Juggling 101

• Why, Gen Y? PART ONE

  2 Comments
  16 Aug 2010 /  students
  This is a longer blog, and I’ve decided to break it into two parts.

  I see them shuffle in every semester, this group referred to by the label-makers as Gen Y or The Millennials. The Millennials in my Community College classes, though, don’t look like the super slick, Gossip Girl outfitted, tech-savvy young adults I see in Apple computer or Kia Soul commercials.

  One of the communities that I teach in is very rural, and the students come in right off their jobs on ranches or in construction. The other community that I teach in is extremely urban, with many students unfamiliar with technology except in regards to their music players. In neither group do I have many commercial viewing, internet trolling, movie-going young adults who live on that tech cutting edge.

  Many times during lectures, in fact, I am reminded of my students’ lack of popular culture exposure. I reference movies, songs, news items, the latest commentary on The Daily Show, etc and I get blank stares back at me. In my online Introduction to Myth class I even use contemporary movies to illustrate the mythic themes each week, and I wade through regular emails from confused students complaining that they don’t have an online movie rental account, don’t have access to a DVD player or a computer that will play movies, or worse, can’t even choose a movie because they’ve never heard of them. (Note that I choose mostly current movies, those 10 years old or newer).

  I’m not the only person who’s noticed this inequity in representation. Social commentary writer for Bitch Magazine online, J. Maureen Henderson wrote a recent blog (03 May 2010) called “The Young and the Feckless” where she specifically addresses the “largely invisible” who, “by virtue of culture, religion or upbringing, have different values or a different relationship to technology than those which defines the Millennial archetype.” She believes it’s predominantly an economic issue. I’m not so sure.

  Is it economy alone? Isn’t there some amount of culture of origin, and faith system, and even political affiliations at play? While money is, I think, a large part of this equation it isn’t only money that separates the tech savvy from the tech invisibles.

  Whatever the reason, there’s a definite divide; it is, though, quickly being bridged, even if the media hasn’t caught on to that fact yet. In March, Jennifer Bleyer wrote “Hipsters on Food Stamps,” a blog post about college educated young adults who are finding themselves on food stamps (and they’re shopping at Whole Foods, which adds to the controversy.) Bleyer’s piece looks specifically at those who enter the workforce with a certain expectation of success, only to find themselves heavily in debt and starving. To her credit she makes no overt critique of these graduates utilizing government social programs, but there is a certain cluck-clucking sound playing in the background. I have mixed feelings.

  Few, if any, of my students have ever stepped into a Whole Foods and while these so-called Hipsters might have been the original Gen Y models for all those cell phone commercials, they no longer have the disposable cash to utilize their tech know-how. The divide could easily close over all of them, without regard for their parentage or economic status of origin.

  Next time: The media and Healthcare versus the reality for Community College students.

  Tags: Apple Computer, Blockbuster, Blue Ray, community college, DVD, DVD Player, DVR, Economic Divide, Gen Y, Gossip Girl, Katherine Kiefer-Newman, Kia Soul, Media, Media Representation, movies, Netflix, Red Box, rentals, rural, teaching, tech divide, tech invisibles, tech savvy, The Millennials, urban

• Showing vs. Telling: Twilight Invades My Writing Class

  No Comments
  25 Apr 2010 /  students, teaching
  It was bound to happen in one of my classes. I knew that sooner or later I would be confronted by the fanatical devotion fans have for the Twilight books and movies. Twilight, for the three people in the United States who don’t know, is the first in a series of novels and movies about a young woman named Bella Swan. As the series progresses, she must choose between two different young men with whom she has fallen in love. The first is Edward, the outsider who comes from a wealthy and prominent family; the other, Jacob, is everyone’s favorite town son. The twist that makes this more than a standard teen romance novel is that Edward is a vampire and Jacob is a werewolf.

  These stories have captured the attention of so many people, from all different age groups. Christine Seifert, writing for BitchMagazine.org back in 2008, explains that this multigenerational reader infatuation with Bella and Edward’s smoldering romance was even the focus of a fan “engagement” party at the Sandy, Utah, Barnes & Noble store on the night before the fourth book was released that year. Participants wore formal wedding attire in honor of the happy fictional couple. It was a big night for romantics, one and all (”Bite me, (Or Don’t!“).

