“Why should I take this stupid test anyway?”

September 28, 2010 By 5 Comments

01-29-08
Creative Commons License photo credit: Fort Worth Squatch

As October nears, it is time to start explicitly preparing CUNY students for the dreaded CUNY Proficiency Exam (CPE), offered twice a year and a required, if standardized, rite of passage for all students with 45 or more credits.  At the BLSCI, we present a series of CPE Workshops that aim to walk students through the sometimes-tricky but never-impossible set of instructions mailed to them at the beginning of the semester.

For most people, both professors and students alike, even the thought of a “standardized test” brings up horrible associations: class and cultural bias, indecipherable rubrics, and the Kafka-esque nightmare of filling in tiny bubbles with No. 2 pencils in hopes of pleasing a robot. In leading some of these CPE workshops, I thus often feel the need to overcome this negative energy, or at least to address it in some meaningful way.  The approach I’ve fallen into lately, which is quite uncharacteristic for me, is to become a kind of evangelist for the CPE’s overall value.  I spend some time explaining the very basic skills that the test asks students to demonstrate, and I attempt to convince them that these skills, while perhaps never to be applied in such a “standardized” way again , will nonetheless prove extremely useful to them for the rest of their lives, and are in fact necessary for them to succeed in the types of careers that they are ostensibly seeking.

It is unlikely that our students will be writing five paragraph essays after they get out of college.  However, the basic framework of those essays, in which claims are made and backed with specific evidence, is a technique that extends far beyond college essays, applicable as much in an argument with a friend as in a loan application.  As much as students desperately want the CPE to go away, the fact is they MUST pass the exam to continue at CUNY, and I have found that framing the test as an opportunity to hone an elementary but imperative set of skills helps some students see through the No.2 pencil haze to find some personal value in what can be an admittedly stomach-churning experience.

Filed Under: CUNY

“The most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago”

September 7, 2010 By 5 Comments

While normally not the biggest fan of slam poet-motivational speakers, the above piece by just such a character caught my attention this summer.  Taylor Mali’s reminder to “speak with conviction” contains some painful observations about the way we speak, and as I begin my second year at the BLSCI, this brief video helps diagnose some of the unfortunate patterns that can infect our oral communication.

Mali’s main point is one I stress to the students who attend the debate workshops I organize to support Baruch management courses.  That is, how you say something is often more important than what you say.  And I have found that most students think much more about content than delivery, which means their oral presentations are often presented in stilted, too-quiet, monotonous speech patterns that prevent the speaker’s often solid facts and arguments from coming across.  While not every student speaks in the specifically meek manner described by Mali, it’s clear that a lot of students, for a wide variety of reasons, have a difficult time “speaking with conviction,” whether they are talking about geometry or Lady Gaga, and I’m wondering what kinds of interventions we can make upon this widespread lack of confidence in oral communication.

In my debate workshops I forbid the use of notes or index cards, forcing students to internalize their main points rather than turning to the crumpled paper in their hands.  I’ve found that the more they feel like they are speaking from a place of knowledge, their speech patterns become clearer, louder, stronger.  The “no notes” rule is just one strategy, though, and I’m wondering if other have ideas about the admittedly difficult task of helping a young, diverse set of students to find the authority that often hides within them.

Filed Under: Oral Communication

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s course?

May 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

coney island // astroland
Creative Commons License photo credit: mandyxclear

Each year, as the spring semester comes to an end, my thoughts inevitably turn to the whims of summer in New York City: long bike rides to Coney Island, rooftop parties and, unfortunately, two-and-a-half hours in a classroom at least three days a week. I am a summer adjunct!

It might seem counter-intuitive to the whole concept of, you know, “enjoying your summer,” but I actually kind of look forward to my summer courses. The main difference, of course, is one of time: In the summer, you only spend five weeks with your students, though the actual class time is usually double that of fall/spring classes. This means that the class becomes effectively super-concentrated; material must be adjusted to fit the new time parameters, and this can often present something of a challenge. After all, two-and-a-half hours is a long time! Without diversifying classroom activities, the experience is going to be grueling for everyone involved.

