Adjunctorium

Think I’ll ever get an actual, real day off? So far, haven’t seen one.

Spent the last two days building a new course for the next set of McBoingers. Imagined I could just recycle last summer’s 102 course.

Wrong.

It was seven weeks long. This summer’s gig is eight weeks. So had to rejigger the course to fit a different time span.

And, come to think of it, to take advantage of experience earned and insights sought.

Decided to go back to the group format, which worked so well last summer with the bright men and women who feel confident enough in their skills to take on an intense, short-form course.

However, I liked the idea of assigning them specific topics. And I felt the scheme to give them only one draft but grade it as though it were the real deal worked pretty well: it not only allowed them to see, quickly and vividly, what they needed to do (and not do) to succeed, it freed me of two dreary assignments to have to read.

The idea, snabbed from readers and from Heavenly Gardens faculty, of having them report orally on specifics of their progress on each paper-in-waiting also struck me as good, really good. First, it’s an adequate substitute for a draft: listening to them talk is a lot less excruciating than reading their half-baked effort. Second, it occupies class time that I don’t have to fill with the sound of my own voice, always good. Third, it allows for some degree of peer review on the rare occasions that students deign to engage the speaker. And fourth, it forces them to at least think about what they’re going to do for the next paper, even if they don’t actually do it.

So I wanted to merge all three of those ideas in one eight-week incarnation. Took most of the day yesterday to do that and make it work.

As for today: my fault. Serious stupidity led to serious time consumption.

What, what, what was I thinking when I decided to clone the MacBook to the new iMac rather than copying the old machine’s entire disk to the hard drive and cloning that back up to to the new machine? I must have been drinking something. Something toxic.

I ended up with not ALL of the files I need on the iMac. Some of them still reside on the external hard drive, to which I copied all my data files. But…find it. Go ahead. Just try to find it. Whatever you need, it’s not there.

Sorry, Apple, but “Spotlight” is a nuisance. Enter what you can remember or guess of a filename, and it brings up 87 gerjillion irrelevant files and folders. This leads to interminable sifting, pointing, clicking, opening, closing, DORKING AROUND! Couldn’t even begin to count the amount of time wasted today, trying to find files I needed to create the summer term’s course packet.

And speaking of Apple Nuisances: Lion, the latest large cat, disabled my Acrobat Pro.

Now here we have another example of the lâcheness of moi: I was a) too lazy and b) too cheap to go out and buy a new version of Acrobat Professional. As a matter of fact, since I’m no longer editing copy in PDFs (thank God!), I figured the Mac’s Preview program would do the job. It will manipulate PDFs to some extent. One of the Acrobat functions I used frequently can, we’re told, be done in Preview: merging several PDFs into one file.

One of the lessons Experience has taught is that instead of running to the copy center every week or two, it makes better sense to compile all your handouts into one big course packet and go to the copy center ONCE. Then, never drag up and down those stairs again, laden with paper most of your students will never look at twice. Or even once.

Well. My course packet is 78 pages long.

Preview appears to merge all the PDFs that go to creating such a packet, which varies from each preceding semester’s packet in that a new syllabus with new due dates and a new calendar has to be put into it.

Appears. In reality, as soon as you save the file, Preview disappears about 2/3 of it. Apparently there’s a limit to the size of file Preview can handle

Fair amount of time was wasted with that and with trying to wangle a workaround.

Finally I had to locate all the files that go into it in their Word for Mac incarnations. That was quite a trick, as it’s been several semesters since I used anything but the PDF versions. Searched and searched and fiddled and fiddled and searched and fiddled and finally found all the needed files. This took all afternoon.

Then had to find out if the Copy Center would be open when I arrive to meet my 6:30 p.m. class on the 29th. In a word: NO! However, they’ll send the stuff over to the department, because they’re being made to move and no one will be able to get to them easily.

Oh…kay…

Then had to wangle one visit to the library for professional training in DB sue and two visits to the computer commons. We’re in for the computer rooms, but don’t know about the library yet. I’ll be very surprised if any of the librarians want to hang around talking to a passel of freshmen until 7:30 or 8:00 at night. Oh well.

It took hours and hours and mind-numbing hours to get through all this garbage, some of which was inflicted upon me and some of which I inflicted upon myself.

Hours and hours and unpaid hours. Damn. Two days of unpaid labor.

At least if I could wait tables, I’d be paid for the work I put in.