  With so much overexposure, I should have realized that at some point a student would bring up the books and movies in a class discussion. We were talking that day about “showing” versus “telling” in writing. I was giving examples about word choice, word placement, sentence choice, and using examples. One young woman lovingly brought out her copy of the second or third book and, in a rush of breathless exclamation points, told the class that she wanted to write like Stephanie Meyers, the author.

  Quite the controversy exists around these works and this author. Early last year, horror writer Stephen King, in the USA Weekend Magazine, stated that while Meyers does speak directly to her audience, “Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn.” Her lack of polish and talent dogs her as she continues to write for fans who are so avid they call themselves Twi-Fans and Twi-Hards, or Twi-moms if they’re of the older variety. They don’t seem to care that literary critics pan her work, they just keep buying her products obsessively. And, with the second movie just out on DVD, and the third movie scheduled to arrive in theatres at the end of June this year, fans everywhere are in a frenzy.

  Here I was in my college writing class faced with just such a dedicated enthusiast and I was caught off-guard. I am not going to spend this entire post outlining the failings of Ms. Meyers’s books. Not when gifted bloggers like Eric Boyd Vogeler have already done a superb job of it here. And the Monkey See duo at NPR have also done a series well worth your time here.

  But I was at a loss as to how to manage the spellbound student. I barely had to. Not all students, it turned out, were in the thrall of this pseudo-gothic-vampire love story. A heated debate broke out. One contingent believed that Twilight was a poor substitute for such literary classics as Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. Another didn’t care about the literary merit because readin’ is readin’ and that’s what these books caused people to do (people who normally weren’t bookish). Still another rallied in support of the writing in the Twilight books, sticking with their dogged belief that it was good. What’s an instructor to do?

  In the end, I allowed all sides to state their views. Then I took lines from the book and used them as examples. Sadly, they just didn’t hold up to scrutiny and the student-fans were forever awakened to that fact.

  I seem to be breaking ever more hearts in my classroom…

  Tags: bad writing, college, Composition, debate, English, good writing, Katherine Kiefer-Newman, show, students, tell, Twilight, wordiness, writing

• Student Writing: Old Habits Die Hard, and Other Clichés

  1 Comment
  02 Apr 2010 /  evalution, students
  As I’ve said before, critical thinking is important, but if the students can’t figure out how to put their ideas down on the page in a readable way, then no one will care if they thought critically. Even if I explain all of this to the students and they agree that learning methods is what they most desire, when we get into the actual methods work they balk. No one likes to be criticized; and no one wants their comfortable bad habits attacked. Worse, students don’t even realize they have bad habits. They believe that what they produce is good writing and previous teachers gave them poor grades for other reasons.

  I had a young man approach me just a few weeks ago. He shook his head, clucked his tongue, and told me that I just didn’t like him and that’s why I was so hard on his fantastic work. His writing was a series of long-winded sentences that offered no subject, only layers and layers of modifying adverbs and adjectives. When I asked him to find me the subject of the sentences he couldn’t, of course. He was undaunted, though, by the evidence of his own work.

  Denial is not new to me in these classes. A few years ago I had a student insist that he wasn’t plagiarizing, even though he had no citations at all anywhere in his writing. I’d given him the benefit of the doubt and explained unintentional plagiarism, but he was adamant that it wasn’t necessary to cite anywhere in the document as long as he had a Works Cited page. His reasoning was that no other teacher had said anything.

  In another class, a young woman interrupted my lecture on thesis statements to inform me that I taught thesis statements all wrong. They don’t have to be arguable, she vehemently maintained. She was quite sure that they could simply be informative. When I explained that arguability, if nothing else, made for a more interesting thesis, and potentially a more interesting essay, she interrupted again to tell me that no other English teacher ever taught thesis statements this way, and her proof was that her brother had had a composition class the previous semester and his teacher didn’t, nor had any of her high school teachers. Irrefutable evidence, indeed.

