Monthly Archive for March, 2011

Facebook: The Third ‘R’?

Published
by
Hillary
on March 30, 2011
in Assessment, Education and Writing Instruction
. 2 Comments

http://doctortext-info.blogspot.com/2009/08/techniques-for-custom-research-paper.html

How much writing did you do as a first semester undergraduate? 15 pages? 30? 22? 2?

How much should a first semester undergraduate write?

I’ve been thinking about the answer to that second question since I met with a student— I’ll call her Jane—in the midst of a routine day of individual appointments with Introduction to Theatre students. Immediately after I had made an introduction in her class in the early days of the semester, Jane emailed me seeking general feedback on her writing– she is a transfer student from another CUNY college, and is eager to take advantage of Baruch’s resources now that she’s here. Unlike the majority of students who utilize the services we offer when supporting THE1041C, Jane wasn’t panicked about a soon-to-be-due assignment, but wanted a kind of general consultation on her academic writing skills. I asked Jane to send me some samples of her written work, and she told me that so far, she only had blog assignments.

When we met, we spoke about her approach to these blog entries; it was clear that she had given them some thought, but her sentence structure was often confusing, and it took me repeated readings to fully grasp her meaning. In most of her blog entries, she was beating around the bush of her argument or main idea. This isn’t an uncommon problem; I face it all of the time in my own writing, and it is among the biggest issues that our students face.

Jane’s eagerness to write more was what was uncommon. As we talked, she peppered me with questions. How could she improve her writing? What should she be doing differently? What kinds of exercises would help her improve her writing on her own? I had never before had a student actively seeking additional written work, so I asked her about the assignments she had coming up in the semester. I discovered that Jane was not being asked to write very much at all. Out of four classes, her longest assignment was a four-page paper. After talking with her a bit more, a few questions kept popping up:

How do we negotiate the balance between boldly experimenting with new technology and maintaining certain (old) standards of rigor? This question comes out of the sheer lack of quantity (yes, not always quality, but important nonetheless) of writing that I saw this student being challenged with, thanks to word-capped Facebook and blog assignments. Often, adventurous faculty members are juggling many different assessment elements at once– course blogs, maybe a course wiki, too, and then oral presentations, low-stakes writing in class, plus quizzes and finals. Your syllabus is busting out before you’ve even gotten to factor in class participation. So it’s not hard to imagine that having students write  extended essays might be what gets lost in the shuffle.

How do we make the assignment diversity feel relevant, not random? Jane was a little self-conscious about her blog posts, confessing that she wasn’t sure of the expectations in terms of formality. But, as I gave her feedback on them, she also defended herself; these weren’t really evaluated, she explained, they were just graded on the basis of whether she had done them or not. She felt they were an after-thought, and so, that’s how she thought of them: after. (Click here for my own reflections on the challenges and triumphs of course blogging, here for a course blogger superstar story, and here for much more about the phenomenal Blogs@Baruch and profs who are using it to thrilling ends.)

Can we teach code-switching within online social networks? Jane was not assigned any papers in her Sociology course, either. The class has a Facebook wall, where they post pertinent links and have lively conversation about readings and class discussions—even the organizing logic of the course is debated on the Facebook page, which looked to me to be a healthy and vibrant online commons. Still, the Facebook page comments are either 250-300 words or 420 characters. Since Jane is likely using Facebook to communicate with her friends and contacts, too, how will this Sociology professor go about making the distinction between one mode of commenting and another?

Could Jane’s lack of high-stakes writing assignments have to do with work-avoidance on the part of her Instructors (and so what if it does)? Are Jane’s assignments—blog posts about 18th century acting techniques and Facebook comments in response to Sociology theory– examples of radical teaching, or just radical avoidance of the time-consuming task of reading through an 8-10 page (or 10-15 page) academic paper? None of her classes culminated with one of those. (In her Math class, Jane had no writing. In her Great Works class, the bulk of assignments were short—very short, 150 word assignments identifying a certain theme in the literature they were reading.) As is the norm within CUNY, half of Jane’s faculty is adjunct; adjuncts are generally only getting paid for one hour of work outside of their time in the classroom. A Facebook page can easily be monitored in one hour of work, so having students compose 420 characters at a pop could seem like a good way to minimize faculty labor while shaking up the tired old models, too. But there is a vast qualitative difference between infusing your syllabus with a diversity of learning objectives through multiple learning styles and creatively trying to avoid grading 10-page papers from 30+ students.

