…or a tiny fraction thereof. The dollar, I mean. It’s 8 a.m. and I’ve been working since 5, so I suppose a substantial fraction of the day has come and gone.
Visit to the Cardiodoc later this morning. That meeting, I hope, will put the whole blood pressure question to rest, once and for all. After another entire month of twice-daily bicep-pinching, the average comes to 124/74, not bad for a seventy-year-old broad who drinks a lot, doesn’t exercise enough, grinds her teeth in frustration until her jaws hurt, and most days consumes meat decorated with butter. I would like very much not to have to hear anything more about that!
Yesterdaya very nice little discoverycame my way:Joel Friedlander, a graphic designer who blogs about self-publishing, has come up with a whole set of Word templates tricked out as book formats for various types of fiction and nonfiction. Once you pour your copy into one of these and tidy it up a bit, you can convert to a PDF that any printer should be able to use to produce the desired trim size.
While, no, Word cannot do really top-flight page layout (largely because its fonts just aren’t up to the job), for most self-publishers’ purposes Page Layout As High Art is not required. Something that’s readable and doesn’t look like it was put together by a sixth-grader will suffice.
These things more than suffice. I’ve been putting Slave Labor into one of them and finding the task moves right along. The styles built into the template work smoothly and provide excellent consistency. It would be good to be able to insert a hard hyphen to force a line break, by way of fixing the occasional loose line (the particular template I’m using won’t allow that), but otherwise I have no serious complaints.
Student papers are starting to come in, so when I get back from the doc’s place I’ll have to kill at least part of the afternoon reading that stuff.
Two of them have plaintively begged to be told the title of the book. Uhm…it’s at the top of the FIRST PAGE of the syllabus. What part of download the syllabus, an instruction emitted three times on the first day of this online course, did they not understand?
They have an open-book quiz on the syllabus that gives them FIVE CHANCES to find the answers. It should be impossible to get less than the full ten points. We have scores of 7.3, 8.5, 8.3…jeez.
Wonder how they’ll do on the quizzes over the book’s chapters (assuming any of them manage to buy the book)? They only get three chances to get the answers right on those things.
This train of thought is making my teeth grind again. Must get up, feed the dog, and fix some breakfast.
Not that I don’t love my students. Most of them. I do, they’re lovely. And all. But i. hate. teaching!
With two days to go before semester grades are due to the District, another incident happened that I have specifically designed my classes and my policies to avoid.
Three bloated sections’ worth of student papers are graded, and I am at last ready to file grades. Experience suggested, however, that it was best to wait until the last minute to enter everyone’s final scores and click the “done” button in the District’s software. Once you’ve done that, you can’t go back, even a few minutes later, and adjust a score. This means that if a student has a problem of some kind that you can help by accepting a paper a day late or giving the person an opportunity to rewrite some screw-up, you can’t change that person’s final grade without jumping through a complicated, time-consuming, annoying set of bureaucratic hoops. So: don’t hurry to get finished with the grading hassles.
Thank you, Goddess of Experience!
Two days ago, I get a message from a chucklehead who has turned in all of two assignments (if you count the machine-graded quiz over the syllabus as an “assignment,” which I don’t): “Why do I have a score of 14% in this class when I turned in all the assignments correctly?”
Dear Mr. Chucklehead:
You turned in the first assignment but did not turn in any of the others. Attached is a screenshot showing how this looks in Canvas. As you can see, the system says “No assignment submitted.”
Mr. C. writes back:
Dear Ms. Crabapple:
But I did! I sent them all to you by e-mail. I thought I was supposed to do that.
Oh yah? Well then, why did you file the first assignment in Canvas, in the normal way? I refrain from remarking on the speciousness of this, because now I realize this idiot has
a) never registered (or cared) that he was not getting any feedback or grades on his assignments;
b) never checked into the online course to see what grades he got on the many papers he was supposed to have turned in; and
c) sent an entire semester’s worth of student drivel to my account in the campus e-mail system, which, in violation of the rules, I absolutely positively decline to use.
I don’t use the District’s system because they allow everybody and her little sister to blitz the entire mailing list of the largest community college system on the planet with all manner of stupid time-wasting irrelevant junk. On any given day, 50 to 100 inane messages are blasted out to everyone from landscape workers to the president:
From a campus in Chandler, halfway to Tucson: Our beloved janitor Joe Bltzphk is retiring on Friday. His retirement party is at noon in the department lunch room. Y’all come!
From a campus up against the South Mountains, halfway to San Diego: Having cleaned out our file drawers, we have a stack of 15 spare file folders. Please come by the department office and take them away.
From a campus in the northwest valley, halfway to San Francisco: Many thanks to Arnold Heffenpfeffer for photographing our campus picnic the other day.
