Juggling 101

• Spring Break Is An Oxymoron

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  30 Mar 2010 /  time management
  This week is Spring Break. Well, sort of. No, it is, but not necessarily for me. It’s break for some schools, some instructors, some kids, but not all of them. One of my colleges is, in fact, on break for the week. I teach two online classes and a face-to-face class there. In the face-to-face class we had the midterm last week and they couldn’t get out of that classroom fast enough. I warned them that we still had the second half of class to finish. One young man asked if I was going to get the midterms done early. I laughed. “I still have classes to teach at a different school. I’ll try, but I need to work them into my regular grading schedule.” He was shocked that I wasn’t on break. He said, “I thought I worked all the time, but your schedule is nuts.” He has no idea.

  At the other college where I teach, I have classes this week, next week, and then one of the classes is on break for a week, and the other for two weeks.

  Last Thursday, in one of those classes, I forgot where I was and tried to send them off on a break. They were thrilled at the idea of having the entire month off. “Not so fast,” I told them. “Even if I get confused, you have the schedule, you know when we’re supposed to be here.”

  It would funny, this crazy schedule of mine. OK, it is funny. But my poor husband has his own crazy adjunct schedule that doesn’t line up with mine. Worse, I have a daughter in high school and one at the local university. Their schedules also don’t mesh with my husband’s or mine.  We used to take family vacations, but that just isn’t possible since we started teaching as adjuncts.

  My older daughter asked for help with one of her final projects due this week. We laughed as we pulled out the calendars (on our cell phones and laptops) to find some time. She keeps getting confused because she’s on quarters, hence she’s in finals, and her father and I are on semesters, which puts us at midterms.

  One of the real victims in all of this is my elderly father who can’t keep any of these schedules straight. My husband prints schedules for my dad, but we have to constantly update them. And my daughters have things come up weekly, sometimes daily, that cause them to need to be out of the house when the schedule says they should be home. It really confuses poor Dad. He has started just bolting and chaining the front door all the time. He doesn’t even check who’s not home yet. We have to call each other from outside and ask someone to take the chain off the door.

  Worse than that, I have a dear friend who also teaches adjunct. She and I were hoping to get together for lunch over one of the breaks. Sadly, she’s at still other schools and none of our breaks line up. In fact, our personal schedules don’t line up, either. The previous weekend she left me a message on my Facebook asking if we could try to do lunch. She suggested the weekend, since our days are so crazy. While I teach five classes at three locations, she teaches something like nine classes at I-don’t know how many locations. She also works as a tutor at one of my colleges. On Thursday, last week, I called her. I got her voicemail. I left her a message that asked if she had Sunday off. I needed to take my daughter to get her senior portraits done on Saturday, so Sunday was the only day I had open.

  She texted me back that Sunday she was taking her kids to the movies. Several texts later we tried to find a two-hour spot in our schedules but had no luck. Her last text was “we’ll have to play it by ear.”

  My ear is getting tired and sore, though, because this keeps happening. You would think that I would be used to it by now, but I’m just not.

  Tags: adjunct, busy, Katherine Kiefer-Newman, schedules, spring break, vacation

• Function Over Form, Really?

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  19 Mar 2010 /  organization, teaching
  I was out walking with a friend last week and the conversation turned, as it often does, to school. She’d just finished her college-level writing class and was sharing her experiences. She loved her instructor and mostly wanted to express how grateful she was for the terrific job he had done. In his class, the students wrote eight essays, plus a rash of smaller writing assignments. They watched movies, and analyzed them. She raved about the various critical thinking exercises and discussions this instructor offered—she felt challenged to try harder, and to push herself. Overall, the class sounded like one that, as a student, I would’ve enjoyed.

  This got me to thinking.

  Much goes into putting together a writing class. As part of the design, instructors consider the course’s outline of record and other requirements. These can be rather strict and stiff. Some schools have tightly controlled curricula, some limit the textbooks used, while others allow the instructor total autonomy. A minimalistic approach is one extreme (basics only), and a fully-loaded course like the one my friend had is at the other extreme.

  Where my friend’s class was chock-full of critical thinking opportunities, a variety of materials for the students to analyze, and ample classroom discussions on controversial topics, the minimalist approach offers a more practicum-oriented structure rather like a vocational application of writing techniques. Here, students spend their time learning writing formulas for thesis statements, paragraphs, and essays; they read mostly other student work looking at style, function, and effectiveness more than content and quality of writing; and while they are introduced to critical thinking as per the requirements, classroom time is mostly spent in various writing exercises and workshops rather than heated discussions.  Instead of spending weeks on research essays and longer writing pieces, students have a shorter reading and writing assignment due every class, and frequently workshop those assignments in groups.

  Now, the ultimate goal of any instructor is to offer a variety of teaching styles so that more students’ needs are addressed. Sticking too closely with one or another style, however well-intentioned, can result in losing some, or many students. Having too minimal an approach can lead to formulaic and dull writing; having too creative an approach can lead to the basics getting lost in the milieu of technique. Perhaps it comes down to that old battle of function over form, of practicality over style.

  You might be thinking that I am about to say that my courses fall firmly between the two extremes. That isn’t the case, though. I did used to teach the fully-loaded, critical thinking heavy class. If lessons got sidetracked because of hot topic discussions, I figured that students were learning how to express themselves. I encouraged creativity. I cheered on individuality and innovative thinking—at least I did until I taught a critical argument class about two years ago.

  The first meeting, I surveyed my students and they admitted that not a single one of them had scored higher than a C in their prerequisite writing class (which I regularly teach). I spent the majority of that semester:

  1) teaching them the what and how of a thesis statement

  2) that opinion is not analysis

  3) that plagiarism can be unintentional yet still be really bad.

  I came to dread the discussions because basic “if/then” arguments were lost on these students. Their attempts at writing clear, concise arguments were painful to read. Critical analysis was all opinion for these students, and they had no idea how to even communicate those opinions in grammatically correct ways. When we moved into the literature section they were lost in every discussion about symbol, tone, mood, and interpretation.

  I made the decision then to return to my computer training method of a practicum approach. I developed my writing formulas, and I’ve been using them since. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder sometimes if I haven’t sacrificed style for practicality. Sometimes it’s a roll of the dice how well we do in any class; sometimes we agonize over every choice we make. I’d say the proof is in the pudding, but I don’t allow my writing students to use clichés or figures of speech in their writing and it would be bad form for me to do it here.

  Tags: adjunct, adjunct instructor, complicated, critical thinking, form, function, how to teach writing, how to write, Katherine Kiefer-Newman, minimalist, philosophy of education, POE, simple, style, teaching, writing

• Death & Dying: A Love Story

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  13 Mar 2010 /  teaching
  Last semester I walked into a class that I had been petitioning to teach since I began at this particular school. It is a class on the dark and brooding subject of death. When I first talked with the department chair about this class, and about how I would bring a completely different perspective to the material, I actually had no idea what the class was about. Hubris, I know. I’d seen the name in the catalog and thought it would be fun to tell people I teach a class called Death and Dying. It is fun saying that, I admit it. I am a 40+-year-old woman, and the name sounds cool is a frivolous reason to want to teach a class.

  In that meeting with my chair he gently but firmly informed me that he was quite content with the gentleman currently teaching the course. Last summer that changed. I was suddenly mired in the culture of death, grief, mourning, and more. I was going to bring in various cultures and how they approach sickness and death. I was going to show students how Freud’s oft-misunderstood “death wish” was alive and well. I had so many plans.

  The reality, of course, is that I also had to find a textbook (or five) that allowed me to do all of that. And that was when I hit the wall. Had no one ever taught this course the way I wanted to? Was there no instructor out there who saw the ceremonial purpose of body tattoos that commemorate our beloved dead, and had a textbook made that showed pictures of them? And what about those “in loving memory” car tattoos that everyone drives around with? Wasn’t there a collection of essays someplace that had academics discussing the healing merits of such things? I did find some rather oddball books about zombie and vampire culture as outgrowths of our collective fear of dying. But the books were expensive, and the essays proved to be difficult to integrate into any other kinds of lecture. In the end, I went with a collection of essays that more or less outlines the historical development of the cross-cultural study of death utilizing essays and chapter excerpts by anthropologists, ethnographers, psychologists, folklorists, and other scholars. Mostly the students like the book. I’m constantly looking for supplemental materials, though, to fill in the gaps.

  Is teaching this subject everything I thought it would be? Yes and no. I do enjoy telling people I teach it. They always give me a strange look and then shake their heads and some, the less timid, finally ask me what a class on Death and Dying really is. The reality of the class, though, is that it’s a lot of work trying to teach students that the universe isn’t made up of “us” versus “them” but is, instead, just full of a whole bunch of “we all.” Two days a week, for 18 weeks, I do my best to teach that. Some cultures seem scary at first, some are rather boring, while others are very involved with their death and dying practices. There’s intrigue and exotic locales and more politicizing around corpses than you might think.

  Yesterday, two former students stopped by to say hello and update me on their transfers to four-year schools. As we were saying goodbye one of the young women - a smart and vivacious young woman who favors extremely tall hair styles and elaborate lip tints - said that she couldn’t get the class out of her head, even midway through a new semester. “I keep seeing death, rituals, and how people cope with it all in everything.” We laughed at that, but I think I can chalk that up to a win for me. After all, as Freud pointed out so long ago, the human body is moving inexorably toward its sure death, immortality is only, you see, a figment of the collective imagination. Every semester a few more students “get that” and perhaps see things a little more clearly in the big, bad world? Or not.

  Tags: brooding, Class, classroom, dark, Death, Dying, Emo, Gothic, Grief, Katherine Kiefer-Newman, Mourning, Philosophy, Religious Studies, student, textbook troubles

• The Hot and Cold of Chili Peppers

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  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

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