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The Scientist posted:[...] It is. I read it years and years ago and set it aside, and I was blown away when I came back to it.
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Feb 28, 2011 20:39
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bummer dude posted:I just found this thread a couple of weeks ago and I'm still working my way through it so forgive me if you have already answered these. It has been a great joy for me especially your insights on the academy and pedagogy. I'm glad it's working for you, man. quote:Reading this thread I can't help feeling like your style is somewhat akin to David Foster Wallace, particularly your heavy use of footnotes and a common appreciation of both high and low culture. Do you see any truth in this comparison? Do you like DFW's work? I do and I'm flattered to be compared with him. I've said some about DFW here, but the short version's that I think he is (was) an essayist of staggering ability. I don't think that anything I do in writing approaches what he does in, say, Consider the Lobster. quote:OK onto a pedagogical question. I am a Ph.D. student in sociology at a large public research university as such my tuition and stipend require that I TA. I actually really like teaching (I was an adult literacy instructor before going back to school), but I constantly feel frustrated with my current teaching situation. Being a big public school, I am responsible for teaching 3 discussion sections, 2 have 30 students and the third has 50.[...] Wow. I think the first thing to keep in mind is that these are "discussion" sessions in nothing but name. I can see why your fellow TAs lecture during them, since it would be very, very difficult to do anything else. Especially when some percentage of these students are reluctant to begin with, and probably all the more reluctant for sitting in an overstuffed section. What you should do here depends on what you want to accomplish, but I think any successful lesson in this type of setting will need to be highly structured and have clear, challenging goals. The reason (or one reason) your discussion involves you and the same handful of students is because topical discussion is basically impossible among more than about ten people. More than that, and you'll have ([class population]-10) sitting on the sidelines, passively listening or worse. What I'm saying is, I don't think class-guided discussion is a pedagogical option in groups of this size. I think you've shown good thinking in using small groups to start things, but my guess is that the groups vary widely in quality and that bringing them back for a discussion as a whole class yields mixed results at best. Were I in your position, I'd abandon conventional discussion almost entirely and build small (two or three person) groups around problem-based learning or similar exercises. (At least as long as this fits whatever goals you're allowed to set for the "discussion" sessions.) So say lecture that week covered, I dunno, the Milgram Experiment. I might see if I could write some kind of problem based on e.g. the McDonald's strip search scam -- maybe involving writing some rationale for whether a sentence of however many years would be appropriate for e.g. a manager who performed a strip search on behalf of a caller who identified himself as a policeman. Once the groups are finished writing their rationale (and each member is consequently up on the Milgram Experiment thanks to group interaction), you can pair groups up according to their opinion on the exercise, or assign groups roles of advocating for e.g. either a light or heavy sentence and pair them up to form larger groups that engage in a constructed debate. I'm not saying that's a good exercise -- it may not be, depending on what role your discussion sections are supposed to play. But it does provide the focus it'll take to reach most of the class.
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Feb 28, 2011 21:51
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Thanks for the advice Brainworm. Small directed activities have definitely been the most successful, so I'll keep working with those with the occasional supplementary lecture/comments. It's just hard to give up on group discussion when that was the model that I saw (and enjoyed) as an undergrad.
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Mar 1, 2011 03:06
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bummer dude posted:Thanks for the advice Brainworm. Small directed activities have definitely been the most successful, so I'll keep working with those with the occasional supplementary lecture/comments. It's just hard to give up on group discussion when that was the model that I saw (and enjoyed) as an undergrad. Yeah. I was thinking about this last night. I don't like advising anyone to give up discussion just because that's what I would do. Mostly because what I would do and what I say I would do don't always line up. I mean, when an administrative structure hands me something that's broken by design, like a "discussion" section with fifty students in it, my "what I say I would do" response is something like "clearly the administration does not want a discussion session, because they wouldn't populate it with fifty students if they did." So I think about what I can do with fifty students that's likely to be as good a learning experience as possible for all of them, and accept whatever limitations I think are in place. In this case, that means small, focused group exercises. But if you didn't mind some weirdness, you could have discussion. Good discussion needs both small groups and facilitation, so as long as you have space for groups to work all you really need are facilitators. So you could conspire with some of your other TAs to share out course planning and show up at each other's discussion sessions -- I've seen that happen before. It takes a good deal more time and somewhat less work from everyone, and was regular practice among TAs in Engineering and the hard sciences while I was at Lehigh. In a similar situation, back when I was adjuncting at a community college in an enormous comp class, I deputized about a half dozen of the better students to help plan discussion and class sessions with me, and I'd work with them before class to see that they knew whatever material well. They would then each lead small group discussion for that part of class, run small-group peer review, and so on. I didn't get complaints about that, but I'd be surprised if conventional undergraduates at a state college didn't make some noise about a class running that way. Your deputies need to dedicate somewhat more time outside of class than your non-deputies, and you can't deputize just anyone or rotate these jobs evenly through the class -- a slacker as a deputy is going to kill a class for a whole group, and may complain loudly or even effectively when you fail him for it.
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Mar 1, 2011 19:27
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Pardon me, but what's up with the use of * footnotes? Is there an agreed-upon standard for the use of footnotes? I've read some books recently (technical, about the stock market) that used such a heavy amount of footnotes that it was downright annoying and disruptive. Every other page would be 30% footnotes, and I can't help but read them anyway. Why not just write everything out sequentially?
