b l o g o s

I am on something of a grading binge

Like most of you, probably, except for those of you who are done (yay!) or on leave (double yay!). I do my grading on the computer, so my wrist hurts, my eyes are tired, my head is throbbing, and if I hadn't taken a break to go see Slumdog Millionaire (which, by the way, is really fantastic), I think I might be a little crazy. It's so nice during the semester, I'll tell you, to have a seminar that is so packed there is no room for anyone else. The discussions, as I've mentioned on this site, power through any break, spill past the bells, and out in to the hallways. But then it comes time to grade the papers, and I admit that a little part of me wishes the seminar had been a nice medium size with lulls and fits and starts. If it were, I would be done. But instead, I am a little over half way finished with seven more papers to go, and leaving on Monday. Wish me luck.

disciplinary grappling

I have spent the week in orientation for new TAs. For about an hour on Monday, I sat in on a colleague's orientation for an oral and written communication class, and the rest of this week I have been doing--mostly observing--the orientation for Speech Comm 101, "The Principles of Effective Speaking." I'm directing 101 this year. Fortunately, there are many other people involved, including a coordinator, an assistant director, and three peer leaders (all five really fantastic) and so my main job is to think about the course itself and the training we do.

On Monday, one of the new TAs in the other orientation used English classes as a point of contrast for this particular course. The main idea there was that the writing that gets done in English classes is, well, overdone. And the unspoken assumption was that such writing (think of the words flowery, beautiful, ornate, and use really elaborate 19th-century gestures when describing such writing) is not only condoned by English professors but demanded. Hm. That's not really how it works, though it is often true that students in English classes come in thinking that this is what we want as well.  The result is often (not always, but often) clotted, thesaurized prose that needs to be pruned. Badly.

Then today in a really terrific teaching demonstration, the assistant director of 101 used English papers several times as a point of contrast when describing the kind of writing students need to do for an oral presentation. She used the phrase "write for the ear." Writing for the ear, incidentally, is something that really, really interests me, and Quintilian was a little obsessed with it too. And while it seems like writing for a composition class is more writing for the eye, written discourse also, Sharon and I stress in our book, ought to be composed for the ear. Why? Because when someone reads, even silently, they often hear the language. Now, it is definitely true--and I'm pretty sure this is what the a.d. was getting at--that writing for an oral presentation needs to be quite crisp, and that shorter sentences are almost always more articulable and therefore more easily understood when spoken (or in the case of a conference featuring mostly English professors and graduate students, when read out loud). It's also true that when speaking from an outline of keywords, it would be next to impossible to recall a complex sentence, draped with dependent clauses, kind of like this one.**

But. I praise crisp, short sentences in essays written in my English classes just as much (perhaps more than) I do really complicated sentences. Both can have a certain elegance that gets worn away when the same sentence structure gets repeated over and over. This wearing away might not happen as easily in oral presentation, but I'm still thinking about that.

There were many more instances in which my training as a teacher of English seemed to go against the training as a teacher of communication. There is, in one (the speech comm class), a huge emphasis on thesis statements, whereas it's a big no-no in current writing pedagogy to build everything around a thesis sentence.* I also had to wrestle my own hand back to the desk to keep from pointing out a really big (huge) misplaced modifier in one of the model sentences today. (I didn't want people to roll their eyes at the English professor.) For now, I'm content to observe and to reflect on the disciplinary distinctions--or assumptions about disciplinary distinctions--and what might be behind them.

*note: For the record, in the hour I sat in on the oral and written comm orientation, I didn't hear a single mention of thesis statements, so I don't want to generalize from 101 to the entire discipline of communication. Instead, there was a heck of a lot of rhetorical training going on. That probably owes to the person in charge.

**updated to add: I've had even more a.d.-inspired thoughts on the two-wayness of memory in writing-for-speaking pedagogy, but I've recorded those in a comment below, like the 8th one or so. I expect to have much more to say on these distinctions (and nondistinctions) later on in the term, and am loving the comments, so keep 'em coming!

question for all you grad students out there

(or for those of you who were in grad school recently enough to remember, really, what it was like):

Packet or .pdfs?

I'm working on my grad seminar for the fall, and in addition to a small handful of required books, I have a bunch of articles that I'll need to make available. It's tempting to go the .pdf route to save folks the bulk and cost of the packet. I would make the readings available at the beginning of the semester, in week-by-week folders online. Or, there's the old-fashioned coursepack, made at the local Notes-n-quotes. Advantage: the readings are all there and ordered, and students don't have to spend time finding and printing them. It will probably cost 50 or 60 bucks.

I don't think a combination is the way to go--too confusing.

