Wednesday, September 28, 2005

for giving feedback

Last week in 5931 we touched on phrases to use in giving feedback to student work. So I've pasted in below phrases that have worked well for me in the past for shaping a response. [Notice that some of them depend on having asked students to write reflectively about the work they are turning in, so that I can respond to questions or concerns they've raised.]

Please add your favorite and most useful phrases in the comments -- then we'll all have a good base of comments to draw on. Thanks!

  • "Your work shows me that you listen carefully to what we discuss in class and to the readings, and that you really do think about how to apply those discussions; if you want to deepen those applications, you might try…"
  • "If you want to strengthen the work you are doing in this class, what I’m seeing is that you could stand to stretch your thinking so that you have more, and more detailed, ideas top work with. Your writings tend to be pretty short: it looks like you put down your first ideas and responses, and let it go at that. If you can get into the habit of pushing on your ideas in your writing this will not only help your writing improve, but will help you develop your ideas in your writing. To do this, try asking more questions about what you have read in class (we talked in class about how to ask questions); don’t stop writing until you are satisfied you understand an idea completely…"
  • "It is clear to me that you think well about this work, as your class comments show. Now push yourself—by giving your work the time it deserves—to develop your ideas. There’s solid potential here…"
  • "Your desire to do this work well and in interesting manners shows through in all you have turned in. Based on all that I see, I have two recommendations for how you can continue to strengthen your work over the semester…"
  • "I want to encourage you to attend to the various levels of the rhetorical more in what you do."
  • "Your writing really could benefit well from a re-read to make sure your sentences will make sense to others…"
  • "Your arguments would be more compelling with more concrete examples and even more facts and figures, I think -- and as you've suggested in your own thoughts about this."
  • "You have a strong and wonderful opening… but I start running into trouble, though, after the third paragraph."
  • "All the comments and questions you wrote about your paper on Tuesday during class make good sense: Yes, you do need to check your spelling and grammar because right now their oddities do too often make it hard for me to get easily to your meaning. Yes, you do also need to add all your citations. Yes, you do need to work on the introduction and conclusion and the order of all your facts and examples. Right now the facts and examples are arranged simply to accumulate, which means they don't have any particular order -- which also means that it is therefore hard as I read to understand why one paragraph follows another… That might sound like a daunting list, but it's really that you've gotten to the fun part of arrangement of writing (well, from my perspective, anyway, given that I like to write)."
  • "What you have so far is quite nice. Be sure that before you turn in your final draft you get someone else to proofread for you -- but otherwise you are developing an okay argument here with your direct and conversational tone of voice and clear signalling of transitions from paragraph to paragraph."
  • "What you turned in as your first draft is generally fine so far. There's not tons I can say in response, until you have more, but the ordering seems to make sense, and I like how you are using a narrative structure to build the argument because it adds an appropriate level of emotional connection for your readers."
  • "Hmmm... given the required length of the final version of this paper, you've got a problem, hey? What are you going to do to fill the pages you need to fill?"
  • [at the end of the feedback]: "Let me know if you have any questions on any of this, or want to talk about any of it."
  • "You've got a passionately written draft in which you accumulate a considerable weight of information. The passion can result in a compelling ethos, because your audience will pick up on your passion -- but it also means you need to be very careful: passion can sometimes make the writing seem biased, perhaps making judgments that are a bit too strong. If you are going to keep the same tone of voice as you revise, be careful with your word choice, in order to keep the passion from seeming biased and hastily judgmental."
  • "Come talk so we figure out how to build a stronger structure -- and overall argument -- out of all you have so far."
  • "Your thoughtful and conversational tone of voice is a real strength in your essay. Here's how I think you can strengthen the writing still more.."
    [when you are really at a loss of what to say:] "Please come talk. I think my responses might make more sense in discussion than in written comments." [Then ask the student what s/he thinks really needs to happen in the writing, and build on that.]
  • "After I read your draft, I'm left mostly with questions. I know that you know what you are talking about, but here's some questions you might need to address in order to help your audience understand…"
  • "You also need to think about the order of your arguments, in terms of your audience and purpose. What you've written in your design plan lays out possible arguments, but without yet considering why different orderings of your points might be more or less effective with the different possible audiences you can address."
  • "Before I comment on your design plan, I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your presence in class. Your dry sense of humor always makes me laugh, and you give thoughtful responses to others. It would be nice if you were happier in speaking in the large group; you might think on this as something to work toward in the future, because you have so much to bring. Meanwhile…" [this is followed by specific comments]
  • "Your design plan looks good to me. You've described your various audiences very well, and you've done your research, which is crucial, so that you know the reasons given by those who oppose [your position], and can bring up statistics and observations by credible sources to counter their claims. Here are the questions raised for me by what you have so far:"
  • "Let me push you a bit on your argument..."
  • "You've found some very good sources to use. I'm not worried in any way about the base of facts and figures you have to draw on, and I'm not worried about your ability to discuss the general policy decisions of the US toward global warming, such as the Kyoto protocols. Given that you've got those sorts of issues under control, what I'd like you next to focus on are some of the issues Chris raised in his feedback to your statement of purpose."
  • "You need nothing from me at this point except encouragement. Your design plan is smart, detailed, and thoughtful. What I particularly mark in it is your sensitivity -- as a writer and thinker -- to positions your audience members might hold (*their* sensitivity about their religious beliefs, *their* sensitivity to any suggestion in your writing that all Christians might be deemed immoral), which helps you think of the kind of careful path you are going to have to thread as you compare the morality of Christians with that of atheists."