  Some might think that these types of incidents as absolute proof that students are rude and ungrateful. But I think it has more to do with how hard it is to let go of what we know, what we are comfortable with, even if that “what” doesn’t gain us positive results. Change really is hard, just as the cliché goes.

  I initially believed that students would welcome my approach of teaching them the methods and tools they’d need for their required college writing. Over time, though, I’ve come to see that they long for their mixed metaphors, their clichés, and their idiomatic phrasings. They tell me they miss randomly and unconsciously injected figures of speech. They miss their colorful phrases that they believe liven up their sentences. I patiently explain that you can’t dress up bad, no matter how hard you try.

  They also enjoy taking my lecture notes and telling me that I break the rules: I use contractions, I start sentences with FANBOYS, etc. Ah, but my lecture notes aren’t formal writing, I reply….every semester…..

  There is much handholding that goes on in writing classes, and mine is no different. Being told that one has superfluous wording, poor grammar, troubled syntax, or any other corrective statement can be tough to endure. My class size dwindles as the assignments collect and the papers are returned without praise for what the student truly believed were legendary masterpieces. I’m eyeballing a stack right now, writing this blog instead of making the necessary corrections. Another group will find out this week that their brilliant and clever creations are only a C- grade at best. I feel bad for their lost innocence - now, where’s that red pen.

  Tags: cliche, draft, English, FANBOYS, Katherine Kiefer-Newman, methods, student woes, writing

• The Hot and Cold of Chili Peppers

  No Comments
  06 Mar 2010 /  evalution, self-marketing, students
  Some days I really love chili peppers. I mean all kinds: habanera, jalapeno, serrano, the band from the 80s and 90s, and also the RateMyProfessor.com chilies. As I get older, the edible chilies become tougher to take in quantities, the band hasn’t been active lately, but the RateMyProfessor.com chilies never fail to make me smile.

  I definitely know the power of marketing and I use those chilies to full effect. Students comment to me about them at least a few times a semester, and usually it’s to say they don’t know how they feel about the chili rating, but they love the funness of the idea of them. Back in 2008, John Warner wrote Quién Es Caliente? Getting Your RateMyProfessors.com Chili Pepper, with humorous advice that no one should take. He does note, though, that at that time fewer than 25% of college instructors listed on the RateMyProfessor.com site have any kind of hotness. I wonder what the numbers would be now? Sounds like a conference paper waiting to happen. Also from 2008 (that must have been a troubling year for chili-pepper-seeking profs) are two other pieces that explain that chili hotness is contextual; one is by Craig Willse and the second is by NewSocProf. These insightful bloggers suggest that hotness has less to do with looking like Paris Hilton, put everything to do with how one engages in the subject s/he is teaching. For example, one can be in his or her 60s and still be “hot” because s/he is passionate about her/his subject.

  Prior to that, the general talk around the academic water cooler was that the entire site was horrible - allow students to anonymously rate instructors; worse, to assign attractiveness, as if that matters. Not everyone was so grim, though. Many discussions showed the deeper meaning of such soon-to-be iconic structures. In 2005, for example, Alex Golub worried that even mentioning that we instructors knew about the site, let alone to openly discuss the chili peppers, might potentially be considered a violation of the students’ privacy. But he concluded that the successful professor would ultimately embrace what the chilies represent - student voice, and faculty needed to understand that.

  I’m glad that Golub’s predictions of normalizing the website have come true, and all the furor has died down about it. There’s even an example essay in one of my writing textbooks from the students’ point of view about the website that is quite funny. This essay always provokes a discussion on my own rating, and I tell students that if they decide to rate me, they should, of course, say whatever they need to say, but at least give me a chili pepper to soften the blow. It’s part of my classroom shtick and it always gets some laughs, and even a chili pepper rating or two. Am I violating their privacy? I just don’t think so. I’m not, after all, telling them to pull out laptops and do it right there so I can check their spelling and grammar.