From the same campus: Congratulations to Arnold Heffenpfeffer for getting thanks for photographing our campus picnic the other day.
From the same campus: Thanks to everyone who attended our campus picnic the other day.
From the same campus: Yes. Everyone who attended our campus picnic the other day was GREAT!
And on and on and on and inbox-cloggingly ON…
As a practical matter, as long as the students use the Canvas online course site, as anyone with any common sense would naturally do because that’s where the damn course resides and it’s where the damn assignments submission function IS and it’s where the “e-mail-your-professor” function IS, I’m not violating the rules. All Canvas’s e-mail functions are routed through the campus Gmail system — thus doth the contract with Google work. Anything a student sends to me or I send to a student is copied to Gmail and accordingly backed up on Google’s servers, there to dwell until the end of time. So technically we are using the District’s email system. Sort of.
However, if you send a message directly to me at the District’s Gmail address, naturally it does not forward to Canvas, and so naturally I will not see it.
What would possess the jerk to do this escapes me.
But when he did it, he put me over the barrel: I couldn’t refuse to read an entire semester’s worth of work, because when he complained to the chair and the dean (which he would, forthwith), it would become apparent that I never, EVER log into their annoying system.
It took almost SIX HOURS to read all that shit! He obviously hadn’t bothered to read anything associated with the course — he must never have visited the site after the first week (I could find out but do not wish to bother, myself). He passed with a C-minus, which, this being a junior college, is the equivalent of a D-minus or F-plus in more advanced realms.
This made me particularly angry because years ago, when I was just starting out teaching full-time, some jerk did the same thing by asking for an incomplete and then coming back, three years later, with a whole semester’s worth of papers. I hadn’t yet learned to put an end-date on an incomplete form; at GDU, if you fail to do that, the kid can come back sometime in another century and demand a grade in the course. My syllabi now state that I do not give incompletes unless all but one paper has been submitted and the student has an average grade of C or better in the course. At one point yesterday, obeying Cardiodoc’s order, I took my blood pressure: 157/135.
Holy shit. By comparison, this morning it’s 122/77, about where it’s hovered all month.
Paused long enough to bolt down lunch.
Then returned to the computer to write this summer’s syllabus. This also is a multi-hour project, because we’re required to reiterate our assignments and calendar three redundant times in the template that we have to use.
First, like this…
Grading Scale:
90% – 100% = A
80% – 89.999% = B
70% – 79.999% = C
60% – 69.999% = D
Less than 60% = F
Then, like this…
Description of Assignments:
Note: All assignments and the essays are submitted electronically through Canvas. You may use the narrative box to paste in your reading responses and the syllabus response. The three required essays, however, will be submitted as attachments. The attachments MUST BE WORD-COMPATIBLE! That means they must be saved as .doc, .docx, or .rtf files. NO EXCEPTIONS, and no, I am not going to spend extra time grading papers that didn’t get read by the deadline because they were submitted in the wrong format.
Preliminaries: Introduction and Syllabus Quiz
Syllabus Quiz: May 28.
This is an open-book review of the course syllabus. You must score 10 points on the thing to get credit on other assignments in the course; you get five tries and can keep flailing at it until the end of the week.
Introduction. Due May 29.
Please write, in essay form, not as bulleted points, a short introduction. Tell me who you are, where you came from and how on earth you got here, and what you hope to accomplish at PVCC.
Open-book Quizzes: Chapters in the Seyler Text
Please note that the number of the quiz does NOT correspond to the number of the chapter! The chapters are not assigned in consecutive order.
I know it’s a hardship for many of us, but you WILL need to buy, rent, or borrow the textbook. The library has copies that you can use there, but note that the library’s hours will be much restricted this summer thanks to our legislators’ short-sighted budget cuts.
Deadlines are short; you’ll need to read this material at a pretty fast pace. PLAN AHEAD and MANAGE YOUR TIME. One option may be to go in together with a classmate on the cost of a book and work on this material together. Note that you’re not required to do each quiz ON the due date but rather BY the due date. Thus you could, if you organized your time effectively, do some of these quizzes a day or two early and relieve some deadline pressure. Note also that quiz 11 is due the day before July 4; plan accordingly.
You get 3 chances to maximize your score on each open-book quiz.
District-Required Essays
The first two essays (a cause and effect and an extended definition) may be used to build toward your final 2,500-word term paper. Note, though, that this will require you to think ahead! To make this work, you’ll need to decide on a topic for your final paper very early in the term, and you’ll need to make both the cause & effect and the extended definition essays be researched papers with citations and documentation on topics closely related to your final paper’s subject. This strategy is not required BUT will save you a lot of last-minute work at the end of the semester.
