Three students from my technical writing class came to see me during my office hours a couple of weeks ago because they were unhappy with the grades they received on their first assignment of the semester and they wanted my help in rewriting it for a better grade. The assignment, which I give every time I teach technical writing, is pretty straightforward. Students are instructed to imagine that it is the end of the previous semester–which in this case would be Spring 2009–and they have gone to the English Department office, where they are told that registration for Technical Writing is by instructor’s permission only, and so they need to submit to me a letter of application. In writing this letter, they are allowed to use any source material they think is relevant: the syllabus I have handed them, the college catalog, my faculty and/or personal website, my ratings on ratemyprofessors.com–anything–as long as what they write contains the following:

1. An explanation of the course’s relevance to either their career goals or their academic careers;
2. A discussion of what they perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses as writers;
3. A discussion of what they believe they have to offer the class.

The assignment is difficult, especially given the fact that my students are, overwhelmingly, college freshmen or sophomores. Not only have most of them never had to write a real letter of application before–and good letters of application are damned hard to write–but even seasoned writers can find it difficult to articulate their writing strengths and weaknesses. More, it is rare that an 18-, 19- or 20-year-old has the maturity to write persuasively about either her or his character traits or plans for the future. Indeed, one of my goals is that, by confronting students with just how difficult it is to write about themselves in a way that is both persuasive and professional, the assignment will spur at least some of them to think a little more deeply about who they are, what they want to do with their lives, the place of writing in their lives, and how and why they choose to present themselves in writing the way they do.

The first student who came to see me, a woman from Senegal for whom English is a third language, received an F on her paper because it was filled with so many grammatical, editing and proofreading errors that, had it been an actual letter of application, I would have stopped reading after the first half of the first sentence. Truly, it read like she’d spent, at most, fifteen minutes typing, unfiltered, whatever was in her brain and then handed to me the piece of paper that emerged from her printer without giving it even the most cursory of second glances. Almost the first thing she said to me when she sat down in my office was, with her eyes starting to tear up, that maybe the best thing for her to do was drop my course. Clearly she was a horrible writer, she said, and she did not want to end up with an F on her transcript. I asked her if she was a good writer in French, the language of instruction in her country, and she said yes. I asked her what grades she’d gotten in high school on the essays she’d written in French, and she told me A’s and B’s. The problem, then, I explained–and I am paraphrasing a much longer conversation–was not that she was a horrible writer. Literacy skills transfer from a first to a second–and even a third and fourth–language. The problem was that she hadn’t taken the time to do her best work, and when I suggested that maybe this was because she’d figured writing a letter would be easy, she smiled and nodded. Now that she knew better, she said, she would at least give rewriting the assignment a chance before deciding to drop the course.

I’ve been teaching in the English Department of the community college that employs me for twenty years now, and I am still surprised–though perhaps I shouldn’t be–that it’s the students who are used to getting good grades with whom I have to have the above conversation. Not that these students are the only ones who fail to take assignments seriously, but they tend to be the ones who come to my office either, like my student from Senegal, more or less destroyed by the poor grade I have given them or convinced that what they need is to get from me my personal “Student Road Map to the A.” Student who are looking for the latter tend to argue that my standards are not just different from those of all the other teachers who have graded their work in the past; my standards are much, much tougher. This was what the second student who came to see me said. An African-American man who wants to be an inventor and a consultant, his first words after he sat down across from me were, “I don’t understand what you don’t understand about what I wrote.” It’s a fair question, and one I usually look forward to answering because it can lead to real dialogue and real learning on the part of the student, except that–at least at first–this student was more interested in persuading me that the strategy he used in his letter should have gotten him a better grade than the C I gave him than in hearing my explanation for why it didn’t. I explained, giving several examples to illustrate my point, that his letter was neither well-focused nor well-enough substantiated and organized to convince me, were he truly applying, to admit him to my class. Each time I paused to see if he understood what I was saying, though, he responded by explaining in turn that his goal in the letter was for me to get to know him as the impressive person he is–that is my paraphrase of what he said; he was not, in fact, arrogant enough to say it like that–because that knowledge, he felt, ought to have been sufficient for the letter to succeed. When I suggested that asking me to read five paragraphs of often irrelevant detail about himself before he even mentioned the fact that he was applying to my class might be asking a bit too much, he explained, again, how important it was for me to get to know him. “I still don’t understand why you don’t get this,” he said.

So I went over one paragraph with him in extreme detail. I showed him how adding specific examples to support the claims he was making about himself, while at the same time taking out the irrelevant information, would make his letter persuasive. He understood, or at least seemed to understand, but instead of taking this understanding and going back to rewrite his letter, he tried to push me into doing the same thing with every other paragraph. When I told him I would not do that, that he needed to take what he’d learned and try to apply it–to do, in other words, his own work–he said, “I’m beginning to understand what you want from me, and so what I need to know now is how to get you to give me an A, and the only way I am going to learn that is if you go over each paragraph with me.”

