NAS Blog

My former student Joshua, now ambivalently quartered at UC Santa Cruz (home of the fightin’ Banana Slugs and currently under Federal investigation for systemic anti-Semitism), has an article in Literary Matters about cheating.  Not students cheating; students who feel cheated.  He’s found a couple of excellent literature classes (Cervantes) but most just use books as a vector for stone-cold political ideology.

When he was at Monterey Peninsula College, Josh was the midwife who helped deliver a great books program to a college that had been out to axe all its literature courses.  In my Intro. to Lit., class he heard me refer to Robert Hutchins’s metaphor for Western literature as a “Great Conversation,” and in Literary Matters he writes

“Within weeks other members of the class and I were meeting on our own time to discuss the Great Books. We read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. We read Sappho. We felt and spoke as if we had rediscovered some long-forgotten treasure abandoned by the generation before [my emphasis].”

Josh devoured a copy of Hutchins’s The Great Conversation that he found (where else?) in the college library discard pile.  He says, “. . . the students I came into contact with seemed to react as I had. We felt we’d missed out on something essential by not being exposed to these works earlier.”

An Iraq War veteran, Josh notes that he was

inspired by The Iliad.  I read the Robert Fagles trans­lation and understood, finally, that this poem was not only about the Trojan War, but also about humanity and warfare. It might have been any war. It might be every war.”

In a similar vein, my current student Lisa says that “Before last semester I had never even read a book entirely. I realized how much I really enjoy it. Reading has opened up a whole new world for me. I am glad I finally got introduced into this world . . . .”

That they both say “finally” speaks volumes about K-16 education today.  Thankfully, The Great Conversation lives on, and it’s encouraging that more and more students, such as Josh and Lisa, are growing tired of being excluded from the dialogue.

Brian Taylor for the Chronicle

As the academic job market worsens (was it ever good?), graduate students are angry, according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Don’t expect a protest march in the streets burning Ph.D. gowns, but the blinkered view of some tenured faculty about the job market must drive a grad student nuts.

I had a mentor who let me know I would have to walk on water, or at least not sink too much, to be considered for jobs. That was 1994 and half my applications (75 out of 150) were for community colleges. At the time, I considered that market second-class until I arrived at Southern Illinois University and found we had a Community College Teaching certificate. Together with a M.A. (or Ph.D.) many of our grads have gone on to satisfying careers as full-time community college instructors. Did they have to pay their dues (a year or two of adjuncting), yes, but so what?

This is a growth sector of the job market and I encourage grad students in all fields to consider it. It’s not just for Gen Ed instructors — one of my former grad students is teaching history and construction courses!

It’s tempting to curse the darkness but this is just one candle to light. If others have ideas for grad students in job-short fields, send them here.

For links on job advice for graduate students (with emphasis on history), see this post at my eHistory blog.

For the association representing schools with community college prep degrees in administration and teaching, click here.

According to Inside Higher Ed, classes at community colleges have been jam-packed this year:

Nearly a third of community college students were unable to enroll in one or more classes last semester because they were full, according to a new national survey.

I know my NAS colleague Glenn Ricketts, who teaches political science at Raritan Valley Community College, can attest to this, as his and other courses on his campus are bursting at the seams. As America strains toward President Obama’s goal of the U.S. having the highest proportion of college graduates by 2020, where will we put all the students?

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous sent me the following comment.

Your talk of the approach to literature is endemic in all subjects.  I know AP history teachers that are so lazy that they give nothing but multiple choice tests and never require a paper be written by their students.  I know English teachers that consider Danielle Steele to be true literary fiction.  Enter an English department, mention Martin Amis, his father Kingsley Amis, Olive Schreiner, W. Somerset Maugham and be prepared for blank stares.  Talk to a teacher of current events and mention Christopher Hitchens, Mickey Kaus, Jonah Goldberg, or in fact anyone who writes for the New Republic, National Review, Slate, Wall Street Journal, etc. and get the same blank stares.

The dumbing down is so endemic that in my “Inclusion Classes” (students with mild learning disabilities and traditionally low performers) I get more work out of students than most teachers with college prep classes.  Ed schools today do not seem to understand that you can challenge students, hold high standards and still make it fun or relevant.  When most teachers see the posters analyzing demographic data taken from the census bureau on the city I teach in, they initially think they were done by honors students.