Cause and Effect Essay: Due June 22. 750 words
Write a causal analysis on a subject of your choice, using the rhetorical principles and techniques you have been learning about in your readings in Seyler. It is important to apply sound logical thinking and argumentation to this assignment! Your topic should be focused sharply enough for you to address causes and effects of some specific issue or phenomenon – do not try to explain all the problems of the world. This essay should be sourced and documented, even though you have not yet studied techniques of gathering information and documenting sources. Do the best you can to find material to support your argument and show where the material came from. Remember, if you find some solid, credible sources and record where you found them, you may be able to use them for your final, 2,500-word paper, assuming you choose your subject cleverly. In any event, follow MLA style for typing your manuscript; this is described in the textbook and also at the Purdue OWL website: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
Extended Definition: Due June 29. 750 words.
Interpret, from your point of view, the meaning of a term, concept, or issue related to a topic of current interest. For example, in defining charter schools, you might take the point of view that certain charter schools whose entry requirements are very high or that have certain other stringent requirements are not really “public schools,” in that they cultivate exclusivity. This paper should have at least three sources, two of which should be solid sources from the library’s databases. Use in-text citation to indicate where you’ve found your information and ideas, and use a Works Cited page to describe each source using MLA style.
Preliminary Work on Final Paper: Due July 6.
Submit the topic of your position paper or causal analysis, with a thesis statement, one paragraph from any part of the planned paper, and an outline of the paper. The outline does not have to be graven in stone but should show what direction you’re going in and demonstrate some thought about how you will approach and organize the paper.
Position Paper: Due July 13. 2,500 words.
Against all comers, present and defend a considered, reasoned, and well researched position on a topic of current interest. Using plenty of facts and expert opinion, state your position and explain your thinking. Take into consideration what other people may think; describe other points of view and explain why you disagree with them or simply why you have concluded your viewpoint is more accurate or more effective. Consider the parts of your argument that others may question, and respond to any doubts or counterarguments in your discussion. This paper should have at least six solid sources from the library’s databases and hard-copy books or journals, plus as many lighter online sources as you would like to include. 2,500 words.
Extra Credit Items:
Extra credit will be offered for a revision of the cause & effect paper, and for a good, serious, no-nonsense outline of the final paper, which must be turned in no later than July 6. Also, extra credit is available for turning in the final paper (the 2500-w ord position paper) by 11:55 p .m. July 10.
Opportunity: A cleanly edited revision of the Cause and Effect argument, pasted into a document with the graded original in such a way that I can tell the difference, see my edits & comments in the original, and identify your edited version. Due by June 26 and no later than June 26.15 points.
Opportunity: A credible, legit, full-length, complete, no-BS topic outline of the final paper, submitted by July 8and no later than July 8. 15 points.
Opportunity: Post the final paper (the 2500-word position paper) early: by 11:55 p.m. on July 10. 20 points.
Then like this…
I have to ask you: Is that or is that not the stupidest goddamn thing you ever saw?????
All this crap could be distilled into one, count it, (1) table (I know: I’ve done it), which would be easier to read and would state the details ONCE, not freaking THREE TIMES.
Most of it is boilerplate, of course. But for every single semester, I have to go comb through the whole mess — the department’s required syllabus is SEVENTEEN PAGES LONG! — and replace all of the dates, trying to get them right. But every semester, there’s always some damnfool complication.
This semester, the complication is my decision to deep-six the busywork assignments requiring students to read and summarize the chapters (this was an attempt to get them to buy or borrow the book and then open the damn book, which most of them will not do unless forced to it). These are now replaced by machine-graded quizzes — ELEVEN of the little effers — which also amount to a form of busywork because classmates get to take them three times by way of trying to rack up a passing score.
The true/false/multiple-guess quizzes are not meant as assessment tools. Their purpose is to force the little darlin’s to read the book and to run their glassy gaze over the important passages in the key chapters. Most of them don’t read textbooks (if they can get out of it) because they can’t read. Well, they can parse out the meaning of a message on a billboard. But they don’t, by and large, read well enough to quickly spot the high points of a dense document like a textbook chapter. So, because reading is a strain for them, quite naturally they avoid it as much as they can.
At any rate, because they can’t read, my workload is multiplied by some uncountable factor.
The latest annoyance indicated that even though the boilerplate syllabus says “All assignments and the essays are submitted electronically through Canvas,” I’d better reiterate THAT again in more assertive language. Hence the bottomless syllabus gained yet another passage:
How to Submit Assignments in Canvas
Please do not email assignments to me unless specifically asked to do so. Submit assignments through Canvas’s “Assignments” function. Here are two sites that explain how to do this:
I will return your graded papers as quickly as I can, through Canvas. Turnaround may take several days. PLEASE CHECK IN to be sure your papers have been returned, and read the comments on your papers. They’re designed to help you do your best on the next paper. The only way you can be sure that your paper has reached me and your grade has been posted in Canvas is to check in to the course, view your grades, and download your graded paper.