What I need to know is how to get you to give me an A. I recognize that students want good grades; I acknowledge the emotional validity of feeling like, if you are paying for an education, part of what you should be receiving is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I certainly appreciate that there are students for whom the practical value of their grades outweighs, legitimately and reasonably, whatever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show students how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help students learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really matter to me if a student moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What matters is that they have moved, that they are better writers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indifferent to students’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learning to write is not like filling in a blank or coloring in a circle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each question and so the formula for getting an A is clear. Rather, learning to write is a lot like growing up. No matter how much advice and guidance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never manage it at all. Read the rest of this entry »

I am scheduled to teach, for the first time, a class in Asian American Literature starting next month, and I am wondering if people here might have some thoughts on a question that I have been asking myself in terms of what should be on the reading list. I would like to include Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the eerie parallels between the way the beginnings of the 1978-79 revolution are represented and the events that took place in Iran this past June and July after the contested presidential elections (and those parallels are even stronger in the movie). These parallels are important not so much because I want to teach something about Iran today, but because of the way they contextualize the protagonist’s conflicted sense of self after she has spent time outside of Iran, and she experiences herself as not being part of either Iranian culture or the culture to which she has traveled.

The thing is that Marjane Satrapi is not American, and so nothing about her book represents an Asian-American experience. At the same time, however, it would be foolish, I think, not to see her book as part of Asian-American literature. It exists in American English, is not, by virtue of its content, so easily and narrowly categorized as French literature in translation and it absolutely speaks to an experience that Iranian-Americans share and that others will recognize as part of the Iranian-American experience, even if some of the specifics are slightly different.

Normally, I do not worry so much about categorizing literature like this, but largely because this is the first time I am teaching this course and because I recognize that Asian American literature is an established field of academic study that I have a responsibility to represent accurately in my class, I am wondering about the degree to which assigning a book like Persepolis undermines the notion that a class like this should represent the Asian-American experience and present students with books written by Asian-Americans, even if the Asian-American experience is not, per se, what the book is about.

My own gut feeling as a writer is that the question I am asking sets up a false dichotomy, but I am not Asian-American, am not at all well-versed in the field of Asian American studies and so I don’t want to presume that my gut feeling is accurate–especially since, as I said, this is the first time I am teaching this class. So I am wondering what people here might think.

I was not planning to start posting again until I could begin in earnest the series I want to do on classical Iranian literature–and interruption after interruption after interruption has kept me from getting to the point where I am ready to do that–but something happened this week relating to a former students of mine that I need to write about. It is actually quite urgent, probably not to anyone who reads this blog, but certainly to the woman whose message is at the root of this post, and it makes a point that cannot be made strongly or frequently enough: We, especially but not only those of us who have survived sexual abuse of any kind and are strong enough to do so, need, need, need, need, need to speak up loudly and often about the realities of that abuse and how it has shaped our lives (because, whether we realize it or not, it shapes the lives even of those of us who have not been abused, either because we know someone who has or because it shapes the culture in which we live.) You may have seen this post in which I put up a YouTube video of an interview I gave to Jackson Heights Poetry Festival, an organization on whose advisory board I sit. In the interview, I talk about the relationship between my experience of child sexual abuse and the fact that I became a poet. The substance of what I said there is not important here. What is important is that watching this video moved a former student of mine to send me a message in which she told me–and the tone of the message suggests that I am the first person she has told–that she was sodomized a couple of years ago and had been trying to deal with it by pretending it didn’t happen. Even more importantly, though, and more urgently, she said that she suspects her three-year-old daughter is being sexually abused at the girl’s father’s house and that she [my former student] freaks out just thinking about the possibility. As I read the message, it sounded to me like she was saying this freaking out keeps her from acting on what she intuits, which is scary, because even if it turns out she is wrong–and there was no indication in the message that she has any vindictiveness towards the girl’s father that would lead her to make a false accusation (my point being that she might be wrong in good faith)–she needs to tell somebody, first to make sure that her daughter is safe and, second, to alleviate her own anxieties (and maybe understand, if she is wrong, what triggered her unfounded suspicions in the first place).

I responded in all the predictable ways–thanking her for her trust, acknowleding the courage it took for her to speak out, and encouraging her to get in touch with someone about her daughter’s sitation, though since I was running out the door, I couldn’t take the time to look up crisis hotlines or other phone numbers–and I am hoping to hear back from her, but what her message made me think about was, as I said above, just how important it is for us as a society to talk openly about the reality of sexual abuse. More, though, it made me think about how important it is to talk about that reality not just in contexts where sexual abuse is the topic–i.e., talk shows, conferences, seminars, etc. that are set aside for the specific purpose of addressing sexual abuse–but also, simply, merely, in the contexts of our daily lives, because abuse is always already part of our daily lives. Because you never know who is listening and how important your words might be to them.

I am remembering as I write this something that I have written about before, that I was not even thinking about when I started, but that is worth talking about here: An independent study I did five or seven years ago with two women who told me they wanted specifically to work on personal essays that dealt with the sexual abuse they had experienced when they were girls. They were both in a creative nonfiction class I was teaching and one had written an essay about her abuse that, while obviously cathartic for her, worked neither as a public document of personal testimony nor as art, and it was art she was trying to create. The problems in the essay were indicative of the difficulties abuse survivors have speaking out about their experience. Under normal classroom circumstances, I handle this by directing the student to some examples of writers who had dealt with similar topics; I might have a kind of “therapeutic” conversation (and I put that word in quotes because I do not mean that I would try to do therapy) to explore whether or not the student was really willing and able to delve into the topic at the depth and level of complexity it required. (I do, after all, have to assign a grade to the work my students hand me, and the last thing I would want is to give a low grade to an essay in which someone is struggling to come to terms with, or even just to name, the sexual abuse they’d survived because they were not yet able to write about the experience at the college level.) If the answer is no, then I offer the student the chance to write about something else; if the answer is yes, then I try to get them to articulate some of the difficulties they were having in writing the paper as a means of talking about how to deal with them in writerly terms; and I always encourage such students, if they are not in therapy, to seek counseling.

