Joe Sixpack goes to college

I have been to two pedagogy workshops in the last several weeks that touched on (to me) a very disturbing set of beliefs that some college professors have about their students.

The assertion is made that our students are predominantly from Working Class families and thus have been socialized much differently than we have been as the Professorial Class. Therefore, it behooves us to understand the habits of The Working Class and how they affect students' ability to adopt the (desired) behavioral norms of the college environment.

I have so many problems with this line of thinking that I scarcely know where to start. First, I find the terms "working class" and "middle class" problematic these days. The speakers tended to use them as metonyms for particular lifeways, somewhat (although not totally) independent of household income. Thus a Working Class family stresses the importance of family, obedience to authority, no interest in their children's development as thinkers, and no focus on enriching their children's cultural or intellectual lives through family trips to museums and the like. The Middle Class family, on the other hand, values the intellectual growth of its children; they "perform" at the dinner table by reporting on their day, and the parents validate, probe, question, show interest. They are taken to museums and given other cultural opportunities that connect them to a wider world of ideas and diversity. And so on.

All this strikes me as wildly stereotypical and not a little bit elitist. Second, since class distinctions usually relate to income levels, it's curious that at my institution, the median family income is over $90,000 a year, not really very working-class in my opinion.

Third, these faculty members seem undecided about the degree to which they should be pushing students to adopt traditional collegiate values over the ones they've supposedly grown up with. There's a sort of awkward cultural relativism at play: on the one hand, these professors profess to believe in open inquiry, questioning authority, pushing for social change, celebrating cultural difference and the like. On the other hand, their left-leaning inclinations make them not want to privilege these elitist values over the proletariat's values of family, obedience and all that. But they can't have it both ways: what values SHOULD they be teaching?

Fourth, there is something very patronizing about the notion of a bunch of college professors sitting around looking down from on high at the proletariat they deign to teach, and talking about what backgrounds they have to "deal with" and what values they should be inculcating, and that REALLY bothers me.

Fifth, this business of generalizing by the unclear marker of "class" reduces students to known, simplified (and simplistic) categories and encourages faculty to deal in abstractions rather than the flesh-and-blood reality of the student in front of them. While I know it's the business of the so-called social sciences to categorize in order to explain, I don't find the categories persuasive or useful.

The offending professors are quite a bit younger than I, so this isn't some ivory tower rose-colored dream about "how students used to be." Rather, it's a bizarre manifestation of some grad-school-learned radical ideas run amok.

Reading books: overrated?

What is (or should be) the function of the college library at a state college, in today's technological world? I am the departmental liaison to the library at my institution: that is supposed to mean that I evaluate requests for books, journals and other materials from my colleagues, and funnel them to the library staff. We have a budget of a couple of thousand dollars a year, which seems generous enough (although we are kind of weak in the periodicals area). We can also buy books or videos (teaching orientation) with departmental funds.

I thought, when I took on this task, that building up the library's collection of recent classics in geography - important works that have withstood the fads in the discipline - would be worthwhile. The collection is very weak in newer books (1990s and thereafter), although it's clear that in earlier decades, someone was paying attention to what was being purchased, especially in environment, in planning, and in physical geography (our historical strengths).

B, though, raised some good questions about the function of a college library, 1) in a small state school and 2) given emergent technology.

cleaning it all up

Lots of parties this past weekend - feted my mother on Saturday and B's mom on Sunday.

I finished my grades on Friday and have sort of been waiting for the other shoe to drop. So far, only two email questions along the lines of "um, you made a mistake in my grade?"

It's that pesky MATH thing again. Different assignments are weighted different amounts, and missing work is a grade-killer. Students seem to think they can average what they've done and that'll be their grade. Sometimes I play along a little, and inquire how they graded themselves on class participation. (Mean, I know. But full credit for class participation is clearly defined in the syllabus, so if you sat there all semester and never said a word, you are VERY far from "full credit reflects a meaningful contribution at EVERY class meeting.")

I have put away the materials from 2 of 3 classes, but have yet to clean up the electronic files and archive them and back them up. On Wednesday this week, B and I are going to work together on getting our online courses organized for the summer. I should do textbook orders on Wednesday too. Meanwhile, the first of my writing assignments beckons (once I clean up this sty). Onward!

quantifying learning

I guess this is a coup: my college has just gotten a six-figure grant to focus on student assessment. For readers new to this particular conversation, the hand-wringing about measuring student achievement has slowly been drifting upwards from K-12 into post-secondary education:

• What are our students learning?
• What SHOULD they learn?
• How do we measure that learning?

Reactions are varied. Old-school (and tenured): "that's bullshit! Just more eduspeak to clog up our in-boxes and take time away from teaching!"

Administrative types: "We have to demonstrate our VALUE to society in the form of the skills/knowledge gained by students in college through their investment (tuition, fees and the like) and their opportunity cost of not working for 4 years." (The economic argument is a non-starter and also a slippery slope: once you go there you can't escape, but that is a subject for a longer, more philosophical post about what college is really ABOUT.)

I see the value of the approach, but I also can visualize the pitfalls. In MA, quantifying learning has been reduced to scores on standardized tests. Yeah, it's damn hard to do it through portfolios, or essays, or other broad measures that really demonstrate what a student has learned. So let's bubble in some Scantron (TM) sheets that can be scored by a machine.