It’s your responsibility to be sure your papers are submitted correctly and can reach me through Canvas. It is not my responsibility to read a whole semester’s worth of your papers because, three days before the end of class, you figured out you’d been uploading them to the wrong place. Do not expect that I will do so.
Can you imagine having to tell a college student, presumably an adult or near-adult who is paying to take the course, to read the graded papers? Honest to god.
You understand, they will not read the syllabus, any more than they’ll read the book. However, the District explicitly describes the course syllabus as a “contract.” Provisions are regarded as rules graven in stone.
So the syllabus actually is not so much a guide to your course as a CYA document. If some student pulls a stunt that you haven’t anticipated and so have not laid down the law peremptorily in your syllabus, you are SOL. Because it never entered my mind that some moron would e-mail his assignments through a different system, I was screwed: I had to spend five hours reading trash that should have moved off my desk weeks ago.
So, you ask, being a reasonable person, if they don’t read the syllabus, how do they find out what the assignments are and when to turn them in?
Well…some of them don’t. That’s why you give them a quiz over the syllabus during the first week of class.
Then, you have to take all of that material, which you’ve now already expressed in three different hard-copy formats, and reiterate it in your Canvas shell three different ways:
•You post the 17-page hard-copy syllabus online, as a PDF. •You enter the assignments and their due dates in Canvas’s “Assignments” function, which generates a calendar-like list for them. •Once a week, you post an “announcement” that describes all the assignments due that week with their due dates.
So…after you’ve rewritten your syllabus, then you have to go through your Canvas site and rewrite all of that. And that takes the better part of another full day.
Yesterday I worked from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m., with a brief pause for lunch and social media check; then flew to choir. Fell into bed after 10 p.m. None of the work I did between noon and 6:00 p.m. was paid — course prep is unpaid overtime.
Wow! I just finished studying and annotating 800 pages (yes, that’s eight hundred) of printed-out research material for the Boob Book! Wa-hooooo!
About 80 percent of it consists of abstracts or full texts of medical and genetic research studies; most of the rest is resource material published by various nonprofits. 😀 You’ll love this one:
Elmore, Joann G., Gary M. Longton, Patricia A. Carney, Berta M. Geller, Tracy Onega, Anna N. A. Tosteson, Heidi D. Nelson, Margaret S. Pepe, Kimberly H. Allison, Stuart J. Schnitt, Frances P. O’Malley, and Donald L. Weaver. “Diagnostic Concordance among Pathologists Interpreting Breast Biopsy Specimens.” Journal of the American Medical Association 313, vol. 11 (March 17, 2015): 1122-1132. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.1405. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2203798.
Hurry right out and buy it!
Now the next stage before I can begin the actual writing is to take that stack of index cards and sort them according to the topics in the book’s outline. That’ll take a few days, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.
With an introduction in draft, all that’s left to do by way of building a prospectus to send to publishers and agents will be to write one solid chapter — any chapter — and one of the appendices, trick out the rough outline as a full-blown chapter outline, and distill that into the form of a proposed table of contents. And, of course, write the proposal itself, in the form of a cover letter.
In theory, I could get that done in two or three weeks…if I just didn’t have so goddamn much to have to do.
Tomorrow is gone — so is tonight, for that matter. Choir practice tonight; then out to Scottsdale at 7 a.m. tomorrow; from there grab some grocery items on the way back into town and then right back out the door to a mid-day birthday shebang kindly hosted by dear friends. That will blow the afternoon. The evening is already claimed by the Arizona Book Publishing Association, which is rising from the grave for a kind of alumni jamboree that I’ve pledged to attend.
Meanwhile, student papers are pouring in. The 235s had query letters due Monday and they have a substantial article due on Friday, and the same day the 102s will dump a mountain of 2500-word papers on us. Since those two 102 sections are full of good little doobies, several of them have already posted their papers. It would be good to start reading those, given that plowing through 100,000 words of student drivel is no small endeavor.
Honest to God. Whose idea WAS it to assign a 2500-word research paper to cohorts of students who have never written a sourced paper in their young lives?
Anyway, grades are not due until Friday morning. Most of the waking moments between 10 p.m. tomorrow and 11:30 a.m. Friday the 15th will be absorbed by reading that stuff.
And that means it’ll be 10 days before I can get back to doing my own thing. Even then, the time will not be my own: I have to build a summer course as soon as the spring sections end, and while I’m at it, I should build the fall sections, too.
So. In reality, make it three, maybe four weeks before I get any real work done on the Boob Book project.
