A Drop in the Bucket

Mary arrives for her October advising appointment.  Transcript and catalog hang limply at her side.  We look over a grid of offered courses.  She chooses a schedule for her final spring semester.  I skim my copy of her record and commend her for coming so close to graduating cum laude.  "Almost made it, didn't you?" I smile

"Um... almost?  No, I am totally graduating with honors.  I'm getting an 'A' in Spanish and Senior Seminar."  Mary speaks with equal parts confidence and condescension.  She is wondering how a man gets to be a college professor with such a poor understanding of mathematics.  Of course a strong eighth semester will boost her average.

The End of Bold Critique

A month ago, a friend of mine had a baby.  I'm happily included in a cluster of folk who bring meals and coo at the fresh human.  The women in that circle compare birth narratives ("...well I was in labor for twenty hours...," "...like pushing a watermelon through a straw...," "...one kid right after another, like a Pez dispenser..." and so on).  And many of them — seldom in the new mother's presence, mind you — say some variation of this:  "Wow, she looks good; she's lost nearly all her baby weight."

It's clear that women (yes, even in this enlightened age) value certain standards of weight loss and ideals of figure.  But they dare not encourage it.  They can no longer ask each other "So, when did you think you might lose those last five or six pounds?"  These women are not Philistines.  Many are educated "crunchy moms" who read and share articles about home delivery, organic foods, and gender empowerment.  They envision and work for a world free from privilege and discrimination.

Living Backwards

At the end of each semester an audience of 300 gathers for the Media Showcase.

Having calibrated your level of expectation, what assessment evidence is appropriate?  As in earlier posts, I'm going to offer my syllabus calendar for Intro to Video Production as an example, annotating it here with my reasoning.

Students in my orbit have often heard me tell them to "live backwards."  It's a mantra meant to express an understanding that the afternoon plan for a picnic motivates a morning of sandwich-making.  Similarly, a film's premiere motivates a back-timing of tasks from editing to scriptwriting.  This seems self-evident.  Yet many, many students wait until the last week of the semester to ask:  "Is the final cumulative?" or "How high must I score to pass?"  These underachievers are (and I use the term pejoratively) "forward-thinking."

Extra Credit For Sale

I've sent e-mails, Tweets, texts, IMs, and Facebook updates. I've made personal appeals with handshakes in the hall. Finally, I ended the exam period with a reminder to students to fill out their on-line course evaluations. One student said "I hear other teachers are giving points for a certain class response percentage. What do we get if we evaluate you? " A friendly class opinion leader with whom I have a good relationship, he had the mischievous gleam in his eye of a boy who's just discovered the closet in which his parents hide unwrapped presents.

Good Enough

Picasso's Femme en Pleurs (detail)

A high school junior I know wants desperately to attend an art school.  Recently he asked me, “How do I know if I’m good enough?”

“Show your work to a teacher.” I said.  “To someone who’s good at what they do.  Someone who’s not related to you. Someone who knows you, but maybe doesn’t love you.  Ask that person if your art is good.

Excellence by Default

"Asking students to evaluate their professors anonymously is like Trader Joe's soliciting Yelp reviews from a shoplifter." -- Rebecca Shuman, education columnist for Slate.

An exhausted alternator took out the truck's electrical system.  I coasted to the side of the road and called AAA.  Six hours and $1100 later, I was back on the road. 

Please, don't give me grief for going to the dealership.  I do know better.  It was the closest service garage.  Yes, $1100 is an outrageous price to pay for an alternator and a new battery.  But the waiting area had a fireplace, a coffee bar, and a concierge.  Well, the coffee bar was really a trio of thermoses.  And the concierge was a secretary who relayed customer questions to mechanics.  But the fireplace was real.  Well, it was a real gas fireplace.  So the flames were real.

The Train Wreck of Hate Watching

The moment of impact at the famous Crush, Texas train wreck in 1896.  Many of the 40,000 onlookers were injured by debris.

Some of the best-attended spectator events of the 19th century were staged train wrecks.  Decommissioned locomotives intentionally smashed into each other at high speed before grandstands of onlookers.  Perhaps this love of calamity constitutes an antecedent for the phenomenon of “hate watching.”  Yes, our species is so reliably bitchy that NBC strategically presumed a certain percentage of this week’s Peter Pan Live! audience would be snarky tweeters hoping for something to go wrong.

That reminds me of a few too many college committee meetings.  You know how they are.  Somebody presents a new idea.  Maybe a curriculum upgrade, maybe the renaming of a course.  And those around the table offer criticism.  They almost always offer criticism.  They offer criticism because it demonstrates they’ve read the agenda or studied the proposal.  Much less often (in my own experience) do they say, simply, “I like it,” “Count me in,” or “Let’s move forward.”

Nurture Shock & Trophy Kids

Alex Gregory for The New Yorker

Recently, I listened to an interview with Ashley Merryman, co-author of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children.  She argues that we’ve raised a generation of trophy kids.  They are rewarded not for excellence so much as mere existence.  One example:  more money is spent on trophies by youth soccer organizations nationwide than on coach training or equipment.  Indeed, parents faced with little league budget cuts more often choose to save money by playing fewer games than by giving fewer trophies.

Some other highlights from Merryman’s interview:

Self-Reported Mischief

Tom Hiddleston as Loki, the Norse god of mischief.

Last year, Margo created a survey to gauge attitudes toward bullies by their middle school peers.  The questions took months to draft and vet for bias. The Institutional Review Board checked her protocol against NSF rules for the ethical treatment and informed consent of human subjects.  The survey was tested on a dozen middle schoolers.  Three of them misunderstood the wording of question 17.  Six more rewrites.

Next Margo sought guinea pigs.  She needed a representative mix of ethnicities and genders.  Some urban schools, some rural.  Private and public.  Bible Belt South and affluent Northeast.  Six weeks of research, e-mails, and snail mail.  The begging phone calls to sixty principals:  “Yes sir.  Completely anonymous.  I know, sir.  You’re absolutely right; the school day is precious.  I promise.  Fifteen minutes, max.”