And why not?
A few notes after my first week of work:
1. In his address to us employees last week, the Pres. of my new institution used Eno's "Big Here and Long Now" as his leitmotif. I was very pleased by this.
2. I'm finally able to do online research and journal reading from my home again. Also, Interlibrary Loan has come back into my life (how I missed it!).
3. To punish me for going back to work, summer has returned and it's been beautiful here the last few days. At least I was able to go for a walk on the beach this afternoon. Dude, I can totally walk to the beach from my house.
How are you dealing with the onset of the semester/fall in general?
Oronte Churm has suggestions on how US News might calculate its rankings of higher ed institutions. Heh heh.
Just in time to head out to the BFA show, I've finished all of my grading. It's always such a relief to know that the semester was successfully concluded (for most, at least). So many good conversations in class--this was a pretty good semester, all told. But did I mention that I'm glad we're done now? It'll be nice to see the seniors' work without any other school stuff on my mind.
And also, weather permitting, tomorrow will be the first hike of the season. Woohoo.
"Chicago's plates are the Hummel figurines of the feminist movement."
From Maureen Mullarkey's 1981 review of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party.
Spring break starts Monday, and here I am saddled with three classes' worth of midterms. That's how it goes, I guess. My goal was to have 50% of their grades accounted for before the mid-term evaluations go out in two weeks, so here we are. Plus I thought it would be nicer for them not to have to study over break. Right?
I heard from some students that another instructor held a Jeopardy-style tournament in class in lieu of a test. Sounds like everyone wins: fun is had, candy is dispersed to the winners, and there's no grading afterwards. But if you choose to go this route, with no traditional test grades, what are they graded on? I suppose that they're doing projects throughout the semester, or maybe there's a cumulative end-of-semester exam (a method I don't really embrace).
I've tried before to move away from the strict two-thirds tests/one-third project model and to come up with other ways of evaluating student work, so I'm filing the tournament idea away for future application.
Even though it's still summer here, the school year has clearly begun. Traffic is a bit heavier on our street, I assume with UW people. And there are kids wandering back and forth to the high school down the road.
Somewhat inexplicably, I'm also getting ready for the semester to start. I really didn't think I'd find a teaching job so soon after moving up here, but I did, and my first class is today. It's my first evening class ever--in a three-hour chunk. Sounds brutal if you're used to two 75-minute classes.
Let's see how it goes.
At Inside Higher Ed, some comparative data on average faculty pay. Not surprising:
Full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members earn approximately 26 percent less per hour than do tenure-track assistant professors.
Part-time, non-tenure-track faculty members earn approximately 64 percent less per hour from their institutions than do tenure track assistant professors.
...
The median, full-time, tenure-track faculty member is paid $8,424 per section taught, compared to $5,435 for full-time, non-tenure-track, and $2,174 for part-time, non-tenure-track.
Insurance and other benefits, or rather the lack of them, only increase the discrepancy. Ouch.
...grading finished, grades turned in. Checked in at various campus offices re: the end of my contract. All that remains is to turn in my keys to the physical plant, and my time as an adjunct is over. At the moment I'm so tired I can barely think, but I'm sure by tomorrow the remorse will set in. This class had such a good vibe, and nearly every meeting yielded good discussions. I'll miss it, no doubt, but the prospect of writing full time (what does that mean? 40 hours a week?) is really appealing at this point. I'm a bit sad to consider that this was my last teaching stint for at least a year (if things go well, only a year; I suppose it's pragmatic to assume it might be longer).
At Invisible Adjunct, an excellent offshoot discussion of lecture and discussion methods in the college classroom. Struggling with all of this myself at the moment...
Still trying to decide whether and how I will use a blog in the class I'm teaching next semester. Anne Galloway recently posted a bit on this, and that discussion is helping tremendously as I wonder and worry about the benefits and possible pitfalls of required blog writing.
[Hoping to engage this further at some point; see below for caveat.]
Stuart Rojstaczer at the Post writes that he no longer gives C's in his classes, for reasons best represented by him in the essay—go have a look. Here I just have to say that Texas did very poorly on his Grade Inflation survey; apparently in the last decade our mean GPAs have risen a quarter of a point, with no (reliable) corresponding rise in the quality of students.