Is there any question why I never get anything done?
Y’know, sometimes I look at what my students do, often out of simple self-defense in a world fraught with absurd bureaucratic demands, and wonder if I would have done the same thing as a freshman.
Would I refuse to buy the textbook for a college course I was paying to take? If I did buy it, would I refuse to read it? Would I turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or, in my day, from a magazine or book)? Would I beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because I had a full-time job and was taking 18 credits? Would I need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?
Well, off-hand the answers would be No, Probably not, No, Not a chance, and No.
BUT…on reflection…
The truth is, there’s really no comparison between today’s student’s experience and my college experience a half-century ago.
In the first place, I did not take English 101 and 102, the two-semester iteration of the high-school English that apparently does not “take” for most Arizona kids. I didn’t go to school in Arizona, thank all the Gods and Goddesses that be: California schools, even the lesser schools of southern California where my parents moved after three years in San Francisco, went so far as to teach basic literacy and basic expository writing. My SAT scores got me into a one-semester substitute for the advanced dumbbell English most students had to take, and that was a course in modern literature — it wasn’t a composition course at all. So it should be noted that there really was no comparison. With that in mind, let us consider:
Would I refuse to buy the textbook for a college course I was paying to take?
No, certainly not. In the first place textbook publishers did not gouge students upwards of $80 for what really are nothing more than $20 trade paperbacks. So buying a semester’s textbooks did not mean I’d have to skip paying the rent that month.
And in the second place, it never even occurred to me not to buy a required textbook — or even one of the optional texts. Of course you bought the text. What would be the point of taking the course at all if you didn’t buy the books?
I remember being absolutely shocked when a third-year student bragged, in the moments before a particularly boring history class convened, that he hadn’t bought the course textbook and that in fact he had never purchased a textbook for any class in his major, and he had a B+/A– average.
Tellingly, he was an education major.
Speaking of that history course…
Would I refuse to read a textbook that I’d bought?
That history course was taught by a dry, monotone professor who required a heavy, thick, equally dry and monotone textbook. It’s hard to make history boring, but this guy did it. That book was the most tedious piece of published anything I’ve ever read this side of a journal article in higher mathematics. It was almost unreadable.
I didn’t refuse to read it — I tried to read it. But if he’d sat me down and asked me what I’d read, he’d probably have concluded the answer was “nothing.”
These comp textbooks are similarly boring and tendentious. They’re excruciating to read, and I know the subject matter. No. I live the subject matter. And I find them perfectly awful.
I would not have read it because, at the age of 17, when I entered college, I knew all this stuff. I had been writing sourced (i.e., cited and documented) expository papers since the seventh grade. By the time I left high school, a textbook like the ones we require for today’s freshman comp courses would have nothing to offer me. I certainly could have passed a 2015 freshman comp course without ever looking at the text.
Being the little doobie that I was, I probably would have looked at assigned readings. But I wouldn’t have studied them carefully, because I would have considered it a waste of time.
However…it must be remembered that for today’s students, the material is not a waste of time. Many, many high-school graduates entering your comp courses will tell you that they have never written any researched paper in all the 13 years they spent in Arizona’s K-12 schools! Some will tell you they’ve never written a piece of exposition at all. Any piece of exposition, like “what I did on my summer vacation.” They do not know how to find research sources. They do not know how to distinguish, in terms of credibility, between something they read on Faux News and something on the same subject that emanated from the New England Journal of Medicine. They cannot recognize when they’re indulging in a fallacy. Some of them don’t know what the word “fallacy” means. As many as a quarter of them do not write in coherent paragraphs — they can’t organize their thinking in rational blocks of copy. About a third to a half habitually write in fragments and fused sentences.
Although the average American high-school kid did not score in the 99th percentile on the SAT’s verbal section, nevertheless a good 80 percent of them were capable of writing a coherent paper without a lot of basic grammar and logical thinking errors.
So: not a fair comparison. Quite.
Would I turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or, in my day, from a magazine or book)?
No. I was too scared to pull a stunt like that. Nor did I need to: I knew how to find information and how to synthesize it from several sources into a single coherent argument. I left high school knowing how to do that — it was as natural as breathing.
Over the decades, a sea change in attitudes toward honesty has taken place. People in general — including young people — have discovered that it’s very easy to get away with things. Keep a straight face and no one is likely to question you, first because most people are too busy to be bothered and second because few instructors want to go through the hassle of flunking you out of their course for plagiarizing.
That’s a function, I think, of the number of bureaucratic rules that now afflict us all. We have restraints and demands coming at us from all directions. And one of the things people have figured out is that nothing much happens if you quietly neglect to obey. Or that the chances that you’ll be caught out and hassled are relatively low.
