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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.

Once, a student told me that he couldn’t present his final assignment for my public speaking class because he had to take the CPA exam. It was understood that the exam would take precedence as a kind of gateway to gainful employment, but I was still a little surprised at how compelled I felt to step aside. As an adjunct, I’ve been made aware of the connection between public speaking and employment for Baruch students. Several teachers work in public relations firms or as corporate consultants outside the college, and students seem to respect and learn from they way they both model and teach the conventions of business professional comportment and conventions.

I’ve told my students that public speaking assignments should prepare them for the corporate world in terms of how to coherently present their work, and how to be poised, authoritative, and collegial doing it. I’d like to have more to say than this, but less to say than the broad justification of humanities that I’ve heard before (and largely believe). While I haven’t had any interest in the business world before, after teaching at Baruch for a few years, I’ve become more and more aware of how much I don’t know about it. I feel kind of hampered in my ability to figure out how what I am trying to offer (my own work research is in democracy and culture) might connect to their lives outside college. And hampered from connecting what I’m doing to what I guess makes up the majority of their classtime. I looked up ‘what can the humanities do for business’ and found a Stanford webpage from early this year, in which several people respond to Stanley Fish’s (he’s like academia’s Joe Liberman!). John Bender says, “Not too long ago, the New York Times reported interviews with a number of CEOs who connected their ability as managers to their long-term engagement with books of all kinds, including fiction and poetry.” Bryan Wolf responds that Fish is “trying to save the humanities from instrumentalization.” But I’m actually curious about what, in terms of business, that instrumentalization might be.

The Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity has hosted some interesting panels, one on corporate failures that may have led to the current crisis called, “Did we get what we deserve?” And another one I wish I’d seen that featured alumni Edward Zinbarg, who wrote a book called Faith, Morals, and Money. So, I vow in 2010 to go to this center’s events, and meanwhile I’m working on a list of my favorite novels and plays, and the different ways they address money. So far, I’ve got: Aristophanes, The Acharnians, which stars a merchant who argues against an idealistic warmonger; anything by Charles Dickens; Easter, a play about debt and Christianity by Strindberg; Jerry McGuire (money and success is love); and Slumdog Millionaire. The more I read, the more leftward I seem to drift. And, while I refuse to read anymore Ayn Rand, I’m interested in literature that views neoliberalism and capitalism critically as well as positively. So far, Jerry McGuire is all I can think of. I’d like to find some writing on connection between literature and economics. So far, all I can think of is the passage in Capital when Marx talks about the lace-maker’s death notice, and how much it reminded me of Dickens. I’d like to read some fiction over winter break, even though I should be working and working. And I would like a booklist of fiction on money.

Last summer a student in my public speaking class said that “Cloverfield” was ‘pretty good for an action movie.’ And then he said, ‘I mean it’s a disaster movie, which is a kind of action movie.’  I asked him to tell me what an action movie is as a form or genre, what its properties are. This led to a conversation in which we put the film into context, so rather than just sketch the plot, describe a spectacular scene or two, and name the actors, we talked about the form of a disaster film, its history, and the range of locations and themes it has traversed so far.

When I was an undergrad, my professor Heidi Krueger sent us to look at pointillism paintings at the Moma, then read Gertrude Stein’s attempts to translate pointillism into writing. Stein dispersed units of description throughout a paragraph the way Seurat’s paintings disperse dots of color throughout the frame. After years of reading transparently, without reflecting on the mechanism of the forms of writing, this exercise was a kind of “Matrix” moment for me. I began to see the way forms and genres impose structure, and I began to see representation as a kind of translation of experience or thought which is never complete or direct. In any translation there is adaptation, even distortion, and maybe even loss. I guess translation can be alienating, as well. And I wonder if this is what might be partly what is happening when I hear students mimic the style of the texts they’re assigned in class, or the style of their professor’s lecture.

At the Writing Across the Curriculum Conference last week, two fellows described teaching with different forms. In her class on personality psychology Valerie Futch highlights the way research questions and methodology determine results by assigning personality questionnaires to her students. Doug Singsen taught a class on comics in which he assigned his students to diagram a page, indicating different logics connecting one frame to another: character-to-character, aspect-to-aspect, etc. I was struck by the way both of them seemed to foreground the form, of comic or psychological study, and the way this foregrounding moved their students past a book-report kind of absorption and summarization, to an awareness of the way form works as a kind of structuring logic.

I’ve heard the phrase “writing is thinking” in my experiences with Writing Across the Curriculum, and after the last WAC colloquium I thought about other kinds of work that friends of mine have described: photography, contracting, pattern-making. If these are all forms of thinking, maybe we could say that writing is the academically consecrated form of thinking. Or, that writing is a representation of thinking, one that requires translation into a specific form.