Finally, let me some up the idiocy with one last story.  In order to obtain my “Professional License” in order to be allowed to keep teaching, I have to take a bunch of inane Graduate Ed School classes.  In order to pay for those classes, I have to take on a part time job.  The part time job I have to earn the money to take the classes I need to be allowed to continue teaching high school math?  An adjunct math instructor at a local community college.

In Community Collegeland, it’s transfer time as students nervously polish their apps and recs, teetering on the brink of the future.  My student, Youjin, was shocked at this line from her University of California Transfer Admission Guarantee, “As a transfer student, your goal should be to complete your degree and graduate within two years” [my emphasis].  Of all the goals a college student might have (structured study of important texts, discussions of different philosophies about what makes a good life, an enhanced sensitivity to music, art, and literature), U.C. thinks what she should feel is desperate to be done with it.  Yet Youjin demurs:

It is strange to find myself wanting to take just one class for a year (‘taking a year off’), considering how acceleration in education always has been the trend in my (not yet long) life . . . .  It seems only natural for a real student to desire the luxury of time to really think about a topic . . . .  If even educational institutions . . . follow the suit of acceleration as if students were online articles to skim through, and decide to take time away from students by rushing them, even fewer people will take time to do outside reading, spend hours creating a perception of one’s [own] painting, and will cease to ponder.”

Ponder?  No time!  No metric!  No chance with today’s accelerating, hyperlinked, clickerfied, competency-shortened, pragmatic, outcomes-obsessed academic urgency.

However, students whose entire lives have been on track for academic success can yearn to get off the train.  The anime classic Ghost in the Shell includes a curious wordless sequence during which an unidentified pov just wanders slowly through the streets of a futuristic Hong Kong, exploring a previously un-comprehended, unnoticed world.  Students rarely enjoy seeing with such eyes of discovery rather than with the “weary eyes” of Conrad’s Marlow,

looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone . . . .”

What is college (or life) without time to see, time to feel, time to “really think?”

Andrew Hacker, co-author of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It, has great things to say about a college near and dear to us:

One of the 10 schools we liked was Raritan Valley Community College, which has a very good two-year liberal arts program. Small classes, dedicated teachers, and you discover students (you wouldn’t believe it) who are interesting and interested. After two years at Raritan, you can transfer to any larger university and actually have a better first two years than you would have at, let’s say, Michigan State where you’re in a lecture class listening to a PowerPoint with 500 other students.

Our own Glenn Ricketts, public relations director at NAS, teaches political science at RVCC. Great job, Glenn!

According to The Chronicle this afternoon:

An overwhelming majority of Americans say it is better for some students to go to community colleges instead of four-year colleges and universities, according to a poll released today by the Associated Press and Stanford University. Respondents also said community colleges were “good” or “excellent” at almost the same rate as four-year colleges.

As the creator of SimCity, The Sims, SimEarth, The Sims online, and Spore, Will Wright is a computer gaming “god.”  In his GameTech 2010 keynote address, Wright offers provocative observations about games and education.  He argues that learning begins with collecting data, then studying the data for patterns, using discerned patterns to develop schemas (abstractions) which allow us to create mental models, and finally base our behavior on those models that we hope will be predictive.

So gamers learn to master a game which unfolds in “nested feedback loops” of increasing duration.  Gamers succeed by learning what works only through suffering serial failure, the same way an apprentice learns from failing at what the journeyman does well.  But classroom education, Wright says, causes students to avoid failure by teaching them as many rules as possible.  Theory, too, he says, insulates you from failure.  Worse, theory often results in schemas that are not derived from the experiential world (which explains why businessmen run countries better than professors).

From online play data, Wright discovered that The Sims players actually enjoy exploring failure states because by hitting walls and discovering limits, they can build a model of the game’s “possibility space.”

Life, Wright warns us, allows limited opportunities to build reality-based behavioral models, but we can take advantage of two “educational technologies” to increase our store of experience:  toys (play) and stories (the experience of others).  He calls his games “toys” because they don’t involve winning and losing; Spore, for example, teaches basic biological principles through play.