Reel it in and shut your mouth, Or, culture inserts itself

It is, yes, the modern condition to start up the car and have the CD player start up at the same time and to hear the music as the soundtrack to the day that is also starting?

FADE IN:
INT. SOME CAR
ANNE drives through a drizzly grey late September morning in the north woods through the ever-light traffic (logging trucks and minivans) onto and across the bridge, scaring the cars coming down the hill, merges into the small town labyrinth climbing the hill on the other side, past the Houghton County Transit authority bus whose drive never looks before merging, across Montezuma Street behind an older couple in a white Cadillac with Kansas plates who do not know the traffic patterns and who stop where the road splits. Around them, down the hill onto College Avenue, where the cars stop abruptly because a truck is parked half in the road. A bicyclist weaves through the stopped cars. A little girl follows her bouncing ball into the street. The couple in the car in front starts kissing. The woman driving behind is putting on her makeup and tailgating. The SnoGo is clearing the banks from roadside, dumping all the snow into a truck next to it, blowing its snow into the air, creating a white out. An ambulance comes from the other direction.

Is the morning foreshadowed by such a drive that much different if it's Patti Smith rather than Jill Scott playing above it all?

Saturday, September 24, 2005

The morning might be lonely, but there are some compensations.

With Dennis gone, my breakfast this morning was fresh figs, chocolate, and orange juice.

If someone were to ask for an ostensive definition of "wishful decadence" or "distracted sloth," point them here. I'm just trying to be useful.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Luddites can cheerfully change. They learn well through repetition.

I got Dennis (and, well, me) a cell phone plan and cheap but cute (and free) little phones so we could talk more easily during the 10 days he is away and then while I have a fair spot of travel after that.

While on his way to Chapel Hill, he had a five hour layover in the Minneapolis airport. I am happy to report that he 1) has figured out how to do voice messaging on his cell phone, 2) has figured out how to make his phone vibrate instead of ring, 3) felt at home on the plane by speaking on his phone along with everyone else describing the row by which he was waiting for the person ahead to put the suitcase into the overhead rack, and 4) gotten to Eva and Barbara's house in the Carol Woods retirement community. I know this because he called me after (or during) each event.

We have now spoken 6 times today on the little phones, and will probably speak several more. Our conversations are generally but not always substantive.

Eva is doing well. She still has a tube for breathing, and so cannot talk, but is responsive and recognizing people.