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Mar 3, 2011 16:16
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Help. I think I'm turning into a medievalist... I know you're a Shakespearean, but do you have any particular thoughts on The Tragedy of Mariam, The Roaring Girl, The Rover, Bell in Campo, or Masque of Blackness/Beauty? I'm fishing around for a research topic for an Early Modern Drama seminar.
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Mar 4, 2011 04:16
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Pilsner posted:Pardon me, but what's up with the use of * footnotes? Is there an agreed-upon standard for the use of footnotes? I've read some books recently (technical, about the stock market) that used such a heavy amount of footnotes that it was downright annoying and disruptive. Every other page would be 30% footnotes, and I can't help but read them anyway. Why not just write everything out sequentially? The only standard I'm aware of -- at least a standard that applies across publications and disciplines -- it that footnotes may be used for references or parenthetical information. I think it's also fair to say that footnotes get used in deeply creative ways by e.g. David Foster Wallace, Mark Danielewski, Ander Monson, etc., and that part of the pleasure in reading their text is exactly the kind of distraction you find so irritating in other places. But in the kinds of books you're reading, footnotes are going to be mostly documentary -- pointing to articles on a specific point, providing short lists of statistics, glosses, definitions, references, and so forth. In these and like cases, the role of footnotes is referential; one would not read through them for the same basic reasons one would not read through a dictionary, and including them in the body of the text would leave readers wading through a swamp of loosely-connected ideas. I do not think it would make pleasant reading. Also, I think that the preponderance of footnotes in e.g. textbooks and technical documents comes from other places, though. Most textbooks are written by academics and farms of graduate students (or a technical writing team lead and farms of subordinates) and, long story short, the structure of their compensation usually rewards dumping massive amounts of basically irrelevant information into footnotes rather than (a) cutting it entirely or (b) introducing further appendices, endnotes, glossaries, or other more appropriate depositories for footnoted material.
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Mar 4, 2011 16:54
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An English professor?! Excuse me for bothering you with this, but do you happen to have any experience with MLA citations? They are kicking my rear end. I just waded into my papers work cited page, and I am having a hell of a time figuring out what to do. I think almost all my works are atypical. Maybe you can help guide me through this? No worries if not. I have a quote or two from "Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy" which you can find here: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/index.html . The specific quote is from part 3 (chapter 3?) which is a pdf here: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/pdf/08decl1.pdf , on page 58. Page 459 of my Rules for Writers MLA guide says when citing a govt. source you "treat the agency as the author, giving the name of the government followed by the name of the department and the agency, if any." From what I can tell, this was a commission enacted by statute, so not a typical congressional commission. Who is the govt. agency in this case? Is there a standard way to refer to the US govt. here? United States, I would guess? Oh wait, there is more! Another great source I found is a video of a panel put on by The Churchill Club: http://www.churchillclub.org/aboutGeneralInfo.jsp , panel details here: http://www.churchillclub.org/eventDetail.jsp?EVT_ID=892 . The specific video of the panel I have been referencing is on youtube. For the purpose of citation, does this count as FILM OR VIDEO, ONLINE VIDEO CLIP, or something else? It would almost work better if I cited it as an interview. This internet thing has really made a mess of citations! Thank you for any assistance!
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Mar 4, 2011 23:06
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Grouco posted:I know you're a Shakespearean, but do you have any particular thoughts on The Tragedy of Mariam, The Roaring Girl, The Rover, Bell in Campo, or Masque of Blackness/Beauty? I'm fishing around for a research topic for an Early Modern Drama seminar. Well, these are all in my area. I'm a Shakespearean by teaching load and research preference more than by training. So: The Tragedy of Mariam You could do a lot with this. If I remember correctly, Cary's play was never performed, but was instead written as part of Elizabeth Cary's and her husband's literary association or friendship with Ben Jonson. And of course Mariam is the "fair queen of Jewry." So there are a few interesting possibilities: * You could contrast standards of female conduct in Mariam with, say, the ones articulated in Jonson's Epicoene. * You could contrast Mariam with Marlowe's Barabas or Shakespeare's Shylock on the basis of their shared religion, or historicize Cary using e.g. Shapiro's Shakespeare and the Jews. * You could contrast Mariam with other tragic queens, e.g. Shakespeare's Cleopatra or Marlowe's Dido. Much the same applies to The Roaring Girl. Given the subject matter, I think a comparison to Epicoene is probably apt, and it's commonly read alongside e.g. Gilbert's Early Modern Hermaphrodites and (in a New Historicist way) against medical publications that pretended to explain cases of spontaneous gender change using a rhetoric of "heat." The Rover Behn is always interesting, and Rover is a great way to examine her relationship with John Wilmot, her place among Restoration Libertines both in England and on the continent, and her relationship to the Cavalier poets like Herrick. Check e.g. Hesperides 221, 1113, 237, 816 for Cavalier continuities with libertines that are based on more than a relaxed sexual morality. Masque of Blackness/Beauty This is another good one. I don't know about the breadth or scope of the project you want to take on, but you can certainly use this to examine the relationship between Jonson and Jones (always great), Early Modern racial politics (confusing), or the uses of official courtly spectacle that Greenblatt describes in "Invisible Bullets" (and almost everywhere else). Bell in Campo This isn't Mad Madge at her weirdest or most utopian, but you can certainly read it against revolutionary utopias, like the ones articulated by the Diggers and the Levellers. I haven't read this in probably a decade, so I mistrust saying more. I know that's brief, but it's also inside baseball. I'm glad to talk to you more about specific projects if you want to email or PM me.