I knew a young woman who indulged in a fair amount of insurance fraud. She’d become expert in navigating insurance claims and would even offer to help her friends maximize collections. A couple of times, her scams were pretty damned transparent. But you know what happened? Nothing. She collected. She got not one but two houses completely rebuilt (questionable whether the fire that burned down the second house was actually a fraud or a genuine attempt on the part of her psychotic husband to murder her — probably the latter, IMHO, but that was never proven). Neither of these people — the crooked wife or the equally unethical demented husband — have ever had to account for their scams in any meaningful way.
Young people aren’t fools. Students can see this stuff going on. And when they attempt their own small frauds, they learn the same thing: getting caught is a very, very long shot.
If I’d been functioning in this environment, who knows what I would have done? It’s a different social ethic altogether.
Would I beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because I had a full-time job and was taking 18 credits?
Never would’ve entered my mind. You did not challenge your teachers. Or your parents. Or a cop. Or a principal. Or the IRS dude. Or anyone else.
The kid who asked to turn in a major paper three days late did so not once but twice — she actually came back after I said “no” and tried to change my mind.
But once again one has to ask: is there really a comparison here?
Except for reading texts to a blind student once or twice a week, I didn’t hold a job during the entire four years of my undergraduate training. People didn’t. No one expected kids to go to school full-time and also go to work. For a student, your job was to study. That’s what you did. You didn’t go out and sell furniture or wait tables. The very idea would have been frowned upon.
And sign up for 18 credits? Are you kidding? Sixteen units was considered a heavy load. I doubt if the university would have allowed me to take 18 credit hours in a single semester. I would have had to get some kind of special permission to pull it off, and you can bet that if an adviser had a clue that I was working on the side, no such permission would have been forthcoming.
Tuition at public universities was almost free. Families did not have to damn near bankrupt themselves to send a kid to college, and students were not saddled with a lifetime of debt to get a degree that is now considered indispensable for white-collar employment.
Blue-collar jobs that would support a family existed in those days, so a college degree wasn’t regarded as non-negotiable for entrée to the middle class. For that matter, the middle class still existed, too…
So again, there’s really no comparison. College kids were not subjected to unreasonable demands or exploited mercilessly. They didn’t have to work as wage slaves while they were trying to take classes, and so they didn’t have to beg dispensation to turn in assignments late. And instructors were full-time faculty on the tenure track, not wretched part-timers juggling two, three, or four mini-gigs to put food on the table. So they could afford to fit an occasional late paper into their workload.
Would I need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?
Sure. We used footnotes back in the Dark Ages.
But the principle driving the practice was the same. And I’d been using footnotes since the seventh grade. No one needed to take my little hand and sit me down and explain to me what sources to cite, when, where, or why. Today’s poor little things haven’t a clue.
How’z about you? Would you refuse to buy the textbook for a college course you were paying to take? If you did buy it, would you refuse to read it? Would you turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or from a magazine or book)? Would you beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because you had a full-time job and were taking 18 credits? Would you need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?
WonderAccountant has a term for the High Drama friends and family like to inflict on us (and everyone around us): NMP! That’s short for Not My Problem! You know whereof I speak, I’m sure: we all have a variety of Drama Kings and Queens in our lives. “NMP” is a handy device for disconnecting from that noise.
Well, I’ve been in high NMP mode all day, trying to throw off the traces of not one but two Other People’s Problems.
First off, the college (or maybe the district) has an annual thrash-around in which they try to do “Assessment”: a perennially fruitless effort to quantify (digitally!) all the ephemeral qualities of teaching and learning that really can’t be quantified, so they can report this to the community college board and anyone else who decides to make it their business. A couple years ago, they devised a vast (I do not overstate here) online assessment survey and asked everyone to fill it in.
It’s a gigantic pain in the ass, and we are not paid to do it. What we have to do is navigate through several layers of websites, signing in with username and passwords here, there, and everywhere, and then pull up rosters of our classes and go through EVERY STUDENT’S PERFORMANCE filling in numerals representing how they’re performing on 87 gerjillion rubrics.
This is very time-consuming. Free, unpaid overtime-consuming.
And of course it means nothing, because to do it right, you would have to pull up all the papers the students have written and examine each one to figure out how it aligns with the rubrics. I have been specifically told not to grade student papers by the district’s rubrics because they are, in a word, inadequate. So that means the rubrics are only incidentally relevant to your own evaluation of your students’ work. So…you end up looking at their current grades and then just guessing at how they’re doing vis-à-vis the district rubrics. And that of course converts the whole exercise into a gigantic waste of time.
If it weren’t already that at the outset.
