Thinking about Assignments and Grading

Claire Potter at Tenured Radical has a wonderful post on how we create assignments, what students get out of them, and to make the whole process more interesting.

I hate nothing in my job more than grading the same boring essay over and over again. It makes me want to jump off a bridge. And because I'm bored, I work very slowly and it hurts everything else in my life too. I have developed some pretty good assignments I think. I usually assign final papers where I tell the students to work on whatever topic they want within the parameters of the course. That usually results in some very interesting work. Sometimes in my survey courses, I have students look at how the past is interpreted on the internet. That's been relatively successful except that some students never get that they aren't doing a report on the Civil War, they are writing a paper about how modern Americans think about the Civil War. I didn't do that this year in either of my survey courses and I think I regret it. Because as soon as I give students a specific "prompt," a word that I really hate for an unspecified reason, I know I am going to get some very boring papers. If I didn't feel the need to make students pay at least moderate attention in class, I'd probably eliminate the midterm entirely because that's also boring.

One of Potter's best points is not to waste tons of time correcting every grammatical mistake:

Do you write lots and lots of marginal notes on the paper, spending hours correcting everything and re-diagramming their sentences?  The truth is, although you are trying to be the opposite of the teacher I describe above, this freaks students out.  Although you have spent maybe an hour on this, feeling like you are a really caring teacher, the student may see them as a blur, as grammatical correction collides with interpretive questions, typos, basic misunderstanding of the text and long-winded attempts not to utilize the first person or appear "biased."  If a paper is really muddled, it is a waste of your time to do this:  far better to sit down with the student, ask a couple questions about what s/he intended, and describe how s/he might have gone about writing such a paper.

One common grumble I hear from faculty is:  "I bet I spent more time grading it than s/he spent writing it!"  While that probably isn't technically so, it may well be so that the paper was written at the last minute, and that the student had not done the work necessary to write the paper of which s/he might be capable.  How much better would it be to find this out in the course of a conversation?  Better yet, to take the opportunity to underline in person that a better effort over the long term would produce better written work.  A fair number of students think they "want to work on [their] writing," as if writing were disconnected from the other work in the course.

Of course, it can be rather time-consuming to have a lot of individual meetings with students. And if you are teaching classes of 75, I don't know how possible that would be. At the same time, I don't know that it's significantly more time consuming than spending 30 minutes going through the grammar on each and every paper. And it's far less boring to talk to my students. On the other hand, students do need to know how to improve their writing. So it's an interesting dilemma.

In any case, we (or I at least) need to have more discussions about how to teach, craft assignments, grade, and interact with students.

LBJ

One of the many things to love about LBJ--just by quoting him, I can swear up a storm in my class.

Top 100 Events in American History since 1945

I am creating my syllabus for my U.S. history course since 1945. Because the course is at least as much thematic as chronological, I am creating a 100 most important events list to include in the syllabus. Here's what I came up with. Comments? Anything egregious that I am missing? Anything dumb that I have included?