The woman in my creative nonfiction class, however, was not simply fulfilling an assignment I had given. She wanted to be a writer and she told me quite explicitly that she saw me as a role model, and so I was faced with the decision of whether to share with her my own experience of trying to write creatively, to make art, out of the fact that I had survived child sexual abuse. For reasons that are not so relevant here, I decided to do so. Then, when a second woman in the class also began to write about her experience of child sexual abuse, and she told me that she too wanted to be a writer, and she was a damned good writer, when the first woman approached me about doing an independent study, I suggested that the two of them might work together. The story of that independent study is really quite remarkable, but the part of it that is relevant here is this: At the end of the semester, all independent study students at my college are required to present their work at a colloquium; if they don’t, they don’t get credit. As the day of the colloquium drew near, my students grew increasingly nervous, for all of the predictable reasons, but one that stood out was their concern that the faculty and administrators present would think the subject of their work inappropriate for an academic context. So I told my students that I would introduce them by talking about my own experience of abuse and how meaningful it had been to me to be for them the kind of mentor/role model that just was not available to me in the 1980s when I started to talk about my own abuse. At that time, people were just starting to recognize the sexual abuse of girls. No one, as fas as I know, as talking in any substantive way–or at least was being given a forum to talk in any substantive way–about the fact that boys were being sexually abused as well.

And that’s what I did: I introduced those two women by naming myself as a survivor of sexual abuse and telling a little bit of my own story. It was a watershed moment in my life and in my career as a teacher. Not that I had any problem talking about my abuse, but I had always kept that part of my life separate from my professional life. It was “personal,” and so I had not really thought much about the degree to which it informed my practice as a teacher and a writer, my political stances in the world, etc. and so on. There is a great deal more to say about what it has meant to me to integrate these parts of myself, and I will, I hope write more about that. What I want to say here is simply that, if it were not for that independent study and the women who worked with me that semester, I would never have talked in that interview about the relationship between my abuse and my becoming a writer as easily as I did, and I would never have had the chance to encourage my former student to act on her feelings about her daughter’s situation, and my encouragement might turn out to be the thing that moves her to act, and we all know what kind of difference that could make in her daughter’s life (if she is being abused), and in my former student’s life as well.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

From the New York Times:

Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

…

James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

What else is there really than the effort you put in? Well… you know, there’s the finished product. The one thing that I, the educator, actually see? But that’s inconsequential, right?

Here’s the bad news - I originally wrote a pretty detailed response to this article, including both my outraged reaction as an adjunct who has experienced this sort of behavior, and a more thoughtful response on how race and gender play into student entitlement. But I found I couldn’t write it without divulging details about past jobs. So no commentary for you!

Instead, here’s an education-themed tab dump (it’s been a fertile week at NYT):

The humanities continue to have to justify their existence to college administrators. The best justification, in my opinion: the humanities explore what it means to be a human being. It’s true that you don’t need to go to college to do that, but college would be a pretty barren place without it.

18 students have been suspended from NYU following a sit-in. The students were demanding, among other things, an annual reporting of the university’s operating budget and the right of TAs to organize. Oh, the horror.

Speaking of university labor and operating budgets, coaches, star faculty members, and administrators can make millions of dollars a year while adjuncts and TAs - you know, the people doing the actual teaching? - subsist on salaries as low as $4,000. (That last part’s not in the article - it’s the salary I received my first year as a TA, after tuition was deducted.)

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

Lani Silver, a native of San Francisco and an anti-racist teacher and activist, who founded the Bay Area Holocuast Oral History Project, passed away, just found out through San Francisco supervisor Eric Mar on his Facebook:

Lani’s work with the Holocaust lead to her discovery of Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara. Chiune was a Japanese diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews in the Holocaust while stationed in Lithuania in 1939. Sugihara is called the “Japanese Schindler.” Sugihara, with the support of his wife Yukiko, and in cooperation with the Acting Dutch Consulate Jan Zwartendijk, issued visas to Jews against the orders of the Japanese government. After the war Sugihara was dismissed from the Foreign Service for “that incident in Lithuania.”

Lani’s funeral is this Sunday, February 1, at Beth Israel Judeo, Brotherhood Way, in San Francisco. It will be at 12:30 PM.

MLA (the Modern Language Association - where English professors go to party) just released a report on academic employment. Overall, the number of full-time jobs in academia has more or less stayed the same, while the number of part-time jobs has jumped due to increased student enrollment. The number of full-time jobs in English decreased by 10% in ten years. Across the board, part-time jobs are held mainly by women. Funny how the more white women and people of color attend and teach college, the less we pay the people working in the classroom.* What a coincidence. Isn’t that interesting.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I was giving up on academia and searching for a nonprofit job. I’ll be honest - I didn’t work that hard at the job search. I sent out maybe five resumes, had one interview. If I really set my mind to it, I could probably have found something in a few months. But due to the nature of part-time work, which forces you to constantly cycle through job after job (most of us TAs and adjuncts pick up side jobs like private tutoring whenever we find out that a section has been cut or an offer has fallen through), I’d already spent the past year and a half sending out resumes on a semi-regular basis, and I was tired. Plus, a funny thing happened when I emailed the department chair at my other campus to tell him I couldn’t keep the class I was teaching: he offered me another one.

I sat on the offer for a few days. Another class meant $1,300 a month instead of $650. It meant I could make rent and buy groceries. I emailed him to accept it, and then slumped in my chair and cried for an hour.
Read the rest of this entry »

Glenn Reynolds writes the stupidest thing he’s ever written, even dumber than his Iraq War touchdown dance on his own 20-yard-line. It turns out, you see, that There Can Be Only One.