Over at Confessions of a Community College Dean, Dean Dad gets a conversation rolling when he takes on the subject of writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives that ask professors of so-called “content” courses (so called as if the skill of writing were not itself “content”) to make their courses writing-intensive.

Since the current received wisdom in teaching writing says that we must make writing a recursive process—i.e., force students to show us that they’re outlining and drafting, and then put them through the meaningless exercise of peer-review—this presents a difficulty. To fill this particular bill, someone who is teaching an actual subject rather than the skill of writing per se will have to sacrifice hours of class time to this “process.”

My response to Dean Dad’s question—how does one make a “content” course writing-intensive?—was to suggest that one assign a lengthy term paper and be done with it. There really is no point in making a psychology or a chemistry student jump through the “process” hoops. This is something she or he should have learn in freshman comp, and so the how-to of the alleged “process” should not have to be repeated in every course the kid takes.

Meanwhile, over in the freshman comp classroom, I’ve about given up on drafting and peer reviewing. Following the lead of some of my full-time colleagues, this semester I cut those time-wasters down to the bare minimum: a draft for one of the required papers (four required in 101; three in 102), and study groups for on-your-own peer review.

Peer review is the blind leading the blind. If you don’t know anything about how to write a decent paper, how on earth can you advise someone else on the same? My students are often just a step above illiterate. Those who are good are pretty darned good, and they do not want to waste their time trying to instruct people who couldn’t learn how to do the job in 13 years of K-12 schooling. Even a freshman can recognize an exercise in futility.

I do believe that one reason students come to us barely able to spell their own names is that they have not been asked to write in substantive K-12 and lower-division courses. When I asked my students, earlier this semester, who had written a 2,500-word paper before, three of 25 in one section and none in the other answered in the affirmative.

That is ridiculous. My cohort (I graduated with a BA in 1966) started writing eight- to ten-page source-based papers in junior high school, and I never took an undergraduate course in any subject, including the hard sciences, that did not require a term paper. As high-school graduates’ writing grew weaker and harder for a college professor to tolerate reading, apparently faculty responded by deciding not to make writing assignments.

Until this spring, I trotted my students to the computer lab and made them write and post drafts for each paper; then trotted them over there again and made them post peer reviews. I read all of these and commented upon them in detail, providing copious advice on how to improve the final version.

Their final papers usually showed no significant improvement over the drafts. Often students would simply copy a draft and paste it into a new Word file. Sometimes they paid so little attention to this process that they pasted their instructor’s (blithely ignored) advice into the “final” paper, too.

Who has time or energy to waste on this nonsense? Especially when that time earns something less than minimum wage?

This semester I assigned one draft, and only one draft. This was for the term’s first assignment.

I graded the draft exactly as I would have scored it if it were a final paper, keeping the assessment free of grade inflation, and explained specifically what they needed to do to achieve a higher grade. After the students recovered from shock, they turned in fairly creditable papers.

No further drafts were required for the remaining papers. I informed classmates that the rest of the course’s assignments would be graded according to the same rubrics used for the first paper, and they would be expected to turn in a polished final draft, without my having to review early drafts.

The second set of 750-word papers elicited a fairly normal grading curve. Overall, without benefit of the drafting and peer-reviewing hoop-jumps, the quality of their papers was  the same as that of student papers put through the “process.”

If anything, they were somewhat better. They certainly were no worse.

For the long, required 2,500-word argumentation paper, we had oral reports describing their theses and detailing their research progress, followed by one-on-one conferences for which students were asked to bring specific materials and during which I advised them on ways to develop their topics. I have yet to see the products—they’re due on Monday. But I’ll be surprised if they’re not just about the same as papers produced by prior semesters’ cohorts who were jumped through the “process” hoops.

Got next fall’s assignment: A 101 and a 102 section, at the same times I landed this semester, plus another go at the magazine writing course. Good schedule: Tuesday-Thursday mid-day with a half-hour break between the two, plenty of time to do lots of other things in life.

The magazine course always makes, bizarrely enough: an awful lot of folks out there still think they want to learn how to make buggy whips. And of course because freshman comp is required of everyone, those sections always fill.

The 101 section will need to be rewritten, because I want to change its overarching topic. The 102 section can float as it is through the summer session and then into the fall. The magazine course has picked up a few videos, the new computer having made it unbelievably easy to record and post them.