The .pdfs are slightly more of a pain for me, but once they're made, they're made, so long term, this would be good. I'm well familiar with the issues from the professor's standpoint, though, and so I'm really interested in hearing from those who will either shell out money or time.

Oh, and Happy 4th! There are more holiday-appropriate images over at no caption needed if you're doing some holiday cruising. But leave a comment before you go!

the art of updating

A few weeks ago, I went to see "The Visitor" with my friend J. If you haven't seen it, it's a good, if predictable, film about immigration in the U.S, or, to use a term of Burke's that I like, about the bureaucratization of the imaginative. The main character, Walter Vale, is played by Richard Jenkins, who played the dead dad on Six Feet Under. Jenkins makes the short leap to playing dead wood here, starring as a burnt-out economics professor at a liberal arts school (Connecticut College) who holds a degree from--this got some laughs in the theater I was in--the University of Illinois. Vale is currently on a one-course load, with a reduction to work on his nonexistent book, and he's teaching the large lecture course he claims to have taught every year for twenty years. The filmmakers, in order to establish how burnt out he is so that they can move on to the real substance of the film, which takes place in Manhattan, show him "updating" his syllabus with a little bottle of white out, listlessly blotting out the "6" in 2006, presumably to replace it with a "7." But everyone who has updated a syllabus knows this wouldn't work; the dates would be all screwy.

Walter Vale and his white out are on my mind this afternoon as I set about updating a syllabus of my own. Mind you, only twice have I been able to repeat the same course, so I'm no Walter Vale, but it is so much easier to update a syllabus than it is to create one anew. It's also fun. I get to relive meetings that went well and revise those that did not. This is a graduate seminar on Aristotle's Rhetoric that I have blogged about here before. Indeed, a couple of photographs from that class were in blogos's second post ever. Aw.

What else is fun about updating? On the more brainy side, there's the opportunity to search and read new stuff that has been published since I last taught the class. And on the more mundane side, I bet I'm not alone in taking perverse pleasure in the mere act of consulting the university's academic calendar to see when classes will begin this fall, when Thanksgiving lands, and when it's all over. Somehow distilling a course down to fifteen days and a few pages makes it all seem entirely doable. But I have also always liked calendars and schedules--they appeal to my big-picture side, the side that needs to know what needs to be accomplished and what will be happening in the coming months. 

And the fact that I'm not even a little bit sad to be returning to teaching after a sabbatical? This tells me I'm in the right profession and will hopefully never find myself as despondent about my job as the white-out wielding Walter Vale.

here's another reason I love my job

This past Saturday, I hooded my first doctoral student, K. It was an occasion for happy reflection. Like when K came to my office many years ago, planted herself in the chair facing me, put one arm on my desk, leaned forward, and said matter-of-factly, "I want you to direct my dissertation." I was still quite new to faculty life, and I wasn't even sure if directing was something I was supposed to do, but she didn't let me protest; instead, she listed for me the reasons we were a good match. And we were. 

Having been a secondary teacher before coming to graduate school, K was the kind of person who knew what she wanted, so there were many, many moments when I felt like she was training me rather than the other way around. We had our share of disagreements, but they were just disagreements, never arguments, never bitter fights. And she coaxed me to her side just as much as she capitulated to mine. She let me be tough on her, and by maintaining the frankness with which our advising relationship began, she taught me how to let someone find their way while still providing strictures. Her maturity (and my year away) kept me from becoming a helicopter mentor. She also spoiled me just a little because she is fantastic with deadlines, not something that all graduate students--or many academics for that matter--observe.  She even gave birth during it all, but still didn't slow down, learning to focus and write during her son's naps, which is really amazing if you think about it.

And K can write. Oh, can she write. But even more than that, she can revise. She would internalize feedback from her writing group, from me, from her other advisor (who is also a hugely important mentor for me), sort through what she wanted to do and what needed to be done, and she would work steadily and regularly, through frustrations and breakthroughs, through to good drafts, and finally to damn good final versions. K thinks about writing as a craft, and she knows that a craft takes regular and protracted contact with that which is being crafted.

So she returned this weekend, at the end of her first year in her fabulous new job, along with her hubby and her friends A and J, who also returned from their fabulous new jobs, and whose dissertation committees I had the privilege of working on. Having them all back here, smiling in their regalia on the quad, mixing news from their new jobs (and new grants!) with sweet nostalgia for their grad school town, brought to light yet another way that this job can be, really, breathtaking.

happy woman professor day

This morning I had to send a flurry of emails to rearrange my teaching schedule for next year, and I am amazed by how easy it all was. My two departments have wonderful administrators and staff members who can--and do--make things happen lickety split. I'm very pleased with how it all turned out; it looks like I'm going to be teaching my Aristotle and Rhetorical Studies course in the fall (a.k.a. "Spawn of the Dead").