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Mar 8, 2011 16:36
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What languages have you studied? Do you find the process of learning language rewarding? How did you decide what you wanted to study and how did you bring it to bear on your research or specialty in general?
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Mar 9, 2011 06:27
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Kaluza-Klein posted:An English professor?! Excuse me for bothering you with this, but do you happen to have any experience with MLA citations? They are kicking my rear end. Yeah. That's a mess, but the good news is that I think you're overthinking this considerably. Apart from and above matters of formatting, the whole point of citation is to make it as easy as possible for readers to find your sources. So I would choose the citation format that comes closest to including and rationally ordering all the information you believe your reader will need. I can include two sad points of fact here, if it helps: (1) I have footnoted or otherwise annotated citations many a time. Those notes often look like "The CLRO records were being moved to a new office and reordered during my research. Documents in series 1900-1998 are now listed in series 2500 and will apparently be stored in the basements of the new CLRO buildings" or "this is a 1928 summary of a now-lost manuscript account of the exchequer's inquiry." Point is, if you want people to be able to find your sources in real-world research, standard formula citations are often inadequate. (2) If you look in the notes of any scholarly book or article from just about any discipline, you'll discover that even the simple citations are a mess. Seriously. Author names and title names are usually correct, but you'll run into baffling problems if you try to track down all of the sources someone used to write even a short book. I don't know why this is, and I don't (generally) suspect deception or anything of that caliber. It's instead a conspiracy of small-circulation journals, nearly impossible-to-catch typos in citations,* publisher consolidation, poor record-keeping, and so on. I can't tell you how many times I've had to call or email a writer to track down a cited source during my own research thanks to, say, a publisher's typo. So in your case of the "Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy," I'd either abandon the idea of an author entirely, or look in the document to see if any authors are credited (or whether it has any signatories). I'd then use a citation method that leads the reader to your PDF version of the document (which may differ from e.g. print versions or other electronic versions of the same report). Past that, I wouldn't sweat it. * I mean, if you're copyediting a text, are you sure the article that this footnote cites didn't start on, say, page 138 instead of 238? Are you sure it's Shakespeare Quarterly 28 and not 27? And would any sane person consider it worthwhile to check thousands of footnotes for these kinds of mistakes?
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Mar 9, 2011 21:15
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Do you still resent high school English teachers? You mentioned this on page 1 or 2; looking back I couldn't find the quote.
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Mar 10, 2011 01:07
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I've copied the posts that you're probably thinking of below. Neither one expresses any real "resentment" for teachers.Brainworm posted:dancehall posted: Brainworm posted:quote:
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Mar 10, 2011 01:31
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Brainworm – First, I echo the sentiments of many in this thread by saying “thank you.” I’m teaching Shakespeare, for the first time, this semester and many of your answers/thoughts have helped me – and my students – see the texts in new, interesting ways. My question is this (and my apologies if it’s been addressed before): The students seem to “get” the play [Hamlet] after I talk about the assigned readings in class but struggle with the text on their own, complaining about the language (“It’s too tough to read/understand”). Do you have any thoughts/suggestions on how to break down the language “barrier” of Shakespeare?
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Mar 10, 2011 03:56
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This thread alone is worth the price of SA admission. Thank you. I'm always interested in hearing about other (more successful) people's work space. So I have to ask, what do you consider your optimum writing environment? Do you have a favorite chair? Do you prefer some light jazz playing in the background? Do you commandeer one of the corner tables at Starbucks? Are you most productive first thing in the morning, or maybe last thing before bed? Do you keep a bevy of snacks at arm's reach? Do you gaze at a marble bust of Shakespeare for inspiration? Do you commit yourself to writing for 6, 7, 8+ hour uninterrupted marathons? Are you most lucid while slightly buzzed? Basically, I'd like to hear what you require to ensure the most successful writing session possible. What works best for you?
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Mar 10, 2011 15:35
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:Do you still resent high school English teachers? You mentioned this on page 1 or 2; looking back I couldn't find the quote. I'm not sure "resent" is exactly the right word, though I've probably used it before. The reasons for this are complicated. Part of it has to do with the categorical failures of American secondary school education, which I think we're all familiar with and which I won't treat here in any great detail. Some of these failures are strictly academic: students can't do X well, where X is some basic skill. But many of these failures are edu-social: students do not study habitually or according to any coherent method, for instance. I'm not sure HS teachers deserve much blame for the first, but they're in pretty deep on the second. I mean, I have never heard of a "study hall" class that attempted to teach, or even offer materials on, study methods or skills. Neither have I heard of a regularly-offered course that exclusively and explicitly focused on teaching learning and study strategies. That seems perverse. If you're blowing billions of dollars in taxpayer money to send millions of students to school to learn, shouldn't the first thing they learn be how to learn, and how to assess their own learning? And shouldn't those skills be continually revisited and further developed as a student progresses? But that's not what happens. Instead, assessments of student learning are implemented at an institutional level and students are taught to game the instruments used to measure it. Goalposts, like "any High School graduate ought to be able to do X, Y, and Z" are usually articulated somewhere, but I've never heard of a high school student who was given a set of skills he or she ought to be able to demonstrate competence in by graduation. Don't get me wrong. Those skills are measured by tests (or at least by well-designed and well-implemented tests) that I think have extremely specific goals in mind, and teachers who teach to those tests may be implicitly teaching to those goals. But at the same time those goals are apparently kept secret from students at all costs. I mean, really? The message is something like "I'm going to put you in a building to learn stuff for twelve years. What you're supposed to learn, I'm not going to tell you. How you're supposed to learn it, I'm not going to tell you either. Instead, I'm going to give you a series of short-term goals that don't clearly articulate with one another, and while the knowledge and skills you accumulate may be used for some greater purpose, I'm not going to tell you what it is." Well, no poo poo there are problems. A second smaller issue has to do with unionization and its politics, which I hate having to discuss in the context of Wisconsin, etc. Long story short, I don't think union busting is going to lead to better educations for students, but I also doubt that the presence of e.g. the NEA in its current form does much to improve educational quality. Moreover, it erects barriers to entering the profession -- when you've got PhD holders adjuncting for $2500 a course while a BA or BS holder in the same field doesn't have to compete with that adjunct for a full-time teaching job, that's a problem.