I’ve noticed a tendency among students to parrot or mimic the style of the texts they use in class, and I wonder if this is because for them, unlike grad students and professors, writing is not thinking. Instead, expressing thinking through writing might for some students be an act of extreme translation, from the thinking they already do (in forms other than writing) into the form of writing. After all, academics write and read all the time, we think in it like fish in water. Writing and text is perhaps transparent to us, but more or less opaque others.

The conversation with my student about “Cloverfield” made me want to integrate other forms that we all encounter all the time into academic work, as a way to make the structure opaque to both student and teacher, and allow different levels of competence and levels of analysis into the classroom. I’d like to assign students to write “Cloverfield”  in the form of the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice; or draw the argument of an academic essay as a comic strip; or make a news report of a poem, explaining logical, structural mechanisms across different forms.

In my first year as a WAC fellow, I’ve learned about integrating journals and blogs into academic assignments, and this seems like a great way to connect writing to the thinking that students are already doing outside of college. (If we agree that people generally write emails, and read blogs).

Photo by Shannon Ebner.

I could think of them all these forms as representations of thinking. That’s the way that Derrida and post-structuralism has real world resonance for me. I wonder if by making several forms opaque, we might give students a sense of analytical and expressive competence, which could provide a kind of transition to academic writing. And I wonder if an alienation from popular forms like movies, songs, and news reports might work well with an alienation from academic forms like essays. So we could spread the alienation around, and categorize writing as another form of thinking among many. After all, we arrive at college already schooled in, even experts in, movies, songs, and news reports. And with Blogs@Baruch available here it is possible to integrate many forms into an assignment, or ongoing assignments in a class. (The Baruch blog projects I’ve peeked in on, from classes on food, Chaucer, journalism, etc. are compelling to me, and I imagine they would be to students too.) What if there was a class that didn’t focus on a specific content, but instead was about forms. Is there? I gathered from the WAC colloquium that teachers are assigning writing exercises that highlight the methods and styles of different disciplines, but I’m looking for ways that other teachers might be doing this kind of work. It is my current dream class, working title: “Forms, Forms, Forms!” or maybe, “Post-structuralism and You.”

A few weeks ago, I logged on to VOCAT for the first time, and as watched the video of a student’s rehearsal for their presentation, I was surprised to hear my own voice. I was sitting near the camera, and focused on the students as they went through their Powerpoint slides. Maybe because the camera was pointed towards them, at the time of the recording I was unaware that I was also recording myself.

And this made for a kind of unexpected self-assessment, along with the student assessment I was prepared to do. I’ve often wondered if my voice is too low, if I repeat myself too much, if what I’m saying makes any sense, if what I’m saying is more helpful than confusing to my students. And I realized, listening to myself talk to a student on the VOCAT video, that I’ve spent six years of graduate school trying to get better at absorbing what I read, and better at writing clearly. But I haven’t put any sustained or rigorous effort into getting better at speaking.

For me, the VOCAT incident, the unexpected switch of the assessment tool back on the assessor, made me realize how alone I have felt with this part of teaching. The first day of your adjunct job: the door shuts behind you, it is just you and students. A professor visits my class for one session during the semester, sometimes they don’t stay for the whole class. Their written assessment is usually generous and they’ve all talked with me after the class to offer encouragement and the wisdom of their experience. But, you know, the rest of the time, it is just you in there. Talking and talking. Wondering if the students are falling asleep because they’ve just eaten lunch, or is it the lulling drone of my voice? I know there are books and articles out there I could be reading on how to effectively engage a class. And I’ve sat in on other professor’s classes to see what I pick up from the way they engage a class. George Shulman at NYU Gallatin showed me how effective it is to value every student’s contribution, repeating it, rephrasing it, writing it on the board. Heidi Kruger at the New School held me spellbound with her intense, low whisper. Sekou Sundiata at the New School moved around the class like we were the orchestra and he was conducting us.

But, what works for me, and for my students, on this particular subject? I hadn’t really focused on that so much. Which is weird, given how, you know, important oral communication skills are in teaching.  Should the VOCAT assessment tool be turned on teachers? Well, I wouldn’t volunteer. But, when confronted with it, I thought it showed me some things that I should be aware of.

This brings me to the connection between writing and speaking. At the recent WAC conference, several people brought up the fact that writing often, in different forms, helps people become better writers. Speaking about writing also improves writing.  We talk about students ‘finding their own voice.’ One impediment to that might be that students are reading authors whose voices are quite different than their own. Often when I’m working with students on their presentation, I’ll ask them to summarize or draw a conclusion from their research. They articulate clear, original, logically organized claims aloud. But, when it comes to the formal work, they leave this out. Why? The answer I’ve heard more than once was, “But, that is just my opinion.”

What I want students to do, what I’ve heard other teachers say they want students to do, is enter a conversation with the authors they cite. What I’ve seen happen too often is a student articulating their own view, then summarizing an author’s view, using the author’s own style. How can we yoke them together?

