Writing is a process best begun early.

Here are two conversations I recently had with different students:

Student 1: "I'm having trouble focusing my thoughts. I just keep going around and around in circles. I feel like I'm trying to include too much."

Me: "Well, how many pages have you written so far?"

Student 1: "Oh, none."


Student 2: "I'm really worried about this topic. It just doesn't seem like there's enough to say. I don't really know where I'm going with it."

Me: "Well, how many pages have you written so far?"

Student 2: "Oh, none."


Okay. See the problem here? I suspect I'm speaking in another language when I tell them, "Write first. Make writing a part of your process. Writing is an act of discovery. No time spent writing is ultimately wasted."

They have also not heard me when I said, "The best paper is a done paper." Less than half of my students managed to submit their final papers on time.

My current mood vacillates between frustrated and punitive.

Exams as educational tools

While researching something unrelated, I stumbled across an article by Howard E. Aldrich entitled, "How to Hand Exams Back to Your Class" (College Teaching 49 [2001]: 82). Aldrich's method has several parts:

1. An answer key with "best answers" given to the students
2. Students meet in preassigned groups to compare their answers. Those with correct answers take on a teaching role, explaining why theirs is a better response. 
3. At the start of the next class, Aldrich administers a 5-question multiple-choice quiz covering the questions most frequently missed. 
4. A cumulative final exam.

Instead of glancing at the grade and stuffing the test into their folders, Aldrich's students use the test as a learning tool. It becomes necessary to review one's progress in order to improve at the next stage.

My literature courses aren't heavily test-based. I give 2 or 3 exams, including the final. What are your thoughts on cumulative finals in literature courses?  Would they encourage students to build on their previous progress? Or would they overwhelm them?

Image source

Thanks, Peyton!

Previously, I've commented on the problems caused by the physical learning space. This summer, I am overjoyed with my classroom. It's the most perfect environment I've ever had. The desks are independent and movable. The other classrooms nearby aren't noisy. We have a view of the river. The room has white boards and is stocked with markers. It's a SMART classroom, with a projector and sympodium. It also has . . . (drumroll) a working PC and an opaque projector! And I owe it all to Peyton Manning:

Sign outside my classroom in the Communications Building

And of course the nice folks at the Registrar who scheduled me there.

Having a PC in the room has made me very willing to include media that I ordinarily wouldn't have bothered with. In yesterday's class, I had planned for the students to put Tess Durbeyfield on trial. While they were working, I loaded a Pandora station to play music so they would be more comfortable talking. The speakers in the room were excellent. Later in the class, I played a clip from the 2008 BBC adaptation, available on YouTube. I decided to show it at the last minute; I would not have brought my own computer for these minor uses. There are also many days that I would (and initially did) bring my own laptop to hook up to class. I frequently give PowerPoint presentations about the historical context of our readings. It's wonderful to have a class where this is easy to do. Thanks, Peyton!

The Raven, or The Death of the Author

Common Raven (and yes, they can be trained to talk)

The Raven (2012) features John Cusack as Edgar Allen Poe in a highly imaginative (i.e. no basis in fact) plot. Poe helps solve a series of murders based on his stories. As one reviewer described it, "It's like a grisly one-person interactive book club focused on one man's literary output" (Michael Phillips). The movie itself is mediocre. Cusack's innate charm, plus decent performances from Alice Eve as his love interest and Luke Evans as the police inspector, can't quite rescue the film from poor pacing and uneven tone. Still, I quite enjoyed it. I love watching Cusack in just about anything, and I was able to congratulate myself about all the Poe stories I had read.

What I thought most about, though, was the pleasure readers take in seeing their favorite authors on film. Becoming Jane is a prime example, though it's in a different category than The Raven, being 90% factual. Dickens' appearance in Dr. Who ("The Unquiet Dead") and Stephen King in Quantum Leap (The Halloween Episode) are other examples. People like to interact imaginatively with authors. They also enjoy learning more about their lives and personalities, to look at the wizard behind the curtain.

As a teacher, I'm ambivalent about the place of biography in studying literature.