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Mar 10, 2011 19:54
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Brainworm posted:I'm not sure "resent" is exactly the right word, though I've probably used it before. The reasons for this are complicated. Are you familiar at all with John Taylor Gatto? He's kind of a radical, and I don't agree with him on every point, but I've found a lot think about from what I've read by him. The seven lesson schoolteacher: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt is a nice angry piece to start with.
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Mar 10, 2011 22:51
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Brainworm, you are getting a lot of love, and you deserve all of it. A truly great thread. I hope you don't mind if I keep asking questions. As an academic discipline, English looks to Continental philosophers for guidance -- Foucault, Marx, Derrida, Freud, for instance. But, hardly any English professor (as far as I know) pays any attention to analytic philosophy, even though most Anglo-American philosophers are analytic. How come? Do you think this is a mistake?
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Mar 12, 2011 13:39
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Brainworm posted:I think the best advice I can give is treat teaching like it's your major area. Because if you want a teaching-centered job, it is. A week after you posted this, I found out that the American Musicological Society had just started a new Journal of Music History Pedagogy. So I guess it's very timely advice. But I have two follow up questions: Can you point me towards articles or publications that do what you're talking about here? Good examples? I can imagine what you're talking about, but seeing it executed would be tremendously helpful. How much freedom do you have to do these things as a grad student? Is it common for grad students to end up designing their own courses? Seems like you'd need to be running the course to run little "studies" like this.
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Mar 13, 2011 20:25
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What are your feelings about Charles Bernstein? He's pretty awesome, but I find of his poetry to be kinda ridiculous. His poem "Lift Off" for example; I can't find it anywhere online except in small snippets, but it's basically two pages of this.quote:HH/ ie,s obVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineocpcy I Also, just want to chime in and say that Heart of Darkness is one of the best English language books, which is especially impressive when you consider that Joseph Conrad didn't speak a word of English until his twenties.
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Mar 14, 2011 06:40
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Naked Man Punch posted:Brainworm – Thanks man. quote:My question is this (and my apologies if it’s been addressed before): The students seem to “get” the play [Hamlet] after I talk about the assigned readings in class but struggle with the text on their own, complaining about the language (“It’s too tough to read/understand”). Do you have any thoughts/suggestions on how to break down the language “barrier” of Shakespeare? I don't think I've talked about this specifically before. If I have I don't remember, anyway. Since I've started teaching I think I've grown a few insights on student responses to Shakespeare: Students sometimes read genre difficulties as language difficulties. That is, reading a play written in modern English is generally difficult for students who are used to reading novels, since novels explain a great deal more than scripts do. After all, a novel is a finished product. A script is more like an animal's skeleton or the frame of a car; it's not a finished product, but a complete piece of what will become the finished product. So there is sometimes confusion. Students who read Shakespeare and don't understand it will often point to the language as their barrier, since the language is conspicuously unusual. But walking through a "reverse scriptwriting" exercise (e.g. asking them to write a script from a scene of a TV show) can show them how much (and what kinds) of work they need to do to as readers to apprehend the finished product. So can short introductions to scriptreading, like Ball's Backwards and Forwards. Shakespearean drama is often entertainment rather than imitation of life. That is, students sometimes think that Shakespearean dialogue sounds artificial, stilted, or unnatural, and of course they are correct. There is very little about Shakespeare that is realistic in any meaningful sense of the word, and consequently very little about his drama that is accessible through one's lived experience. What happens on stage is supposed to be entertaining, but there is little realism about it, as there is little realism in ballet or opera or game shows. In other words, part of student difficulties with Shakespearean language have to do with the expectations they bring to the text; a student might usefully ask "what is happening in the text?" But sometimes when you ask them to ask that, they're really asking "what is the literal meaning of every line in the text and under what conditions would a person express himself in such a way?" Which leads me to: Students obsess over details. At least, there is a common kind of student who confuses reading carefully with producing a modern English translation of every Shakespearean line in his head. I don't think there is anything terribly wrong with this as long as this student realizes that much of what happens in a play is not expressed in the dialogue or (in Shakespeare's case) in stage direction. It must be divined by the reader who imagines the characters on stage and doing things that their dialogue requires (but does not say) that they do. Take these lines from Hamlet III.iv: quote:Gertrude: Have you forgot me? The Shakespearean language in these lines should not present any difficulties for most readers. They are neither densely tropic nor allusive. There are no long speeches. But consider what a reader needs to know (or guess) in order for these lines to make sense. Working backwards, Polonius must say his lines in a way that reveals where he is hidden -- he can't whisper them to himself, for instance. Likewise, Gertrude must believe that her life is in danger, which is a condition outside of Hamlet's speech. His lines do not intimate violence. He does not say "sit down or else," or "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry." So me must do something. But exactly what is up to the reader. And before that, a reader must decide what Gertrude means by "I'll set those to you that can speak." The literal meaning of these lines is not really clear -- maybe something like "I'll account your accusations to our words, not to my actions" or "you're saying those things that way because you're angry, not because I'm wrong." And here, a reader who obsesses over the literal meaning of those lines is going to end up hopelessly confused. Gertrude isn't saying "I'm acting dismissive." She's actually acting dismissive, and in that sense the literal content of what she says is not nearly as important as the way the line is acted, which is what makes its meaning and importance clear. Maybe Gertrude turns her back on Hamlet as she says this. Maybe she sighs in exasperation. But my point is that the line is unclear; a reader needs to accept responsibility for giving the line a sensible meaning, and I doubt any amount of reading or re-reading it, of looking through footnotes, etc. is going to improve the reader's situation if he approaches the line in the same way he approaches a line in a novel. So when it comes to breaking down the language barrier, this is usually where I focus. There are times when you might want to work through the language of a particular soliloquy, but I've found that hitting these points makes things less generally frustrating for students.