Are Jane’s assignments  preparing her for future employment challenges? The ability to communicate short, coherent messages is a fundamental expectation of many, many jobs. Just this year, at my “side gig,” I found myself parsing copy for a website, brochure, and even the 140 characters allotted for a web advertising button. These kinds of tasks will await Jane in every one of the fields she expressed interest in pursuing.

Still, these jobs will also expect the ability to sustain an argument (or inquiry into a topic or question)—exactly what is exercised in writing the long essay. Indeed, my friend who does just the kind of work Jane is interested in—communications for a policy organization—is called upon to write everything from one-page letters to the Mexican parliament to lengthy research reports on human rights abuses in Cuba. He is generally not the one tapped to write the blog posts or tweets for his organization, but someone else there is. So if we are giving students Facebook comments and blog posts as assignments, what kind of an evaluative standard should we use to ensure that they’re not just throw-away writings, but reach the kind of level that may one day be expected of them professionally?

I’m not advocating that we willy-nilly unleash a bevy of high-stakes writing assignments on our students, or mandate a standard number of pages of “academic writing” expected of each student. This post is appropriately full of questions, not answers. (And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Write-to-Learn strategies can and should be employed with incredible effectiveness.) And yet, it seems fairly clear that I saw something else happening in Jane’s coursework, and that something seems to be connected to a very worthy kind of experimentation on the part of her instructors. We can’t draw hard and fast conclusions from any one student’s anecdotal experience– and it is important also to mention that Jane was absolutely inspired by many of her classes and professors, and she was motivated to master their individual challenges. And yet, the question nags– what could explain this?– that an undergraduate could be writing so little? And what would you recommend to Jane?

The terrible secret of space

Published
by
David Parsons
on March 29, 2011
in Higher Education and teaching
. 2 Comments

Soldiers and civilians mingle in a Vietnam War-era "GI coffeehouse." Photo credit: http://www.sirnosir.com

In this sometimes laughably cynical polemic, which employs far too many zombie metaphors for my tastes, German philosopher Alexander García Düttmann nevertheless makes a point that resonated with me after many years of teaching at Baruch:

Where [the university] survives, its life will be transformed radically: it will survive only as a simulacrum of life, a death worse than death, a life of zombies, with students no longer being students but clients and consumers, and with academics no longer being academics but replaceable entities in a service industry designed to satisfy the desires of clients and consumers who pay a high price for such satisfaction.

Again, while I think Düttmann’s hyperbole could be toned down, I share his concern about students and teachers increasingly assuming roles more appropriate to the marketplace than the academy.  Students that pay a ridiculous amount of money to attend classes at a university obviously should have some right to determine the quality of education they receive.  But if a university education evolves into just another consumer product, both students and teachers will have to dramatically shift their expectations of what constitutes teaching and learning.  I’ve witnessed this shift in my classroom on a few different occasions, when students have (sometimes, rather bluntly) addressed me as if I were an employer with whom they could negotiate terms (e.g. “I’m not going to be here for the last 3 weeks of class, but I’ll write an extra paper to make up for it”; or, a personal favorite, “I need to leave 20 minutes early every day.  Can you email me notes if I miss anything?”)  Several students have, on the first day of class, asked for my business card and “contact info.”

I’m not exactly sure how to combat the business-ification of my classroom, but since my dissertation is on the subject of coffeehouses, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the conscious creation of space.  While most teachers engage, to some degree, in a kind of pedagogical feng shui, probably most commonly by arranging the desks in a circle, I’d like to suggest that more radical adjustments to the physical environment of the classroom might induce both students and teachers to take on more productive academic roles.  Students are very accustomed to a certain sensory experience in the classroom, and I wonder if those expectations can be intervened upon in the same way that artists subvert aesthetic conventions in order to create a space for interrogation.