The hairy woodpecker now on the feeder (of whom the chickadees are very respectful) does not recognize me. He does not recognize me either as Anne or as a threat that should cause him to leave the dried fruit and nuts in the feeder.

the birth of empathy is rarely abstract

An evacuee from Houston, speaking to someone from the New York Times:


Rosa Castro, nearly out of fuel, walked to the front of the long line with a five-gallon plastic gas can, but officers said she'd have to be in her car, with her sister behind the wheel and their seven children in tow. They left Pasadena at 4 a.m., and stopped 17 hours later to spend the night in a Baptist church.

"It's been terrible, believe me," she said, wearing shorts, a T-shirt and house shoes. "We started with a full tank of gas and lots of water for the kids, but it was such a mess. I wondered why so many people in Katrina didn't move in time, and now I'm in the same situation. All I have is cash, clothes, and God."

Orion was up

at 6 this morning when I drove Dennis up to the airport, so it is closing on to fall.

On my drive back, there was a dead skunk in the middle of the highway coming down from Calumet. I had the windows open (which I hadn't on the way up) and the skunk's pungency kicked me a little bit out of my airport sadness. Dennis has flown off to North Carolina for a week to help take care of his aunt, who just underwent surgery for cancer of the esophagus. Her recovery is going a bit slowly. She is Dennis's only aunt, and they are very close.

I will miss him, but he also flew off with the Kubrick boxed set, so he'll have some salutary distractions. I have the cat.

Monday, September 19, 2005

reason 75 why I like living here

Up to the Co-op this evening for dinner components, beer, dried organic cherries, fennel toothpaste -- the usual -- and on my way to the register I try to remember our number (which davina re-activated for us this summer) and my brain does its occasional dyslexia-but-with-numbers bit: 1461? 1641? 1612? 1261? The patient woman at the register tries the first couple, asking me after each one -- as a name appears on the register after she enters the number -- if I am the name that appears. I keep saying no. Eventually she asks my name. I spell it out so she can enter it into the register and get the number, and she says, "Oh, I think my brother was in some of your classes." She's Dan Martin's sister Holly, and we get to talk about how much we like him and how well he is doing in Chicago (still living with Matt Hart) -- and he is coming up for Annie B's wedding the weekend after next. Annie B's wedding is going to be a reunion of some of the coolest people who ever worked in the CCLI. I came home and ate my ginger carrot soup happily in anticipation. I will get to be the old teacher who embarrasses herself on the dance floor, but the reception is up at the South Range Eagles Club where the rambunctiousness usually overwhelms all embarrassment. (Annie B is the one who figured out that the phone number for the CCLI is 487-CLUB. The place was like a club when she was around. The disco ball now stored in the lounge is testament)

Sunday, September 18, 2005

some Sundays

...it is the most revivifying activity possible, to watch Nicollette Sheridan recover from a stroke with the help of Doris Roberts speaking with a Polish accent.

Friday, September 16, 2005

today

I was reminded how human, oh so human, I am, in oh so many ways. There were the sweet moments -- talking with Teal about her Masters thesis, which will be eye-blinding sharp when it is done, talking with Alex about horrible events but talking with Alex, the cat dropping a mouse at Dennis's side of the bed this morning -- but then there was responding to the whole list when I meant only to respond to one. Perhaps this (top left) is the way I can over up the big L tattoo now on my forehead.

to add to the discussion of geekiness....

Of course, we cannot ask the people in our classes to show us whether or not they are so marked, but it would certainly shift how one was feeling up there in front of the class if the whole time one was wondering which of the sitting people had gotten these tattoos last Friday down at the Edge.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

talking about a homework...

it sounds like a whisper.

Our discussions in 5931 and various of the linked blog entries here have gotten me thinking about what to do when people in class aren't doing their homework.

I think about *why* students don't do their homework, and I come up with the same reasons why I am sometimes under- or unprepared for various tasks. If I am crunched for time, if I see no good reason for doing work, if I'm not interested, if I'm resisting giving in to a situation I resent . . . then I don't (or don't happily) do the work. And often these reasons feed on each other: if I'm really interested in something, I will somehow find time (by giving up sleep or TV or . . .) to do that something, but if I'm not interested, the time just won't be there. Because of my own, er, issues in this area, I have a hard time demanding other people to live up to standards that I myself can't always keep. So: what are my responsibilities as a teacher to "make" the work of class interesting or relevant to students, and what are students' responsibilities (to put this in words that reflect my least patient moments) simply to do the damn work without me having to babysit them?