Well, a day or so ago the chair sends out his call to us to please get to this, attaching two .doc files full of instructions. I groaned when I saw that hit the in-box. It’s not like I have nothing to do here… And if the true assessments I promulgate — the students’ grades — mean nothing, why the hell are you asking me to read and grade their papers and assign them semester grades at all???
Having put it off as long as I could, this morning I re-opened his email and got into the two files. I’m sitting there studying them and I think…hm. Y’know, there’s nothing in any of the stuff that says we have to spend a couple of unpaid hours on this sh!t. There’s a lot of “thank you for participating,” but no “do-it-or-you-die” messages.
On reflection, I conclude that the whole clown’s dance is probably optional. And that makes it NMP.
Not.
My.
Problem.
Other People’s Problem #1: out the door.
So now I figured I would move on to my truly huge Other People’s Problems Evasion Project. To wit:
All of my comp courses are now online. This effectively turns our college courses into latter-day correspondence courses. And among the several large headaches associated therewith is the fact that most students don’t have the self-discipline to do the work on time, and about two-thirds of community college students are unable to read and comprehend well enough to understand more than about 10 percent of what a college course demands.
In the face-to-face classroom, you assign readings in the textbook or elsewhere, with the understanding that very few of them will read a word of it. You then remedy that by regurgitating the high points of the assigned readings as so-called “lectures.” Or you give them in-class exercises that force them to pull the textbook out of their backpacks and at least rest their eyeballs on its pages. You can’t do that in the online environment unless you want to spend untold hours recording YouTube videos of yourself rehashing the readings, which I and most of my honored colleagues are not gonna do.
You can’t read? You won’t read? That’s NMP.
They need to read about a dozen of the book’s chapters to learn how to do a research-based position paper (many of them have never written a piece of exposition, to say nothing of a researched expository essay…and “position paper”? What’s that????).
So, to try to get them to learn something , I’ve been assigning “Reading Reviews,” which ask them a) to synopsize a chapter (try to explain what that word means to people who don’t know how to summarize to start with…) and then b) to apply its principles to one of the essays the textbook compiler attaches to the end of each chapter.
In some cases this works. In others…heh! One guy looks at each chapter title, guesses what’s in the content, and writes a “summary” of what he imagines the chapter is about. Others may venture a little further into the text, but not much.
To get them through this material in time to apply it to the District’s three required writing assignments (one of which is 2,500 words long…), I have to front-load the course with it. That means that in the first month or two, a great flurry of the time-wasting Reading Reviews come in. One week three of them hit the server by midnight Friday.
Well. We have two sections to deal with here, each of which hosts 22 students.
22 x 3 papers x 2 sections = 132 effing papers!!!!!
Meanwhile, strangely enough, some of us have other things to do. Paying things to do. A hundred and thirty-two busywork papers was way, way too much low-paid labor to take on, especially with clients lined up at the door mewling for help.
Because these Reading Reviews exist to address the students’ Problem — they can’t read because they don’t read and they don’t read because they can’t read — what the RRs do is turn the Students’ Problem into My Problem.
And the fact that they can’t read? NMP!
So. I decided we should replace the Reading Reviews with machine-graded true/false-multiple-guess quizzes whose purpose is to highlight the important parts of the chapters. Although they’ll be scored the same number of points as the Reading Reviews, their real function is not to assess but to direct classmates’ attention to the details they should know about and think about. In the past, I’ve found this to be a surprisingly effective strategy. And we will never have to plod through another pile of bullshit again.
The problem is, though, that writing a dozen TF/M-G quizzes and converting them into digital format for a CMS is a BIG job. Coming up with questions that will work takes a good two hours. And then…o god. I actually timed the last upload: with me working as fast as I could (which is now very fast — practice makes perfect…), it took almost 45 minutes to get the crap online.
You can’t just click a button and upload. Nooooo…. You have to copy each and every line, one by one, out of Wyrd into Canvas. Then click to file the entire instrument to disk. Then proofread it.
Can you not just write it in Canvas? Yeah, you can do that: at your peril. I’d rather spend the extra time to write it in Word and then paste it into Canvas’s “quiz” function than take a chance on losing data in some new digital fu!k-up. It’s only an extra 40 minutes, which is a lot less than it would cost you if you had to rewrite the entire damn thing from scratch.
So anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing this week: approximately three hours per quiz, eleven quizzes. That’s 33 hours required to turn the student’s problem into NMP.
You recognize the allusion, of course. Hint: Mark Harris.
The question of the day, to be more specific, is why WAS I in the English Department? What on earth would possess any sane human being with a sliver of a normal sense of self-preservation to get a FREAKING Ph.D IN ENGLISH???????? What part of “you will never be able to get a decent job that will not leave you tearing your hair” can such a person fail to understand?