In this course, we read through Aristotle's Rhetoric bit by bit, focusing on one main concept each week. These concepts include persuasion, philosophy, invention, topoi, phantasia, delivery, and more. And each week, in addition to reading the next section of the Rhetoric, we read "around" Aristotle's tome, which is to say, we'll look at writings by his contemporaries as well as a selection of secondary texts, in order to see both what A was responding to and also to consider how his writings have been taken up. The course is inspired by a wonderful classics course on A's Poetics taught by Helen Cullyer at the University of Pittsburgh, and it's designed to give grads a primer in ancient rhetoric, a stronger grasp of Aristotle, and a deep understanding of how A's concepts have shaped the field of rhetorical studies for better and worse.

How appropriate, then, to realize in the midst of the administrative breeziness and my pedagogical zeal that today marks the second annual Happy Woman Professor Day.

As the link above will show, HWPD asks women professors to post about things they like about their profession. One thing I love about my job at the moment is the fact that we get a sabbatical every six years. This is a pretty intense job with so. many. things and people to keep track of and such high expectations wrt research and publishing that it's very nice to be told to go away and focus on research for a semester. Very, very nice. And while this time gives me a chance to recharge my research batteries, I have also found that I've been increasingly fond of my colleagues of late, and (surprise) that I already feel excited about teaching again, when the time comes. So, mushy gushy. There it is.

Now if I can only remember to read this in, say, October.

calling all users of ARCS

As I mentioned in a previous post, Sharon and I have been asked to cut a rather ridiculous number of pages from the last four chapters of our textbook. That we can't take those pages from the first eight, which are running very long, is frustrating. That we weren't told our book would have to be the same exact size as our previous edition is infuriating.

On the chopping block, then, are two chapters: chapter 9 on sophistic topics (definition, division, etc.), and chapter 12 on Memory.

Collin and I were joking on Friday about how Sharon and I were going to erase memory from the canon, and while it's kind of funny, it's really rather depressing. The problem is that the chapter on sophistic topics has some usable stuff for composition--like what goes into a good definition, and how definitions can be incorporated into arguments--whereas the memory chapter has some useful stuff for history of rhetoric, such as a treatment of ancient memory systems, which were pretty damned cool. Complicating matters is the fact that our book, for those of you who don't know, has two audiences: those who use it as a resource for ancient rhetoric, and those who use it as their comp textbook. So you can see why we're at something of an impasse about which one to cut.

Our editor favors memory, probably because the bucks aren't made with grad students who consult our book on the shelves of their comp office. We on the other hand cherish those readers.

Trimming down at this point isn't really an option.

So I'm asking you, dear readers, especially those who use ARCS in either of the ways mentioned above, which one could you do without?

happy things

Happy thing one: One of my advisees got a review essay accepted at CCC!

Happy thing two: Another of my advisees did a really impressive revision of a chapter she's been wrestling with for a long long time. It's completely different and really, really good. And she is on the job market to boot (which of course raises the degree of difficulty).

Happy thing three: What will it be?

Let's ask magic 8 ball:

         

Better not tell you now.

The sly bastard.

Dear Awesome Undergrad:

On Wednesday I spent some time writing your letter of recommendation for graduate school--a true pleasure. You have assembled quite an impressive profile so far, and those GRE scores are eye-popping. Working with you has resembled a gift more than work. I am grateful for that.

Today I spent a couple of hours sending those letters, and I am almost as grateful for the care you took to assemble your application binder, which included:

1. a cover to do list, including a checklist of the schools to which you are applying and the means by which I should submit the recommendation (online or by mail)
2. all the responses and major assignments you wrote for my classes
3. individual recommendation sheets with addressed, postage-added, PEEL AND STICK* (rather than lick and seal) envelopes, with post-its on the ones I needed to sign across the seal

Very best of luck to you, and congratulations to the program that lands you.
DH

*Note to grad studies directors everywhere: don't throw away the envelopes. They can be an important material indicator of thoughtfulness.

styles of engagement

Today I taught my grad seminar and then rushed over to Greg Hall in the philosophy department for the first meeting of a faculty reading group on Plato's Timaeus, and I have this to say:

Going from a room full of smart, energetic people who have read the same set of texts and have been building a conversation for a few weeks and who really take seriously the challenge of being open minded, believe in the value of augmentation, and thrill at combining knowledges across the table to make something new, moving from that to a room full of smart people who have read one small section of one text and have arrived ready to defend their own readings to the end--defend them to the end!--can be, well, stunning.