In addition to all the above about why I -- and students -- sometimes aren't prepared, though, most students (here at Tech) do not yet connect what happens here in classes with life outside campus. Classes don't connect much to each other, either. And the environment on this campus often doesn't much ask students to value what it is we think is important in Humanities classes.

And if I fully follow out the implications of what I've written above, I'd never give homework and never expect anything of students and I'd be swimming right now since it is such a gloriously beautiful day. But, well, obviously not.

So I am thinking more about how to create motivations for shaping the homework as worth doing. And there seems an easy division to make in categorizing approaches:

stick approaches
When I send students home to read an essay, I can tell them there will be a short quiz (counted toward the final grade) at the beginning of class about the essay, or that we will start class by going around the room and requiring everyone to give a one sentence summary of the reading. On the day a reading is assigned, I can give each person a different question about the reading, and ask each to write a short response to the question, to turn in; in class the day of discussing the reading, students would start by comparing their responses -- small groups could compile their responses to different questions into a unified summary of the reading or of its main points or of . . . I can ask them each to bring a question about the reading to class, so that they quiz each other on the reading.

carrot approaches
What about the reading should matter to students? Why should they care? The day of assigning a reading, I can explain why I think the reading matters to the goals of the course or to life at large, but, most importantly, to their lives. I can ask them to come up with any experiences they've had with the topic of the reading, and to discuss (or write for a few minutes about) how the topic matters to them -- and ask them to come up with one question about the topic, tied to their own lives and experiences; as they read the essay, they should look for answers to their questions, and write up a short piece on how the essay did -- or did not -- suggest a response. I can ask them to come up with reasons why an essay on X topic should matter to class, and then to read to see if the reading does matter -- and to suggest other readings they think might better address the topic.

so . . .
My division of approaches into carrot and stick implies a value judgment, and it is one I hold. The stick approaches bring an external motivation to doing homework: students are told to do the work because we think it matters and because it shapes their grade. The carrot approaches attempt to build internal motivation, by asking students to make connections between the work and their lives. The carrot approaches are, yes, a bit utopian in their hopes; realistically, I know that it is hard to develop real motivations with people taking 5 or more classes and working 2 jobs and more interested in engineering than academic communication. But, well . . . I wouldn't be teaching if I weren't generally optimistic about people caring about creative and just communication -- and if I didn't also try to mix classroom realities with the optimism.

Monday, September 12, 2005

one would laugh...

if the approach laid out in this very funny piece weren't actually being bruited about: Political party takes heat for lackluster response to disaster.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

what I try to finish today

8000 words (which includes bibliography) to cover the "Interaction of text and graphics, multimedia, and Electronic Forms of Writing." This is nowhere near enough words. I wish it were possible to write it in the amount of space all the requested topics need -- and then to be able to compress it like those "just add water" sponges.

Gak.

What was I thinking when I accepted this one? Why didn't I suggest that this really needed to be two chapters?

Wednesday, September 7, 2005

I think one possible answer...

to Karen's and Roxane's concerns about the particular students they describe can be found by taking the Geek Test. A reasonable number of students on this campus would score well here. Or check out The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test. I make no claims that these offer complete explanation -- only a glimmer.

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

I need to be careful...

This semester I am teaching an undergraduate class I have taught every year (and occasionally twice a year) for at least 12 years. It is a class I enjoy teaching a lot because it is a creative and intellectually engaging class, where the people in class make cool stuff and learn a rhetorical approach to visual arrangement to boot. As I teach it now, the class is hugely different from when I started, and every year I make some modifications, and every 3 years roughly I am careful to rethink it and make large changes in order to avoid me becoming robot-teacher.

I have to admit, though, that I have taught the course enough that some aspects of it -- getting people to move around the room a lot, having them do lots of small group critique, doing whole group critiques of all the work, getting them all engaged and happily diving hard into the work, helping them see the cultural ramifications of what seem can seem like very simply and unremarkable design decisions -- are like floating on my back out in the lake. And the class this semester -- after 3 meetings -- is clicking along well enough, with a relaxed atmosphere, the work progressing as it should, and everyone talking, including the one woman who in her syllabus response particularly remarked that she didn't like speaking in class: today she said something very smart, and she said it very confidently.

