When Stupid Is Funny

by Melete Posted on November 4, 2012

This week I’m having the Monday-Wednesday 7:30 a.m. students meet with me one-on-one, briefly, to discuss any issues they may be having with their 2500-word research papers. There’s a pair who sit in the back row, talking and texting through most classes. The brighter of the two — let’s call her Ms. Paresseuse* — showed up late and so missed the sign-up sheet when it went around. Her pal, Mr. Perdant*, cut altogether. So after class she barged up, cutting off Mr. Workingman, who also arrived a few minutes late (but much sooner than she did), grabbed the sign-up sheet, and called Perdant on her cell.

After he woke up enough to understand what she was saying — i.e., you need to select a ten-minute slot to talk with the teeeeecher — he staked out ten minutes on Wednesday. She signed herself up for 7:30 on Monday. Mr. Workingman looked a little disgusted but managed to get himself a space on Monday.

As I was getting stuff ready for class this evening, what should I discover but that Ms. Paresseuse snabbed the very time slot that the first person to sign up had claimed. That is, she didn’t bother to read the times other classmates had taken!

:lol: :roll: :lol:

Mr. Workingman must have been quietly gratified when he saw that she’d shot herself in the foot, after she practically shoved him aside to get at the sign-up sheet before he did and then helped her boyfriend to cheat by grabbing a slot out of turn.

Of course I e-mailed her to suggest a different time slot, but it’s unlikely she’ll read her e-mail before 7:30 tomorrow morning, the hour she nailed. Students are so text-happy that many of them never read their e-mail at all anymore. So that means she’ll show up as dawn cracks. If she wants to talk with me, she’ll have to wait until 8:10. Or she could stand around until 8:45 and talk with me after class.

Mr. Perdant will not show up. He rarely appears in class, and the likelihood that he’s started on the paper is almost nil. When he does show up, he’s there in body only. So, even through the dim haze in which he dwells, he should be able to see how pointless it will be for him to meet with me to discuss what passes for his progress. Ms. Paresseuse does come to class most of the time — she’s only missed three days out of 21 so far — and so unfortunately she probably will surface at 7:30 tomorrow morning. So…goodie. I get to start my day with a nice little conflict. I can hardly wait.

*Don’t speak French? Pas de problème. You can always find it on the Internet!

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Out with Blackboard, In with Canvas

by Melete Posted on November 3, 2012

So yesterday I went out to Heavenly Gardens to spend two unpaid hours learning to use the District’s replacement for the hated Blackboard, a CMS known as Canvas. Designed by Instructure with, according to our instructor, the intention of being as un-Blackboard as possible but with virtually no advice from anyone who actually has to use the system to teach, it is every bit as complex and work-intensive as its competition.

All faculty who use the CMS in any capacity, even if it’s just to post a start-of-the-semester “Welcome” notice for face-to-face students, are required to attend the two-hour “Basic” workshop. No tickee, no laundry: if you haven’t shown up at one of these, IT won’t give your classes the Canvas shell.

Even though I’ve “retired” (the operative term is “escaped”) from teaching freshman comp, I’m keeping the online magazine writing course, because it’s easy, it attracts fewer fools, and most of the students actually want to take it. To direct those students to the site I built for them in WordPress, I have to post an announcement in Blackboard…or, starting next fall, in Canvas, which means I have to extract a shell from IT. So that meant donating two hours of free labor to the cause.

Opportunity cost: $180, including the hour of commute time.

As it developed, though, the two hours morphed into FOUR hours. Turns out the instructor had set up the “Advanced” workshop to flow right out of the first two hours.

Damn. I figured to be out by 3:00 p.m. Needed to go by Costco and then spend the remaining conscious hours cleaning my incredibly filthy house, since a friend was coming over this morning and I couldn’t entertain in a total pigpen.

But since I was on the campus, I decided the path of least resistance would be to sit through another two hours of jawing. Then at least I wouldn’t have to traipse out the campus for another unpaid workshop.

Now the opportunity cost was $360. Not counting the round-trip commute that racks up an hour of travel time.

Oh well. At 5:30, the Costco is almost empty. Got in there and out in just a few minutes; arrived at the Funny Farm a little after 6:00. Threw down some food for the dog and started cleaning. Dinnertime: around 9:30. And the truth is, the real opportunity cost was nil, since my best client has been on the road for a month, so no work has come in from those quarters, and our other current client has hit a slow spot.

The woman the District has hired to train people in the course management software and any  number of other handy things is extremely good at what she does. Not only does she know and keep up to date with these programs, she has a doctorate in instructional design. So I can’t complain about having to work with her: she is just great.

About Canvas, here is what I would say:

It appears to have a number of significant advantages over Hated Blackboard. For example, you can mark up papers within the system, using a screen that seems to be similar to the Mac’s Preview function. Thus your students do not have to save their papers in a Word-compatible format. Since some students simply refuse to even try to understand what you  mean when you say “save it as a .doc, a .docx, or an .rtf file,” this will obviate a fair amount of hassle. One of the 101 students still has not bothered to resend her first paper to me in a word-compatible file, and that class is now on its third major paper. How many times can you tell some idiot something without getting tired of hearing your own voice rattling in your head?

You can embed YouTube videos using YouTube’s code — except that you have to remember to select the OLD code. Apparently the new code is incompatible. As long as YouTube keeps providing the old code, though, that makes life a lot easier than it is in the Blackboard universe. In exploring around, I saw something that looked like a function that would let you record a video straight from inside the program. But since we didn’t touch on it during the workshop, I have no idea how (or if) it works.

Major, huge disadvantage: they change things about once every three weeks, with no notice and no explanation. We’re told that you can turn it on one day and have it look entirely different from the way it looked the previous day.

That will not make it for me. With each passing moment, I have less and less patience with the learning curve that stretches to infinity. And I would be extremely pissed if I had everything all set up the way I wanted it only to discover the whole construct was sabotaged at some nerd’s whim.

The District, we’re further told, is Instructure’s largest client (and it must be said: the District is one of the two largest community college districts in the land, with a student body larger even than Arizona State University’s, whose esteemed president equates quantity with quality and is trying to make his institution the world’s largest university). This outfit is young and small, not all that far beyond the start-up stage. So it remains to be seen how well they can handle a huge, chaotic, far-flung district that spreads across one of largest metropolitan areas in North America (Phoenix alone, not counting its swarm of suburbs, is geographically larger than L.A.). An online class that runs only eight weeks doesn’t have a lot of wriggle room to accommodate down time, especially when it comes at some critical juncture…like the last week of the semester.

So, even had I not resolved to quit devoting hours and hours of unpaid labor to a job that’s low-paying to begin with, I still would not incline to take my course off WordPress. While the extra $4800 a year that this course pays will come in handy, nevertheless, if they tell me I must move all that stuff over into Canvas, I’m going to quit. To make up the lost revenue, I’d have to bill all of another 80 hours a year: 1 and 33 minutes hours a week!

 

Posted in Community Colleges, Online coursework | Leave a comment

Countdown to Freedom: 11/1/2012

by Melete Posted on November 1, 2012

Twenty days to go

We’re down to ten classes each, Eng. 101 and Eng. 102! And won’t it be nice when we’re in the single digits?

The li’l 101s have only two more major papers to write. They can’t get past the fact that they don’t get “rough drafts” for these things: that the Thesis/Paragraph/Citation exercise is their last chance to let me know how they’re doing and to show me they’re on track.

This afternoon two of them, asked to deliver oral progress reports, had to admit they haven’t even thought about the topics of their upcoming cause-and-effect papers. Others offered profound insights like “I’m writing my paper on education and the economy.” Uh huh.

The TP&C is due tonight…that’s right: by 5:00 p.m.

Having repeated “And what ABOUT [fill in the blank]?” until I was blue in the face, by the time class broke up I felt altogether out of sorts.

Ms. Annoyance was in full ADD mode, getting up and plugging her various devices into a wall outlet several times and then, when asked to deliver her assigned progress report, said “I can’t succeed at this because the teacher has already decided what grade I’m going to get in this course based on the grade I got on my first paper. That’s what all teachers do.”

Augh. Not to say barf.

I suggested she try doing a little research on the effect of teachers’ subjectivity on assessment of student work.

It actually would be a good idea for a student paper. She indicated she wasn’t especially interested in learning more about that, though.

This paper, which is worth 200 points, is due one week from today.

If I were an undergraduate student, I would be in a freaking frenzy if I had no idea what topic I was going to cover for a research paper due in seven days. Is it any wonder that they can’t write their way out of a wet paper bag?

The 102s are quiescent. They have only one paper left to write this semester, the 500-point monster 2,500-word researched position paper, upon which their passing or their failing of second-semester freshman comp rides. I’m not allowed to pass a student in the course who does not get a passing grade on the final paper. Ugh. Not to say barf.

Next week I’ve scheduled one-on-one meetings with this set of classmates. At least two of the ten who have made appointments can be relied upon to stand me up. So that will provide a little peace and quiet, anyway.

Twenty is a tetrahedral number.

A dodecahedron has twenty vertices.

In nuclear physics, twenty is a magic number.

The portrait of Andrew Jackson, who
seems to have had a premonition
of freshman composition students,
appears on the $20 bill.

Adam Smith, who looks fully capable
of whipping freshman comp students into shape,
appears on the £20 note.

Twenty was the age at which Levites
in the time of King David were allowed
“to do the work for the service of
the house of the Lord,” the Temple in Jerusalem.

A standard dartboard is laid out as twenty sectors.

Twenty days to go

Images:

A tetrahedron. Rendered by Blotwell using POV-Ray and converted with Adobe ImageReady. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Rotating dodecahedron. Created by en:User:Cyp. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
Graph of isotopes by type of nuclear decay. Orange and blue nuclides are unstable, with the black squares between these regions representing stable nuclides. The unbroken line passing below many of the nuclides represents the theoretical position on the graph of nuclides for which proton number is the same as neutron number. The graph shows that elements with more than 20 protons must have more neutrons than protons, in order to be stable. Table_isotopes.svg: Napy1kenobi. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
Andrew Jackson. Matthew Brady. Public domain.
Moses Pleading with Israel, as in Deuteronomy 6:1-15, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company. Providence Lithograph Company. Public domain.
Diagram of a dartboard, without labels. User:IIVQ, User:Stannered. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in General Miseries, Students, Teaching composition | 2 Comments

Countdown to Freedom: 10/31/2012

by Melete Posted on October 31, 2012

Twenty-one more days to go
Eleven more Eng. 101 class meetings
Ten more Eng. 102 class meetings

“Ten.” Now that starts to sound almost manageable. Wish it was t’other way around: ten Eng. 101 chivarees and eleven 102 shindigs. By and large I enjoy the 102 students. The 101s drive me nuts.

Making some plans for marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk: it’s always a good idea to visit a press’s editors in person when you’re trying to persuade them to hire you on a contract basis. I just realized that during the off-season, I could afford to drive to New Mexico, descend on the UNM Press in Albuquerque, and then hang out for a couple of days in Santa Fe. On the taxpayer dime, we might add, since the whole thing would be covered by the S-corp with pretax dollars. There are museums in Santa Fe that publish books, too, and so I should be able to make an appointment or two there, justifying the time in that lovely little burg.

That, unfortunately, will have to be put off until after Christmas. Obviously, I can’t spend a full day on the road when I’m meeting classes Monday thru Thursday. The semester won’t be done until halfway through December, and Santa Fe has a big holiday tourism frenzy. But in January it will be colder than a bigod, prices will be cheap, and shops and galleries uncrowded.

The University of Arizona Press, however, is only a two-hour drive from my front door, and so I could drive down there any day when I don’t have to cope with flicking students. If I left after a 7:30 a.m. class, I could be on the road before 9:00 a.m.; hit Tucson around 11:00, meet with an editor there, and be back up here by 3:00 p.m. That drive would only cost about $100; it would take $400 to $800 to do a junket to Santa Fe.

Two of this semester’s students are, I think, pulling some sort of a fast one. Particularly annoying: they’re both return students from earlier sections, and I think they each pulled the same scam before. One is in the 101 section and one is in the 102 section.

Here’s what they do: they sign up for the course. They show up for class. The one who looks and acts like the straightest of straight arrows shows up every single day, right on time or early. He participates in discussions and appears to have his act together. The other, who always looks amiably hung over, often cuts, but until the 45th-day cull, he shows up frequently enough to keep his place in the section. After 45th day, he shows up about once every three or four meetings.

So…what are they doing?

Well, the way I understand it, there are loans and apparently at least one scholarship or grant program that require the student to sign up for a certain minimum number of credits per semester. It does not matter whether they’re passing the courses: they just have to be enrolled.

So, if you send in a mid-term grade of an F or a D, it doesn’t affect the money they’re drawing down. If you dropped the kid, it certainly would—he or she could lose the loan or scholarship. At Heavenly Gardens there is no mid-term grade roster, but you have the option of sending a kind of warning to people who appear to be flunking, as if they cared, and so it’s unlikely that whoever operates a student aid program would know their progress until the final grades are emitted.

Interestingly, too, at the community colleges an F is better for your grade-point average than a D, because the F is negated if you take the course over for a passing grade. But if you get a D and then retake the course, the D is averaged into your overall grade-point average.

So, say you take English 101 and get an F (0 points); next semester your retake it and get an A (4 points): your grade-point average would be 4. But if you got a D (1 point) in that first semester and then got an A the second time around, the grade-point average would be 2.50.

Thus, if you’ve got a scam going, it’s in your interest to just not turn in any papers. You want to fail the course flat. Someday, if you decide to actually pursue a degree, you can take the courses for real, and your grade-point average would be respectable.

Because of the way my courses are structured, by the 45th day there’s a chance that if a kid turns in the assignments that are still due, he or she just might pass. And in English 102, the final paper is so heavily weighted that if you aced the two major and two minor assignments still due after the 45th day, did all the ancillary exercises associated with them, and nailed all the available extra credit, you could pass. Maybe. So, I tend not to drop people who are physically showing up in the classroom.

Clearly, though, a passing grade is not what’s desired.

If the theory is right—that they’re signing up for courses to collect money fraudulently—why kill the goose that laid the golden egg? If you know an instructor’s habit is to keep you on the roll if you show up semiregularly, even if you never submit a single assignment, you’d be crazy not to keep re-enrolling in that instructor’s sections.

So, what are they doing with their time when they’re not doing any classwork? Several possibilities come to mind.

  • Loafing. That would be good.
  • Working a part-time gig. Student aid combined with part-time work, even if the latter were minimum-wage, would add up to a moderately respectable living and spare one from having to spend eight hours a day on the job.
  • Dealing drugs. Showing up in class, making friends with the real-life students, and ingratiating yourself would allow you to build a nice clientele. That would make the student aid scam quite profitable, indeed.

{sigh} You see why I find this whole thing tedious?

Twenty-one more days to go.

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Countdown to Freedom: 10/29/2012

by Melete Posted on October 29, 2012

Hmmmm….  I see I counted all four regular class-meeting days of the final exam week as “days to go,” even though each class meets only once during those days. Thus one could argue that we really have two fewer “days to go” than I’ve been figuring. This would give us

Twenty-three days to go, all told
Twelve days of English 102 to go
Thirteen days of English 101 to go

Lucky 13 for the 101s, eh? That doesn’t bode well. Rather little about that bunch bodes well, except for the fact that few of them have dropped and relatively few are failing. That’s good, anyway. Let’s hope for the best.

Twenty-three sounds marginally better than twenty-five. I guess.

Received next semester’s assignment from the departmental admin: just one section, the online magazine writing course. On the one hand, that’s very cheering.

On the other, it’s kinda scary. It is, after all, $4,800 less that I’ll earn next semester.
$12,000 less for the whole year.

But the business does have enough in its bank account, right now, to replace income for seven sections, even if I don’t earn another dime between now and December 2013. So I don’t feel very worried.

And to earn that 12 grand, The Copyeditor’s Desk would have to bill 200 hours at its current rate; that would be 3.85 hours a week. Plus a little to cover overhead.

The fiscal cliff business we’re looking at is a little scary: between that and the idiotic budget sequester, our fine Congressional leadership has put us in a godawful mess, and if it isn’t resolved by the first part of 2013, we’re all going to lose our shirts. Once again I can expect to see my life savings go away, assuming they stay invested in the market until the end of December. That’s only two months from now.

At the Chamber I heard a presentation on this looming fiasco that was enough to make you want to move all your money to Germany. Or convert it to gold bullion and stuff your mattress with it.

So, this is probably not the smartest time to decide to abandon paying work, nevermind how little it pays.

But you know…

i

just

can’t

stand

it!

I’d rather go hungry than teach another section of composition.

What the hell. I need to lose some weight.

Twenty-three days to go

Posted in Adjunct Poverty, Teaching composition | Leave a comment

Countdown to Freedom: 10/25/2012

by Melete Posted on October 25, 2012

Twenty-six days to go

Online student to virtual professor:

hi, I am needing more clarification on what I am suppose to research and whereto find information for the assignment market research. can you please explain.

Thank You,

Your benighted student

Every goddamn semester, SOMEone who signs up for the online magazine writing course sends an e-mail almost identical to this. “Please regurgitate your instructions in some other words.” Occasionally when I barf up a new dumbed-down set of instructions, they’ll send another e-mail claiming that they just. don’t. get. it.

The instructions for the kick-off assignment are laid out in the syllabus. They also reside on the website, on their very own page.  I think they’re very clear, and I think they explain in detail exactly what needs to be done:

Market Research. Due Oct. 26 by 11:59 p.m. To assist with this assignment, read Garrison, chapter 1; and in our site’s page 5, “Lecturoids,” see “Scoping Out a Magazine.” For a grasp of what feature articles entail, see Garrison, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 13, chapter 14, and chapter 15; and also on our site, page 5 “Lecturoids”: Lecture 1, “What’s a Feature” and Lecture 2, “Types of Features.”

This semester, we’ll write a how-to article, a profile, a seasonal piece or personal experience article, a brite (i.e., a short-short piece). I’d like you to investigate possible markets for each of your efforts in these genres.

Take yourself to a library or large bookstore and search for some magazines that are likely to publish these kinds of articles on subjects that interest you. Depending on your subject matter, you may be looking for certain niche publications that focus on specific subjects (hobby or crafts publications, for example) or for more general-interest publications with sections that feature how-to articles (Sunset Magazine, for example).

Using the techniques described early in our course, study several issues of this publication (you’ll may need to be in a library to do this, since bookstores generally carry only the current issue) and examine such things as the type of articles the magazine publishes, the length of such articles, their language and tone, and the way they’re organized and illustrated.

Also get the name of the appropriate editor, his or her title, and the editorial office’s address.

Then, still in the library or bookstore, go to the reference section and find a copy of Writer’s Market. Look up the most likely markets for your proposed four articles. Take some notes on what the editors say they’re seeking and how much they pay.

Then, for each type of article (how-to; profile; seasonal, roundup, or personal experience; brite), write up what you’ve discovered in a convenient, easy-to-read way. You may use bulleted points, if this is easiest for you.

Here’s how to submit this: I will publish a post on our site titled “Market Research.” Open a comment to that post and paste your discoveries into your comments, and then click “post comment.” It’s very easy.

Part of the point here is to share what you learn about markets with classmates. Understanding and comparing markets is extremely important for magazine writers. With this assignment, you not only can begin to develop some markets for yourself, you also can perform a service for other budding writers. 100 points.

Maybe the problem is, this assignment requires the students to have actually learned something from the video lectures, the PDF lecturoids, and the book. Maybe that’s more than they can cope with?

I find it frustrating and annoying to have to repeat everything that I’ve already spent a great deal of unpaid time composing, revising, editing,  rewriting, and posting. Even more frustrating and annoying is to be asked to repeat it again. Last semester I told the person who kept pestering me in this way that I’d described the course assignments as clearly as I knew how, and if she couldn’t understand the instructions, maybe she really should take the course in-class. Mercifully, that one dropped.

Virtual professor to online student, October 2012:

Try it in a few steps:

1. Think about topics that you might write about for your profile story, your how-to, a personal experience or seasonal piece, and a brite.

2. Consider what KIND of magazines might publish stories like this. (For example, if you’re profiling a musician, maybe a magazine for rock fans would be interested; if your how-to is a gardening piece, maybe Sunset or a magazine for gardening hobbyists would like it).

3. Go to the library or a Barnes & Noble and get your hands on a reference work called Writer’s Market. Look through it and try to find those types of magazines. Look for some that are big enough that you can find them in a bookstore or library — although sometimes smaller publications will appear for free online. Check.

4. For each article type, select a magazine that would be a good fit for your article idea.

5. In Writer’s Market, look for the names and titles of editors who would be likely to receive queries for freelance stories. (A query is a proposal written in business letter format.)

6. Also, try to track down some back copies of the magazines you’ve chosen. Often large public libraries will have these. Read back issues and try to get a good feel for who reads each publication and why. What is their demographic? Are they affluent, middle-class, working-class? What do you think a typical reader’s age might be? What interests do they probably have?

7. Write a report for each of the four likely markets for your upcoming articles. Include the name and address of each publication’s editor, managing editor, or feature’s editor, the title of the magazine, and a description of what the magazine publishes and what its readers are like.

I think there’s an online version of Writer’s Market, but you may have to pay for it. Most libraries carry the annual hardcover book. You probably can find it at the Heavenly Gardens library, but if  not, you almost certainly will find it at your local branch library.

Hope this helps!

Can you think of a better way to say this? I sure can’t.

* * *

Twelve more class meetings of the English 101 class.

Today one of the nineteen-year-olds presents herself after class. She wants to know why, after she got a 65 on the draft, she ended up with a 50 on the final version, since she worked so hard to add more material and make the requested changes. I try to get into G-mail to check the papers she’d submitted, but the system hangs, and besides, I have the two graded, commented-upon compilations of golden words stashed on my home computer. I say I will review them when I get home this afternoon, which is exactly what I do.

Going through the e-mail between Ms. Aggrieved and me, I’m reminded of the backstory:

When the time came to turn in the final version of this paper, Ms. A appeared in class and reported that her computer had crashed just as she was finishing her paper. I couldn’t prove it, o’course, and besides, she looked pretty distressed (the drama department at Heavenly Gardens has quite a good reputation…). So, I gave her a brief extension on the deadline.

On October 14, two days past the official due date but within the period she negotiated, she turned in the final paper, word-for-word identical to the D paper. So her ever-lovin’ instructor, moi, subtracted another 15 points for not having done one darned thing to improve the magnum opus, as instructed in the draft. This resulted in the 50-point “F” for the final paper.

Once I get back to my home office, I open the two files and see that yea verily, as I recalled during our conversation, the version she turned in as “final” is a clone of the “draft.” Checking to be sure I didn’t make a mistake, I go back to G-mail, redownload her e-mailed draft and final papers, and observe that indeed the paper I’d read as the final version was the paper that she’d sent as the final version.

Consequently, I paste each paper into a two-column table, the draft on the left and the final on the right. They are so exquisitely identical that the lines wrap in perfect unison: not a single word has been changed. I send this to her with the explanation that this was the reason she got a 50 on the final version.

Dollars to donuts, her next ploy will be to tell me she mistakenly sent the draft and that she really had revised it and would I please please please let her submit the alleged revision. Effectively, then, what she’s done is to generate two extra weeks in which to rewrite the paper—or to get someone else to do it for her.

Is there any question why I so love teaching freshman comp?

 Twelve more days: twelve days too many.

Posted in Online coursework, Students, Teaching composition | Leave a comment

Countdown to Freedom: 10/24/2012

by Melete Posted on October 24, 2012

Twenty-seven days to go.

My smart and lively colleague who teaches creative writing—the one whose class I substituted in while she was enjoying a bit of surgery—marched into the classroom after the 7:30 bunch rolled out. We hadn’t been in touch since her adventures in medical science, and I was happy to see her looking well. She was surprised when I told her I had decided to quit teaching freshman comp.

I think she thought I was going to do some work for her program. And I would, if I could be paid fairly and not have to deal with craziness. She looked a little cheered when I said I would continue to teach the magazine writing course, and remarked that maybe we could get some project going together.

Yesh. The magazine writing course. Online.

Of the twenty who signed up, seven students have already dropped or been dropped by me. That leaves 13 at the start of the course’s second week.

It’s still three more than the number needed to “make” the course, so I don’t feel too bad about it. But it tells you a lot about community colleges and about online courses in specific: 35 percent of the students are gone by the end of the first week!

The one whose excuse was the out-of-town elective surgery said she was in the ICU as she typed and dared me to call her room at the hospital. In the course of that message she said she thought she would drop all her courses and try again next semester. Sounded like she’s hit a rough spot…hope she’ll be OK.

Then there are the others.

Most of the surviving 102 students have kept their acts pretty much together. Comparatively.

After class this morning one of them came up to ask what her grade is. Heh…what do you suppose she thinks? She didn’t turn in one paper, she got a D on the next paper, and a C on the next. She ignored an opportunity to nail ten points of extra credit. But she’s only missed three days of class. :-)

The alleged honors student in that class dropped, after showing up for a total of 5 of the 19 days the group has met. Nine of the original twenty-six 102 students have dropped or been booted out: again, 35 percent of them. Two have not been coming to class but are still turning in A- or B-level papers, and so I’ve quietly neglected to drop them.

In the noon 101 section, however, only one person dropped, and he was quickly replaced, leaving that section fully enrolled at twenty-five. The hour is slightly more decent; and besides, that class is such a soap opera they probably keep coming just to see what will happen next.

Hmmm… I see there’s one soul in there that I should drop…he seems to have stopped attending after the twelfth meeting. Hasn’t turned in any papers to speak of, either. Ugh. I’ve signed in to the District’s secret grading site three times already this morning…do I have to jump through that hoop again?

Interestingly, at the Great Desert University (at least when I was teaching there), instructors could not unilaterally drop a student. If a student who quit coming to class wanted to avoid getting an F in the course, he or she would have to drop the course proactively. I was not allowed to withdraw them. That certainly made life a lot easier.

To my mind, on the college level attendance should be irrelevant. We’re not in high school anymore, Toto! If the person submits the work with passing grades and manages to show up for and pass the exams, then presumably said person has shown mastery of the subject matter or skills and should pass the course. So, IMHO, all this attendance-tracking is yet another waste of time.

As if quite enough time weren’t already being wasted.

To add to the wastage, if I drop someone and she comes back to haunt, begging to be let back in, then I’ve got to jump through still MORE hoops to track down paperwork, fill it out, sign it, and turn it in to the registrar’s office. That, of course, does not incline one to eject students at the 45th day, when the school is hot to know who’s where, because of course who wants to kill still more time fiddling with getting a bunch of them back into their courses?

Wouldn’t you know the largest section would contain all the pains in the tuchus? Don’t suppose it matters: a class of fifteen with three pains still provides the same number of pains in the tuchus as does a class of twenty-five with three pains.

Jeez. It’s time to head off to a Chamber meeting. Time passes so fast when you’re having fun.

Posted in Community Colleges, Online coursework, Students | Leave a comment

Countdown to Freedom: 10/23/2012

by Melete Posted on October 23, 2012

Twenty-eight days to go.

Weird, difficult day. When I said I hate the noon TTh class more than I hate the 7:30 a.m. MW class, I wasn’t kidding.

By ten or eleven in the morning, I’m usually on a roll. That would be real work a-rolling, not the junior college stuff for which I’m paid next to nothing. Soo…having to drop everything at 11:15 to traipse out to the campus and put on a dog and pony show for students most of whom pay little or no attention is more than a nuisance. It rubs my nose in the rather dreadful opportunity cost of this semester’s teaching venture.

Today I was in the middle of wrestling with the computer and the scanner to accomplish a job that really needed to be done this morning. As the struggle goes on, time passes. Eleven-fifteen comes and goes. Eleven-twenty. Eleven-thirty…. Finally as the thing belatedly goes through, I glance up at the clock and see, holy gawd, it’s 11:35.

I’d met some friends for breakfast, so at least I’d smeared enough paint on my face to cover the ravages of time. But I wasn’t dressed for teaching. As I start to peel off the work-worn jeans the phone rings: business contact. Not inclined to hang up. I keep talking as I’m yanking off clothes and squeezing myself into a better outfit.

By the time we get off the phone, it’s after twenty to twelve.

On a good day, it takes twenty minutes to drive to the Heavenly Gardens campus. I jump in the car and roar off down the street. Naturally, I hit every. single. red. light. between. here. and. the. freeway. It’s ten till by the time I roar up the onramp. The Dog Chariot’s six-banger is old, but mercifully it still will tool along nicely at 80 mph.

I fly onto the campus…and of course, there’s not a single space to park, not a crip space, not a faculty space, and naturally not a student space. I park illegally and run, sciatica and plantar fasciitis and all, to the classroom. Poke my head in the door, say “I’ll be back as soon as I can find a parking space,” and race back to the parking lot just in time to avoid a ticket. The most annoying of the annoyances in this class sees me and hollers that I’m late and in a rage I inadvisedly yelp back, “Fuck YES I’m late!” Not good, considering this creature’s potential for trouble-making.

Finally find a place to park. Harangue students about peer-reviewing techniques. Ms. Annoyance lays her head on the desk and goes to sleep, which is good, because that keeps her quiet. Ms. Annoyance’s BFF looks like she’s suffering from a severe hangover but she manages to stay conscious. Mr. Aspberger and another guy get into it—after Mr. A lobs a pot-shot at a third student who is big enough and fast enough to turn him into cream cheese in about 30 seconds—and things start to get start to get  hot enough that one of the other men tells them to let it go. The three contenders settle into a prickly silence.

I just know there’s going to be a fight in that classroom one of these days.

Is this hideous semester EVER going to end?

From there I’m late to another appointment. Shoot off the campus, making a long cut through a parking lot to get around the 87 gerjillion alignment-wrecking speed bumps that litter the road out. Hit the freeway at 80 mph again. How many more years will the old heap last? Not many, at this rate…

It occurred to me that the heart palpitations could be some sort of GERD manifestation rather than, as suspected, the result of raw stress. Gulped down a number of Gaviscon. That theory appears to be wrong… My little heart is going pitty-pat as I sit here reliving this lovely day, and once again my head hurts. I suspect this semester will end, all right, when I keel over with a stroke.

When I got home around 5 p.m. two frantic e-mails awaited: one of the five nonresponsive online students I dropped yesterday—two days after the deadline I’d given them for turning in their three late assignments—was in a tizzy. How COULD anyone do such a thing to her (and, BTW, to her sister, who’s also signed up for the course and doing nothing)? Pasted the college’s policy about online course participation into the return e-mail—the same policy that appears in my syllabus; the same policy I had pasted into the e-mail I sent her last week promising to drop her if she didn’t show a sign of life by 5:00 p.m. on the 20th.

Oh well.

Passed a few moments this morning perusing websites of others who amuse themselves in the pursuit of adjunct teaching.

Along the way I rediscovered Copy and Paste, the website of activist Josh Boldt, creator of the Adjunct Project. He holds forth on a number of interesting topics, one of which caught my eye today: a quiet commentary that doesn’t quite rise to the level of a rant on the subject of the astonishingly annoying “five-paragraph essay,” a knee-jerk technique presently taught,with baleful results, to K-12 students. He refers us to his critique of this strategy, which appears at Nancy Flanagan’s Education Week blog, Teacher in a Strange Land.

The Adjunct Project has its own blog, compiled by various contributors. Some of the posts are enough to…well, to cause heart palpitations. Yes. For example, here’s a tale by a character who managed to make a living at adjunct teaching—by taking on thirty-five classes a year! I passed the link to this thing along to my associate editor, who remarked that, by juggling eight-week courses with the District and equally brief courses for the University of Phoenix (all of them online), she’s “teaching” twenty-four classes a year herself.

But not, we might add, making much of a living at it. She does this in addition to her full-time job editing the planet’s largest scholarly journal of organizational management, and in addition to taking on contract editorial jobs for The Copyeditor’s Desk as needed, and in addition to waiting tables several nights a week.

In the bizarreness department, isn’t it interesting that Boldt uses the same WordPress theme for Copy & Paste as I use for Adjunctorium? Weird coincidence. Possibly the minimalism brings to mind the stark penury of the adjunct predicament.

Enough. It’s past time for dinner. Past time to dose the fluttering heart with alcohol. That seems to be about the only thing that calms the adrenalin overload.

Twenty-eight more days from Hell to go.

 

 

Posted in Adjunct Poverty, General Miseries, Students, Teaching composition | Leave a comment

Countdown to Freedom: 10/22/2012

by Melete Posted on October 22, 2012

Twenty-nine days to go.

Welp, we’ve broken the –30– barrier. That’s something. I guess.

This morning I dropped five of the errant Magazine Writing students. Two others self-deported, as it were, by proactively dropping the course.

One person responded to my reminder that they were supposed to have done not one, not two, but three assignments by last Friday with the report that she’d had surgery last Thursday.

Captain Bligh

This twangs one’s heartstrings, no? You’d have to be Capt. Bligh not to respond empathetically.

Well. Sure. Until she lets it slip that this was elective surgery, done “out of town.” The Blackboard site for this course went live two weeks before the course began last Monday. My e-mail was posted prominently on that site’s homepage.

If you know you’re going to be put out of commission in the first week of a course you’ve signed up for and you know the instructor’s name and e-mail address, wouldn’t it make sense to send a message?

Dear Ms. Boxankle:

I have surgery scheduled on October 18. I will have to travel to Phnom Penh to have the operation done, and so it looks like I won’t be able to participate in your online course until the second week. Will that be all right? I will try to get the first week’s assignments in as soon as I’m well enough to type.

I hope you will bear with me. Thank you for your indulgence.

Worshipfully,

Your Subservient Student

How hard is that, anyway?

I told her I’d accept her work late if she could send me something from the doctor or hospital showing the surgery took place.

Just when you think public education has been dumbed down as low as you can get, you stumble across some brilliant new innovation. Students are already arriving in my classrooms unable to write (or to read) cursive. They print everything, slooowlyyyy and painstaaaaaakinglyyyy. Now we have this: why bother to teach them algebra, since most of them will never have any use for it and besides none of them can understand it, anyway?

The 101 students are running up to their cause-and-effect paper, a vast 750-word tome on causes, effects, or both of some issue related to one of the class’s four subtopics on public education in America.

Instructor: Get together in your groups and brainstorm ideas for causes and effects of issues related to your topic. Then write down your topic on a piece of paper and hand it in before  you leave.

Students:

I’m writing about the cause and affect of furthering your education.

Effects in the job market from not going to college.

The cause and effect of an increase in college students.

My topic is the purpose of school. Specifically, the cause and effect of the purpose of education. The answer may seem very simple, but maybe with some research and opinions of others it might be more detailed and complex.

Education and the income gap.

Meanwhile, the 102s are starting to work on their 2,500-word position paper.

Instructor: Get together in your groups and brainstorm ideas for causes and effects of issues related to your topic. Then write down your topic on a piece of paper and hand it in before  you leave.

Students:

Government jobs and military jobs should require a education to get a job in the government field because it will protect our [illegible] security level.

My position on deportation. I believe we should all be given a chance to succeed regardless of background.

Something along the lines of how they say every little thing is bullying when it’s not.

No Child Left Behind and standardized testing is not helping the students it is harming.

{sigh} I’m supposed to read 2,500 words of this? No: make that fifty thousand words of like drivel: 2,500 words x 20 students.

What. Is. The. Point?

Well, you can see why educators think there’s no point in teaching algebra—what’s the use, when few of them will learn it any better than they’ve learned to use their native language?

Image: Portrait of William Bligh. Painted by J. Ruffell, royal painter to His Majesty and Their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and Duke of York; engraved by J. Condé. Frontispiece in A Voyage to the South Sea, Undertaken by Command of His Majesty, for the Purpose of Conveying the Bread-Fruit Tree to the West Indies, in His Majesty’s Ship The Bounty, Commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh. London: George Nichol, ca. 1792. Public Domain.

 

 

Posted in Online coursework, Students | 6 Comments

Countdown to Freedom: 10/19/2012

by Melete Posted on October 19, 2012

Thirty more class meetings to go.

That’s not thirty more days. That’s just class meetings. Fifteen English 101 meetings and fifteen English 102 meetings. The online course adds seven days a week of riding herd over the next 8 weeks: that would be 56 more real-life days of lovely teaching activities.

Well, subtract five from that: the online course officially started on Monday. Fifty-one real-life days to go.

Which of the two F2F courses is the greater annoyance? The one that starts at 7:30 in the morning, requiring me to shoot out of the house at 6:45 a.m. every Monday and every Wednesday? Or the one that starts at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays, biting a big chunk of productive time out of two days each week?

I think it’s the Tuesday-Thursday class. The Monday-Wednesday class, though it starts too damn early in the morning and I hate hitting the ground with my feet running and I truly loathe dealing with rush-hour crazies, at least hosts students who are reasonably polite and sane. If any of them are insane, they keep a lid on it.

But the mid-day T/Th class? Holy CRAP!

Two people in that section are just batshit. One of them is marginally aggressive, and the other is the single worst pest…no, make that one of the top contenders for All-Career Single Worst Pest status. She’s just a gawdawful nuisance, interrupting all the time, making me repeat stuff I’ve already said a half-dozen times, and annoying other students. Other pests have afflicted me over the years. This one may not take the cake, but she comes mighty close to it. And she has 15 more opportunities to win the prize.

Three others in the section are a little strange…oh, make that four. The fourth is endearingly strange. The other three…just strange. They seem harmless, though, and they’re quiet. But the two that make me nuts are vocal, crazy, annoying as hell, and difficult.

Yes. Definitely the Tuesday-Thursday section. I’m developing a flinch reflex about it. I dread going to class because I don’t know what is going to happen next, and I just hate dealing with fruitcakes.

I wouldn’t enjoy encountering either of these two crackpots once. Having to deal with both of them twice a week for 16 weeks and then one more time for a pointless “final exam” period is enough to make me crazier than they are.

Speaking of the online section, nine of the twenty students enrolled in that class have turned in nothing. Three things were due by today:

• A response to my e-mail to them asking them to confirm that they know the class started Monday and that they intend to participate.
• A few lines of introduction, telling me & classmates something about themselves and why they want to take a magazine writing course.
• A quiz over the syllabus.

Yes. To get college-level students to read your fukkin’ syllabus, you have to make them take a quiz over it. No joke.

I think the latter wasn’t due until midnight, so a few may yet surface.

Of the nine stray sheep, four have never shown any sign of life at all. One had her sister respond to the email, she presumably being too lazy to say “hello” herself. Four replied to the e-mail but have done nothing else.

This means that tomorrow morning I will have to send all nine of them e-mails explaining that they have to turn in the assignments on time, not whenever they feel like it, if they expect me to refrain from dropping them from the course.

Kinda hate to do that…lest they respond and save themselves from being booted out. If I can get rid of these people, then I’ll only have 11 students in the class. One or two of those will drop when they realize that magazine writing demands actual work, if you can imagine. And that will leave a manageable enrollment for an online course.

 Think I’m getting a migraine. Either that or a stroke. Let’s hope for the worst. Then I won’t have to do this anymore.

Posted in Online coursework, Students | 1 Comment