For me, carefully selected music has been the primary method through which I try to create a more focused atmosphere.  By playing music at the beginning of class, the slowly lowering it until I begin speaking, I have been attempting to recreate a kind of cinematic experience, in which attention is engaged through sensory cues.  But music is only one tool in the arsenal.  Have you ever been to a meditation center, yoga studio, or church?  All of these spaces very consciously create an atmosphere conducive to the specific form of concentration they hope to experience.  More and more, I’m thinking about ways to create the same kind of reverent feeling in my classroom through my own intentional creation of space.

Are beanbag chairs and Led Zeppelin posters totally out of the question?

Godzilla, the last sequel

Published
by
Alessandro
on March 22, 2011
in Art, Media, Politics, Technology and What if . . .
. 1 Comment

Reflecting on John’s recent post on Japan, as well as my last contribution to this forum, I think it is time we do indeed start thinking and talking about our implicatedness in the transformations in and of the earth itself. In the wake of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear crisis in Japan, the New York Times gently reminded readers:

Three of the world’s chief sources of large-scale energy production — coal, oil and nuclear power — have all experienced eye-popping accidents in just the past year. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan have dramatized the dangers of conventional power generation at a time when the world has no workable alternatives able to operate at sufficient scale.

In all three scenarios, we heard from leaders and experts assume the mantle of authority to dissuade the panic-stricken from questioning our energy economy, or–gasp!–suggesting we make meaningful moves towards alternatives. These ‘accidents,’ as the NYT itself terms them, continue to be framed as matters of risk management, regulation, and oversight.

Let me suggest a different take the environmental and health risks of nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, and mine explosions are not technical failures but political ones. The expertise and ownership infrastructures necessitated and supported by these industries are what have produced “irrational fears about risk.” Why do we live in a world where people don’t know what processes power their lightbulbs, washing machines, and computers? We need a renewed global conversation about energy, technology, and democracy now.

As a colleague of mine reminded me recently, this conversation has precedents: see Ivan Illich’s 1973 essay “Energy and Equity”. A pithy excerpt:

Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and “cold turkey”—between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps—but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.

I want to draw attention to the ideological blindspots hidden in the notion that ‘natural disasters’ bring people together under the banner of humanitarianism. This is the imperative sense of our moral responsibility (‘response-ability,’ as John framed it), and there is nothing wrong with it: we need ever more of this kind of altruism and less cynicism. But the thing about natural disasters is how they naturalize many aspects of our world that are not natural. In fact, we see this view as a smokescreen for all kinds of new projects of class power, as documented in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. As geographer Neil Smith noted about Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe that effectively functioned as a mass eviction of poor people in New Orleans, “far from flattening the social differences, disaster reconstruction invariably cuts deeper the ruts and grooves of social oppression and exploitation.”

This brings up the question I posed before: what kind of horror-movie is contemporary capitalist society? Comedian Patton Oswalt offered three possibilities: zombies, spaceships, wastelands. In the midst of the current Japanese calamity, it seems appropriate to call for the return of the monster movie.

"Om nom nom nom"

Many American audiences enjoyed and dismissed Godzilla as a campy sci-fi flick and thus missed its scathing critique of the nuclear age. The monster, a symbol of science gone berserk, appeared in cinemas in 1954, the same year as the thermonuclear detonation on Bikini Island. “Audiences who flocked to “Gojira” were clearly watching more than just a monster movie. The film’s opening scenes evoked the nuclear explosion in the Pacific and the damaged Japanese bodies so poignant to domestic viewers. Godzilla — relentless, vengeful, sinister — looms as an overt symbol of science run amok. The creature’s every footstep and tail-swipe lay bare the shaky foundations on which Japan’s postwar prosperity stood,” notes Peter Wynn Kirby. (Interestingly, a new monster film by Guillermo Del Toro, ‘Pacific Rim,’ has come under pressure to ensure ‘insensitive’ references to Japan being attacked are excised from the screenplay.) I wonder what idiom the political mobilization against the excesses of the science/energy industrial complex might have to develop to capture people’s attention the way Godzilla did in the 1950s.

So, I am concerned and skeptical about the attempts to silence political debate under the rubric of “we must all band together in a crisis.” Human beings as a global society are transforming the earth to the extent that our collective activities are increasingly entangled with so-called natural processes. Some have harkened in this era as the ‘Anthropocene.’ Perhaps there is no way back, but there must be a different way forward.