But I have to watch myself. The class dynamics this semester are very different from last year, where there were a few people who set a very cheerful, focused, and hard-working tone from early on. (These were also the people who would say out loud in class how much they liked the class, and how well they thought the class was organized, and so on. It was spontaneous, and would have me sailing out smiling at the end of class -- which is worth bringing up, maybe, in terms of how an audience can very much affect what a teacher or speaker does... but that's a digression.)

People in class last year were very friendly to each other, and there was a high level of trust and risk-taking with assignments. This time around there is some combination of personalities and my this-semester demeanor that isn't yet clicking. Today, when we put all their work out on the floor to critique it and moved some pieces to the end that was designated as "very boring," one or two people were quietly but visibly upset. I thought I had prepared them all well for such things to happen, by doing what had worked very well in the past: I had talked several times about how hard it is to get feedback that your work isn't cutting it, but that getting such feedback is what helps you figure out how to make your work better. I checked in with the visibly upset people afterwards, and reassured them that this wasn't a sign of 'bad' work but rather of the beginning of the process for figuring out how to make the work better.

Maybe this is all just impatience on my part: it was only day 3 today, and I am remembering last year's class as a whole. But this tells me that I do have to be more careful with this group to set them up to be able to hear and respond to feedback that (sometimes) is not about how wonderful their work is but is rather about how their work could be very much stronger. I'm going to have to work harder with this group to get the trust built more firmly -- between me and them, amongst them -- and to help them understand how sometimes it is the NOT "all is wonderful" feedback that is the most useful.

But I am also going to have to be careful, it is clear, to hear and see this class as this class, as this particular mix of people.

Monday, September 5, 2005

Monday night

Yesterday's Meet the Press transcript is only one transient bit in the construction of the collective memory of Katrina, as is the transcript for Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer (who stands loudly and well at the end), but I hope they last, along with Bérubé's Bassomatic-equivalent. I hope that the estate-tax vote and the SCOTUS discussions are delayed until there is appropriate time for careful consideration following what has happened -- and that those half-mast flags are also meant for the Gulf Coast dead.

Sunday, September 4, 2005

different water

Dennis suggested kayaking but I had been watching out the window all afternoon while working on a long long embarrassingly long overdue book chapter and said, "But there are white caps..." and he said, "Not on the bay." Which was true.

So we went.

There were white caps out on the big lake, and long breaking waves out toward Rabbit Island. Little waves were breaking on our beach and farther down toward the Lutheran camp where the water gets shallow suddenly. But we were able to push off easily, and once we were out the big swells coming in behind us rocked us down the bay toward the slough. Closer toward the slough, however, where the bay is more open to the water coming in from the big lake and the wave action is focused by the shape of the beach, the water got choppy. Given the time of evening, the water looked like a big Vija Celmins drawing, exactly.

When we come back from kayaking the water in our little corner of the bay always feels warm and once we have the boats up we just walk ourselves right back out into the bay and languidly breaststroke our way farther out where we can float on our backs in the rocking water to look up at the big sky and the settling evening.

Falling asleep much later, in bed, I was still rocking on that mix of swell and wind and big water evening.

As Laurence has written, I am aware of our luck and am happy to be so aware. Thank you.

Saturday, September 3, 2005

soothing...

for a (selfish) little while.
We drove out to the lake this afternoon and went for a long walk along the sandy edges. It was warm and there was a cloudbank on the western horizon: dark clouds high up and lighter clouds -- with bright bright sun edges -- down lower, long thin strands sitting just above the trees across the bay and the light streaming through around them. We walked and remarked on all the animal prints, the gulls and ducks and deer and occasional raccoon, all of their little feet everywhere in the sand at the water's edge. The slough was quiet, the water low at the end of summer, all the trees and bushes starting to yellow a bit as summer ends.