Am I talking of the Highlander? The Fifth Cylon? No, I’m talking out the one important black person that can exist for all of American history:

I feel a little sorry for Martin Luther King — his enormous accomplishments got less attention than they deserved because of the cult of Malcolm X, and now he’s being eclipsed by Barack Obama. Though I suppose he’d be perfectly okay with that.

Yeah, that Martin Luther Whatever guy, who’s ever heard anything about him? It’s not like the guy has a national holiday or anything.

Now, we can go on and on about the utter stupidity of Reynolds pretending that W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman are now totally unimportant thanks to Obama’s victory; indeed, we can go further and note how insane it is that Reynolds would think Du Bois, Douglas, King, Malcolm X, Tubman, and the several million other African-Americans who worked for equality through our nation’s long and bitter racial history would see Obama’s victory as anything other than a positive outcome of their work. And certainly, I think everyone, including Barack Obama, would view Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of the three or four most influential Americans of the twentieth century, and one of the ten most influential in our nation’s history. He got his holiday for a reason — not that Reynolds’ allies wanted him to.

But Reynolds’ world view is of a piece with the dribblings of Mark “The Human” Steyn, who just doesn’t like that his kid is learning about the darkies:

A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, “Guess what we learned today?” I said: “Rosa Parks.” He said: “How did you know that?” I said: “Because it’s always Rosa Parks.” And, if you don’t learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it’s just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.

Teaching only the warts is a terrible thing to do to young children. At its extreme it leads to those British Taliban captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan: Subjects of the Crown who’d been raised in English schools and taught only that the country to which they owed their nominal allegiance was the source of all the racism, oppression, colonialism, and imperialism in the world. Why be surprised that a proportion of the alumni of such a system would look elsewhere for their sense of identity?

But, even in its more benign form, warts-only education leaves a big hole where one’s cultural inheritance should be.

Wow. So much to unpack. First off, let me remind Mark that he’s a Canadian; whose cultural heritage are we talking about? But the hoser’s point would be dumb even if he could trace his roots back to the Mayflower.

My daughter, who’s in first grade, learned about Rosa Parks. She didn’t learn about Parks absent context; she learned that she defied a rule that said she couldn’t go where she wanted because of the color of her skin. When my daughter mentioned learning about Parks, I amplified the lesson, telling her how in some places in that time, the color of your skin dictated which schools you went to, which restaurants you could patronize, even what bathrooms you used. I told her that this was horribly wrong, and that American heroes like Parks stood up to that system, and that they made our country a better place.

This is, of course, what Steyn misses in this — Rosa Parks’ story is told precisely because it is heroic. Martin Luther King, Jr. is revered precisely because he was a national hero. We learn about our country’s sins — slavery, the genocide of native peoples, the long period where women were denied the vote — and we learn that even in the face of the worst our country could do, that ordinary Americans still stood up and fought for justice.

Our country has done great things. Among them are the great things we did to heal our own self-inflicted wounds. I’m grateful for all the men and women of all races who have worked to make ours what the founders called A More Perfect Union. Far from being beside the point, they are the point of this endeavor, the people who were empowered by the ideals of the Founding Fathers to speak out against our nation’s failings and by opposing, end them. That is the greatness of America, and it is a greatness that is belittled by ignoring it in favor of bland triumphalism.

Poor Prof. Alexander McPherson. A professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Irvine, McPherson was recently denied his academic freedom.

How, you ask, did that happen? Was he told what he had to teach in the classroom? Harrangued about work he’s published? Told that his public support for John McCain was going to get him fired? No, nothing so benign. McPherson was told that he had to attend a mandatory sexual harassment seminar along with all other employees of UC Irvine.

Clearly, he is all about sticking it to the man:

Four years ago, the governor signed Assembly Bill 1825 into law, requiring all California employers with more than 50 people to provide sexual harassment training for each of their employees. The University of California raised no objection and submitted to its authority.

But I didn’t. I am a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine, and I have consistently refused, on principle, to participate in the sexual harassment training that the state and my employers seem to think is so important.

Because when your employer tells you that you are required to attend a seminar as a condition of your employment, that’s completely optional, as many unemployed people can tell you.

For a while, it didn’t seem to matter much that I had refused. I (and fellow scofflaws) were periodically notified that we were not in compliance, and we were advised to get with the program like everybody else. Then the university began warning me that my supervisory responsibilities would be taken away if I did not promptly comply.

Last month, the university finally followed through, sending me a letter announcing that my laboratory and the students I oversaw were to be immediately turned over to other university officials and faculty. I continued to refuse to take sexual harassment training, and do so now.

Now, at this point, everyone who’s ever been employed by anyone is pretty much saying to themselves, “Well, duh.” I mean, all of us have been shepherded into pointless meetings on everything from ergonomics to the new 401(k) plan to why our health plan costs just jumped 43,000 percent. And when they’re mandatory, you go. You may grumble that you have better things to do; sometimes those better things are work, and sometimes it’s talking fantasy football, but whatever. You go, because the entity that’s paying you for your time has decided that for this particular hour, this is how you are going to use your time.

In this case, it’s not even McPherson’s employer saying this; it’s the people of California, through their duly elected representatives. And McPherson isn’t even part of an independent company that could argue their rights to promote harassment in the workplace are being infringed; McPherson works for the State of California. He is out of legs, arms, and any other body parts to stand on, and should probably just go to the damn seminar.