Japan

Published
by
JohnH
on March 21, 2011
in To Ponder
. 0 Comments

I can’t get Japan out of my head.  A strangely compact little bundle of news images, inchoate anxiety, and deep grief seems to be lodged somewhere just behind my right ear, pulsing with a dull ache while I go about each day’s business.  I sat down to write a blog post on one of several other matters, smaller spheres I could actually speak to, but my brain just keeps saying Japan, earthquake, tsunami, radiation, food-water-shelter, Japan, Japan.

I don’t want to get these things out of my head, but I don’t feel like writing about them either.  What makes me balk is not just that I am profoundly unqualified to say anything precise or revelatory about the still-unfolding crisis, it’s that I don’t really know what to say at all, much less what to do (here are a few ideas, by the way).

I’ve been thinking about the roles that information and communication play (and might play) in how we “witness” massive crises from often great distances.  In the current case of Japan, the information is abundant and ubiquitous, most of it in the form of images (photos and video clips, many of them shown over and over); succinct fact- or update-bites (“The Fourth Reactor Is Now Leaking Radiation”); and spin-off stories (“Iodine Tablets Flying Off Shelves in the U.S.”).  All of these things are packaged, inevitably, in the form of a running current-events-news-spectacle, a carefully chosen title signaling the “story”: “Disaster in Japan” or simply “Japan Quake”—we now turn once more to the devastation overseas…etc.

Less frantic, perhaps, than streaming news are the sort of interactive maps and satellite photos on the New York Times website.  These at least provide some crucial, basic facts that can stabilize and focus one’s awareness.  But what real communication is going on in the midst of this torrent that we passively field or manipulate at our leisure?  To what degree is each of us able to sift meaningful (that is, clear, bracing) facts from the turbulence?

The net effect of merely receiving this sort of “knowledge” often seems to be a low-level bewilderment, which the brain responds to by bundling the news item and holding it close-by but off to the side, somewhat as I tried to describe at the top of this post.  For reasons that include but also go beyond the very real emergencies in Japan right now, news-of-it-all tends to render one stunned, speechless.  In the past week, I have observed and participated in several exchanges like the one below:

“This Japan stuff is crazy, huh?”

“Yeah, terrible…”  [Beat]

And then, after this beat—an impasse-indicating pause—the conversants are likely to steer themselves abruptly to a new topic, something lighter or closer at hand.  Terrible natural disasters—or “Acts of God” in the pseudo-pious language of the actuary—have been rampant in the past 7 years or so: the cataclysmic 2004 tsunami in the Pacific, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquakes in Haiti and recently New Zealand, to name some of the most destructive. (Of course there are always unnatural disasters going on, too, wars and oppressive regimes and terrible exploitations of people and the environment.)  This is all overwhelming.  So what do we really know about these catastrophes elsewhere, and how are we already—or how do we become, functionally—implicated in them?

I’m hung up on the question of responsibility here, something I’ve often asked my students to think and write about.  They tend to hear this word as “duty,” and squirm or bristle at the suggestion that they might be responsible to anything outside of conventional spheres of obligation, like family and close friendships.  I ask them to rethink the term as hinging not on binding rules but on responsiveness, habits of possible response that could be shaped in various ways and that would thus inhere certain valuations.  With regard to the current situation in Japan as well as other such disasters, the potential for realizing some working sense of this responsibility seems to arise less from passively receiving information than from actively reflecting, speaking, and even writing, of or through this information.

There’s no shaking that back-of-the-mind awareness of Japan right now, and there shouldn’t be.  But at best, such awareness would be more than a vague, shelved anxiety.  Maybe venturing into language can begin to draw it toward the front of the mind, catalyze our capacity to absorb, translate, convey, and maybe act on what we know.  Silence has its place here, but too often it is just a mark of the dislocated bystander’s numbness.  What has happened and what is still happening in Japan is perhaps impossible to comprehend, in the sense of compassing something, though it would be woefully glib to dismiss the situation as “too awful for words.”  Disasters might be inherently unfathomable but they’re not unspeakable.

What would Krishna say?