1. August 6, 1945—U.S. drops atomic bomb on Japan; World War II ends 8 days later
2. 1946—Winston Churchill gives “Iron Curtain” speech in Missouri, tensions rise between United States and Soviet Union
3. 1946-63—Baby Boom—record amount of births in a period of economic growth and increased consumerism leads to the most dominant and self-conscious generation in American history.
4. 1947—Unveiling of Truman Doctrine, announcing the U.S. would do everything in its power to contain communism
5. 1947—Marshall Plan enacted, providing American aid in rebuilding western and southern Europe, advances the Cold War significantly
6. 1948—Berlin Airlift shows American resolve against the spread of communism and Soviet aggression
7. 1949—Creation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
8. 1949—China becomes communist, Republicans use event to paint Democrats as “soft on communism”
9. 1950—Senator Joseph McCarthy asserts he has list of communists in the State Department. Although he has no such list, McCarthy builds upon national fear of communism to make himself the nation’s most powerful individual. Eventually falls in 1954 after accusing the military of communist sympathies. Nonetheless, McCarthy defines the 1950s as a decade of suppression of left-leaning thought and action.
10. 1950-53—Korean War
11. 1951—U.S. tests hydrogen bomb
12. 1951—Release of The Day the Earth Stood Still, beginning of science fiction films standing in for American fears about the Cold War
13. 1952—First rock and roll concert in Cleveland
14. 1953—Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason
15. 1953—Hugh Hefner launches Playboy magazine
16. 1954—Supreme Court declares segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education
17. 1954—Television becomes increasingly common
18. 1955—Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by a young Martin Luther King
19. 1955—American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) merge, signaling an end to the great period of American labor organizing.
20. 1956—Elvis Presley becomes international star, rock and roll becomes music of America’s youth
21. 1956—President Eisenhower signs Interstate Highway Act, leading to massive government investment in road building and disinvestment in American downtowns and public transportation
22. 1957—Federal court orders Little Rock to desegregate schools, violence results and forces federal government to intervene.
23. 1957—USSR launches Sputnik, beginning of Space Race
24. 1959—Cuban Revolution brings Fidel Castro to power
25. 1960—4 North Carolina A&T students begin sit-in at Greensboro lunch counter, begins sit-in movement around South.
26. 1960—Food and Drug Administration approves birth control pill for general use
27. 1961—Freedom Rides test willingness of federal government to enforce desegregation decisions, violence results.
28. 1961—Bob Dylan releases first album
29. 1961—East Germans raise Berlin Wall
30. 1962—Cuban Missile Crisis—U.S. and Soviet Union come dangerously close to nuclear war
31. 1962—Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, exposing the terrible environmental damage of pesticides and the chemical industry, eventually leads to banning of DDT and other toxic pesticides.
32. 1963—Birmingham campaign of civil rights movement, Martin Luther King leads March on Washington to pressure President Kennedy to support civil rights legislation
33. 1963—Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique, frequently seen as beginning of modern women’s movement
34. 1963—Assassination of John F. Kennedy
35. 1964—Gulf of Tonkin resolution, giving tremendous power to make war to the presidency, significantly ramps up American involvement in Vietnam
36. 1964—Freedom Summer in Mississippi—attempt to register African-Americans to vote, violence results throughout Mississippi
37. 1964—Civil Rights Act of 1964
38. 1964—Republican Party nominates Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate, marking the rise of modern conservatism. Lyndon Johnson defeats Goldwater in landslide, but conservatives see marked gains in elections of 1966 and 1968.
39. 1964—Lyndon Johnson signs Wilderness Act of 1964
40. 1964-1968—President Johnson launches his Great Society, including establishment of Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and dozens of other programs intended to lift Americans out of poverty.
41. 1965—Voting Rights Act of 1965
42. 1965—Murder of Malcolm X in New York City
43. 1965—Immigration Act of 1965 ends revokes restrictive and racist immigration legislation of 1920s, begins rise of Latin American and Asian migration to the U.S.
44. 1965—César Chávez and United Farm Workers begin Delano grape strike, call for national grape boycott
45. 1965—Ralph Nader publishes Unsafe at Any Speed, attacking unsafe General Motors cars. Nader becomes leader of consumer rights movement and one of America’s most influential figures through the late 1970s.
46. 1965-70—rise of  Black Power movement, eventually crushed by FBI-led murders of leading Black Power advocates
47. 1966—National Organization of Women (NOW) founded
48. 1966—California becomes first state to make LSD illegal, nation soon follows, but far too late to stop spread of drug
49. 1966—Martin Luther King takes civil rights movement to the North; violent protests against housing desegregation in Chicago.
50. 1967—Summer of Love in San Francisco, hippie movement becomes increasingly prominent
51. 1967—Bonnie and Clyde hits the theatres, destroying the restrictive code that guarded the morality of movies for 33 years and launching a new era of American film.
52. 1967—Reies López Tijerina leads raid upon county courthouse in New Mexico in protest over lands stolen from native New Mexicans.
53. 1968—Tet Offensive puts lie to President Johnson’s proclamations that the Vietnam War is almost won. Lyndon Johnson chooses not to run for reelection.
54. 1968—Assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee
55. 1968—Assassination of Robert Kennedy by Palestinian nationalist Sirhan Sirhan.
56. 1968—Brutal beatings of protestors at Democratic National Convention in Chicago, open warfare on the convention floor.
57. 1968—Alabama Governor George Wallace runs for president on openly segregationist platform, wins significant support in North—rise of white backlash to civil rights movement.
58. 1968—Richard Nixon wins presidency behind power of white backlash
59. 1969—Americans land on moon
60. 1969—Stonewall Rebellion in New York City marks first open resistance of gays to police repression, launches gay rights movement
61. 1969—increasingly radical women’s movement protests at Miss America pageant in Atlantic City
62. 1969—Cuyahoga River catches fire in Cleveland, drawing attention to massive environmental problems
63. 1969—Woodstock music festival in New York
64. 1970—Environmentalism becomes prominent; first Earth Day protests, creation of Environmental Protection Agency to enforce increasing number of environmental laws and regulatory agencies.
65. 1970—President Nixon invades Cambodia, leading to massive protests, including killing of students at Kent State University and Jackson State University
66. 1971—MASH begins its run as the most popular television show in American history
67. 1972—Equal Rights Amendment passes Congress, but rise of conservatism dooms it in state legislatures.
68. 1972—Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev conclude talks on Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the most important treaty controlling the nuclear arms race
69. 1972—Passage of Title IX, greatly expanding women’s access to college sports
70. 1973—U.S. pulls out of South Vietnam, Vietnam united under North Vietnamese leadership in 1975
71. 1973—American Indian Movement seizes Wounded Knee, South Dakota, leading to violent standoff with FBI
72. 1973—passage of Endangered Species Act, leads to revival of threatened species such as the bald eagle, wolf, and grizzly bear.
73. 1973—First large-scale economic crisis since Great Depression, leads to high unemployment and long-term economic uncertainty that lasts through remainder of 1970s.
74. 1973—Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion
75. 1974—Watergate scandal comes to light, resignation of President Richard Nixon
76. 1977—Apple introduces Apple II, the first prominent personal computer
77. 1978—California passes Proposition 13, drastically cutting property taxes
78. 1979—Iranian radicals take over American embassy, hold dozens of Americans hostage until 1981.
79. 1979—Three Mile Island incident—near nuclear meltdown ends period of nuclear power growth in U.S.
80. 1980—election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency
81. 1980s—President Reagan launches “War on Drugs,” results lead to imprisonment of 20% of young black men on nonviolent drug charges.
82. 1981—AIDS first recognized, Reagan administration ignores it as gay disease until 1985, setting back research and dooming thousands to early deaths.
83. 1981-87—Reagan administration supports right-wing movements in Central America, leading to civil wars and the deaths of tens of thousands.
84. 1986—Iran-Contra scandal comes to light, embarrassing Reagan administration
85. 1986—Challenger Space Shuttle explodes, event watched by nearly all schoolchildren because first teacher to enter space was onboard; national interest in space program declines
86. 1987—Supreme Court recognizes legality of Indian gaming
87. 1989—Fall of Berlin Wall heralds end of Cold War, breakup of USSR in 1991 ensures its end.
88. 1991—First Gulf War begins period of long-term American military involvement in the Middle East.
89. 1992—creation of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), expands both globalization and outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs abroad.
90. 1993—Internet becomes prominent
91. 1994—Republicans win massive gains in Congress, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich issues “Contract with America”
92. 1994—California voters pass Proposition 187, designed to deny undocumented migrants all state services, leads to backlash against Republican Party and makes California a Democratic stronghold based upon Latino votes.
93. 2000—Disputed presidential election, Supreme Court gives election to George W. Bush, voting on a strictly partisan basis
94. September 11, 2001—terrorists attack the United States, over 2000 dead, begins “War on Terror,” invasion of Afghanistan, etc.
95. 2003—President George W. Bush orders invasion of Iraq
96. 2003—Latinos pass African-Americans as nation’s largest minority group
97. 2007—Global recession begins, no end in sight as of fall 2010
98. 2008—election of Barack Obama to the presidency
99. 2010—Arizona passes restrictive anti-immigration legislation, resurgence of racism and nativism throughout U.S.
100. 2010—summer of 2010 sees record high temperatures around nation, flooding around the world, global climate change reaches critical tipping point.