But he’s taking a bold, brave stand:

am not normally confrontational, so I sought to find a means to resolve the conflict. I proposed the following: I would take the training if the university would provide me with a brief, written statement absolving me of any suspicion, guilt or complicity regarding sexual harassment. I wanted any possible stigma removed. “Fulfilling this requirement,” said the statement I asked them to approve, “in no way implies, suggests or indicates that the university currently has any reason to believe that Professor McPherson has ever sexually harassed any student or any person under his supervision during his 30-year career with the University of California.”

The university, however, declined to provide me with any such statement, which poses the question: Why not? It is a completely innocuous, unobjectionable statement that they should have been willing to write for any faculty member whose record is as free of stain as is my own. The immediate reply of the administration was that if I didn’t comply with the law, I would be placed on unpaid leave.

Well, yeah. If my boss asks me to come to a meeting, and I tell her that I will, but only if she signs a statement saying the company does not know anything about me stealing a gross of paper clips, my guess is that not only won’t she sign, but she’ll ask me why it’s so important that I sign — and begin auditing the supply cabinet.

I’m not saying that McPherson has in fact been harassing students. But it is weird how he wants administrative cover about it, especially since he hasn’t been brought into this seminar because he’s harassing students. Indeed, he’s in the same basic seminar that every single middle-sized and bigger employer in California is running. It doesn’t get any less selective than that.

So why is it he’s so concerned that he’s somehow been singled out? And why is he so afraid to go?

So why am I am being so inflexible on this issue? Why not simply take the training and be done with it?

Yeah, that’s what I asked.

There are several reasons.

First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

And he should know, because…er, he just knows it won’t be helpful. Especially since he hasn’t been through the training, and knows nothing about it. And he’s going to stand firm on this by demanding that his employer defy the law of his state, because he doesn’t like it.

Guess what, binky? There are all sorts of laws of questionable value out there, from the laws criminalizing marijuana to the recently passed repeal of basic human rights for gay and lesbian couples. If you don’t like them, though, you work to change the law. You can disobey the law too — but you can’t be surprised when it turns out that the punishments the law spelled out are applied to you.

What’s more, the state, acting through the university, is trying to coerce and bully me into doing something I find repugnant and offensive. I find it offensive not only because of the insinuations it carries and the potential stigma it implies, but also because I am being required to do it for political reasons. The fact is that there is a vocal political/cultural interest group promoting this silliness as part of a politically correct agenda that I don’t particularly agree with.

Shorter Alexander McPherson: the world was better when you could tell a freshman that her tits looked nice, and that she could guarantee herself an A if she’d just do one little thing for him.

I’m sorry, Professor, if that seems like I’m stigmatizing you. But you’re the one who’s so afraid of being told what normal adults should know — that demeaning and disrespecting people because of their gender is wrong — that you won’t even be in the same room as someone saying so. The “politically correct” argument against sexual harassment is simply that sexual harassment is wrong. If you disagree with that message, the implication is obvious. At the very least, you don’t see anything wrong with sexual harassment.

The imposition of training that has a political cast violates my academic freedom and my rights as a tenured professor. The university has already nullified my right to supervise my laboratory and the students I teach. It has threatened my livelihood and, ultimately, my position at the university. This for failing to submit to mock training in sexual harassment, a requirement that was never a condition of my employment at the University of California 30 years ago, nor when I came to UCI 11 years ago.

And therefore, nothing can ever change.

Look, Professor, things have changed a lot in 30 years. In 1978, it was still considered perfectly appropriate for the boys’ club to leer at women in the workplace. And some of the men who came of age at that time — i.e., you — never grew up past that point.

That’s why we have seminars like this — to let you know that 2008 is not 1978, and these things aren’t okay. Are sexual harassment seminars perfect? Of course not. But they’re taking a strong stand that says women in the workplace — and in your case, the workplace is also a school — deserve equal respect and dignity, that they should not be treated worse because of their gender.

So what’s wrong with that? Even if you think the seminar’s hokey at times, why don’t you agree with its basic premise — that women are equal?

The question contains the answer, of course.

Interestingly, I have received many letters of encouragement — about 25% of them from women. The comments have been rich with words like “demeaning,” “oppressive,” “politically driven” and “indoctrination.” Other phrases included “unctuous twaddle” and “sanctimonious half-wits.”

I’m not surprised that some women are praising this — like Dr. Helen, who naturally loves this column, there are always some who are willing to throw others under the bus to be the “good kind of girl.”

But I’m sorry, I’ve been through sexual harassment seminars. And while they were at time eye-rollingly earnest, I’ve never seen them as demeaning. I don’t harass women, though — and frankly, view it as important that I not do so inadvertently. I view that as important because I know too many of my fellow men have harassed women in the workplace for decades before I got there, and that only by my being willing to work to undo their sins can men like me help to level the playing field.

McPherson closes with a line that shows that for all his education, he has no clue what he’s talking about:

Sexual harassment is a politically charged issue. The people of California have granted no authority to the state to impose narrow political and cultural opinions on individual citizens.

Except they have; you even cited the exact bill, Assembly Bill 1825, which was passed by the duly elected representatives of the citizens of  the state, and signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The people of California have given that authority to the state, and said that they do in fact want the state to be tolerant of women’s rights in the workplace. Perhaps that will change some day; given that California, as we all know, has a pretty viable initiative and referendum system, McPherson could be working to get this bill’s repeal on the ballot.