A-a-a-a-n-d…speaking of videos, cabbages, and kings, I’m now thinking I may rewrite both courses.

Today or yesterday, can’t recall which, I came across an article in the local Play-Nooz describing how some doughty educator switches lecture time for homework time. In his strategy, the instructor records the lectures for the courses and assigns them to the students to watch at home. Then exercises and homework are done during class, under the teacher’s gimlet eye.

That strikes me as a freaking brilliant idea. It’s been around for awhile…don’t know why I’ve never thought of it as something to apply to composition. Duh! You want them to write? Make them write where you can see them in action.

A 15-minute video lecture is astonishingly easy to record. And today I finally figured out how to get Quicktime to record what’s on your computer screen with a voice-over. This would make it easy for me to perform any number of professorial antics, right out there on the Internet.

So I’m thinking I will record key lectures, especially the ones that ask students to pay attention to the details of specific skills. Then have them practice those skills in class.

Of course, I am not, not, NOT interested in reading any more drivel than already what pours across my desk. So we’ll go over the answers to the exercises in class. Those who pay attention profit; those who don’t, don’t. At least it will keep them busy, rather than setting them up to gossip, play with their smartphones, and zone out to the drone of my voice.

It also would solve the whole issue of what to do when laryngitis (or, gawd forfend, another bout of that hideous bronchitis) makes it impossible to speak. I won’t have to speak; not much, anyway.

And as a final glowing benefit, once your golden words are online, your students can access them even if they miss class. No more “did we do anything important on Monday”? The answer will always be, without irony, “of course not.”

Everyone in our business group chipped in and we bought 13 tickets for the MegaMillions lottery. To our collective astonishment, we didn’t win.

With any luck at all, by the end of next fall I will have finished the coursework and passed the real estate licensing exam and maybe I’ll even have a job that pays a living wage.

Besides the fact that I’ve never been thrilled with teaching composition and that I cringe at the prospect of passing the last few years of my working life this way, every new shooting incident that takes place in some classroom leaves me more and more convinced that risking my life is worth a great deal more than $2,400 a semester.

Anyone who’s ever taught in a community college—or, for that matter, at a university—knows how effectively lower-division classes call in the nutcases. Every semester, there’s at least one. Truly, I think every one of us has at least one, every semester or at best every year. While 99.99999% of these confused souls are benign, you never know which one is going to shatter. And when that happens, I don’t want to be in the line of fire. We’re not earning hazardous duty pay here, folks!

Ugh. I’ve been reading stoont papers and studying real estate all day long. “All day” started at 5:00 a.m. Now it’s 8:30 p.m., I haven’t had dinner or fed the dog or walked the dog, and I need to put in another three or four hours copyediting the worst piece of pseudo-litcrit I’ve ever read in my life.

Please, God. Let me get a job in real estate that will pay enough to cover the bills, and please don’t make me hate it. I will sing in Latin and French and German and even English every Maundy Thursday, every Good Friday, every Easter, every Saint Swithen’s Day, every other pagano-Christian Day your followers can dream up, yea verily until they cart me off for my final trip to the ICU.

The two English 102 courses’ second set of papers hit my desk a week ago. They’re all finally read and returned. So I got a good look at what happens when you do not  have students draft, peer-review, and revise their papers.

The answer?

[drum roll...]

Not much. Scores were slightly lower, but not extremely so. If anything, the result was probably a more realistic view of student performance.

Average score was 78.41, disregarding several 0s for papers that weren’t turned in. Average score on the first paper was 81.24. The first assignment—an extended definition—was somewhat more difficult for the students, because few are asked to write that type of paper in high school, and many had never heard of such a thing. The second paper was a causal analysis; the cause and effect paper is commonplace, and all of them have written some variant of it before now.

So yes. Their scores dropped. But not by much. As a matter of fact, the drop is probably illusory.

Delete the 0s for students who have dropped, and then add in the 0s for plagiarism and nonperformance so that the same number of 0s appears in each set of scores, and you get an average of 77 points on the first paper.

Viewed in that light, the average scores of classmates who actually turn in some work and don’t copy it off the Internet rose slightly.

In short: asking students to jump through all the recursive-writing hoops does exactly nothing to improve their scores. Indeed, asking them to simply turn in a final paper without making you plod through reading drafts and peer reviews appears to improve their final product slightly.

Not, possibly, in any statistical way. But one thing’s certain: it doesn’t harm them.

So, what have I done so far and how has it shaken out?