And yet I don't know of anyone in my department (perhaps there are secret lurkers) who would shy away from giving a student a C, a D, or an F if she deserved it. Perhaps this has to do with teaching a survey, again, rather than an upper-level course. I can't imagine giving someone a B who wasn't doing B-level work, under which I might roughly group things like being able to illustrate major concepts using details from an image (both in class participation and on tests).
We make the system we're working in, and Rojstaczer's argument just sounds lazy or even cowardly to me:
Parents and students want high grades. Given that students are consumers of an educational product for which they pay dearly, I am expected to cater to their desires not just to be educated well but to receive a positive reward for their enrollment. So I don't give C's anymore, and neither do most of my colleagues. And I can easily imagine a time when I'll say the same thing about B's.
Really. Am I just a delusional grad instructor with no clue about the economics of higher ed? Maybe there's some irony in there that I'm reading over.
[As a side note I feel like saying that the students who get low grades in my classes know far in advance of that slip arriving in the mail that their grades are low. No surprises. And if they know this early enough, they have time to drop the class—which might explain why I rarely deal with people who are disgruntled about grades.]
Update: Ok, having slept on it I've decided that for the full-time instructors (tenured and seeking tenure) in my department, giving a wider range of grades, including failing grades, has more pitfalls than it does for me. I'm sure that they're less likely to fail people than I am. I think, for the time being, I'll enjoy the freedom I have.
The Little Professor offers a view of grading (and grade inflation) that closely resembles my own. It seems to come down to having expectations that fit your students.
I'm now teaching the same class I did last semester and for the first time I'm able to make some comparisons. What I'm learning is that I won't always be able to teach material with the same attention or enthusiasm I've done in previous cases. Who could be utterly consistent from one semester to the next, without becoming repetetive and dull? But the more important lesson seems to be that I also can't expect that my students will learn the same from semester to semester. (Things would change, I'd hope, if I were teaching some of the same students in an upper-level class.)
It's that time in the semester: we're all thinking about grading. Have a look at the discussion of Grade Inflation at Invisible Adjunct.
I must point out the reader, probably being cited by everyone who reads the blog, who quoted a colleague: "I teach for free; they pay me to do the grading."
Most of the time I feel the same: I really enjoy teaching, for lots of reasons. But I wonder how I'll feel about it when I'm full-time somewhere and more depends on how my students do than just my own feelings of accomplishment or defeat.
(Notice how I use "when" and not "if" in that sentence.)
Just read this essay at the Chronicle on the various difficulties of evaluating student work. Syncs up very nicely with my class’s schedule, as today I have an extra credit assignment coming due and will receive projects and papers on Friday. Faced with a huge stack of work to evaluate, I always feel overwhelmed. But there's still this tiny grain of excitement there, buried underneath the anxiety and annoyance: how did they do on those exam rewrites? What did they choose to work on for their projects? Will I see any Doric temples made of playdough?
The Chronicle essayist discusses grading essays specifically, and this is something I struggle with often. Not just because writing skills are not what we all wish they were, not just because many students show up to college poorly prepared by their high school experience. In my department, nearly everyone gives essay-based exams. Some include a few fill-ins or short answers, but the majority of people teaching surveys use essays. This includes me, although increasingly I find myself questioning the benefits of the essay format. First it’s the time constraint: what is reasonable to demand of a class in 50 minutes? How well-developed can a 12 minute essay be? Given that these are questions based on a comparison of two images, should I expect synthesis, or be happy when they just provide the facts I’m asking for?
Papers I grade on style and coherence, and expect that the student can make and support a thesis, that her comparisons will demonstrate some creative thought. Generally students do better when given more time, and most see this assignment (which is their third of four grades—the other three being in-class tests) as a chance to boost their average. In the past most have invested an appropriate amount of effort in the assignment.
The reason I'm bringing all this up, though, is that I've been trying to decide whether the in-class essay format as it is clung to by many in our department is useful. I have no doubts that essays, in general, are the best way to evaluate a student’s progress. It’s the time aspect that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with. I wonder what other possibilities there might be: assigning several shorter papers in which students have to trace a particular theme through different images or buildings? The department—and possibly the university—conceives of the survey as a lecture course, and the implication is that there shouldn’t be too much of an emphasis on writing. We’re meant to lecture in these surveys, but I’m never satisfied with the lecture-only format. If I thought I could organize this class so that there was time for in-class group activity, for example, I would. What to do?