But of course, such an attempt would fail, because we don’t think that women are second-class citizens, at least not so much as we once did. And while there are far too many holdovers, most of us don’t see much wrong with asking people to learn to work with others in a respectful manner. There’s a word for people who do: sexists. Which is exactly what McPherson is. And exactly why it’s good for the students at UC Irvine that he’s losing his supervisory position over this. Because I wouldn’t want my daughter working with a sexist professor. Indeed, I don’t want anyone’s daughter — or anyone’s son — working with him. Any man who would put hatred of women at such a great level of import is a person all of us are better off ignoring.

(Scott, Jill, and Megan have more.)

With all this bullshit being flung all over the blogosphere and stric-9 laced saliva being spewed out of every single pundit due to this election I want to present to you the dopest school kids I have ever seen. Hope this makes everyone’s day.

[Hat Tip: LawdaMercy]

So I’ve had a backlog of posts building up for about a week now, but I haven’t had much time or energy to devote to writing. One of the colleges I teach at decided to cut 50% of its sections, and I was laid off.

Oh… wait, I’m sorry. Since I and my colleagues are all classified as temporary part-time, there’s no such thing as a layoff in higher education. Rather, my spring sections have been cut.

Except, darn it, that’s not quite right, either. They only cut one of my sections, which cut my salary in half and made the forty-minute commute infeasible, so I was forced to withdraw from the other section. So, as you can see, it’s my fault completely that I will be underemployed come January. My employers had nothing to do with it.

See, here’s the reasoning for the “temporary part-time” classification: non-tenure-track college faculty, like so many other types of workers, are expected to exist in an “informational” mode. This means that, like data on a computer screen, we’re meant to start existing at the moment that we’re needed, and then stop existing as soon as administrators are done with us. You don’t bargain with information. You don’t work out a deal with it so that both your needs (affordable, reliable labor) and its needs (stability and reasonable compensation) are addressed. It’s not human. It doesn’t have needs. As soon as you run into problems and need to protect your own salary by cutting sections - blip! It’s gone. The informational mode saves you not only severance package bucks, but also the trouble of planning ahead so that you don’t have to abruptly cut sections in the first place. (For more information on the concept of informational labor, see How the University Works.)

I’ve been criticized, in the past, for trying to masquerade as a common worker. This type of thinking is dangerous for a couple of reasons. First off, it’s incredibly naive to assume that systems of exploitation stop at the poverty line. If Agriprocessors perfected the art of exploiting their workers, why in the world would you assume that college administrators can’t figure it out, too? Why would you assume that your own employer won’t come up with the same idea? Secondly, thinking that white-collar workers and professionals, including us pointy-headed brainiacs teaching freshman composition, are “above” exploitation not only prevents solidarity among our movements, but is a classist and racist way of looking at blue-collar workers and the working poor.

In any case, smell ya later, academia. I’m going to quit my other temporary part-time position, too; I’m now looking for something full-time in another field. (In an economic crisis. With a humanities degree. Sigh.)

I’m writing this not to vent - well, okay, to vent a little - but to emphasize the fact that US higher education is in serious trouble. There is a major brain drain going on among current and future college faculty. I should know; I’m part of it.

I’m also writing this to get some opinions on something. When I emailed my department chair to ask if his decision had anything to do with my teaching ability (he said it didn’t), he assured me that I’m a “very bright person.” It took me a while to figure out why the remark felt so backhanded. Then it hit me: isn’t “bright” the adjective you usually use with children?

I could be wrong on this, but I can’t remember the last time I heard someone call an adult man “bright.” If a man is intelligent and hardworking, you say he’s intelligent and hardworking. If a woman or child is intelligent and hardworking, you say they’re bright. If employers see me as childlike (Maybe it has something to do with being overly polite? Does that make women seem less mature? Funny, since being too collegial makes us seem presumptuous or even ball-busting), then I and my female colleagues are kind of screwed. In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.

Like I said, though, I’m not sure about this one.

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

I hope, in her academic career, that my daughter encounters teachers who disagree with her. Learning to understand and respect other positions helps us to strengthen and challenge our own beliefs. If my daughter grows up to vote straight-party Democratic without questioning why she’s doing so, I’ll have failed her, as her schools will have.

That said, there’s a limit to what I want my daughter exposed to. And I can state without hesitation that my daughter would never set foot in this man’s classroom again:

The day went as usual at Marianna Middle School, but one thing is different: 7th grade teacher and coach Greg Howard is no longer an employee. He was suspended without pay for 10 days starting Thursday for making racial slurs at presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Our source told us Howard asked his students what “change” stood for and proceeded to write out the acronym “change”- come help a n(word) get elected.

Jackson County’s Deputy School superintendent says he’s received conflicting reports, but he can confirm change and the n-word were used.

Crystal Dragon Jesus, are you kidding me? How big a racist buffoon must this guy be to think that was appropriate to write in a classroom? With six African-American students in it‽ I find it difficult to type the n-word even when quoting it directly from another source. I don’t say it — ever. And if a friend used it in private conversation, I’d be stunned and reproachful. I can’t imagine being so sanguine about it that I’d use the word in front of kids.

Unfortunately, Jackson is keeping a job — though he’s being kicked over to adult education. That’s not good enough. A teacher who is comfortable using racist epithets is not someone who should be teaching in 2008.

(Via CPL)

From How the University Works:

I started my semester at one of my campuses this week (the other started last week). Upon checking my mail for the first time this semester, I found a letter stating that due to a lack of cash flow at the state level, all part-timers are receiving a pay cut. Or, well, not exactly. The money’s just held up, is all, and we’ll get it right after the school year’s over. Except, okay, well, they’re not entirely certain they’ll get the money. You know how state budgets are! So why don’t we just work the school year, especially since they told us after it was too late to find other jobs, and once we’ve done the work, mayyybe we’ll get paid for it!