One can’t help wondering if Basic Skills education might be redesigned so as to produce learning through play, failure, and nested feedback cycles.

I run a Great Books Program that offers courses online so that students anywhere can earn a certificate.  Recently I heard Gareth Williams, Chair of Columbia’s famous Lit-Hum core and emailed him for his thoughts on teaching great books online.  He was, not surprisingly, dubious:

As for Core courses online, I myself would be sceptical about the feasibility of such a step, at least from a Columbia perspective: so much here depends on the seminar format of voices heard around the table, and I feel that that format would be very hard indeed to reproduce in anything like its ‘real-life’ vitality if we tried it online.

I confess to similar doubts, admit that synchronous live dialogue is not reproducible, and acknowledge that the online courses are a marketing tool.  Still, in 2010, perhaps discussion takes a back seat to getting students exposed to challenging texts at all.  I started my program basically to keep frequently-cancelled literature courses alive in my institution (administrative pluses:  lower cost and a draw for disenfranchised literature students across the country).  Yet Professor Williams’s reply started me thinking about other virtues of online courses (I have taken at least a dozen and taught even more).  My defense of the online mode was bolstered by an experience of “voices around the table” while reporting to an informal group of students about the Association for Core Texts and Courses Conference where I heard Dr. Williams.  I could hardly get a word in edgewise with all the interruptions and crosstalk.  Everyone wanted to speak at once; everyone had an opinion; no one had a question; no one cared to listen.  I finally gave up.

Neil Postman preached that

for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost.

For now, the cost of electronically embracing what Victor Davis Hanson calls the “vanquished civilization of readers” may be the loss of “voices around the table.”  The advantage of online discussions, however, is the opportunity to complete one’s thought.   Students can also take time to frame their words, reflect rather than react, revise, expand, cross reference,  corroborate, and fact-check.

My online classes often turn into one-on-one tutorials, epistolary, more time-consuming than the classroom but with a balance of distance and intimacy.  The shy can “speak” as loudly as the bold.  Discipline is limited to enforcing the flaming policy.  No one is watching the clock or tweeting, and students are no longer packed in a box (by the end of the day, my 1940s era classroom is redolent of a high school locker room).  Martin Pawley used to argue that all technology acts as insulation against human contact.  Sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

As an undergrad, I spent one year at Berkeley, 1968, a year full of death, riots, tear gas, and bayonets under Peder Sather’s gate.  I dressed in Levis, love beads from a head shop on Telegraph Avenue, and an Army field jacket pilfered from Fort Ord.  I wore OD and flashed the peace sign in “solidarity” with my contemporaries who were fighting and dying in Vietnam while I skated by with an educational deferment.

Ironically, three years later I was at Fort Ord teaching classes full of `Nam vets, some rotating back to the rice paddies and the jungle.  I learned the shorthand:  TDY, MOS, HALO jumping, “boo-coo” (beaucoup), “bookin’,” and I discovered the joy of teaching military students who were prompt, eager, did the reading, and called me “sir.”  For the next 20 years, outside our barracks classroom was Vietnam, Panama, Desert Storm; inside was Moby Dick and Dylan Thomas.  Then the Soviet Union’s collapse brought base closure, and I was transferred to main campus.

I furnish this prologue because recently I listened to a colleague expound passionately on the futility of war, and I wondered how a veteran would feel hearing that indictment of his sacrifice, however well-intentioned.  Professors with pacifistic sentiments are commonplace, of course, but one also finds naked hostility towards the military in academia, such as Dr. June Terpstra’s fever-dream, “Killers in the Classroom.”

That’s why I now include a “thank you for your service” in my syllabus and request that veterans identify themselves privately in case I need to adjust class material for them.  When studying film, I often show Apocalypse Now. Thirty years ago, a sergeant asked to be excused from the viewing because he, like Colonel Kurtz, had “gone native in Vietnam.”  Just last year, a quiet, Iraq War veteran also asked for an alternative assignment.  He ended up writing a stunning account of a chaotic, bloody firefight he was in on “IED Alley” outside Al-Qaiim.  He said it helped him to write about it and thanked me.  I could only reply, “No, Corpsman Chan, thank you.”