1. I asked them to write a draft of their first paper, a 750-word draft definition on topics that I assigned them.

Each classmate was given a specific topic on a broad subject that functions as the “theme” of the course this semester: Prohibition and the Great Depression.

2. They received instruction from me and from a librarian on research techniques, using the library’s databases, assessing validity of sources, note-taking, integrating source material into their writing, citation, and documentation. They also studied and discussed rhetorical organization, logical thinking, and ways to avoid falling into fallacy.

3. They submitted a draft extended definition that was to be as close to “final” as possible: no less than 700 words, with a specific number of sources supporting their argument, formatted in MLA style.

4. They submitted a final version of the extended definition in which they were expected to revise and rewrite, based on corrections and comments on the draft.

This draft was extensively edited and commented upon. Each student received thoroughgoing analysis and feedback, plus advice on how to improve his or her paper.

5. They delivered oral reports describing their progress toward their second paper, a causal analysis whose topics also were assigned to each person.

6. They turned in a final version only of the causal analysis: no draft, no peer review, no group work.

Average score on the draft extended definition: 58.5%
Average score on the final extended definition: 77%
Average score on the final causal analysis: 78.4%

IMHO, we waste our time and we waste our students’ time by requiring them to submit drafts of their papers, and especially by requiring them to peer review each others’ work. They’re better served by allowing them plenty of time to gather research material, by explaining in detail how to marshal facts and use them to support a thesis, and by asking them to report on how they’re faring as they work toward the paper.

Having them give an oral report on their progress and then advising them on directions to take roughly approximates a tutorial approach. In an ideal world, each student would meet one-on-one with the instructor and confer on her or his research, developing ideas, and planned direction as the paper progressed. But since we live not in an ideal world but in a hell of 160-student/semester course loads where a good half of our students arrive unprepared for college-level work, true tutorials are not going to happen.

Drafting, peer reviewing, and portfolios do not approximate tutorials. All they do is jump students through hoops whose value, to the extent that they have any value, is easily circumvented.

We’re better off sparing ourselves a lot of useless work and them a lot of wasted time by dispensing with drafts and peer reviews and simply asking them to turn in final papers.

It makes some sense to have them turn in a single draft, for the first assigned paper. However, it does not make sense to let them think the score on that draft will be dropped or is negligible compared to that of a full-blown paper. If they think they can blow it off (which is exactly what they do think of most drafts), they will blow it off. To get them to turn in a decent draft, you probably should weight it the same as all the other papers. If desired, you can cut its weight at the end of the semester.

Use the draft on the first paper for two purposes: as a diagnostic writing, allowing you to identify students with writing or learning disabilities; and as a way to communicate to the classmates exactly how you will grade papers and what you expect. Tell them the draft must be as close to a final version as they can make it, and be as tough on the draft as you are on final papers.

By cutting out drafting except for a preliminary draft on the semester’s first assignment, and by cutting out all peer reviewing, I’ve freed myself from having to drudge my way through reading FIVE sets of unnecessary papers.

If classmates were asked to submit close-to-final versions of the two remaining papers—another 750-word essay and a 2500-word research paper—the drafts alone would represent 162,500 words of drivel for me to have to read, assess, and try to comment upon intelligently. That’s on top of the 162,500 words they will submit in final form!

An average book-length work is about 90,000 words, and most copyeditors do not read manuscripts that are blank-eyed drivel. The 162,500-word figure does not represent the entire output of two sections; in fact another 750-word paper is assigned, giving a total output of 4,000 words per student, or 200,000 words pouring down on the head of an adjunct who teaches only two sections.

If you’re teaching three sections of 102 at Heavenly Gardens Community College, you will read, comment upon, and assess an outrageous 300,000 words, most of it garbage, over the course of 16 weeks. With a standard community-college course load of 5 and 5, you can expect to see 500,000 words of junk copy slurry across your desk.

That, I submit, is insane.

Expecting faculty to read twice that much by inflicting drafts and then go over it all again at the end of the semester by demanding that students turn in “portfolios” surpasses unreasonable. It’s comparable to expecting someone to read, comment upon, and assign a grade Proust’s interminable À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. In 16 weeks. Only believe me, these authors are not Marcel Proust!

It explains why students learn nothing in their classes: their instructors are in no position to teach them anything. The exercises everyone in the classroom is expected to perform are pointless, time-wasting, and counterproductive.