Today I engaged eleven years of advanced university education for EIGHT HOURS, trying to untangle the formatting mess left by yet another MS Wyrd crash and then doing things like searching “[any digit] + blank space + a” trying to find every reference to a time of day in 272 single-spaced pages so as to regularize format for each one, roughly according to Chicago style. With curlicues to make allowances for the author.
[Why would I do such a wacko thing? Because AU has written times of day as N a.m., N am, N AM, N:nn a.m., N:nn am, and NN AM. And so on. These all need to be regularized, made to follow the same style.]
So, here’s how this came down:
Last night around 11 p.m., I stumble away from the computer.
This morning around 8:30, I come back to the project. When I turn on the computer, I find a message: Word had to shut down.
Again?!?
This is a constant thing with MS Wyrd: for no good reason that anyone, human or silicon, can figure out, Word will crash. Out of the effing blue.
But this is something new, or so it seems: the program has gone down after I clicked Open-Apple > Sleep.
Fortunately, only three files were open at the time of the crash, one of them very short. Two are easy to restore.
Then we have 272 pages of client disquisition.
He is an articulate client who pays handsomely. And on time. An interesting man. The sort of client for whom one pines to do well.
The restored back-up file comes up and seems not to have lost much data (shouldn’t have: I saved before putting the computer to sleep).
No. It hasn’t lost data. Au contraire. It’s ADDED data.
Every. single. paragraph has been reformatted: “Not superscript/subscript,” proudly advertised in Word Track Changes.
Huh?
Not a single footnote number was ever changed (on my part) from superscript to anything else. And nary a subscript character appears among a single word filling those 272 pages.
These changes are all intertwined with hundreds of edits — I’ve already read 100 pages, and every page has changes on it: at least a few and usually quite a few.
The only way to get rid of the phantom changes is to click “Accept.” If you reject the change, then it converts the copy to superscript!
There seems to be no way to search “superscript” or “superscript/subscript.” The list of edits doesn’t come up.
And — inconsistently, with no rhyme nor reason — in some paragraphs if I highlight the graf and click “accept all,” Wyrd keeps the tracked edits in place. But in some, it accepts all edits. That won’t do, because Client needs to see the changes I’ve made.
On average, each page has about ten of these “Not superscript/subscript” commands.
No joke: that means something like TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY spurious tracked changes to delete!
Some beach!
Shortly I figure out that I can go from the end of the file toward the last edited page and click “accept all” over batches of paragraphs. This isn’t very satisfactory, because I’ve done a number of global searches and replaces, and I really don’t want to lose those. So even though some of these “accept” commands work to get rid of the “not superscript/subscript” things, I have to watch carefully and Ctrl-Z to undo and manually fix each erroneously accepted “not superscript/subscript” command, ONE at a painstaking, mind-numbing, hair-tearing TIME.
This only partly lengthy procedure leaves about 100 fully edited pages to go through, ONE painstaking, mind-numbing, hair-tearing, goddamn infuriating command at a TIME.
Along about three in the afternoon, I find myself revisiting the question of whether I should shut down the editorial business.
I mean, why am I doing this?
If I wanted to be a typist, I’d hire out as a virtual assistant. Oh, hell. If I hired out as a virtual assistant, I’d make a helluva lot more than I earn as a high-test editor, because there’s one helluva lot more demand for virtual assistants. Some woman at the last meeting of the West Valley Writers group I attended dasted to ask me if I’d type her manuscript.
{sigh}
If I charged enough by the page, I’d make almost as much as I make editing content.
I can’t charge the client for work created because my computer crashed. So today I’ve spent a good six hours working for free.
Do I hate reading freshman comp drivel more than this?
I hate reading freshman comp drivel a lot.
Quite a lot.
But more than this?
Possibly not.
If I took on two extra adjunct courses from the Great Desert University, which pays a Ph.D. almost a grand more than the junior colleges do, I’d earn as much per year as the S-corp earns from my editorial efforts. Actually, all told I’d earn about $3,000 more than that.
It would be miserable, of course. I’d have to hold out for face-to-face sections, which I truly loathe. GDU has lifted all caps from online sections, meaning you can end up with 120 students or more in a writing-intensive course. How on earth would you ever handle any such thing? You couldn’t assess papers. You couldn’t even make the faintest pass at trying to teach. All you could do is rubber-stamp.
Ethically, there’s a limit.
But maybe there’s a limit to this other stuff, too.
Teaching, as miserably paid as it is, provides the only steady, predictable income I have other than Social Security, which is nowhere near enough to live on. The junior-college courses plus the Social Security just about cover most of my expenses, except for property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance. If I drew down only enough to cover those latter gouges, I’d be OK. One or two more courses, paid at university rates, could mean that I wouldn’t have to use retirement savings at all. Not as long as I could mount a course on a CMS.
