  (I put some effort into each assignment, but I stopped working when difficulties arose.  I have not been seeking help when I need it.  I have turned in some assignments on time, but still have some to complete.  I have not yet done the revisions I need to do in order to meet my personal achievement goals.)

1–I have not met my effort goals for this semester.  (I put little or no effort into each assignment. I have not been staying on schedule or seeking help in getting started.)

–End handout–

Talking Privilege

Commenter Jo, in response to my post on participation grades, brought to my attention an article by Heejung Kim in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called “We Talk Therefore We Think? A Cultural Analysis of the Effect of Talking on Thinking.”  The overall point of the article is so salient to the issue of how we use discussion and participation in class that I decided it needed its own post.

Kim set out to discover if differences in cultural attitudes about the relationship between talking and thinking had any effect on people’s preferred modes of cognitive problem solving.  She takes as her jumping off point an article from the San Jose Mercury News, which stated that:

[M]any colleges in the United States with a large population of Asian and Asian American students are concerned about the students’ silence in class. The silence of Asian students is a concern for universities who want their students to be “independent thinkers.” Motivating this concern is the notion that getting students to talk is a way to make them “better” thinkers. In discussing this issue, the news article details the concern of many educators who are trying to make silent students more vocal, and at the same time, reveals a number of educational assumptions about the relationship between talking and thinking.

As I’ve said before, educators socialized according to a Western model that privileges verbal assertiveness tend to treat (non-disruptive, on topic) vocal classroom participation as an objective good and as an essential educational tool.  As Kim’s summary of the newspaper article aptly indicates, Westerners tend to treat talking as a sign of independent thought, a sign that the student is processing and assimilating the information in an individualized manner rather than passively taking it in.  East Asian cultures, however, favor an internalized, reflective model of thinking, such that children socialized in this mode tend to be less verbally expressive and teachers tend to “see quietness as a means of control, rather than passivity, and appreciate silence more than American teachers.”  Obviously these are pretty big generalizations (I know plenty of American teachers who wish their students would shut up), but as broad descriptions of cultural attitudes toward verbal expressiveness, Kim’s study raises some important questions about whether or not talking really is a sign of “better” thinking.

In three separate studies (with an admittedly small sample of college students), Kim found that the performance of East Asian students (second generation immigrants who had spoken English since childhood) was adversely affected when they were asked to “think aloud” while solving a problem.  Similarly, European American students were distracted when they were asked to suppress articulation while trying to solve the same problem.  In one study, it was revealed that student’s attitudes toward the relationship between talking and thinking were significantly associated with this performance difference, and Kim found that parental approaches did have some impact on those attitudes.  In short, Kim points to the need for further research in this particular area but also suggests that we educators should examine the degree to which our expectations about what constitutes a healthy learning environment are a product of socialization and how we may be disregarding the learning preferences of certain members of a multi-cultural classroom.

Of course, one can’t essentialize about this.  There are plenty of outspoken persons of East Asian extraction just as there are numerous introverted European Americans.  While Kim chose to organize her study samples along ethnic lines, it’s clear that acculturation is the much bigger issue here.  Those of us teaching in the U.S. American system need to be aware of the extent to which both extroversion privilege and racial/cultural stereotyping mediates our classroom policies and interactions with students.

Recently, my partner wandered into my office while I was working and expressed bewilderment at how quiet I am when I write, expressing a clear preference for “thinking out loud.”  I do catch him nattering to himself while he creates lesson plans from time to time, but perhaps it’s ironic that he is, in fact, the child of a Japanese immigrant and my ancestors have been in North America since the 1700s.  I have been a pretty textbook introvert since my personality first began to emerge, preferring to work and play quietly by myself, to talk less than my peers, and to withdraw into solitude when I need my batteries recharged.  And I know from first hand experience that children who are quieter and more self-contained tend to raise eyebrows among parents and teachers.  I was held back a year in elementary school at the recommendation of teachers because I didn’t seem to have the social skills or “emotional maturity” to handle first grade (no, I did not fail kindergarten).  My introversion was frequently treated as a mental illness, and throughout middle and high school, I had to develop the skills for “passing” as an extrovert.  How much more frustrating this experience must be when one’s personality or learning style intersects with cultural and racial stereotypes about “quiet Asians,” who really may be quite gregarious and extroverted but trained to keep quiet in class. As Kim says,

In American education and work settings, talking is strongly emphasized and communicative assertiveness is generally regarded as a sign of a healthy personality (e.g., Cook & St. Lawrence, 1990; Henderson & Furnham, 1982), and anyone who keeps silent tends to be devalued as shy, passive, or lacking independent opinions (e.g., Jones et al., 1986; Zimbardo, 1977). The consequence of the collective silence of East Asians in America is that they are associated with some of these culturally negative traits of people who do not raise their voice.

This isn’t to say that classroom discussion isn’t a valuable educational tool and important classroom practice, but information like this does demand that we explore better ways to accommodate cultural and personality differences in the classroom.  At the very least, we should recognize that while many of us in higher education see lively discussion and debate as a good in and of itself (and I admit, even as an introvert, that I do), ours are culturally specific values that not everyone will share.  If encouraging discussion is still one of your pedagogical goals, then consider making the objectives of discussion transparent and teaching students how to actually hold the kinds of discussions you expect.

Participation grades are still a non-starter for me, though, and this study just helps confirm my position.