What’s funny is that only part-timers’ salaries are affected by the state budget crisis. As far as I know, full-timers and administrators are fine. Funny, how that worked out. The union will be taking action, of course. But I refuse to get my hopes up.

This semester, the walls of both my classes were lined with students trying to add the course because so many sections were canceled after registration. These students were desperate; one looked ready to cry when I told her I didn’t know if there was room, and another pumped her fist when I did a head count and announced that I could add a few people. (Right now I’m violating the fire code by allowing students to sit on the floor. There aren’t enough desks. Oh, god, the first batch of papers is coming in a couple of weeks.) My suspicion is that many part-time faculty members saw the pay cut, realized they couldn’t pay their bills, and decided to try their luck elsewhere - either at other colleges (although most semesters have started) or in different fields. I don’t think this is the whole reason why we turned away so many students; enrollment is up because the economy is sending many people back to school, and I also wonder if the administration cut entire classes to save money. But whatever’s going on, it’s hurting both educators and students. And if a system is hurting both the people serving it and the people being served, then what’s the point of that system?

Part-time faculty members make up more than 70% of all college educators - and that’s before you count “visiting” professors, who can spend years going from campus to campus, city to city, state to state, before they find a school willing to keep them for more than a year. As other part-timers have pointed out, we’re no longer “adjunct” to higher education - we are higher education. The system would fall apart without us. We have to use our numbers to do something.

When I got my second job, I was really excited because I’d finally be making 30K a year. I’d been teaching college for three years, but I’d never made 30K before. I’d never known how it felt not to be worried about money, not to feel guilty about eating out or buying something frivolous. Now I’m working more and making the same amount.

When I called HR to ask about the pay cut, they did the calculation, told me my new salary, and then assured me that it was “no big deal.”

Phew! That’s a relief.

Over at Hit and Run, Nick Gillespie says “what, me worry?” to schools cutting programs and services in response to tightening budgets:

Jesus Christ, is this the worst of it? If so, please just stop. As someone who had kids in the Maryland’s Montgomery County schools for a couple of years, I can guarantee you that they could choose to cut something other than funds for “an award-winning” math team with ease. Indeed, the district seemed hellbent on calling three-day weekends whenever snow was forecast for a Friday morning. And where are the calls to make administrators ride their bikes or carpool to school?

Some of the cuts Nick do seem pretty trivial — switching from stop-at-every-home bus service to neighborhood bus stops, for instance. Others, however, are serious: Cutting school weeks from five days to four. Raising the costs of school lunches and charging parents for bus service (in one high school, they’ve cut out bus service altogether). Not being able to get up to date textbooks degrades the quality of education, and so — believe it or not — does cutting electives and math teams.

That Nick responds to these real problems with mockery — as if no reasonable person could possibly be concerned with cutting to a four-day school week, or updated textbooks — shows how irresponsible the idealogical anti-government tax-cutters are.

Meanwhile, Nick’s ideas on how to save money are ludicrous. Administrators typically use their own cars to get to work, so calls for biking or carpools for admins won’t save a cent. And snow days actually save money for school districts (as does any other method of cutting the number of school days).

Nick goes on:

Per-pupil spending is up over 300 percent in constant dollars since the early 1960s. You’d think somewhere in that increase, schools would figure out how to fund meaningful stuff and drop crap.

Of course, a lot of that increase has gone into special education, school breakfast and lunch programs, bilingual education, and computers. These expenses were all either low or nonexistent in the early 1960s — and yes, they are “meaningful stuff” and not “crap.”

The other thing to consider is that as long as we want students to have direct interaction with teachers, the costs of education will always go up, due to Baumol’s disease.

When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it—two violinists, two violists, and a cellist. Today, you still need five people, and, unless they play really fast, they take about as long to perform it as musicians did two centuries ago. So much for progress.

An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren’t alone. In a number of industries, workers produce about as much per hour as they did a decade or two ago. The average college professor can’t grade papers or give lectures any faster today than he did in the early nineties. It takes a waiter just as long to serve a meal, and a car-repair guy just as long to fix a radiator hose.

The rest of the American economy functions differently. In most businesses, workers are continually getting more productive and can produce a lot more per hour than they could ten or twenty years ago. [...] Generally, productivity growth is a boon, but it creates problems for non-productive enterprises like classical music, education, and car repair: to keep luring talent, they have to increase wages, or else people eventually migrate to businesses that pay better. Instead of becoming nurses or mechanics, they become telecom engineers or machinists. That’s why teachers are getting paid a lot more than they were twenty years ago. (The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that’s if you adjust for inflation.) To pay those wages, schools and hospitals have to raise prices. The result is that in industries where productivity is flat costs and prices keep going up.

I have no idea if school districts really spend more (as a percentage of the total) on “crap” now than they did in the 1960s. But I’m skeptical, because Nick presents zero evidence to support his implication.

What I do know is that the amount of “meaningful stuff” schools are providing, and the legitimate costs of the “meaningful stuff,” have gone up significantly since the early 1960s. Too many libertarians, like Nick, act as if they believe in a free lunch; we can make HUGE cuts in education budgets and not suffer any pain at all, because there’s lots of unnamed “crap” to be cut! But it’s nonsense. Just saying “costs have gone up 300%” as if that alone proves there’s a huge amount of waste is economic illiteracy.

Hey, all!