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Mar 14, 2011 15:53
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As someone who hated reading Shakespeare because it made no sense, now I at least feel like I have a better idea of why it made no sense. What I don't get though, is why we make high schoolers read Shakespeare? I posit that the vast majority get almost nothing out of it, since it makes no sense (to them, and takes a lot of effort apparently to make any sense of, and I doubt most student ever learn to make the sense or put in the effort), so it kind of seems like a waste of time.
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Mar 14, 2011 19:06
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Scum Freezebag posted:This thread alone is worth the price of SA admission. Thank you. Well, you're welcome. It's always nice to know that there's interest in what you do and how you do it. quote:I'm always interested in hearing about other (more successful) people's work space. So I have to ask, what do you consider your optimum writing environment? [...] What works best for you? That's sort of a tough call, as I generally write in my office perforce -- there's too much stuff to lug around for me to take academic writing too far from my files books, notes, and so on. I don't have much to drive a comparison. I think I still do my best writing between 4:00 and 7:00, which is when most of my graduate classes ran, and when I was able to find time outside of classes, office hours, and the schedule of interruptions that govern regular business hours. That was the time of day I made the fastest and most satisfying writing progress on my dissertation, and that habit has largely carried over. Apart from that, I'm almost always eating or drinking while I write. I don't know why this is, but things seem to go more smoothly if I have something at hand -- it may be that I don't excuse myself to get food. And I used to listen to non-vocal music while I worked, but now I think I'm more sensitive to distraction. I'm also sensitive to keyboards in a way I don't think I ever was before. I can type well and quickly on my Macbook, but God help me if I try to write quickly on something much smaller -- I end up all over the place. And miscellany: My writing space/office is always, always, always terribly messy. Terribly. I sort things (articles, notes) into piles on the floor so I can see all the piles at once. That kind of sorting strategy gets quickly out of hand. Also, despite being one of the more tech-savvy English professors I know, I sort lots and lots of things out as hard copy and keep lots and lots of files full of articles and notes. You'd think having all of my notes and some articles searchable with e.g. Spotlight would make things faster, but it doesn't seem to. That may be because I've got a better tactile memory for specific pages, or because the floor lets me see more at once than a computer screen does. So the short version? I work best on my Mac, in an office littered with notes and articles, and with a bucket-sized convenient store styrofoam cup full of icewater.
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Mar 14, 2011 20:21
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chinchilla posted:A week after you posted this, I found out that the American Musicological Society had just started a new Journal of Music History Pedagogy. So I guess it's very timely advice. But I have two follow up questions: This is a tough one. I'm lucky that Rhat/Comp exists, because that's a whole field attached to the teaching of writing. So there are organizations like CCC (and the conference, CCCC), Journals like College English, and so on. Most of the other journals I know of that are dedicated to pedagogy don't focus on teaching in a particular discipline (though there are rare exceptions). There are also journals in Educational Psychology (broadly defined) that publish studies that you could use as a model: Educational Psychology, Educational Psychologist, the Journal of College Student Development, and Metacognition and Learning would be good ones to start with, especially since most of the studies that find their ways into these journals also seem to have a strong (read: useful) theoretical foundation. I don't go into these journals looking for work that happens in the Music classroom, but I'm willing to bet that there's something touching your discipline in there on a regular basis. I can't pont you toward articles with particularly great studies off the top of my head, but I think that Baxter Magolda's theoretical apparatus surrounding student self-authorship has generated a lot of good, small scale studies that you could use as models for assessing what happens in your own classroom. quote:How much freedom do you have to do these things as a grad student? Is it common for grad students to end up designing their own courses? Seems like you'd need to be running the course to run little "studies" like this. I had plenty of freedom to do this as a grad student, but very little support. And I designed my own courses for every semester but my first, which helped tremendously. But you don't necessarily need to be running the course to assess any aspect of it (though it does help); you just need the freedom to design and implement some assessment instrument. That could mean pre and post-tests on particular skills, custom questions on student evaluations, or just mashing together the information you get from students' grades on tests. Just for instance, say you're a TA in a course that uses tests for assessment. You could look at the questions on the tests that students most frequently get wrong and see if there's a particular trend; maybe students more often miss questions on a particular topic, or questions that ask for the exercise of a particular skill. Simply recording that information and looking for trends across a course, and using that information to tweak later iterations of the course is more than most people do. If you wanted to run that into something that generated (possibly) publishable results, you could work with other TAs in the same class to design different methods for using that information in discussion sections; the crudest way would be to have one TA set up discussion sections that review and retest the material students most often miss on the test, and have another TA do whatever it is you do now. Then assess the scores on the final in the same way and see whether one group showed significantly greater gains than the other. That means your unit and final tests need to talk to one another, and that you need to do some stats, but it doesn't require designing your own course or substantial institutional or instructor support.
