cac.ophony.org

photo credit: mag3737

As a Writing Fellow, I work with students who are having trouble structuring their essays, or need help clarifying their thesis statements, but sometimes I cannot help but address grammar problems. Yesterday I had some extra time with a student, so I gave him some feedback on a recurring grammar issue I noticed when I looked over his draft essay: rampant misuse of commas and semicolons! In speaking with him, it became clear that he didn’t really know what the difference was between a comma, semicolon, or colon, or when it was appropriate to use them.

As far as commas go, I taught him the “pause” trick. Read your sentences out loud to identify where you naturally pause, and that is where the comma(s) should go. When you read, your sentences out loud, it often becomes clear, when you’ve put in unnecessary commas. [When you read [pause] your sentences out loud [pause] it often becomes clear [pause] when you’ve put in unnecessary commas.]

Unfortunately, I did not have any neat tricks up my sleeve to explain semicolon usage. In the draft that the student showed me, his semicolons should have been commas; they did not connect two independent but related clauses that could stand on their own as complete sentences. “Get rid of them,” I advised. “If you don’t know how to use them, don’t use them at all.”

This got me thinking: I can help students identify when not to use the semicolon, but how do I teach them when it is appropriate to use? I’m a sociologist, not a grammarian! I’ve never had a formal grammar lesson myself, and cannot articulate all the rules of grammar, despite implicitly knowing and using them when I write. When I told the student to err on the side of caution by not using the semicolon, I realize that I was also erring on the side of caution in my proscriptive, rather than prescriptive, advice.

I was discussing this last night with a friend I ran into on the way home from the subway. My friend, who is absolutely not a grammarian either, reminded me about her favorite podcast, Grammar Girl. “I used a semicolon for the first time in my life this year, after listening to the Grammar Girl podcast about them,” she told me. By finally learning the rules about the semicolon, she finally felt confident about using them. Now, I’ve never been afraid to use the semicolon, but I’d like to feel more confident about teaching its usage. So, off to Grammar Girl I go.

The phrase “classroom management” appears a few times in this Sunday’s New York Times article on teaching, and the author seems to apologize for it. It is kind of icky, but why?

photo credit: dcJohn

I think part of the problem is that it implies one-size-fits-all, when individual students are…individuals, and group dynamics vary from class to class. There are video clips in the article of teachers in class, with a narrator who explains their techniques. I watched all the ones on the Times website, and went to the Uncommon Schools site to watch more. They’re compelling and entertaining. And then, the wince factor arises with a description of how a teacher “draws kids’ attention to the normalcy of compliancy, everyone is doing it.” Lots of the ideas on the Uncommon Schools site seem useful and insightful, but I also know that if I tried to mimic what I’ve watched people do in videos, it would be ridiculous. There’s a smile between a teacher and a student in one clip that isn’t instructional so much as inspirational. It shows the kind of particular attention to a person’s distinct way of thinking and expressing themselves, that seems beyond these techniques and studies.

“I think that’s why after citing a lot of research on teaching, this article and a recent Atlantic article both claim that it is very hard to predict what traits make good teacher. The teacher is one part of a huge variable, and one person’s cheesy gesture is another’s brilliant interaction.

photo credit: Sara. Nel

After doing several workshops for students planning to take the CUNY Proficiency Exam (CPE) I’ve been thinking about some fairly basic questions about standardized testing that are nonetheless important ones. I’ve come to realize (as have other Fellows at Baruch) that one of the most important functions of these workshops is to alleviate student anxiety. While some students do not seem to worry too much about the exam, many (some of them excellent students) become rather anxious especially in regards to the time constraints. This raises a number of questions for me regarding the effectiveness of this form of assessment. Are we really setting up a situation that accurately measures student performance of these skills given the stress of the testing situation? According to this article, we aren’t.

As health blogger Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen points out, “Scientists have long known that long-term stress impairs brain cell communication, but they’re just now learning that even short-term stress – such as a few hours of anxiety – can negatively affect cognitive skills.” Pawlik-Kienlen cites research from the University of California (Irvine) School of Medicine as well as the Laboratory of Stress Research at Douglas Hospital Research Center to make this point. Given this negative affect of stress on memory it would seem that we are setting up students for failure. Of course, it could be argued that the anxiety-producing test situation is preparation for stress soon to be experienced by students in the work world. If this were the case, why wouldn’t we coach students on ways to manage this type of stress early in their educational careers? In general I understand the need for assessment of student learning; however, I wonder if it isn’t time for us to start thinking about some different ways of accomplishing this goal outside of the traditional timed exam.

The most persistent psychological barrier to working on my dissertation is not the intimidating size of the project, or insecurities about its intellectual worth, or a lack of time to devote to it.  It’s not even my cac.ophony.org deadline.  What keeps me away from the library is the constant barrage of warnings about the doom that awaits the humanities Ph.D.  Articles that beg undergrads not to pursue useless advanced degrees arrive regularly in my inbox, forwarded sympathetically from the secure, salaried desk jobs of my smug friends outside academia.  Why, I wonder, should I spend my day squeezing one or two footnotes out of hours of reading?

Discouraged, I retreat to the most reliably mindless escapism I know of, a deeply trusted ally in the war against productivity: syndicated sitcoms.

Marge, how could you?

This week I sat in for a professor in her Managerial Communication course, and I taught a class on the classical theorists of organizational and scientific management. As the overall metaphor for these early theories is a machine I designed an exercise for the students using metaphors to conceptualize various companies and work related systems. I got this idea from Gareth Morgan’s book, Images of an Organization, which looks at the use of metaphor as a conceptual tool to understand and study organizations. Much of Gareth Morgan’s work is in the use of creative imagery combined with organizational theory to better understand modern management structures.

After having discussed the classical theory approach with the students and asking them to examine why the machine was the metaphor used to describe these theories, I then asked them to come up with a metaphor for Baruch College. The first metaphor they shared was a beehive.  The students thought that there was a Queen Bee, who directed everything at Baruch though nobody really knew who that was. The students and the faculty were all of the busy worker bees that came and went, offering their work up to the hive at all times. The whole class, myself included, thought this metaphor worked well for conceptualizing Baruch. I then asked the students what did this beehive produce, what was Baruch’s main production? With not much enthusiasm, one student answered ” well..um… I guess it is knowledge or something like that” I couldn’t stop from laughing out loud. The next metaphor was a labyrinth…

Playing with the ongoing theme of dance in recent postings, here is one controversial piece of dance. The 2010 Olympics ice dancing competition just ended, and the aboriginal folk dance put together by the Russian team brought a lot of controversies in and out of the ice rink. Voila! (The video clip shows the original version performed in the past month before it had to be “toned down” at the Olympics.)

It has been reported that especially some indigenous Australians expressed their anger and frustration calling it as “appalling,” “a rip-off” and “exploitation.” Bev Manton, chairwoman of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council, wrote last month in The Sydney Morning Herald that “the faux tribal designs on the costumes and the skaters’ faces ‘are no more authentic or Aboriginal than the shiploads of cheap Aboriginal tourist trinkets that pour into our country from overseas.’”

Now, compare this to the U.S. team’s “Bollywood” impression, which has become a YouTube sensation and instant favorite amongst Indian communities.

Apart from the quality of each performance itself, there are a series of questions that come to my mind. Why do some people consider the Russian pair’s dance offensive or feel uncomfortable while the majority enjoy the U.S. pair’s? (To my mind, it is not just a simple matter of the skating costumes, although one of the NBC commentators mentioned that the Russian team’s faux leaves hanging from their tribal costumes were “gimmicks” whereas the U.S. team’s Indian clothes were “authentic.”) If dancing is a means of cultural expression and human communication, what are the limits of cultural appropriation in dancing in which indigenous culture can be shared, celebrated, and replicated by nonnative members? When does cultural tribute stop being appropriation and become theft? Where is the line between them? How far is too far? While costume controversy seems to be a perennial source of woe and entertainment in figure skating, it is amusing to find these questions to be still valid, perhaps more than ever, in the so-called age of globalization.

photo credit: morgan childers

A professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, recently sent an email that has gone viral, due largely to its unique approach in response to a student’s particularly obnoxious behavior.  The student, who remains anonymous, had arrived an hour late to class and been denied admission, and later emailed the professor to explain that he was late because he had been “sampling” different classes, the last of which was Professor Galloway’s, and that it was within his rights to explore different options at the beginning of the semester.

Galloway’s response has caught attention because of his brutal honesty in addressing what he sees as the student’s overall functional weaknesses.   In short, he takes him down a few notches.  You can read the full exchange here, but I wanted to focus on a specific piece of Galloway’s final advice:

“Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted  to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…”

Opinion on the web seems split, mainly centered on Galloway’s known personality quirks.  The entire controversy, though, provides an opportunity to think about the appropriate tone and level of “honesty” in student-teacher communications.  As an adjunct at Baruch for five years, I’ve certainly felt the occasional urge to respond to particularly ridiculous requests with a similar sense of disbelief.  Galloway’s message, however, takes the impulse a step further, directly and personally addressing what he perceives to be the student’s overall failures.  His main point seems to be that, by exhibiting such a lack of decorum, the student is effectively handicapping himself, making it impossible to succeed in college or the larger world.

I find Galloway’s response generally appropriate considering the student’s rather arrogant assumption that “sampling” courses (by walking in and out of several classes mid-lecture) was a reasonable behavior.  His most memorable advice (“get your shit together”), while perhaps obscene, communicates an underlying truth.  If the student wishes to succeed in the business world, his presumed career direction, he will have to drastically adjust the attitude and expectations reflected in his brief interaction with Professor Galloway.