I was educated in the formalist tradition, where what matters most is the text. I grew into a reader-response position, where what matters most is the meaning that readers make out of the text. I see the text itself as unstable and shifting, based a set of signifiers waiting for the reader to settle into the signified. One must avoid trying to figure out the author's intent, which is ultimately unknowable--if I intended this post to be brilliant and you read it as boring, is that your fault or mine? In this way (and several others) I align with Roland Barthes, who in his seminal essay, "The Death of the Author" (1967), argues that the identity of the author shouldn't be used to form meaning.

But on the other hand, isn't the speaker part of the rhetorical exchange? And doesn't knowing the context in which something is written affect the meaning? I concede that knowing more about the author and his/her time is one way of adding meaning to the text. I do include historical and biographical background in my classes. But perhaps I should do more. After all, in college I greatly enjoyed learning stories about the author's lives, not just the bare facts in the textbook overview. Having the sense of really knowing an author was part of the pleasure for me.

 It occurs to me that I know very little about the life of Poe.

Recursive Journaling

In last year's English 101, I used student blogs to try to get students to reflect on their political ideals. I was dissatisfied with the depth they achieved. One possible solution is recursive journaling. This is where students write an initial journal, and then, after some discussion and additional information, they revisit the journal entry.

This process was briefly described in Lisa Taylor's article, “Reading Desire: From Empathy to Estrangement, from Enlightenment to Implication.” Students in Taylor's teacher-education course write their first journal as they read  Persepolis, commenting especially on their identification with Marjane. Students read contextual materials alongside Persepolis and learn more about history, then revisit their first journal. The purpose of this activity was to have students question their empathic identifications, which often are merely projections of the self onto the other. The recursive journals allowed students to examine their assumptions and place of privilege. 

Persepolis image from Slant Magazine

Have you used recursive journaling? If so, what sort of guidance did you provide to students?

The importance of attendance

One day I'm going to sit down and crunch the numbers on this, to get absolute proof. Regardless of the flaws in my data collection, I feel confident in saying that students who miss a lot of class end up with lower grades. And that's before the late penalty is added in.

For evidence I offer the following chart of grades and absences from two sections of the same undergraduate literature class. Notice the correlations after 9 absences--missing more than 3 weeks of class.

Average	Absences
0.8975	0
0.9026	1
0.8749	2
0.927	2
0.8694	2
0.7117	2
0.887	3
0.8669	3
0.8654	3
0.8478	3
0.9609	3
0.8712	3
0.9296	3
0.9311	3
0.8658	3
0.8684	3
0.815	3
0.6684	3
0.8893	3
0.8951	3
0.8571	3
0.8492	4
0.8423	4
0.9549	4
0.9195	4
0.8682	4
0.8893	4
0.9124	4
0.8364	4
0.8088	4
0.9016	4
0.9133	4
0.921	4
0.9254	4
0.8686	5
0.8512	5
0.8427	5
0.8238	5
0.8084	5
0.7495	5
0.8531	6
0.5819	7
0.8561	7
0.8788	7
0.7998	7
0.884	8
0.8017	9
0.8985	9
0.7992	10
0.7742	12
0.7273	13
0.7956	14
0.7326	14
0.6206	16
0.7638	16
0.7191	19
0.4008	21

To Test or Not to Test?

Last summer, I spent some time thinking through the learning outcomes for each of my courses. With regard to my Introduction to Fiction class, I decided that tests were not helpful. It ultimately didn't matter if they retained the knowledge; what mattered was the thinking processes that are best developed through writing exercises and class discussion. I followed that principle this spring and was reminded of why so many professors give tests: without the test, there is a significant subset of students who will not read. And they will congratulate themselves for not reading.

The class is not entirely without comprehension assessments: there were 10 quizzes over the course of the semester. This subset of students did not do well on the quizzes, but since the quizzes only account for 5% of the grade, I suppose they thought they weren't important.

How shall I remedy this situation? Give a proper final exam instead of the creative monologue project (which I'm enjoying immensely and students are finding rewarding)? Count the quizzes for more? Assign more quizzes? Write letters to their parents? --Just joking, but sometimes I wish this were an option.