On Wednesday someone new to our department took his class outside, a first year class on environmental issues. They were sitting under one of the big old oaks outside our building and heard two crows being raucous. They looked up to see the crows attack and kill a chipmunk -- which dropped into the middle of their class circle, dead, its eye pecked out and bleeding. The crows kept yelling at the class until they left. Welcome to Schopenhauer.

Nature is a Mother, all right, but right now, as I look out my window at the lake, she's a calming one. The water is smooth and glassy and the sun is setting with just a few trails of cloud on the horizon. We are lucky -- and happy -- to live where there are not many other people (except the obnoxious neighbor with the "I am afraid of foxes" Los Angeles-size lights on her house that shine up everyone else in this bit of rurality) and where there is a big lake that is slow to rouse and so most often the visual equivalent of calm and soothing. I will very happily live with that characterization of calm and soothing tonight, selfishly, as I pull away from reading about the continuing sadness in the south and look out to the 15 or so mergansers dipping and shaking in the water off our little point.

I will fall asleep tonight wondering if there is anything young Mr. Jabbar Gibson needs that I can possibly send or provide.

more but other complaints

We watched Girl with a Pearl Earring last night, after coming home from Molly and Erik's party.

Afterwards I couldn't fall asleep because I kept trying to make an ending to the movie. Afterwards I couldn't fall asleep because it was just like having finished reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles back in high school. It's like reading this or this or this. I could keep adding, but what's the point? Plus ca change, plus ca we continue to be fucked. The movie that wouldn't let me sleep last night is just one more addition to the Sisyphean pile of representations of women and realities of women's lives that depict women as powerless or jealous or heartless. Powerless: Griet. Jealous: wife/mother and daughter. Heartless: mother-in-law.

One could say, I suppose, that my inability to sleep is a good sign, that the movie kept me awake because it, oh let's see, revealed how women have been treated for the sake of art and power and money. But that's not how the movie gets reviewed. The movie gets talked about as though it is a contemporary recreation of a Vermeer painting, and the reviews treat Scarlett Johansson in exactly the same way as her character in the movie is treated, as something lovely that will incite others and so bring power to those who control her representations. Johansson is described by one reviewer as a woman "who could ignite celluloid in a jiffy with that face"; another reviewer is in "thrall to [Johansson's] ripe, sensual beauty and emotional instincts". In its own creations of beauty and in its own partaking in the systems of how women are made to be seen and tasted, the movie doesn't undercut any of what it shows about how Griet must bend to others, must be represented by others. Scarlett has a better life than Griet, duh, but women are still making less, working more, and and and.

Nothing new, but it sure was a pretty movie, a sweet little intellectual exercise showing once more how when form and content are composed separately the content does not do what its makers might hope and the form does its insidious work shaping how and what we can see and think.

Friday, September 2, 2005

I am ashamed

Dear President Bush,

I am ashamed of your behavior in response to Hurricane Katrina, and I am ashamed for our country. It has taken you five days to take seriously the suffering and dehumanization of our most vulnerable, oldest, and poorest citizens. Members of your administration have belittled the powerless, as when FEMA Director Brown characterized the poor people left behind in New Orleans by an inadequate evacuation plan as those "who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to leave the city." While people were dying on the streets of New Orleans because they were without food, water, or shelter, you were still vacationing and members of your administration were shopping for expensive shoes in Manhattan and going to Broadway plays. The National Guard that could have been helping out is instead in Iraq. Every year you have been in office you have cut the funding that might have kept New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from being so harmed -- because the money went to the war in Iraq. FEMA has been re-shaped so that it is no longer capable of adequate or informed response.

I, like many others not in governmental-decision-making positions, have sent money to the Red Cross, not because you asked, but because it is the right thing to do. It would also be the right thing for you to understand that the behavior of you and your administration shows the world how little our government cares for the most vulnerable and how poorly we have prepared in this country for attacks or disasters of any kind.

You should be ashamed. As a citizen of a country that is treating its own in this way, I am.

Sincerely, me

===
Others have said all this better than I can. So my writing here is some sort of self-indulgent non-release of anger -- although I did send the above letter to its named recipient. I don't feel any better.