Published
by
Meechal
on March 18, 2011
in teaching, Technology and To Ponder
. 1 Comment

When I get to the classroom where I teach Great Works, usually about 10 minutes early, I commence my usual routine: put the chairs in a circle, gingerly clear the day’s accumulation of food garbage from the floor (I teach at 7:40 PM so the accumulation is immense and often baffling), take my piles of papers out of my bag, chat with students as they walk in. But mostly I watch them as they check their phones for what must feel like the last time ever but is really just the last time ever for 100 minutes. Some have even begun to come early and jockey for the outlets in order to plug their various devices in – this way at least they’re charging and not lying dormant, completely unused.

Last week we read selections from the Bhagavad Gita. Near the end of the period I asked my students whether they found the way of life that Krishna advocated at all tempting, in particular the idea that one should avoid acting with passion. Most of them found this idea repellant. “What is a life without passion?” they asked. “Sure, you might be less likely to get hurt if you don’t put yourself out there, if you don’t try, if you don’t care about things, but what kind of life is that?”  I tried to push it further by asking them whether part of what Krishna was telling Arjuna was to stop desiring insubstantial things and instead, to  remove himself a little from the world, or the worldly. “Why is it appealing to so many people,” I asked, “to dream about leaving New York and moving to the country? Why do I always hear people tell each other that they’re sick of working at jobs, even ones they like, that they’re tired of always being reachable on their smart phones,  that they need to take time out of their fast-paced lives to relax or vacation? What if instead of making it a vacation you turned it into a life?” They were much more receptive to this idea. “We need to simplify our lives and care about less” one of them said. Then time ran out, and I hadn’t gotten to my final point about Krishna, which was that he was bridging the gap for Arjuna, offering him a way to live in this world (fight your battle) while also living for another world (focus your attention on the tip of your nose and stay that way for hours). It wasn’t all “fight” and it wasn’t all “resist desire.”

As I walked to the subway after class, frustrated that I hadn’t gotten to talk about what this amalgam life might look like, I began to wonder about my students and their phones. And about myself and my addiction to the internet (my phone lasts for 7 minutes of talk time, at best, so an addiction is simply not possible). Is being plugged in a way of living in the world or living out of it? Are we fighting our fight on our phones and our various devices or are we using them to live without passion, to remain disconnected? Should our worry be that we are living too passionately or not living passionately enough? What would Krishna say?

What does Brazilian Carnival have to do with (our students’) presentations?

Published
by
Dusana
on March 17, 2011
in Art and Pedagogy
. 0 Comments

What might frivolous, flashy samba, danced and sung in most outrageous costumes, have to do with (our students’ business policy) presentations?

Appearances notwithstanding, carnival in Rio is serious, highly lucrative business that generates millions of dollars of revenue based on ticket sales, TV broadcast, and advertising, which heats up the tourism industry in Rio- this year the city of Rio de Janeiro attracted one million people for the carnival week. So the real question I am asking is how could we get our students (not just in BPL) to approach and carry out their research and presentation as professionally as Carnival in Rio is? Please bear with me and read further before you think I’ve gone nuts.

Maybe some of you took notice a couple of weeks ago of the event of the year in Brazil – Carnival, especially in Rio de Janeiro. Being personally connected to Brazil, I get to watch some of it yearly. Every year I also learn a bit more about the history of this tradition, its contradictions, as well as rules of the “samba schools” competition. Most foreigners are not fully aware of the fact that the Carnival in Rio we get to see in the media is a fierce competition among community-based organizations called Samba schools with very strict rules and rigorous evaluation criteria. Samba schools comprise several divisions, or leagues, where the champion of the second division moves up to the first division and the last place in the competition moves down one division (this year two schools were severely damaged by fire only one month before the carnival so those get to stay in the division for another year, therefore exceptionally, next year there will be 14 school competing).

National TV broadcasts the two-day (actually, night) competition of the first division in which twelve Samba Schools compete, six on Sunday and six on Monday during the 3-day holiday. Samba schools prepare the whole year for an 80-minute presentation in a specially built stadium that Brazilians call the “sambadrome” – a parade of 3-4,000 participants distributed through distinct floats, including a percussion ensemble of about 250-300 members. This event attracts a mix of professionals and volunteers, usually people from community, but also a large number of people from other neighborhoods (including many middle class and affluent cariocas—how people from Rio are called), as well as tourists from other Brazilian states and from abroad.

What is the competition about?

Each samba school chooses a theme for the year, which must be developed during their presentation (parade) for which a samba song must be written and performed by the entire school (a team of professional singers, many of whom develop commercially successful careers as samba singers in the local industry). Every participating school has exactly 80 minutes for their presentation and must exit the gates of the stadium at the 80th minute or they lose 0.1 point for each minute they are delayed. Schools are rarely late and the fact that one of them was 10 minutes late this year amounted to a scandal–the last time a school was significantly late was in 1992, which is almost shocking to me given that Brazilian culture is lax about time and people are frequently late for appointment. There are 10 criteria independently evaluated by judges- each criterion is judged by 4 judges who watch the schools presentations in isolated boxes with no discussions among them. The judges are chosen by a committee composed of city officials and members of the independent league of the schools of samba, the latter representing all the schools. The lowest score is dropped to avoid big discrepancies and prevent against bias. As the competition grew fiercer in the last 3 decades, it is usually a difference in decimal points that decides the championship.

The primary aspect of the competition is the theme the school chooses, its concept and development. In other words, each samba school tells a story on the street (the sambadrome is a street in the center of Rio that was converted into a permanent stadium that comprises several buildings where public schools function during the school year). Some of the most important criteria for evaluation are evolution (the flow of the parade and theme development), samba (lyrics, music, dance, and audience response to it), harmony (how the whole hangs together, including how the song connects with theme presentation and the enthusiasm of participants), and costumes. In sum, it seems that coherence, cohesiveness is key to success in this type of presentation, how all the elements seamlessly connect with one another. The theme must be conceptualized and developed through dance, each float’s costume (members of a float wear the same costume, including hand and headgear, which represents one element of the story), and incredibly elaborate movable platforms (huge cars) that look like Broadway sets. This year some of the themes were Rio in films in, the mystery of life, agriculture in human history, hair and its role in culture, mystery in film (which included reference to Hollywood films), and Nelson Cavaquinho, one of the most popular samba songwriters and founder of one samba school. My personal favorite explored Darwin and evolution. Here’s a look:

This year championship went to Beija-flor (literally, “hummingbird”) whose theme was a tribute to the life and four-decades career of Roberto Carlos, the romantic Latin American singer who has sold millions of records.

Importantly, every school composes a new samba (lyrics and music are evaluated) which is presented by “Bateria” the most important part of the proceedings that includes band with percussion instruments, many of which originally developed in Rio by the first “sambistas” former slaves or their descendants and poor immigrants that lived in the slums of Rio in the 1920s and 30s—this was the time when samba was established as an original urban popular musical genre distinct from other musical manifestations that share Afro-Brazilian roots.

Obviously, the champion does usually well in all the criteria. However, what usually defines the championship is an aspect that although it is not officially evaluated, it influences all other criteria: the reaction and participation of the audience, or how well the school communicates with the audience.

Watching the carnival from NYC I was constantly reminded that it is nothing like being there for real. But what I was able to observe and understand even from the indirect and somewhat distorted and incomplete experience of watching the Carnival made me think of our students’ presentations and I asked what makes a good school samba presentation? What seems to work is a well conceptualized, organized, and balanced story, with a strong message that is relevant to the audience. Endless practice, good preparation and commitment to the team are a must. All the hard work seems to translate into seemingly effortless and spontaneous performance.

And, finally, they absolutely have fun with it.

So posing the initial question what does Brazilian Carnival have to do with (our students’) presentations? It only makes me conclude that, well, maybe we wish the presentations were a bit more like Carnival in Rio.

Building a Bridge…to Laugh City!

Published
by
David Parsons
on March 16, 2011
in Art, Education and Pedagogy
. 2 Comments

In the book-length interview transcript Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, late writer David Foster Wallace discusses the transformative experience of seeing David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in 1986:

…there was somethin’ about…it was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities.  But in fact it upped them.  I mean, I’d always used sort of dreamy stuff.  But I had never as a young writer realized that you still had an obligation to make a kind of narrative.  That really the goals of realism and the goals of surrealism are exactly the same.  And they’re indescribable.  But they’re two completely different highways that have the same destination.  And I’d never snapped to that before.  David Lynch, Blue Velvet, coming along when it did, I think saved me from droppin’ out of school.

Wallace also told his Blue Velvet story on Charlie Rose, where he expressed his admiration for Lynch’s ability to take the viewer to incredibly strange places by using the Trojan Horse of compelling narrative.

As a teacher, I’ll admit that I like to take my students to incredibly strange places, pushing them to reach radical conclusions about the history we study.  Over the years, I’ve realized that this process often requires more that a spoonful of sugar.  Like any good storyteller, it’s important to hold the audience’s hand, seduce them, as you walk them along the path to the good stuff.  In other words, we need to think about developing an aesthetic element to the way we deliver material to our students.

For me, that aesthetic device is, more often than not, humor.  I think comedians offer the best example of how to effectively push audiences into unfamiliar rhetorical territory.  Lately, comic and writer Louis CK has been on a roll, making several appearances on late-night talk shows that have gone seriously viral.  In the two clips below, CK is able to bring up two different topics that rarely get any play in mainstream American media:  the imminent collapse of capitalism and the continued legacy of African slavery in the United States.  Both cases illustrate CK’s impressive ability to lead the audience along using all the narrative tools at his disposal: humor, self-deprecation, and of course, carefully selected words.

At a roundtable on public history at the Graduate Center last week, several of the historians present emphasized the necessity for an “aesthetic of history” that discovers new forms for communicating historical knowledge to an increasingly culturally-fragmented public.  As shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Report have demonstrated, it’s possible, even desirable, to engage humor and satire as delivery tools for conclusions that otherwise might not reach receptive ears.  Colbert’s legendary appearance at the 2006 White House Press Correspondents Dinner is perhaps the most sublime recent example of how to “build a bridge” to controversial material; even George W. Bush found himself laughing at jokes that, underneath the humor, essentially depicted him as a coward and murderer.

Humor is my go-to method of pushing students into new ways of thinking without losing them.  What’s yours?

Making Film into a Productive Teaching Tool

Published
by
Olga
on March 15, 2011
in ESL, Media and Pedagogy
. 0 Comments

“The puffballs. When the puffballs come, then winter is almost gone.”

Thus begins Amarcord, Fellini’s autobiographical film, a brilliant tribute to his birthplace Rimini. I’ve been replaying its opening scene in my mind for the last few days, desperately wishing for some signs of spring in NYC.

This weekend I finally sat down and watched Amarcord in full again. The last time I watched it this closely was several years ago when I was constructing a writing assignment around it for my composition class. Naively, I thought my students would immediately share my fascination with the colorful characters and the sheer surreal beauty of some of the scenes: a boy encountering a white bull in the fog or a gorgeous peacock appearing out of nowhere in the midst of snow. To say the least, my students were not engaged when I showed the film. I was willing to connect their reaction, rather lack thereof, to anything – non-linear narrative, symbolism, unrealistic characters, insufficient introduction to Fellini on my part – but subtitles. Really, I was very surprised to learn that a small inconvenience to read short notes while watching a scene would be met with such intense resistance.

Watching the film again, I wondered how subtitles could be made into a useful tool in the classroom. If the film is in English, subtitles can work to the advantage of English language learners, or to their detriment: relying on the written text, they may turn off their listening. I did some additional searching online and found an extensive list of practices aiming to develop linguistic and cultural literacies through film as described by Anthony Helm in the post “Teaching Language Through Film” on the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) blog. Helm reports how two foreign language instructors use film to create teaching resources. A Russian instructor Alfia Rakova “develop[ed] teaching materials (readers and exercise books) from the scripts of four films. Film scripts are not regularly published, however, so it meant watching and re-watching the film countless times in order to extract a working script. From there, she could build vocabulary lists, identify parts of the film that serve to demonstrate grammatical points that she wants her students to work with and understand, and highlight language exchanges between characters that serve to model real-world interactions.” A Japanese instructor Mayumi Ishida focuses, among other things, on how “films excel at presenting clear demonstrations of non-verbal communications, which textbooks may only be able to describe.” I find the whole post illuminating when thinking about the place of film in the classroom across disciplines and encourage those interested in the subject to take a look.

on asking “should they be in school at all?”

Published
by
Diana
on March 14, 2011
in Education and Higher Education
. 0 Comments

A few days ago I read this piece in Salon.com, and have found myself reflecting on it and wondering what other educators think of the questions the author is posing.

She writes “… the majority of students who start classes in any given academic year will drop out, either temporarily or permanently, for reasons that are far, far beyond our control.”

And later in the article she continues: “If I didn’t think that community colleges could save plenty of people, I could not do my job. But I don’t think they can save everyone, and I don’t think that everyone is in need of salvation. They are expected to fill an enormous void in our culture and in our educational system, to bridge a gap that in many cases seems unbridgeable, to break down barriers of race and class. And at their best, they do every bit of that.”

Some of the comments on this article are intriguing as well. Some people tell stories of how much their community college education meant to them. Others, educators, point to the problem of trying to keep students enrolled simply for the sake of tuition. And some argue that completion should not be the only measure of success, that educational experiences may have value even if they don’t contribute to the institution’s five year completion statistic.

Clear as Mud

Published
by
Hillary
on March 11, 2011
in Assessment, Baruch College, Education, Uncategorized and What if . . .
. 0 Comments

Page A15 of the New York Times on March 7th looked suspiciously like a story from The Onion about the tangled mess that is teacher evaluation in New York City public schools. Winning the award for the most understated headline of the year, “Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie,” Michael Winerip tells the (predictably?) sad story of Stacey Isaacson, a 7th grade English and Social Studies teacher at the Lab school, described as “very dedicated,” “wonderful,” and “one of a kind,” by teachers, students, and principals alike.

So why, then, is poor Ms. Isaacson ranked in the 7th percentile of city teachers when it comes to student academic progress?

Because of this formula, designed to calculate a teacher’s value-added score by the Department of Education’s “accountability experts” (satirists, start your engines):

Click to view full size.


As someone who once taught for the NYC Department of Education and is also a product of it, I wasn’t really surprised that they had gotten it all wrong. I wasn’t even surprised to imagine that they would think such a formula could be an accurate method for tenure evaluation. They did, however, outdo themselves in the category of overall incoherence; not only did this tool strike me as wrong-headed, but it was also completely unintelligible. This is so unbelievably unhelpful a formula (ready-made for critique by visualization genius Edward Tufte), that no teacher could be expected to look at it and see her work (or her true challenges) reflected within it. Matrix-like in its complexity and opaque in its reasoning, it is a formula incapable of communicating what it is measuring or how a teacher might improve her practices based upon it. And from what I can tell, the variables are wonky, too.

It is not until the 16th paragraph of the article that Winerip summons the courage to try to explain the thing:

According to her “data report,” Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. “Her students were predicted to get a 3.69– based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored a 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s valued added in 3.63-3.69.” Simple enough, right? Wrong. The author– who knows he’s hit pay dirt with this one– goes on:

“These are not averages. For example, the department defines Ms. Isaacson’s 3.57 prior proficiency as ‘the average prior year proficiency rating of the students who contribute to a teacher’s value added score.”

Eh? And the calculation for her predicted score is based on 32 variables, which are plugged into a statistical model– the one that made me feel like I was, surely, reading The Onion.

Anyone reading this case study of Ms. Isaacson will naturally wonder a few things, like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to calculate what percentage of Joel Klein’s contract at Fox News Corporation represents Ms. Isaacson’s salary?” or, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to invite these statisticians to actually teach us this formula and how it works?” I frequently work on assessment at the Schwartz Institute, and it is also a built-in aspect of every course I teach. So I know that evaluating teaching and learning is a tricky thing indeed, a hall of mirrors in which you think you see the student reflected but often, you don’t.

I decided, then, to concoct my own formula, with my own variables, to evaluate the teaching that I do at Baruch in my capacity as a Fellow and an instructor of Communication Studies. What variables get in the way of student progress that cannot be accounted for after you have observed my class, read my syllabus, and tested my students for their proficiency level?

Click to view full size.

What if you really tried to articulate the variables that come into play when facing a group of students and a set of learning objectives?

Winerip explains that teachers are eligible for tenure based upon three categories: instructional practices (including observations), contribution to the school community, and student achievement (which is where the formula comes in). Now, I’ve never been much of a whiz at statistics, but maybe that’s okay. After all, if the communications people made the formulas, and the formula people made the communications, perhaps we’d all start getting somewhere?

So please—in the spirit of collaborative learning, improve upon my draft and post your own visual and/or variables in the comments section.