On the other hand, is it right to draw larger conclusions about a student’s chances of future success from one embarrassing incident?  Further, is it even within a professor’s rights or responsibilities to dole out such “advice” at all?  How can we effectively steer our students toward more appropriate and “successful” behavior without being too harsh or judgmental?

During the fall of 2009, I took a course at the Graduate Center with Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, “Contemporary Latin American Theatre and Performance.” Going in, I had assumed that much of the archival material we would be referencing would be from the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), a collaboration between New York University Libraries and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This digital venue brings together videos of performance throughout the Americas that would otherwise be “inaccessible to scholars.”

While it’s true that this is a respected and reliable one-stop reference place to find (and preserve) such materials, given the contemporary focus of the class, YouTube offered hours of browsing enjoyment. The two resources serve very difficult functions—and have very different levels of functionality. (Especially since the Hemispheric Insititute’s archive is frequently restricted to performances that they themselves have had filmed at their own events.)

I don’t know if it counts as procrastination or further research, but I whittled away many evenings that semester watching clips of the dynamic performers we had been studying.

First, here’s a link to a performance by Mexican cabaret performer, Astrid Hadad, from the HIDVL. Her performance, ‘Amores Pelos,’ was filmed in Monterrey, Mexico, in July 2001, as part of the Second Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar. It’s a long clip, but worth the time to see the costumes changes involved in the “wearable art” of her hair. The site provides a bit of context for those first meeting this artist’s work: “Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls ‘Heavy Nopal’.”

And then, below, is another unique Hadad performance, this time from YouTube (and featuring some well-placed self-flagellation). It brings us into the actual performance space, and is part of a larger documentary about Hadad.

Since this is my first blog post in 2010 and since the New York Flamenco Festival is ongoing right now, celebrating its 10th anniversary, of course I will write about my love affair with Flamenco and the ways it inspires many other facets of my life, including my academic work. Slowly but surely, it  has sneaked into my dissertation, and references to the dance ,and to dance theory in general, pop up in my chapters, thanks to the flexibility of my field (English) and of my adviser.

Watching  the opening night of the Festival last week, I let myself re-experience the revelation that always strikes me watching a real artist: dance is their language, and the really good dancers are the ones able to communicate through their bodies in such a way that they reach the audience. I know this might sound obvious, but I really get this message straight as I follow those perfectly executed steps that I recognize because I am doing them myself….I mean, their poor imitations.

This is what I tell the students I work at Baruch with, and all the groups I have worked with so far remembered one thing, if nothing else,  about me personally after my introductory visit to their class: that I dance Flamenco. So, I tell them about using the body for a presentation, grounding it with a sense of presence and control. Straightening the back, maintaining a posture are all important. They come in second to mastering the material, of course, but still.

photo credit: patrícia soransso 

And this is another thing I learned from great dancers: the beauty of mastery, of really giving your best to something. I am always inspired by students who want to do their best, and I watch them with the same respect and admiration I watch a Flamenco performance.

Yesterday I spoke with a faculty member about her frustration with plagiarism by students. One “innovative” technique that she noticed some students employing was the pastiche: whole paragraphs comprised of phrases and sentences culled from websites, press releases, newspapers, and textbooks, mashed together without any attribution or acknowledgment that the words were not entirely their own. While some students probably knew that they were plagiarizing but thought they could get away with it, others apparently have more benign intent: they haven’t yet internalized academic norms about appropriate use of sources and citation. Perhaps we can call these two types of plagiarism “bad faith plagiarism” and “good faith plagiarism.” Both types deserve penalty, but it is the former, I believe, that deserves more scorn. Students who plagiarize because they don’t know any better are students who are capable of learning proper citation techniques.

With this conversation fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking about the recent case of plagiarism in Germany by a 17-year-old novelist. Apparently, author Helene Hegemann lifted passages, including an entire page, from someone else’s novel. Unlike the 2006 scandal involving teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan, who claimed that she had plagiarized in good faith, Hegemann readily admits to using another author’s words in her novel without any attribution–what I would call “bad faith plagiarism.” She claims, however, that her novel is akin to a musician who remixes or samples.

Some of Hegemann’s defenders claim a generational defense. The Guardian UK’s Robert McCrum argues that Hegemann’s novel is actually an example of “good faith plagiarism”:

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Laura Miller isn’t having it:

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

The New York Times article hints that in addition to a generational defense, culture plays into it too. That is, remixing is just part of Berlin youth culture:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

My issue with the “Oh, she was just remixing” argument, however, is that Hegemann did not merely incorporate someone else’s words into her novel. By not acknowledging her sources, she was, in effect, passing off the entire novel as her own, and this, from my perspective, is what some of us stodgy old folks used to call “stealing.” Remixing and sampling can be great, innovative art forms. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I think copyright rules are too strict. However, if you are going to riff on another person’s words, music, or ideas, you should at least give them credit for it.

If Vanilla Ice couldn’t get away with it, why should Hegemann?