One possible way might be to value thought when it is articulated aloud, not just in print. And one way to do this might be to film it, to actually turn the light and focus on recording speaking a thought, the way writing records a thought.

At the WAC meeting, Thomas Meechum and Karen Gregory’s documentary about the writing process in professor Michele Pacht’s class showed students responding to questions about their opinions about graffiti. I wondered if the heightened attention of the camera on the spoken thoughts helped the students to value their thoughts enough to commit them to print. I wonder if I should review the recording of my voice, talking to my students, as many times as I am reviewing the drafts of my dissertation proposal. I kind of think I should.

Last December, Baruch’s campus news posted an article proudly announcing that a professor at our college had made RateMyProfessors’ top ten hottest list. The website lists assessment categories, including the easiness of the class, the rater’s interest in the subject, and clarity. Hotness is given the caveat “just for fun.” A ‘rate my realtor’ website has relevant categories such as communication, market knowledge, and negotiating. A ‘rate my doctor’ website has categories for punctuality, friendliness, and helpfulness. Neither of these cites include hotness. Why would RateMyProfessor.com invite students to judge their teachers by appearance, even by sexual appeal?

Part of what RateMyProfessor.com offers is a chance to level the playing field. The power dynamic between students and teachers can sometimes seem so severe. I’ve had many conversations with fellow teachers about grade grubbing: emails and office visits with students who either plead, bully, or plead and bully at the same time. There is something raw and vulnerable to the badgering of course, and that is what makes the situation stressful and sometimes even wrenching. I sweat through these conversations when they were happening, and they turned my stomach later at night.

“I am not a B student” (or fill in whatever the disappointing grade is). I think this is the gut feeling behind a lot of grade issues even when it isn’t said. And this is what I mean by an uneven playing field between teachers and students. I’ve realized there is a crucial difference between the relationship of teacher and student to those between realtor and client, doctor and patient. A flakey realtor can definitely be annoying, could keep you from the perfect apartment. The effects of an incompetent doctor could have a major impact on your life. But grades affect people’s identity, their sense of who they are at a time when the clay is still wet. When majors are still not entirely decided, much less careers, a grade might seem like a public judgment, affecting your own, private sense of self. When I was in college, the A’s in English and B’s and C’s in math and science told me I was a certain kind of person, they also directed me towards one career and away from other. My students at Baruch have an even more pragmatic grasp of the way grades affect their sense of themselves and way the outside world sees them. They know what grade point average it takes to get into business school, or to get an interview at Ersnt & Young. They have a keen sense that a grade attaches to their fate.

Paolo Carpignano, in “The Shape of the Sphere: the Public Sphere and the Materiality of Communication,” defines the public sphere as any practice that mediates between the public and the private. I went back to the readings from his class at the New School recently, when some recent events made me think about students and their identities, and my own, and also the public/private practice of judging, rating, and grading—the way it effects our sense of ourselves and the way others see us.

In the past few years, I’ve reconnected with people through Facebook and a few have told me they’ve Googled me; to find out what I’ve been doing since high school, or since the last family wedding or funeral. And this summer after a cousin mentioned Googling me, I of course Googled myself. I have an unusual name, so any hit I get is pretty surely me. And there, the very first one, was RateMyProfessor. And the very first rating, above several with comments such as “nice” and a few “boring” and one or two more generous, was a very detailed and sexually explicit post. I guessed, after thinking about it a lot, that a C might feel like the same kind of humiliation, affecting the way you see yourself and the way other people see you. Reading the post made me think that my sense of vulnerability might be right in line with what my student had felt.

For weeks after that post I fantasized about wearing a bomb suit to class. I wanted to prevent students from judging my appearance at all: here is an area in which I am no less vulnerable to judgment than anyone, no matter my maturity or professional accomplishment. For awhile after I found that post, I measured a student’s likelihood to retaliate on RateMyProfessor while I turned in grades. I eventually pushed this to the side, but a sense of wariness remains. I wonder how many other teachers are affected by the site and how we might clear a space for it within the academy, to absorb and reflect with students over what it has to tell us.

There has been some stone throwing on both sides, since RateMyProfessor began to offer teachers the chance to respond. (You can see a striking example from a past cac.cophony post: http://cac.ophony.org/2008/02/21/when-professors-strike-back/). But this has been like a back-alley scuffle behind the lecture halls where we talk about things like the public sphere and the role of the Internet in the academy. Grading and RateMyProfessor.com seem like very public spheres that affect our identities, that mediate between the public and private. But the practices themselves, as Michael pointed out in a recent post, aren’t the source of much open, deliberate debate.

Paolo Carpginano, “The Shape of the Sphere: The Public Sphere and the Materiality of Communication,” Constellations 6, no. 2 (1999).