Note: Already I noticed that I didn't include anything on the oil embargo.

On Outsourcing Grading

This seems like a terrible idea:

[Lori Whisenant's] seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she said, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task — and even, the company says, to do it better than T.A.’s can.

There are several obvious immediate objections that seem to come up here. First of all, this seems exploitative. Graduate assistants are usually very poorly paid, yet even so, I wouldn't be remotely surprised to learn that those in India were paid even less for this work. Secondly, I can't see how outsourcing anything else to India is going to help anybody; true, the assistant positions haven't been eliminated (though given the way university administrations are slashing funding to feed their bulked up administrative arms, I wouldn't be surprised if that were an outcome), but I fail to see why this is even remotely useful. Yes, the students have less work to do, but why not offer more funding to the department to fund more students who could assist the professor in this? Oh, right - the administrators are swallowing that money. And to be clear, I'm not suggesting exploiting student labor (hell, I'm a student laborer myself right now), but additional positions could simultaneously fund more students through graduate school, and leave all the students with a reasonable workload.

And it's the value of that workload that I think is what really bothers me here. Look, very few people love grading, but it's a valuable exercise for all parties involved. In terms of the students who take exams and/or write papers, grading is perhaps one of the most fertile ways to aid students' learning - if you grade with good insights regarding how to improve their work, you're not just improving their grades for the semester; you're improving the ways they think critically, thus preparing them for the world well beyond your own class (or even university). Critical thinking is one of the most important, most misunderstood, and most valuable things that students take from universities; high schools, with their standardized tests and limits imposed by policies like No Child Left Behind, certainly aren't able to offer a majority of students that kind of learning experience. At least in my opinion, it is an essential part of what students take away from universities.

And, as teaching assistants, it is an invaluable experience for the graduate students, as it helps them learn and refine how to help their own students in learning. Whisenant comments that her assistants "were not experts in providing feedback." Not to put too fine a point on it, but how in the hell does she expect them to learn how to provide feedback if their grading assignments are being shipped overseas? Learning how to assign feedback is as much a trial-and-error process for the grader as exams and writing papers are for students; over time, you learn which methods are useful for different types of students, which methods you prefer, which you are good at, etc. If the professor is expecting perfect feedback from graduate assistants, that professor has completely lost touch with the practical way that graduate school (which is, after all, an extended learning process in many ways) functions. You aren't solving the problem of addressing how to offer feedback by denying the students any chance; you're worsening the problem.

Certainly, I sympathize with the students' workload; I agree that having an average of 143 exams to grade per assistant is certainly overwhelming and unfair. But there are many solutions to this issue, and outsourcing the work to Asia seems about one of the worst solutions possible, for the students, for the assistants, and for the university itself as an institution.

Cold War Film Suggestions

Forgive the quietness on my end--I've been in the Northwest, visiting family, attending the American Society of Environmental Historians conference (where I told a lovely story about eye gonorrhea in my paper), and being interviewed for a couple of jobs (wish me luck, I need it!).

But while I won't be back full time until next Monday, I am having a quiet work day today.

And I have a question I could use some help with. This summer, I'm teaching a course on Cold War Film and History. I'm going to show about 12-14 films. What would you show for such a class? I am going to cover a lot of things in a short time, look at films of the time and films made later, and hopefully from all over the world. I am having a specific 4 film section focusing on Latin America.

Here's what I'm thinking so far:

1. One disc of the Animated Soviet Propaganda series, which is awesome.
2. Dr. Strangelove
3. Battle of Algiers
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still
5. Red Dawn
6. The Baader Meinhof Complex
7. I Am Cuba
8. Goodbye Lenin
9. 12:08 East of Bucharest
10. Some Bond film, but I'm not sure which one. Given that I've only ever seen 1 Bond film in my life (yes could can make fun of me for this if you want), I could use some specific suggestions here. 
11. Atomic Cafe

That's pretty heavy on German and eastern European films. And actually it's pretty weak on US-Soviet relations.

I'm probably forgetting some pretty obvious films, so help me out!

Robots: A Tool of Xenophobic Koreans

Koreans are among the most xenophobic people on the globe. Despite the globalization Koreans have remained strongly xenophobic. At first, I thought this had to do with their long occupation by the U.S. military, but it goes far deeper. Koreans are generally obsessed with racial purity, absolutely opposed to immigration from the poorer nations of Asia, and have a history of strong reactions against other non-American white nations coming to Korea in large numbers to work.

In recent years, this xenophobia has manifested itself in a strong reaction against English teachers. Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling has studied this intensely and has provided many examples. Koreans see English teachers as drug-using alcoholics who come only to sleep with Korean women. Miscegenation fears aren't just an American phenomenon. However, the onslaught of globalization has made it imperative for Koreans to learn English. So how to overcome the dilemma of needing the skill and hating the teacher?

Robots.

During the second decade of the New Millennium, robots are expected to replace a number of English-speaking teachers here, who come from such countries as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

At a robotics forum, which brought together 150 experts from across the country late last week in Seoul, participants predicted that English-speaking robots would fill the shoes of native speakers in the future.

"By around 2015, robots should be able to help teachers in English classes. By 2018, they should be able to teach on their own while communicating with students," said Kim Shin-hwan, an economist at the Hyundai Research Institute.

Reliance on technology is not going to alleviate the need for living English teachers, but this incident is a window into just how much Koreans resent having non-Koreans living in their country.

An Extremely Random Question

Does anybody know of any good books/articles on the Japanese student movements in 1968? I'm putting together a class, and would love to include Japan, but am having fits finding anything to use even for lectures, much less for students to read. Suggestions?

Give Me That Old-Time Intolerance

The case of Melissa Hussain is making the rounds. An 8th grade science teacher in North Carolina, she posted on Facebook about her Christian students harassing her openly about religion, which she is calling a hate crime.

I'll get to Hussain's teaching in a minute, but there's no question that her students and their parents and the atmosphere in the school that tolerates this behavior is indicative of the utter hypocrisy of evangelical Christians. They push their ideas on everyone, both in the U.S. and around the world. They don't tolerate other viewpoints. And then they have the temerity to complain of discrimination against them because they can't have a copy of the Ten Commandments in a courtroom.

Amanda says it well:

The reports I could find on this don’t explain why they think Hussain isn’t a Christian.  It could be her last name---I’d be shocked if that wasn’t a factor---or the fact that she’s a science teacher.  Or maybe she isn’t a Christian and didn’t take pains to hide that fact.  So what?  This country supposedly respects religious freedom, and that counts even for school teachers and even for women and even in North Carolina.  The levels of harassment this woman was subject to are shocking, even for a bunch of ignorant rednecks.  The harassers are admitting that they were provoked by the fact that Hussain taught real world biology that included the theory of evolution.

On her Facebook page, Hussain wrote about students spreading rumors that she was a Jesus hater. She complained about her students wearing Jesus T-shirts and singing “Jesus Loves Me.” She objected to students reading the Bible instead of doing class work.

But Annette Balint, whose daughter is in Hussain’s class, said the students have the right to wear those shirts and sing “Jesus Loves Me,” a long-time Sunday School staple. She said the students were reading the Bible during free time in class.

So, what appears to be happening is that the parents are encouraging their children to disrupt class to harass a woman they believe deserves no respect by refusing to do their schoolwork, and loudly singing hymns.  And when called out on it, they play innocent, acting like open disruption of the classroom is just a legitimate, harmless expression of belief.  This is not all that Hussain was subject to.  Students got into the habit of leaving religious materials on her desk to taunt her.  Postcards with pictures of Jesus were left on her desk so that students could act all butt hurt when she did what you always do when junk mail is left for you, which is throw it away.  Bibles were left on her desk, presumably to create the same kind of faux outrage if she treated them like anything short of magical objects.  After the evolution dust-up, when kids tried to stop the lesson by squawking about Jesus and no doubt freaking out on the teacher, a student left a Christmas card on Hussain’s desk with the word “Christ” underlined.

This behavior, of course, is bullying, and it appears to be encouraged by parents.  Bullying is the absolute favorite tactic of the religious right, from women’s clinic blockades to calling the cops on women who dare admit while pregnant to being anything but as blissed out as a dog suckling her pups.  Men are subject to this kind of bullying, but generally, wingnuts prefer to set their sights on female targets, because they believe women are weak, and like all bullies, they prefer to pick on someone they perceive as weak.

Indeed.

Now, the other issue here is whether Hussain should have complained about this on Facebook. And the answer is of course not. Rule #1 in modern teaching should be to never talk about the specifics of teaching problems in a public or semi-public forum. There should be clear avenues for dealing with these problems. On one level, you discipline students--you control the classroom, you report them to the principal, you suspend them, you make their lives hell in your classroom. Of course, this is a lot easier for a man to do than a young woman. And who knows if she has the right temperament to handle a classroom of right-wing 8th graders. Lots of us don't.

If parents and your administration don't support you, take it higher up. Take it to the superintendent. Make someone listen. And if no one will listen, then you can consider taking it public, but in very specific ways that would probably include you quitting your job first.

Now, obviously this was a frustrated and hurt teacher who faced a very difficult situation that she didn't expect. I really feel for her. I can't say I know what I'd do in her situation. But I think the lesson for me if I am ever teaching on the pre-college level is to control the classroom and to tolerate none of that kind of behavior. I really couldn't care less if the students like me or not. That's actually  harder to do on the college level because administrators actually believe that teaching evaluations are legitimate critiques on your effectiveness as a teacher. In the public schools,  I can't see how your students not being a little afraid of you is a good thing.

Film Preservation Blogathon: Film Preservation and Teaching History

I am a late 19th and early 20th century U.S. historian by training. Although I can teach widely within the field, I'd prefer to talk about this period as often as possible.

The work of the National Film Preservation Foundation has added a tremendous tool to my teaching repertoire. It's one thing to talk about race and it's another to supplement that with showing a racist film from the 1910s. You can yap on and on about immigration, but to see an early gangster film overflowing with Italian stereotypes drives that home in ways I cannot.

Just today, my American Cities class read and discussed an article about how Progressives thought the urban environment of immigrants was icky and was contributing to race suicide. They felt the need to get immigrant children out of the urban nature they were used to and into beautiful bucolic rural nature.

That fit perfectly with the 1912 film The Land Beyond the Sunset, available on the 4th disc of Volume I of the NFPF's Treasures from American Film Archives. In this film, a young boy lives a terrible urban life. He is taken care of by a drunken abusive grandmother. He sells newspapers to earn income, which his grandmother promptly steals to buy more booze. But he has a ticket from some reformers to go out in the city for a day. While in the park, a woman tells a story called "The Land Beyond the Sunset." In it, a young boy is mistreated by an evil witch but good fairies intervene. They then put him in a boat and go to an island beyond the sunset without evil old witches. The boy sees his own life in this story. He then doesn't go back to the city. He escapes, steals a boat, and sails into the ocean to the land beyond the sunset.

Of course, you know he's probably going to die. And that's the point--this film is a middle-class fantasy about how awful the slums are. The boy would rather die than be poor.

Thanks to the National Film Preservation Foundation, I can show The Land Beyond the Sunset and any number of other silent, rare, and experimental films to my classes. I owe them tremendously. The students got the point in a way they never would have without the film. It was wonderful.

The NFPF is preserving our glorious history. Give them a little cash if you can spare it. I want more awesome silent movies to present my students.

Evaluating Teachers

California has just signed on to compete for Obama's "Race to the Top" federal grant money. The "Race to the Top" program is a part of the stimulus bill that awards education grants to schools that agree to certain terms. One such term-- and a huge point of contention for many-- is tying teacher pay and evaluation to student performance.

Any kind of massive education reform needs to deal with teacher evaluation. This is always where people of good will-- from all political perspectives-- tend to get bogged down. The situation has become so toxic that teacher's unions tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to any kind of evaluative process. This is, of course, not without good reason, especially when tracking evaluation to test scores. Raw test scores don't take into account differences in resources, differences in local economic factors, etc. A bad teacher can get good results out of well-prepared students with a lot of parental help; similarly, a great teacher can produce middling results if the deck is stacked against her or him. I won't go so far as to say that test scores shouldn't be used at all, but this data must be used carefully, judiciously, and metered against a host of other factors.

So what, then, do we do to evaluate teachers? This isn't just about pay and performance, it is about weeding out ineffective teachers. If we could establish a fair metric by which to evaluate teachers, I have no problem terminating said teacher, regardless of the situation. However, my feelings on this are complicated by the fact that we don't have a fair way to evaluate teachers. I'm not sure what that would look like, but something involving several tiers of review would be necessary-- peer review, administrative, maybe some testing information, perhaps student evaluation, etc. Pardon the problematic metaphor, but this is similar to how I feel about the death penalty. I have no moral or philosophical qualms with executing people for the most heinous crimes in society; however, clearly the criminal justice system cannot assure its infallibility, so I politically oppose capital punishment on procedural grounds.

The clearest way to fix this problem is to have better, more qualified, better prepared people in the classrooms. So much money is spent on pilot programs, technology, and other ancillary items in primary and secondary education. I think spending more money to pay teachers is the first step. With this increase in pay, the district can ask for more from its applicants. I would support the massive changes to the process of getting a teaching credential. First of all, I would require a subject-area masters degree as a way of weeding out academically less-prepared applicants. If someone is bright enough to complete an MA program, I have a little more confidence that the person has some requisite skills academically. If one looks at subject area course work requirements for most education degrees or credential programs, often it is a very small portion of the program. Does one really get an understanding of the discipline from some intro classes and a few upper-division electives? I don't think so, and I would argue that understanding and being engaged with the subject area is important (though an administrative / political initiative, see the recent proposed/approved changes to the Texas history curriculum for an example of what happens when one doesn't have a clue about the area or how disciplinary knowledge is manufactured). I like the idea of getting a solid basic education in the undergrad, taking some education classes and getting some student teaching experience, then completing a subject-area masters in order to get the credential. Ensuring that teachers have mastery over their subject area is vital-- I don't buy the argument that it isn't relevant.

I would also allow for a process for people holding PhDs to get a teaching credential without further coursework. Experience teaching at the college level could be counted as practical experience (I understand that teaching high school and college are infinitely different, but there's nothing in most education curricula that convinces me that college teaching experience is completely useless, either). Because of the academic job market for new and recent PhD's, I have a feeling that some really brilliant teachers are sitting on the sidelines without the opportunity to teach in the public schools (even with a PhD, there is often a year or more of full-time coursework and student teaching that must be done to get a credential in most states).

This is all to say that, at least in my experience working around a few high schools and the one that I attended, there are too many people in the profession that do not have an acceptable level of academic skills to be effective. I think it is damn-near impossible to fairly evaluate teachers if the goal is to remove ineffective teachers, and as such, front-end structures should be used to attract better people to the profession and be rigorous enough to keep the less-able applicants away. Investing more money in compensation is the first step; pilot programs and wired campuses be damned-- we need the very brightest people doing some of the most important work in society, and we need to pay them handsomely for doing it.

Urban Films

tIn the spring I am teaching a new class on American cities. It has an environmental focus, but also looks heavily at race and sex.

As I often do, I want to have a film assignment. What films would you suggest students watch that get at American cities in a particular time and place. Right now, I'm leaning toward Taxi Driver and Traffic in Souls (a silent about white slavery). But what do you all think?

Quote of the Day

From a student paper about Alexander Hamilton:

"Isn't it the American Dream, that the boy with nothing can grow up to be the oppressor."

I just think that's hilarious. And kind of true.

Texas State History Standards

The crazy is heating up over the new Texas history textbook adoption standards. This is important because Texas is such a huge market that publishers will likely kow-tow to whatever the state decides. This means that a bunch of right-wing yahoos in Texas control history textbooks in the nation's public schools. Isn't that great!!!

Anyway, I'm going to try and cover this closely over the next weeks and months. We see today that conservatives are again pushing the argument that Thurgood Marshall and Cesar Chavez are not worthy of being taught. Certainly not as important as Newt Gingrich. Seriously, this is what some are arguing. At least progressives are fighting back.

Matt Yglesias and Merit Pay for Teachers

Yglesias is obviously one of the most influential progressive voices on the internet, but I find him quite susceptible to right-wing talking points about certain issues, especially education and labor. On these two issues, he shows every sign of never having to have thought about how to pay his rent or worry about material possessions at all and of having attended elite schools his entire life where the teachers were great and gave him every advantage.

When he writes about education and labor together, disaster results.

In a series of posts, (here, here, and here) he's talked about the need for merit pay for teachers. Merit pay is something that conservatives constantly talk up to fight against teacher unions. And in a rhetorical sense, it works--who oppose getting paid more if you do a good job? Hell, I would support that if it made sense in the real world. The problem is this--who decides who is doing a good job? We see over and over again in the real world workplace that those pay raises go to workers who tow the company line, rat out other workers to management, are friends with the boss, etc. Sexual favors for merit raises are hardly unknown.

Let's say I am teaching high school history in a conservative part of the country. I am not going to teach a conservative history. Some parents don't like me very much. I'm a pain in the ass for the principal because they call her. But I'm doing one hell of a job teaching history. I'm getting the kids interested, I'm trying new methods, I'm doing all sorts of audio-visual things, I'm making history alive for these kids. Do I get a merit raise? Hell no. The person getting the merit raise is the assistant football coach teaching down the hall from me who helped take the team to the playoffs last year.

If there was some objective way to give merit raises, I think lots of people would support them. But there's not. It gives tons of power to management. What bugs me about Yglesias on this issue is that he's so blind to this obvious fact, despite literally hundreds of people screaming it in his face (or at least on his blog). Everyone even remotely revolved with labor and education knows this to be true, but he won't listen or even begin to deal with these facts. On these issues, Yglesias very much reminds me of the close-minded conservative writers we all can't stand. It's really quite depressing.

All of this doesn't even get into issues of test scores as the judge of teacher competence, the value of teaching degrees, and issues of seniority. I'm happy to slam Yglesias on this too, but I'll desist for now unless someone wants to hear more.

Alterdestiny Homework

OK, you slackers, time to start working for the semester!

On Monday, I am going to talk about some of the film I am showing as part of my US Civil War in History and Memory course. Film is a key way to get at ideas of memory. One of the bits I am showing the students is the South Park episode, "The Red Badge of Gayness," about Civil War reenactments. It's from season 3 and you can watch it here.

Watch it so we can have a good discussion of the value and challenges of teaching this kind of material to students.

Teaching, Part I: College Writing

I want to write about teaching quite a bit this fall, discussing various methods I use as well as larger questions of teaching.

A good place to start is Stanley Fish's latest piece on college writing and changes in college curriculum more broadly. I basically think Fish is a pompous blowhard who constantly reverts to "back in my day" whining, and this article doesn't change my mind. Hilariously, Fish finds his own propositions being endorsed by Lynne Cheney when it comes to teaching the standards and he doesn't quite know what to do with that fact.

Fish's complaints that students can't write anymore are not without merit. In fact, the writing level of 18 year old students probably has declined over time. Fish complains that writing classes are in fact covers for the teaching of race, gender, and sexuality when he thinks they should be about sentence structure and composition. The first part of his argument is not untrue though the second is quite debatable.

I want to defend the students here and also talk a bit about teaching writing more broadly.

First, while our students can't diagram sentences, they can do a lot of things that are really valuable in the modern world. Unlike Fish's generation, they are incredibly literate with computers and other technologies. They can analyze film and other visual media with surprising fluency, even at the start of their college careers. They are far more tolerant of diverse races and sexualities than students of 50 years ago. These are all really important things for today's world, arguably as or more important than sentence structure.

Second, I certainly found my experience in the two quarter college writing program during my freshman year at the University of Oregon to be a sort of indoctrination into University of Oregon ideology 101. At the time, I found this a little annoying, even as I agreed with most of my instructor's positions. However, what better way to inspire passions and to get students into writing than talking about these issues? What are you supposed to teach in these classes? First, a class just on grammar sounds more boring than dirt. That's not a strike against the class as such, but inspiring busy and distracted students to diagram sentences does not sound like a fun task for a teacher. Second, who is going to teach such a class? Fish can complain all he wants to about the quality of college writing, but part of the problem is that we have a huge number of students coming into colleges and a lack of qualified people to teach these classes. Not only are English graduate students forced to teach these courses, but many graduate students from around the university systems are recruited to fill the many sections schools have to offer. Not all of these people are particularly qualified to teach such courses.

The reality is that universities rely on cheap exploitable labor to teach freshmen. If Fish really wants to change how college writing is taught, dealing with this problem is the first step. But I suppose bitching about it is a lot easier.

This brings me to an important issue that I face. How do I teach writing? It wasn't until my Ph.D. program that anyone really sat me down to teach me to write. And from reading this blog, no doubt readers still wonder at my sentence structure. But the chair of my dissertation committee was not about to have one of her students writing poorly. So she beat all the bad habits out of me (almost literally). I found this depressing, though I appreciated it. No one had really dealt with my writing problems before, even in master's program. Sure, I could write complete sentences and get my thoughts across, but I also constantly reverted to the passive voice and wrote in a circular way that made me take forever to get my point across (why use 5 words when you can use 50!).

I became determined to not have this happen to my students. I was going to work with them on grammar and sentence structure and help them succeed. I was going to turn their lives around! This was an especially important task at the University of New Mexico, where you have a lot of Native American and Latino kids for whom English is not their first language.

Then reality set in. First, most kids just don't care. Yet we have to get them through college. Or maybe we don't, but if you set out to be a hard-ass by yourself, it doesn't help the situation. You'd need a school-wide or at least department-wide movement. So what are you going to do? You can spend an hour writing comments and line editing, but if the student is happy with a C, they aren't going to spend 30 seconds reading them.

Second, I have other responsibilities. I am trying for tenure-track jobs. I have to publish. I have to apply for jobs. I have to research my book. I have to do public history. I have to work with the environmental students. I have lots of responsibilites. So does everyone else. If it's our sole purpose to teach good writing, then I can spend my time honing this skill. But it's not. And it's not going to be. If I spend an hour per paper line editing, that's a lot of time I'm not spending doing the other things that advance my career. Again, what I am supposed to do about this? So I've pulled back on the number of writing assignments I give. I don't spend as much time as I did when I was teaching one class in graduate school on writing. Becuase I can't. The incentives just aren't there to make this my top priority.

Finally, there is the question of what skills I want to teach my students. Should my courses actually revolve around building writing skills exclusively? For instance, this semester I am teaching a course called "U.S. Civil War in History and Memory." I'll be talking a lot about this course throughout the semester. I want the students to think about the importance of the past to the present in a very explicit way. One way of doing this is to give them the choice of a final assignment. The first is to write a paper allowing them to explore an issue of interest to them. Standard stuff. The second allows them to create a mock museum exhibit using online sources, then interrogating their own Civil War memory and discussing why they chose these materials to create their particular exhibit. I want to allow students to build public history skills and to gain consciousness about their own subject position in interpreting history. This is not exclusive of writing; of course, they have a writing component to the assignment. But it's also not the primary goal of the class. I have a couple other short papers that I assign to evaluate students who have real and significant writing problems, but for the most part, if a student is a decent writer, I'm going to help them improve in small ways and that's probably about it.

I think one bit of reticence I have in teaching writing too much these days is that I don't really know what it means. We constantly hear about teaching writing in our courses. But we never receive much in the way of guidance. Certainly there is not a set of standards that we are required to push. Without some kind of standardization, I suspect we are all going to teach to issues we think are important. Whether or not the combined effort of all faculty members is somehow going to make better writers out of students remains quite an open question. In my case, it didn't really help until I got to the Ph.D. program.

Your top three...

I'm leaving town in a few hours for rural Indiana, where I will not have the intertubes for a week or so. Before I take off, I want to leave the Alterdestiny community with a question pertaining to my First Year Seminar course that I posted about earlier.

If you had to select three songs that you could make sixteen 18-year-old first year college students listen to, what would they be?

Intensive work on this course prep will begin when I get back-- the last post generated so many great suggestions for readings, many of which I'm taking with me on my trip. I hope to see some interesting additions to the course playlist when I get back!