First off, many thanks to Mandolin and Ampersand for inviting me to post here! I go by The Girl Detective (an homage to Kelly Link, queen of awesomeness) in the blogging world, and I usually write at Modern Mitzvot and my personal site. Interests include Jewish issues, Palestinian self-determination, feminism, academia, contemporary literature, video games, Battlestar, and any combination of the above. I currently teach freshman composition at two community colleges.

Last time the blogosphere heard from me - before I succumbed to a wave of final exams and Fall class prep - I only taught at one community college. The good news is I’ve picked up more work for the fall, and the better news is that I can quit my job as a private SAT tutor.

Oh, how I hate you, SAT.

About a month ago, Wake Forest University and Smith College announced that they’ll no longer be including the SAT among their application requirements. My alma mater made the same announcement a couple of years ago, and many other colleges have followed suit. This is very good news. SAT scores are pretty notorious for correlating more with income than with intelligence or scholastic achievement; a student who gets a 2350 is more likely to come from a middle to upper class family, and an A student from an impoverished or working class family will probably score lower. There are a few reasons for this disparity - non-college-track curricula at lower income schools, different dialects in different classes - and most liberals are at least vaguely aware that wealthier students have an unfair advantage. I didn’t realize how stark the disparity is, though, until I spent a year teaching upper-middle-class students strategies and tricks.

See, the SAT has nothing to do with academics. The SAT, as one of the trainers in my tutoring job informed us, tests you on how well you know the SAT.

Sure, they revamped it a few years ago, replacing the analogies with grammar questions and an essay. But the Educational Testing Service is a for-profit corporation, and their main objective is to make money. (NOTE: EJ points out in the comments that ETS is actually a nonprofit, and that the test is written by the College Board.  I was going by what I was told by my company, but I should have checked it.  Sorry about that.) The more times students take the SAT, and the more copies of the official study guide they buy, the more money ETS makes. This means that they write the questions in such a way that you often have to know ahead of time what traps to watch out for and what kind of answers they want. There are many questions that students are very unlikely to answer correctly if they can’t afford the $800 for a class, the $2-3000 for tutoring, or even the $20 for the study guide.

Take, for example, this Identifying Sentence Errors question:

Nearly all (A) of the editors of the magazine agree (B) that of the two articles to be published (C), Fujimura’s is the more exciting (D).

Students have choose the word or phrase that contains an error. If the sentence is fine as is, then the answer is E - No Error. Now, many of you probably know what the answer is above, but that’s because many of you are adults. Do seventeen-year-olds - even AP and private school students - know the correct answer to this question? Not until I show up at their house and give them extra grammar lessons. Most of my students choose D, because the wording sounds weird. We don’t normally say “the more exciting” - we say either “more exciting” or “the most exciting.” But you can only say “most” if there are three or more things being compared. Since there are only two articles, the correct answer is E.

How about this one:

The new system, which uses (A) remote cameras in the catching of (B) speeding motorboats (C), may undermine (D) the police department’s authority.

Students sometimes pause at “in the catching of,” but chances are they’ve heard that construction before. They’re used to academic English sounding fancier and more complicated than normal English, so they assume it’s correct. However, it’s an idiomatic error. The proper construction is “to catch.” The answer is B.

What really drives me crazy, though, are the pronoun questions:

When (A) a government agency encouraged the use of high-grade recycled office paper, they (B) helped increase the availability of (C) writing paper and envelopes made from (D) recycled paper.

Again, many of you probably caught the error immediately… but high school students often don’t know that when the subject of a sentence - in this case, the agency - is singular, then all pronouns pertaining to it must also be singular, even if the subject is a conglomeration of many other subjects. The answer is B; “they” should be “it.”

The tutoring company I work for has a money-back guarantee if students’ scores don’t go up at least a hundred points. They can do this because students’ scores usually go up about 400 points after ten weeks of private tutoring. We’re teaching them rules they’re not learning in school.

You’d think the essay would be a more accurate way to gauge a student’s ability, but even that’s not always the case. When I was in high school, I took the SAT II, which contained the essay section before they stuck it into the SAT. The prompt asked me if the individual is more important than society. (Or something like that.) I responded - quite eloquently, I think - by saying that, because society is made up of individuals, the individual and society are equally important. And I bombed. The graders are told to make sure essays argue one side or the other; any other response should result in a lower score. I got an A in my AP English class and went to a college known for its writing program, but according to my SAT II score, I was a terrible writer - because I didn’t have a tutor to tell me what exactly I was being tested on.

This is why lower income students get lower scores on the SAT - they just aren’t getting the extra help necessary to learn what the test wants. Which isn’t to say that it’s impossible to get a good score without extra help. But the statistics are pretty telling.

So I’m glad that Wake Forest and Smith are discontinuing the requirement. The problem, though, is that the schools that are discontinuing it are, for the most part, expensive private schools. This means that the students who are applying there are usually the students who could afford SAT coaching anyway. To really level the playing field, all schools must drop their SAT requirements - especially state universities, which are the most affordable. Admissions committees are learning nothing from standardized test scores that they don’t learn from transcripts, sample essays, interviews, and personal statements.

While we wait for that to happen, though, lower income students need more access to outside help. There are some organizations, like 826 Valencia, that offer free SAT prep courses when qualified volunteers are available, but the more the merrier, right? So I’m ending this post with an invitation: leave a comment if you live in the Los Angeles or Orange County area and are interested in - or are already - teaching SAT prep. I’m not officially starting anything here - I just want to see how much interest there is, or if there are any groups I and others could join.

(cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot)