You might not have noticed without my pointing it out, but several of the links at right have changed. I now have my very own subdomain for networked teaching projects, machines.pomona.edu, and so I’ve migrated my old projects (including the MarxWiki) to the new space. If you’ve linked to or bookmarked any of those projects, please update the URLs; the older versions will go away shortly.
Someday I will discover the secret to making the first day of class not desperately dull. Alas, I haven’t figured it out yet. The dullness has in part to do with the emphasis on policy-download during that first session, which is simply tedious, any way you slice it. But it also has to do with my first-day nervousness, which makes me unfocused and a bit blathery.
This is far from an ideal combination.
That said, I’m very excited by both of my classes, both by the material I’ve laid out for us to work on this semester and by the students who’ve signed up. (Assuming I haven’t bored them all away yet.) It promises to be a great, if busy, fall.
My classes, both of which will be blogging this semester:
– ENGL 170L, Special Topics in Contemporary Fiction: Writing Machines.
– MS 190, Senior Seminar in Media Studies: Authorship.
After a particularly obnoxious argument over a final grade a couple of semesters ago, I decided to dramatically revamp the grading policy that I include in all my syllabi. The dispute made clear to me that certain students (by no means all students, and I’d venture not even the majority of my students, but some students, nonetheless) have a sense that, in classes like the ones I teach, everyone begins the semester with an A, and that, barring any serious gaffes, they can end the semester with that A, easy-peasy.
This has never been how I have approached grading, and I thought I might avoid a number of niggling grade disputes if I communicated my actual practice of grading as straight-forwardly as possible. I’ve only used this policy one semester so far—last fall, before I went on leave—but I had no complaints. I’m testing it out again, and thought I’d post it here for comment. And just generally to share, in the event that you’re looking for this sort of thing.
Letters of recommendation.
*sigh*
I’ve just posted what follows on Machine, the aggregator blog from this semester’s Theories of New Media class. I’d asked the class to post concluding thoughts thinking about the blog exercise, what they’d gotten out of it, how it affected their writing, what they wish had happened differently, and so forth. Their comments provoked some of my own thoughts on what worked and what didn’t, and particularly on what I’ll do differently next time.
Today’s the last day of classes here in Claremont, and given that I’m very, very shortly outta here (first, holidays; then, vacation; after, blissful months-long period of reading and writing)—well, needless to say, I’m happy. But also sad. And I wanted to take a few minutes to contemplate the sadness before beginning the mad dash to get my leave started.
Certainly this is more for my benefit than for yours, but here’s what now remains before the sabbatical begins:
That, and a bunch of packing, in the next month. That is what stands between me and freedom. Looking at it like that makes it seem a miniscule barrier, one easily gotten over. But ask me again in a couple of weeks how I’m feeling about it…
Meg’s recent hints of students in crisis over at xoom raises a question for me, one I’ve been wondering about for some time. This really is more hypothetical than actual, at the moment, but it’s had moments of actuality, and I’m just kinda wondering how to handle it should it arise again in the future.
Say, for instance, that one of your students, or former students, gave you her LiveJournal URL—she reads your blog, and invited you to read hers. And say that, through her friends list, you come upon a community composed of many students from your institution. And say that, perhaps, you peek into that community from time to time, just to get a sense of the campus vibe. No judgments. No real sense of what LJ belongs to whom. Just a curiosity, as I say, about the general sense of things on campus and an enjoyment, mostly, of the writing.
Say, though, that through a series of circumstances you sorta accidentally figure out who the author of one such journal is—not a student of yours personally, perhaps, but a student of whom you are aware. And say that you become familiar enough with this student through her LJ to get the impression that, of late, she’s become massively depressed, and that her academic life is suffering because of it.
What do you do? You’ve come to this conclusion via information that you’re sorta not supposed to have, and through a source that might indicate more venting and hyperbole than actual factual representation. On the other hand, if the student really is in crisis, you ought to tell someone, right? Someone who can at least do a subtle check-in and see if everything’s okay? But what do you say?
Today’s the first day of classes. Today’s also the day I decided to start eenching (which is like inching, only more painful) my alarm clock earlier.
This morning, despite the fact that my alarm clock was set for 6.45, something woke me up like a shot at precisely 5.30.
Thanks, Internets!
You know what I love? Designing new classes. I love sitting at my computer with about ten browser tabs running, each with some bibliographic source or somebody else’s online syllabus, just imagining possibilities: what if I paired the Bush and Nelson with the Borges? Should Kittler come before or after McLuhan? Oh, yes, and then if I teach Landow, I’ve got to teach Aarseth, because oh, the controversy!*
It’s thrilling, imagining new combinations of material and the conversations that might arise from them. And so I do this nearly every year, and when I’m not designing new classes, I’m redesigning old ones. It keeps things fresh, new, alive.
But here are the problems with this relentless need to innovate: first off, I inevitably get so amazed by the possibilities presented by any given class that I totally overload it with material. A reasonable syllabus, with a reasonable quantity of reading, always strikes me as inadequate, missing several key texts that absolutely must be included.
Second, I never fail to include a few things that I ought to have read by now but haven’t. The up side of this is that teaching new texts is one of the few ways that I actually get to read them, but the down sides are plentiful: sometimes it turns out that the new texts don’t work as well in the course as I’d hoped; often it turns out that I’ve got less time to do a really attentive reading and preparation of the text than I really need.
Teaching new classes, semester in and semester out, is exhausting, and yet I can’t quite stop myself. Every year I say, no more new classes. I’ve got tenure now; next year I recycle old material, and innovation be damned! But every year I wind up tinkering, or building all new syllabi. It’s a compulsion. And I know I’m going to kick myself in the fall for what I’m doing this week, but this week I’m having enormous amounts of fun, just imagining the possibilities.
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*Quite obviously, one of the new classes I’m designing for the fall is on new media theory, and I’m completely fired up about it. I’m adapting some portions of this course from the Literary Machine class of a couple of years ago, but a little over half of the class is new. I’m also teaching—for the first time, believe it or not—our intro to the English major course, and as an overload (yeah, yeah, yeah), I’m teaching the first half of the Intro to Cultural Studies course up at the graduate school. This last is heavily adapted from my undergrad Marxism and Cultural Studies course, though, so I’m really hoping that prep can be minimal, and that such minimal prep won’t be a liability.