Teaching U.S. History in Texas

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on the battle over teaching U.S history in Texas public schools. Mirroring the evolution/creationism debate, this pits right-wing ideologues over those who have sense. One of the conservatives says this:

"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it"

I absolutely agree with this and that's why these right-wingers must be stopped. What do they object to? Including positive discussions of Cesar Chavez for instance.

• Delete César Chávez from a list of figures who modeled active participation in the democratic process

Two reviewers objected to citing Mr. Chávez, who led a strike and boycott to improve working conditions for immigrant farmhands, as an example of citizenship for fifth-graders. "He's hardly the kind of role model that ought to be held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation," Rev. Marshall wrote.

How's that? Marshall doesn't say, but presumably it is part anti-labor, part racism. They also oppose discussion of Anne Hutchinson as an important person to discuss for colonial America and want to replace discussion of Thurgood Marshall as an important person to study with--wait for it--Sam Houston!!!! There's also a bias against discussing the country as a democracy.

I do agree with the conservatives that studying primary documents should be valued higher. Conservatives always think things like this are going to lead to capital R republican values, but there's no actual evidence of this. One can easily discuss the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution and come to the conclusion that the current Republican party is completely insane.

The moderate reviewers have entirely reasonable proposals such as emphasizing more Latinos, toning down emphasis on the Cold War, and discussing America's historical relationship with Islamic nations and peoples. You know, things that actually make sense in modern society.

With a little help from my friends...

This fall, I will be teaching a class that is part of the larger First Year Seminar program at my school. These classes, though topical, are intended to serve as an introduction to college academics. My class will be a writing intensive course, satisfying one of the writing requirements in the Liberal Arts Foundation sequence. I will serve as the students' academic advisor, and we will address a number of topics like balancing academic life, comporting oneself professionaly in an academic setting, transitioning to a more individually responsible life, the nature of scholarship, and academic honesty. I am, needless to say, very excited about this class.

The topical side of the class deals with music, since that is my area of expertise. The class is called Really Listening: Thinking and writing about the music in our lives. Here is my catalog description:

Music—of all kinds—is everywhere. We hear it in our cars, grocery stores, coffee shops, while we study, while we work, and now with our iPods, even as we walk. Our lives have an almost constant soundtrack, a condition both ubiquitous and relatively recent. In a world with so much music, what does it mean to listen, rather than just hear? What do we really know about music, and what tools do we need to be better listeners—why do we need to better listeners, anyway? What does good writing about music look like? How can we open our ears to musical styles, genres, and traditions with which we have little or no familiarity? What is the role of silence in music and in our noisy culture? How is our musical taste formed? What effect do new media have on the way we listen to, talk about, and consume music? How are communities, cultures, and identities affected by music? Ultimately, how can we make our experiences with music more meaningful, more powerful, and more relevant?

These are the questions (among many others) that we will discuss throughout the course, often prompted by our reading of various kinds of writing about music, including scholarly writing, music journalism, music criticism, and weblogs. These conversations will happen around a playlist that spans genres and cultures—think Basie, Beyoncé, Boulez, Blondie, B-Real, Badu, Beethoven, Bowie, Baez, B.I.G., Bechet, Björk, and boys both Beach and Beastie.

No prior formal training in music is required. This will be a seminar-style class, with our discussions centered on assigned listenings and readings, exchanging ideas and posing questions as we explore a complex and vast musical world.

Because this class is intended for non-musicians, we are going to explore how a non-musician (the largest group of music consumers) can write and talk intelligently and insightfully about music (getting past "it's got a good beat and I can dance to it"), without bogging them down with a great deal of technical jargon. The first book we are going to read is Daniel Levitan's This is your Brain on Music. This is a fantastic book that contains a primer on music (with just enough technical information) and a great deal of discussion of musical cognition, taste formation, etc. Levitan is a psychologist who also worked for some pretty impressive recording studios. I have a reading list that includes a number of appropriate scholarly articles as well. Other books that I am considering are What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland, Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music by Dana Jennings, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang, and one of the many great books on jazz.

The idea is that the topical lectures become about exploring genres and helping students find ways into styles of music that they haven't listened to heavily. From there, we will do some exploration on how to write about music, and the different kinds of writing about music. Most of the music that I am using for the class playlist is popular, which isn't exactly my strong suit. I'm also having a hard time finding really good music journalism to use in the class, and I'd like to balance out the books and journal articles with some popular press writings.

So, the point of this post is to solicit ideas for music, writings about music, etc. that I could use in the class. The Alterdestiny community is a musically saavy outfit; I think utilizing you all would be a great help.

Ideas?

Dismayed, Not Surprised

Last night, I showed Red Dawn for my survey class. As the film was starting, I mentioned to my students that Walter in The Big Lebowski was based on John Milius, the director of Red Dawn. Then I realized that my students had no idea what I was talking about. I asked them if they had seen The Big Lebowski. One said she had, but "it was a long time ago."

One thing about teaching is that you are constantly reminded of your age. In history this is even more so because we are talking about the past, but the slow but inevitable distance between your own age and those of your students always has to be on your mind because they never get any of your cultural references. I'm usually really aware of this, but I figured people still watch The Big Lebowski because it is so hilarious. I guess not.

Sigh.