One of the reasons I enjoy the summer schedule is because of the longer class time, which I find allows me much more room to experiment, improvise, and develop the pedagogical techniques I’ve encountered as a Writing Fellow at Baruch. While I might not have time to do so in the fall or spring, in the summer I feel freer to break my students into groups and have them work on oral presentations together, or to show brief movie clips and “scaffold” low stakes writing assignments from the discussion that ensues (an example can be found here). Either way, the extended class time provides an opportunity to practice new teaching methodologies while staving off the beasts of boredom and exhaustion.

In contrast to the longer class time, the summer session itself is exceedingly brief. How much can a student really absorb in only five weeks? Should a teacher automatically reduce the scope of a class during summer sessions? Since I teach American history, does this mean that I should cut out a few decades, to have the class cover less material in the interest of time? There are of course, different philosophies on this, but I would like to suggest that “covering less material” is not necessarily the best solution to the five-week course problem.

In fact, just as the longer class time provides room to experiment, the shorter overall semester can also be employed to distinct pedagogical advantage. This summer I am teaching a course on the Vietnam War, whose fall and spring permutations contain a much wider “survey-style” approach to all the varied aspects of the era. I plan to have the summer version focus on just a few aspects of the war, in much greater detail, hoping that the students will have an equivalently useful experience through their deeper engagement with smaller bits of material. This way, I can shape the course to the imperatives of the summer schedule without (hopefully) shorting students in the process.

What are your tips for getting through the summer?

Filed Under: CUNY, teaching Tagged With: ,

We Own Everything, So You Don’t Have To

April 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Google logo render - Mark Knol
Creative Commons License photo credit: mark knol

As the startlingly rapid movement to digitize everything on earth marches on, questions ranging from the legal to the political to the philosophical continue to arise. One recent such instance came in the form of a lawsuit filed by the American Society of Media Photographers and other visual artist organizations, who are suing Google for its massive digital book-scanning project, arguing that Google is committing large-scale copyright infringement.  This article in the New York Times details the lawsuit and includes information on a possible settlement that will allow Google to continue scanning virtually every book in existence while providing artists with new ways to profit from their work.  Whatever the outcome of the case, though, it is clear that the current model of copyright law is being forced to evolve rapidly to keep pace with the tremendous legal issues that accompany a technological transformation as large in scale as the digital revolution.  Google’s seemingly inevitable goal, in the words of a University of Colorado professor quoted in the Times piece, “to control…virtually all information in the world,” may end up redefining the entire concept of intellectual “property.”  Essentially, no one will own anything, because Google will own everything.

Google’s dystopic implications are tempered by the insane practicality and amazing access it can provide to the world’s information.  As a historian of twentieth century America, I am in awe of Google’s book and magazine collection, which includes the entire run of LIFE magazine (advertisements and all) on top of hundreds of other titles.  Seriously, it’s amazing; go check it out.

An unavoidable part of living through this peculiar digital stage of human evolution is the growing sense that everything is online. This of course can’t be true, but it’s not going to stop Google from trying to keep an infinity of information within its control.  My own political orientation influences my deep pessimism about the direction of this inarguably necessary enterprise. How comfortable are you with Google’s stewardship of information?   The clip below, from HBO’s brilliantly prescient 1990s sketch comedy series Mr. Show with Bob and David, obscenely captures my perhaps irrational fear that Google is our Globochem…(warning:  adult language, which is kind of the point).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uco5Ed-5y2U[/youtube]

Filed Under: Copyright, Search Engines, Technology Tagged With: ,

But I still only have two eyes…

March 23, 2010 By 1 Comment

The Onion, 2009

Nielsen Media Research, the group that lets us know exactly how many people tune in to the Super Bowl each year, recently reported a drastic upswing in the amount of Americans who surf the web while they watch television.  Just in the last two years, since 2008, there has been a 35 percent increase in simultaneous TV-watching and Internet use.  Whether you are one of these people or not, you have to admit that the amount of time you spend staring at a glowing rectangle has increased exponentially in recent years.  Computer monitors, TV screens, and cellphones are ubiquitous in American life, so much a part of our everyday experience that the phenomenon is even parodied in The Onion:

“We discovered in almost all cases that Americans find it enjoyable and rewarding to put their faces in front of glowing rectangles for hours on end,” said Howard West, a prominent sociologist on the Stanford team. “Furthermore, when citizens are not staring slack-jawed at these mesmerizing shapes, many appear to become lost, confused, and unsure of what they should be doing to occupy themselves.”

Added West, “Some even become irritated and angry when these rectangles are not around.”

More and more, when I am standing in front of a group of undergraduate students, I feel like I am in direct competition with the lure of the rectangle.  Whether they are anxious to check that text message they feel buzzing in their pocket, or opening a laptop to ostensibly “take notes,” it is clear that many students would much rather be staring at their rectangle of choice than the human instructor (and other students) before them.

I am not a Luddite.  In fact, I’m a huge believer in the engagement of technology in the classroom.  For better or worse, technology has become an integral prosthesis for human communication, and learning to navigate in the digital world is a fundamental component of higher education.  But the younger our students get, the more likely they are to arrive in our classrooms with a lifetime of digital experience; they will have lived their entire lives in a world where multiple, simultaneous rectangle-viewing is commonplace.

How does this impact the classroom experience?  How can we preserve what is valuable about the “old-fashioned” college lecture as technological communication continues to evolve?  Are there ways to integrate the traditional academic experience with the brave new world of omnipresent glowing rectangles?

Exploring this admittedly philosophical issue has practical purposes as well.  A recent rash of viral videos depict angry college professors confiscating and destroying various pieces of student technology.  The videos (two of which are posted below) show what can happen when such communication issues remain unaddressed.  Try viewing them while you are simultaneously watching TV, and feel the future…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm1CJPIqUpI[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5w-7IpI0fI[/youtube]



Filed Under: Technology

How blunt is too blunt?

February 24, 2010 By 4 Comments

Untitled
Creative Commons License 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?

Filed Under: Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication Tagged With: ,

I want to be an academic when I grow up!

December 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

curvy_road_horizontal
Creative Commons License photo credit: andysternberg

Recently a Baruch undergraduate student, after listening to my advice on her Sociology 1000 paper, asked me, “So, what are you?”  I replied in the usual way, explaining that I’m a Writing Fellow at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and that my role is to help students with specific writing assignments in their Sociology/Anthropology courses.

The student looked at me, still confused.  ”Yeah, but, are you a professor?  Or a student?  Or what?”  At this point I extrapolated my role even further, describing each step of the graduate school journey, regaling her with such terms as “adjuncting,” “Level III,” “dissertation committee” and, of course, “tenure-track.”  After shaking the glaze of catatonic boredom from her eyes, she asked me a follow-up question that ended up stumping me completely:  ”Should I go to graduate school?”

This brings me to the (intended) subject of this post, which is the sometimes difficult task of answering students’ questions about graduate school and academia as a career. Of course, every academic has different ideas about WHY they became an academic, with some I’m sure regretting the entire enterprise, but I think that answering these kinds of questions presents an excellent opportunity to clarify your own ideas about academia, career, your particular discipline, and even your sense of self.  Particularly for those “Level III” graduate students looking at impending job interviews, this may be a good time, as scary as it can seem, to practice formally justifying your major life decisions.

For reasons that remain unclear, lots of students ask me about graduate school.  Below are three typical student concerns, and a few ideas for how to approach them:

1.  ”Will I be able to make money?”

This question comes most often from one of Baruch’s numerous business-oriented students.  I often will engage them in a conversation about current events, particularly developments in the world of finance since say, oh, last October.  I try to honestly explain that academia is an industry like any other, subject to booms and busts, internal corruption, and strained budgets. However, in general, education is also a field with considerably more historical permanence than, for instance, day-trading.  With this question, you would do best to take a middle route.  It’s probably a bad idea to reinforce the whole teleology of the “job at the end of the college tunnel” anyway.  Say something about learning for learning’s sake, but don’t get preachy.

2.  ”Are you glad YOU went to graduate school?”

Ooh.  Hmm.  This can be a tricky one, especially if caught on a bad day.  First of all, as academics, we already have a tendency to make answers to questions like these extraordinarily complicated.  But there’s no need to confuse a student with all those shades of grey.  Here, then, is the best place for you to articulate your career goals, your internal philosophy, your academic raison d’être.  While everyone’s graduate school experience has been mixed (I can personally, nearly instantly, think of dozens of wonderful aspects it has added to my life, while simultaneously considering the many drawbacks), a student really wants to hear your honest, overall evaluation of a significant portion of your life and whether or not it was “worth it.”  Again, this is a good opportunity to justify yourself and, not unimportantly, to sound convincing while you’re doing it.  Even if you’re only convincing yourself, and barely.

3.  ”Should I go to graduate school?”

Ultimately, you can’t answer this question for a student.  Each person needs to come to these kinds of decisions on their own terms, but you can certainly give them advice as seems appropriate, without necessarily saying “yes” or “no.”  It should also be mentioned that just because a student is interested in graduate school doesn’t mean the impulse should be automatically encouraged.  Sometimes, students are just asking because they are curious.  Others are fishing for feedback, wanting to know if you think they are “smart enough” for graduate school.  Either way, these conversations collectively point to yet another process in the academic’s journey:  becoming a mentor.  Just like we had figures in our undergraduate years who pointed out the paths to us, so too must we become mentors and guides for our students.  That process of transformation, from student to teacher, is arguably lifelong.  In talking to students about graduate school and the vast range of experience that comes with it, we can begin to consider our own steps and the many reasons behind them.  At the very least, you should be able to ask yourself the question “why am I an academic?” without it sounding in your head like it’s being screamed to the gods.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Pedagogy, Uncategorized

Let’s talk about talking

November 10, 2009 By 4 Comments

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc&feature=related[/youtube]

The above video has been making the rounds of progressive blogs recently.  It features Jay Smooth, a popular New York hip-hop radio host, giving a brief lesson on how best to approach a racially-charged conversation.  In a quick three minutes,  Smooth gives several witty examples of conversational traps to avoid, effectively presenting the difference between the two broad categories of racial discussion:  the “what they did” conversation versus the “what they are” conversation.   The video demonstrates the best way to “call out” racist behavior without leading the conversation into name-calling, by focusing on specific words and actions (“what they did”) rather than drawing broad conclusions (“what they are”).

While Smooth’s clever lecture/sermon focuses on racial issues, it also functions essentially as a primer on how to engage difficult issues with critical intelligence, and as such it has captured the attention of communication-intensive educators (that’s us). According to this interview on NPR, the video has become a hit among college professors, who use Smooth’s rant to help introduce ideas about effective oral communication.  Because the video is hip, funny, and easily understandable, it seems like a decent way to get students talking about talking.

As I’ve noticed in my own classes,  difficulties with in-class discussions are not always related to shy, silent students. Oftentimes, I’ve had boisterous groups that have LOTS to say, but don’t often have the most effective tools for oral communication at their disposal, and the result can be an awkward, pointless (and, at worst, offensive) discussion.  After all, there are many ways to talk about any given issue, but our job is to promote a very specific kind of academic discussion that is most likely very different from the average student’s everyday mode of communication.

Smooth’s video is certainly a great starting point for a classroom discussion about arguments, evidence, and rhetorical strategy, but I think it also provides an opportunity for us, as educators, to begin thinking about our own role in teaching students how to effectively “speak up” in class.  What other tools can we use to help students create meaningful, civil in-class discussions?  How can we get students not just to talk, but to talk with confidence and authority, avoiding the “rhetorical Bermuda Triangle” described in the video?  And finally, is Smooth available for guest lectures?

Filed Under: Oral Communication, Pedagogy Tagged With:

The Uses of Absurdity

October 14, 2009 By 1 Comment

vanDALIsm
Creative Commons License photo credit: Dr Case

A recent New York Times article details a study at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that suggests unique approaches to stimulating critical thinking in the classroom.  Researchers have observed that when the brain is confronted with “absurdity” (that is, problems and patterns outside the bounds of normal, predictable experience), it struggles to make the new information “fit” within an understandable framework.  This process, they argue, helps develop the brain’s capacity for creative problem-solving:

…Dr. [Travis] Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

While the researchers say that it is too early to draw concrete conclusions from this theory, I’m wondering what role absurdity, or the shaking up of students’ expectations, can play in the college classroom.  As the article suggests, it may be a little too absurd to begin screening David Lynch shorts as a regular feature of your pedagogy; however, there are certainly ways to try the concept out without losing your class to utter confusion.

One idea for developing this notion might be a “puzzle”-type exercise in which students are asked to effectively figure their way out of a particularly tricky, and curriculum-driven, set of problems.  Since I teach American history, I’m thinking about role-playing exercises in which students take on the mindset of a historical character and navigate a specific (unexpected) problem in that person’s life.  The exercise would, ideally, seek to develop the “problem-solving” aspects of the brain as detailed in the article, without veering too far off course.  I wonder, though, what other ideas are out there?

How can we effectively guide students through an absurd text or problem without dictating the solution? What kinds of exercises might “confuse” students in a good way, challenging their perceptions and helping them see alternative modes of thinking?

Filed Under: Pedagogy

Confronting Tom Cruise in the Classroom

September 15, 2009 By 5 Comments

The Cruiser
Creative Commons License photo credit: xrrr

My course on the history of the Vietnam War necessarily contains a great deal of visual media, most often in the form of newsreel footage and clips from documentaries. However, since the Vietnam War has inspired dozens of fictional Hollywood films, I also have students watch clips from several of the most canonical films on the subject.  As any instructor knows, showing a “movie” in class has its advantages and pitfalls, the latter most often expressed in a sort of collective disengagement from an academic mindset, as students naturally fall into the more passive role of viewer.  How do we break through that passivity and get students to engage critically when watching a form of media that they are accustomed to consuming as entertainment?

Oliver Stone‘s 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July often ends up being a critical text in my course, simply because the narrative (and the ways that director Oliver Stone presents that narrative) engages some of the war’s most fundamental historical issues. The film also, however, stars Tom Cruise, a celebrity with a considerable amount of pop cultural baggage whose name often elicits rounds of giggling from students.  Since my goal is to avoid having them fall into the passive receiver role of pop culture consumers, I find it is useful to play along with the jokes for a bit before subtly steering the discussion into more “academic” areas.  In a matter of  five minutes, a joke about Cruise jumping on the couch on Oprah can become a conversation about  American male celebrities, which leads us to John Wayne, which leads into issues of American masculinity and directly into the critical aspects of the film we are about to watch.

Despite these pre-watching efforts though, students often can’t help but get caught up in what they are watching, particularly when it takes the form, essentially, of an action film.  This is why I think it is vital to avoid turning on the movie and letting it run for more than five minutes at a time.  After all, if you are asking students to consume this text in a different way than they are used to,  it is important that you present the text in a different way.  One way that I found effective is to break the film up into tiny clips that are watched and then written about (or discussed) in low stakes exercises.  This way, students are constantly forced out of the role of viewer and back into their role as critical thinkers approaching a text.  Even if that text includes Tom Cruise and machine guns.

Here’s a quick clip from another Oliver Stone film, Platoon (1986), followed by an example of the kind of free writing prompt that I have found useful for stimulating discussion and leading into more complex writing assignments.  By limiting the viewing experience to this short scene, one that has been selected carefully for its density of critical material, I hope to focus the students’ attention on just a few important elements.  As you can see from watching the clip and reading the prompt below, assignments like this contain more than enough historical, sociological, and ethical issues to keep everyone busy and, more importantly, to demonstrate how to begin unpacking the complex mechanics underlying popular culture:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_dNxlnFKA&feature=related[/youtube]

Exercise

The character Barnes is presented as the ultimate cynical warrior, immune even to death, and his character is contrasted with Taylor and Elias, who are ostensibly “good” warriors.  What makes a soldier “good” or “bad” in the context of this scene?

Barnes’ statement “there’s the way things ought to be, and the way things are” seems to apply to the Vietnam War and history in general.  Do you agree with his attitude?  Why or why not?

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy Tagged With: , ,
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