  If you’re at all curious, I am listed at two colleges. At one I have a 6 out of 8, and at the other I have an 8 out of 8. I guess that means I’m hot. That actually isn’t how I interpret the chilies, though. I see them as one more way for me to encourage students into my classes so that I can continue to teach one more contractual semester.

  I used to create print advertising, back in the olden times when the internet wasn’t in every 5-year-old’s bedroom. Having a public persona was crucial for the companies that I worked for and with. As a contract worker now, how can it be any different? The answer is that it isn’t different. We need butts in seats to keep our jobs. We also need returning students to, well, return. We need them to tell all of their friends we are fair graders, caring instructors, and we need the students to do well (or at least to understand why they might not have done so well, with the conclusion being it wasn’t the instructor’s fault, per se). These are our clients, our customers. In my opinion, RateMyProfessor.com is a better indication of how we’re doing than those semi-regular department evaluations.

  Tags: attractiveness, effective teaching, effectiveness, evaluations, happy client, hotness, Katherine Kiefer-Newman, popularity, ratemyprofessor, student

• Where Am I Again?

  No Comments
  16 Feb 2010 /  community colleges, students
  This morning I was standing in an urban classroom teaching the political ramifications of death for Westerners as viewed through a Japanese lens. In a few hours, I will be teaching college-level writing at a high school (this is a satellite location for a different college) in what is lovingly referred to by residents as a “horse town.” At the urban college, I teach in hundred-year-old buildings (some with pretty scary earthquake cracks running up the walls and across the ceilings). When I teach in the evenings the halls and bathrooms can be pretty creepy to wander into alone. There’s an observatory on campus, and a fully-wired two-story library that the college just finished. The student bookstore is also pretty impressive with a little coffee shop and two stories of its own. This school has a TV station, a culinary certification program, a nursing program, and more. The students dress in inner-city chic, and come from predominantly lower-class, immigrant families from all over the world. Last semester I had a student from Borneo (which was one of the places our textbook talks about), one born in Bangladesh (our textbook doesn’t talk about this country and she seemed put out by that fact), one from Japan (there are two chapters that deal with information from Japan), and one from Argentina (another place our textbook talked about). This multinational make-up is standard at this school.

  That was this morning, and every Tuesday/Thursday morning. For tonight’s class I’ll be driving past dairies, chicken farms, and horse ranches to get to the satellite location. I’ll pass under the billboard advertising the local festival called Stagecoach Days. Come May, that billboard will be replaced by the one advertising the summer Cherry Festival. Five of my current students graduated from that very high school last June; they even know the night dean because he used to be the Vice Principal there. These students tend to be middle-class, from families that own construction companies, delivery companies, etc. One student works for his family, and they board horses (he writes about participating in rodeos and shoeing horses), another student’s father owns gas stations all over town. One of my students works for a vet who specializes in farm animals, and she writes essays about delivering livestock or curing horrible diseases that the big animals get.

  Some of my students come down out of the mountains, yet another culture, and they will often be absent due to snow closing the roads. Alternatively, at the city campus I have students who take up to three busses to get to school; perhaps more interestingly, at the satellite I had a student threaten to come on her horse when her car broke down.

  Once I get my bearings, I find it all very fascinating and rather fun to see the similarities and the differences. Sadly, some of those include things like students who don’t have access to the terrific Learning Resource Center on the college main campus because they work during the day, and attend classes at night; or they come from such a poor family that they don’t have the money for basic supplies like pens and paper, let alone the textbook; or they have no babysitter because their toddler is sick and the regular babysitter is a neighbor teenager who won’t watch a sick toddler.

  It’s hard to know how to help such a diverse student base. I have to acclimate myself to the various challenges on the fly, and on days like today, more than once. It can be taxing. I think it’s worth it, though. I get to learn about so many different kinds of people and meet them, meet their children, hear about their jobs and hopes and dreams, and I get to help them learn something new. This is probably the thing I love most about community college.

  Tags: argicultural, diversity, driving, horse, inner-city, juggling, Katherine Kiefer-Newman, rodeo, rural, satellite, urban

features, news, reviews, cartoon, past issues