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Mar 15, 2011 17:25
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ironypolice posted:Are you familiar at all with John Taylor Gatto? He's kind of a radical, and I don't agree with him on every point, but I've found a lot think about from what I've read by him. The seven lesson schoolteacher: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt is a nice angry piece to start with. I've read "Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" before -- it was in fact in an anthology I used to teach first-year writing years and years ago. But I don't think I've read anything else of his. The thing about Gatto (or one of the things about him) is that he's arguing from a deeply libertarian perspective that I used to sympathize with more strongly than I do now. Like Gatto, I'm especially wary of the kinds of practices that an institutional profit motive tends to produce; unlike Gatto, I think it is probably impossible to exclude for-profits from any kind of meaningful experiment with educational practices. Our corporatist economics and politics cannot simply be undone, and the problems they present for public interests deserve more responsible handling than a typically libertarian retreat to an idealized nineteenth century. That's another way of saying that I'm all for private schools, and I'm all for alternative schools, but I wouldn't want to see the kind of open system Gatto advocates lead gullible, misinformed, or bamboozled parents into some kind of educational scam -- the grade school version of the University of Phoenix.* After all, it's one thing for an adult to make a bad decision and suffer the consequences, but another for their children to suffer them. And I think this is what would happen: greater educational "freedom" is going to mean greater "freedom" for economic predators and very little for other parties. * I'm using UPX as shorthand here. I think UPX is up to no good, but that conversation happened earlier in this thread and I can see no reason to invite a revision of it. My larger point is that for-profit colleges are generally shady, and I would not want to invite them into a broader educational market (or to more government handouts) than they already enjoy. A nice writeup of a recent probe of for-profits is here.
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Mar 17, 2011 17:54
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emys posted:Brainworm, you are getting a lot of love, and you deserve all of it. A truly great thread. I hope you don't mind if I keep asking questions. Absolutely not. I mean, I don't mind. I think I've said before (and I'll say again) that this thread is a chance for me to think about things in my field that I'm not called on to think about in the classroom, as an advisor, as an administrator, or as a researcher. quote:As an academic discipline, English looks to Continental philosophers for guidance -- Foucault, Marx, Derrida, Freud, for instance. But, hardly any English professor (as far as I know) pays any attention to analytic philosophy, even though most Anglo-American philosophers are analytic. How come? Do you think this is a mistake? I'll start by saying that it may be a mistake. My knee-jerk response is that our emphasis on continental philosophy is probably a mistake in the sense that this emphasis seems to have supplanted disciplinary practices like genre study or sophisticated close reading. I'm not sure that concentrating on analytic philosophy would help fix this. Certainly a track that started with e.g. Frege would move some parts of our curricula closer to linguistics, or at least invite such a move. And I think that, practically speaking, most English majors could use greater exposure to e.g. formal grammars (and other ways of thinking on the math/science side of the academic world). But this might not be a problem inside the discipline; one purpose of general education is accomplishing exactly this (though whether it succeeds is another matter). But why this relationship with continental philosophy developed as it did, I can only speculate. I suspect that part of the attraction of the figures you've mentioned is that they describe systems that are both easy to apply and have considerable explanatory power. For instance, while modern Marxist theory gets complicated in application, it's reducible to a set of concepts (class conflict, economic determinism, ideology etc.) that are capable of reshaping and explaining any social or political development of any type whatsoever. The same can be said of Foucault, of Freud and human behavior, or of Derrida and texts. This may lead to more of the same, since most majors learn to analyze a text using a variety of perspectives and to look for where these perspectives interact. I can't immediately think of a literary place where an analytic philosopher would be in such conversation with e.g. Marx.
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Mar 17, 2011 18:24
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JaundiceDave posted:What are your feelings about Charles Bernstein? He's pretty awesome, but I find of his poetry to be kinda ridiculous. [...] I unapologetically find language (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poetry a masturbatory and generally ridiculous expression of theory through art. That said, any artist (or anyone at all) is probably entitled to some amount of experimental failure, so I wouldn't judge Bernstein the poet as Bernstein the language poet.