Full disclosure: I NEVER use multiple choice questions. First, the clever students know exactly how to game them - they've been doing it since they were 5. Second, my students SUCK at MC as written by me - they are not used to having to THINK while they take a test. The tests they've taken reward a particular set of skills, memorization/regurgitation, that are not helpful in the college setting - nor in, dare I say it, real life.

It's easier to quantify fact-based learning on the physical side of geography ("what is rain shadow?") than in human geography ("what is globalization?") but I was amused when this came up in a recent conversation and all my colleagues in human geography were so adamant that we all teach differently and there is no commonality for a test. That too is bullshit: there are plenty of commonalities: we just don't want to have to do the work to sit down and figure out what we can "agree" on as far as testing. Yet with some work, I bet we could agree on 5-7 essay questions, and a rubric for evaluating them.

stick a fork in it, it's done

I still have final exams to grade and final grades to calculate for two classes but otherwise, it's so OVER, baby.

As usual, the last days were full of drama. Two students emailed to say they wanted to take their finals at a different time than scheduled. Well, wouldn't life be grand if faculty were basically on 24/7 call for exam week, and students could pop in whenever it was convenient to their schedule. But, alas, no. There is a makeup session at the end of exam week which is a pain in that the prof has to hand-deliver the exam and then pick it up in person (after pretty much everyone else is gone from campus), but convenient for profs at least in the sense that it is proctored at the academic support center, so usually once I dangle THAT option, students find that their schedule allows them to attend the regularly-scheduled final after all.

Then another student has been in regular contact about the possibility of not passing. I calculated his grade last weekend, and found that even if he got 100% on the final (highly unlikely!) he would still fail. So I advised him of this via email, and when he finally got the email (yesterday morning) he freaked and showed up at my office at the crack of dawn yesterday to beg and make vague references to terminally ill family members, the crisis in Haiti, and ill-defined car problems. I packed him off to the academic support center, where apparently he is well-known, since he has been on and off academic probation most of his THREE YEARS in college. The guy over there called me later and congratulated me for doing the right thing by not caving to The Begging. The admin types at my school are of the tough-love variety, mostly, which is really a blessing, when you consider how many academic blog posts complain about how the admin mostly caves to student whining, thereby undermining the faculty.

I was surprised to see a couple of other long-missing faces at one of the finals, students I'd assumed had dropped without really dropping. (For health insurance, or sports, or financial aid, apparently it's better to take the F than drop to part-time status.) So there are three other Fs in that course in the works in addition to The Beggar.

That's a new record for me, but it's not because I'm a hard-ass. If you don't come to class and you don't turn in the assignments, why would you expect to pass??? (Oh, yeah, they are also bad at math.)

Well, let's go see if I can crank out some grading, and some mathy spreadsheets (oh, soooo complicated!) of my own.

and throw away the keys

Today we visited a real estate open house (one of my favorite forms of free recreation) at the former jail in the next town. The main building was constructed perhaps in the 1830s, of massive granite blocks. The developers have carved new window openings (oddly placed in the units, generally) out of the walls and the floor-to-floor height is very large, so that smallish rooms have tall ceilings, like 12-15 feet tall.

The challenge must have been (hello, capitalism!) to maximize the number of 2-BR units. It's cleverly done in a developer sense, but not so clever in terms of the feel of the spaces. I am pretty sure that the people who laid out the units have no sense of the spatial quality of the rooms thus created. It was a plan-puzzle exercise rather than a 3D spatial exercise. But it must be very costly to gut the interior and build these units so I can't say I blame them for trying to maximize return-on-investment.

Some of the building was still open to studs (their insurance co must have been unaware of the open house) and I have to say that the construction sequencing was puzzling. They are at sheetrock and skim-coat in many places where they still haven't sandblasted the exposed brick walls. Shouldn't they have done all that prep work first??

But anyways, an interesting afternoon, and Mom came with us and found it interesting too, so a good day all around.

heart of empire

We've been back from London (spring break tour with about 85 people from our respective institutions) for about a week, and London already just seems forever ago.

If I had to sum up my impressions of the week, it would be in this: "Empire abides." My point of view is a bit slanted, sure - but in all the museums and sights, the sense of trade and growth and more trade and global connections was just so strong. Of course it's a major narrative point of the museums and the economy - and has long been, but I wonder if the average Londoner feels that too?

Back at the day job, we are at the point in the semester when all the problem-people finally come out of hiding and begin to negotiate for their fate. Should someone be allowed to continue in the course when they haven't attended since early February? So many students seem to think that personal tragedy ENTITLES them to special consideration. I don't mean to be harsh - but I really don't buy it. If you just do the readings and the assignments and tests and never come to class, is that an acceptable substitute for contributing to the classroom community?

In my grading schemes, about 25% of the final grade is based on doing the in-class work and on class participation. I suppose that even if I allow these tragic souls (their stories are the stuff of Lifetime movies) to carry on, they are unlikely to pass - which represents a cruelty of a different sort on my part - better to cut their losses while they can, in my opinion. They never see it - youth is so optimistic.