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Mar 17, 2011 18:33
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modig posted:As someone who hated reading Shakespeare because it made no sense, now I at least feel like I have a better idea of why it made no sense. What I don't get though, is why we make high schoolers read Shakespeare? [...] I agree. I think that Shakespeare in the HS classroom is a sort of holdover from British imperial education. Shakespeare is the quintessential British writer, and in an imperial situation the importance of education in a variety of cultural projects can hardly be overstated. And the importance of Shakespeare in the canon of Anglophone (and world) literature makes cutting Shakespeare from the curriculum practically unthinkable. No other author is indispensable. You can no more have an English program without Shakespeare (even if he goes unread and misunderstood) than you can have a Baptist church without a Bible (even if it goes the same way). Which is a shame. It's clear that American education needs some serious rethinking -- I mean, there's a long list of easily-identifiable problems with everything from pre school to grad school, and the focuses of especially high school education make little sense to me. Maybe because I pay more attention to it, or work in the same field, English seems especially incoherent. Every class seems to present a confederacy of minimally related skills and ranking systems presume that these skills develop in a related way. Every year, I get a crop of students who come from remedial English classes. Some of them are excellent writers who made it to remedial English because they are reluctant readers of Jane Austen. Some of them are excellent readers and writers in languages other than English. Some of them are clever but inexperienced readers and writers, and some of them are lazy or dull enough that competent reading and writing present a legitimate challenge. These seem to me to be different kinds of students with different (though common) skill proficiencies and deficiencies, but they've all been in the same English class as HS Seniors. That seems fucktarded. Granted, colleges often do something similar, but at least there's a clear separation of skills: first year English courses are (allegedly) about writing, and as a rule group or rank students according to their proficiency in that skill set, and separate out students whose writing problems can be usefully categorized (e.g. ESL students). Of course there are problems with this system, but at least this basic job is being done. I mean, it's done (and well) at the community college down the street, which has a smaller yet more diverse student set, less money per student, and a laundry list of other disadvantages to the local high school. So I don't know why or how high school English curricula operate as they do, and I can't understand how their curricular designs are the product of any clear intentions. Of course I also have little interest in the matter other than complaining, so I could be terribly misinformed.
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Mar 18, 2011 16:38
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^^^^ Aww...  I've said it before with another post but thank you so much for being so informative and dedicated to this thread. It's great for people like me who wouldn't have access to this information otherwise. Also, did your blog move or did it become The Parasite Infrequently (haw haw)? I'd like to voice my frustrations with high school literature teaching. My brother's going through The Great Gatsby for the first time and I thought I'd read it along with him. He's criticizing it in a paper that asks how the American Dream is represented in the novel. He came to me with his paper and asked me to proof it. His thesis was along the lines of, "Fitzgerald uses symbolism, metaphors and imagery to show that the American dream is a farce." Then he spends the whole paper talking about how the book is just one big allegory for America in the 20's. I told him to take out the 'symbolism, metaphors and imagery' because well, duh, part but he said he said his teacher would mark him off. I'm trying to think of a concise way to tell him to abandon this way of thought and all I can come up with is, "Literature is not a puzzle to be figured out." Which I think I stole from somewhere. Can you think of a nice broad sentence that would help a 16 year old start to view literature in this way? I apologize if this has already been asked but I've been reading this thread for years and my mind's not what it used to be. Also, why do you think literature is taught this way? Is it because that's the only way to apply an A-F scale to reading books? Is it because we teach Animal Farm? Skrill.exe fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Mar 18, 2011 |
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Mar 18, 2011 16:40
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Thanks for the reply Brainworm. I agree that English curriculum seems totally non-purposeful. It was never clear what skills were desired and how those skills were supposed to be improved by whatever we were doing. I never understood, and still don't understand, wtf I was supposed to be writing about when I wrote about books in school. It apparently wasn't just describing what the book was about, and some themes it dealt with, because I'm pretty sure nobody is bad enough at communication that they couldn't have explained that. I was definitely under the impression that we were being taught that literature was a puzzle we had to figure out, but I never understood what that meant. Hopefully you can help your brother be less confused Banana Grabber.
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Mar 18, 2011 22:01
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What do you English professors think of this? http://memebase.com/2011/03/23/memes-can-i/. Ignore that it's from a stupid site (and that the whole thing is pretty stupid). Saw the link come up on my Facebook feed and the part of me that got drilled to associate can with ability to and may to permission, and it sounds bullshit.
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Mar 24, 2011 04:41
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Brainworm posted:I've read "Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" before -- it was in fact in an anthology I used to teach first-year writing years and years ago. But I don't think I've read anything else of his. Oh, definitely. I'm no libertarian and I'm pretty suspicious of the second half where he starts proposing solutions. The first bit where he's all, "poo poo's hosed, yo" really struck a chord with me.
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Mar 25, 2011 14:52
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Ziir posted:What do you English professors think of this? http://memebase.com/2011/03/23/memes-can-i/. Ignore that it's from a stupid site (and that the whole thing is pretty stupid). Saw the link come up on my Facebook feed and the part of me that got drilled to associate can with ability to and may to permission, and it sounds bullshit. I'm sure a linguist can jump in here, but I think it's bullshit. I've never heard of a "secondary modal form" in English, though I have heard modals referred to as "secondary auxiliaries." Whether this is (in some world of auxiliaries) technically correct I don't know. Grammar is not really my world, and secondary modal forms may very well exist and be matters of great significance. In my world, modals are simple, continuous, perfect, or perfect/continuous, and may be used in active or passive constructions. That's as far as I go. That said, "can" is often used to ask permission or for requests. "May" may be the least ambiguous way to go about asking for or indicating permission, but common usage suggests that it is certainly not the only clear or correct way to do so and may occasionally be preferable. For example: I can borrow Joe's keys means something like "I have permission to borrow Joe's keys." I may borrow Joe's keys means "I may or may not elect to borrow Joe's keys." I'm not arguing a matter of correctness according to a formal grammar, only that a person using this second construction is likely to confuse a listener if he's talking about matters of standing permission rather than the exercise of his preferences. I likewise think that the kind of grammar snood who corrects schoolchildren who ask if they can go to the bathroom ought to be horsewhipped. Usage, and "correct" usage, is a deeply situational matter, and the "can/may" bathroom shuffle is, situationally, an exercise of petite classroom tyranny.
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Mar 29, 2011 13:37
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Brainworm posted:petite classroom tyranny Although I agree with you on this point, now I can't get the image of a Napoleonic teacher sadistically mocking children's word-choices out of my head.
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Mar 29, 2011 13:59
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Jumping in as a linguist, there's no such thing as a "secondary modal form". That said, obviously, from a descriptive perspective there is nothing wrong with using "can" to ask permission.
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Mar 30, 2011 13:22
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Hey brainworm. Amazing thread, you've made me interested in english lit better than any professor or teacher I've had. Praises aside, I'm planning on watching my school's production of Macbeth tomorrow. It's supposed to be a 60's version of it and I don't know really what to expect because I've never read Macbeth outside of the wiki synopsis and I've only been to one play (All my Sons). Is there anything I should know beforehand to really enjoy it?
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Apr 14, 2011 21:01
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As a theatre student/practitioner, and having been in/to quite a bit of Shakespeare, I would suggest not getting caught up too much on keeping up with every single thing that every single person says. This sounds like odd advice, but when I first started watching Shakespeare, it was difficult to keep up with because I was trying to parse out each sentence and stay abreast of what they meant. The language barrier between contemporary English and Shakespeare's language means, as a lay person, many of us aren't going to be familiar with the material. The actors should take on the heavy lifting, and you'll be able to understand more easily if you don't try to understand literally everything they say. That's just how it's worked for me, though. I'll be interested to read Brainworm's opinion.
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Apr 15, 2011 05:20
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bartlebee posted:As a theatre student/practitioner, and having been in/to quite a bit of Shakespeare, I would suggest not getting caught up too much on keeping up with every single thing that every single person says. This sounds like odd advice, but when I first started watching Shakespeare, it was difficult to keep up with because I was trying to parse out each sentence and stay abreast of what they meant. The language barrier between contemporary English and Shakespeare's language means, as a lay person, many of us aren't going to be familiar with the material. The actors should take on the heavy lifting, and you'll be able to understand more easily if you don't try to understand literally everything they say. That's just how it's worked for me, though. I'll be interested to read Brainworm's opinion. It's worth understanding in fine detail at some point though. There's a lot of funny stuff hiding in between the lines.
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Apr 15, 2011 06:25
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tyang209 posted:Hey brainworm. Amazing thread, you've made me interested in english lit better than any professor or teacher I've had. Thanks! I'm not really sure how to follow that up. quote:Praises aside, I'm planning on watching my school's production of Macbeth tomorrow. It's supposed to be a 60's version of it and I don't know really what to expect because I've never read Macbeth outside of the wiki synopsis and I've only been to one play (All my Sons). Is there anything I should know beforehand to really enjoy it? If you hadn't already read the wiki synopsis, I would have advised you not to; Shakespeare either invented or popularized the surprise ending, and it's easy to lose that quality of his plays if you read plot summaries and the like. I mean, if you know the end of Titus Andronicus it's easy to forget that the events in Act V are poo poo-your-pants shocking. I think the same is largely true of Macbeth, so if you've been lucky enough to forget the ending don't spoil the play by reviewing it. In a larger sense, you've got to be comfortable not knowing what's going on when you watch a play. I think many good movies and plays operate by raising questions or confusing the viewer early on, and Shakespeare's plays are no exception. So when bartlebee advises you not to obsess over details, I think he's in the right place; the language is going to be dense and confusing, but that's OK -- it would often have been dense and confusing (and often inaudible) to much of Shakespeare's original audience, too. Likewise, Macbeth presents us with a cast of characters whose historical analogues were probably unfamiliar to Shakespeare's non-royal audiences, in much the same ways that the characters in modern historical dramas are largely unfamiliar to their audiences. I mean, many who enjoyed Capote were probably somewhere between "is that Elton John?" and "I've heard of Breakfast at Tiffany's." So I think bartlebee's advice is good advice here. Don't obsess over details and don't think that because you don't know something that you're not doing your job as a member of the audience. If there's a speech you don't understand or want to parse out, you can. But a seat in the theater isn't the place for it -- you'll end up trying to analyze the play rather than immersing yourself in it.
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Apr 15, 2011 17:51
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| # ? May 15, 2024 09:26 |
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For a given period, are there stylistic differences between European or even American writers? For instance could you tell that a given work from Cervantes [ex: Don Quixote, ~1610 ] or Shakespeare [ex: Much Ado About Nothing ~1610] was uniquely Spanish or uniquely British. Defenestrategy fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Apr 20, 2011 |
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Apr 20, 2011 01:20
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