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Thank you for the answer to my pretty dumb questions. My Milton professor isn't very clear with his answers to questions, and you definitely gave me something to think about going into PL.
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Mar 13, 2013 02:45
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HappyKitty posted:Wicked! I just got accepted to give a conference paper at NASSR! OK. I've written about this situation in a few earlier posts, so those may be worth looking back to. But I think the best and only advice I can give you is to be honest. It's a terribly underrated academic virtue. That means that your presentation might start off something like this: quote:What I'm presenting right now is part of a project that came from [whatever], which is part of what I'm looking at in my graduate work/thesis writing/dissertation research. While I'm confident about X part of what I'm bringing here today, I'm also concerned about Y part, so I could use any feedback you have on ways forward with Y, and anything I might be getting wrong with X. Also, this is my first time presenting at a major conference, so I'm a little keyed up. Or, you know, start off with whatever the truth happens to be. There's nothing unprofessional about asking for specific kinds of feedback, admitting where you're uncertain, or letting people know where you're inexperienced -- in fact, all of these things are highly professional, since clarity on those points is absolutely necessary if anyone's going to either collaborate with you or give you useful advice. Also, posturing (here meaning "strategically concealing scholarly, professional, and personal weaknesses") is the single most popular way to dig yourself a deep professional grave. The point of a conference is collaboration, either in sharing research or helping improve it, and most typical forms of academic posturing undercut that pretty effectively. So ask for feedback that meets your needs, and don't act certain when you're not; nothing's more frustrating than giving useful feedback to someone who doesn't give you a way to focus it (or who doesn't want it) -- except, maybe, the person who pretends their research has an integrity it really doesn't, and forces you to rework a big project or issue retractions once that's discovered. Finally, honesty is charming. If you're honest about being intimidated by working with a plenary speaker's material, she's more likely to react positively and professionally to whatever you do with it -- say, correct any misconceptions you have kindly or in private rather than indignantly and in public. And, generally, people will want to help you. Honesty both tells them how they can do this and gives them a reason to try.
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Mar 13, 2013 17:53
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Hey Brainworm, I'm currently interning for the GED program at a jail in my area "teaching" English to a room of thirty or so men. "Teaching" because I'm a student who has never done this sort of thing before. It's a really lax program, so we've been looking random poems and stories based on whatever topic I want - for example, we looked at a piece called "Good and Evil" by Khalil Gibran and used that to discuss perspective. The writing assignment was to write a letter to themselves from someone they have wronged in the past, and then writing a response letter. Simple stuff. Last week we listened to "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" by Bob Dylan and the discussion/writing was about hope. You get the idea. Anyway, it's starting to get a bit stale in there so, as a professor, I was hoping you'd have some ideas? Possibly some awesome poems you like that would be relatable to a bunch of locked up dudes? Thanks a bunch, and for this thread, I've been following it forever.
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Mar 13, 2013 21:41
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souphanousinphone posted:I'm currently interning for the GED program at a jail in my area "teaching" English to a room of thirty or so men. [...] Anyway, it's starting to get a bit stale in there so, as a professor, I was hoping you'd have some ideas? Possibly some awesome poems you like that would be relatable to a bunch of locked up dudes? I don't know from relatable for these guys. I'm tempted to say that generalizing about them on the basis of their being in jail is probably not a great idea -- what's relatable to one may not be relatable to the others any more than it would be were they, say, thirty guys sharing an elevator or riding the same bus. But that ignores the obvious. They've got some common experience. And I'm going to land on that pretty hard, and in a way that probably sounds completely contrived. So here goes: The single most important developmental lesson I teach is something I just wrote about re: Paradise Lost: Good people are not born good. They become good by coming to wisdom through failure. And that's different from being innocent, being honest, or being smart or hard-working, or exhibiting any number of other virtues. Reading and writing, however else they're important, play really specific roles in that process. Most of what we think of as character "development" is, I think, some version of this arrival at wisdom (or a conspicuous failure to arrive at it), and there's no end to the poems that describe this process in one way or another. So reading, or at least some reading, helps a person understand what that process of coming to wisdom looks like, and how it either works or doesn't. And writing, at least writing that tries to make sense of one's experience, is a way of structuring that arrival at wisdom -- you know, "where did I screw up here, what does that say about me, and how do I become someone who does differently?" You know better than I do how that kind of talk is going to land with your class; in my first-year classes, most students are open to asking those questions about themselves and find the idea of coming to wisdom through failure a kind of relief (it supposes that good people become good because they fail, not because they do everything right the first time, and therefore takes some of the needless fear out of loving up). I can't even guess how to bring this to your guys, though. I'd probably take the center of that process (the reflection) and leave out the "good person" and "failure" bits -- not because your guys aren't capable of it, but because that kind of thinking's probably already overloaded for them. So say that the uses of reading and writing are more like "moving form experience to understanding." ON that front, even though it's overused in anthologies, etc., Roethke's "Papa's Waltz" is a good one to start with. quote:The whiskey on your breath If I were pitching this to a HS-level class, I'd probably start by asking who's speaking (as in "the kid, but as an adult") and following up with some basic POV questions: "How do you think this kid felt while he was dancing with his dad?" and "how do you think the adult writing this poem feels when he remembers this?" If you let that conversation run, you'll hopefully get to something like "the kid obviously loved his dad in the ways that most kids love their parents -- basically uncritically. But the adult writing this poem sees all kinds of things about the situation that make him think about his father differently; as a hard-working guy who sometimes drank too much and pissed off mom, got irresponsible, etc., but in all that still seems to care for his son, even if that caring was bizarre and clumsy." That gets you to something like reflection, or the idea that there's a difference between what you see in something when it happens (experience) and the way you make sense of it later (understanding). And this poem also shows how that difference is important: most experiences are complicated enough that you can't understand them when they happen. For a kid in this poem's situation, the takeaway is something like "dad's fun and loves me," or "mom's upset." This is outside the poem, but not this classroom: for a teenager (and for select adults) it's for some reason important that the situation in this poem be clearly valued, either because dad comes home (good) or because mom's a wet blanket and dad's an abusive drunk (bad). That's sort of the endpoint of a kid's reasoning, and you can sort the sheep from the goats in a HS-level or even college-level class based on which ones get hung up on whether the dad in this poem is a "good" or a "bad" father -- as though agreement on those kinds of issues were the logical endpoint of any discussion, or would help anyone understand anything that they had previously found confusing.* For an adult, the takeaway is different. That is, the difference between an adult and a teenager is that an adult can say: "I treasured the time I spent with my dad as a kid, because I looked up to him" and "Dad was irresponsible and clumsy, mom was upset about that, and Dad either didn't notice this or didn't care," and "Dad wanted to spend time with me when I was a kid, even when he was probably tired because he had a hard job," and "the moment that I most remember about my dad was a time he'd probably had too much to drink," and so on and so on and so on. So where this poem gets you is, in other words, to the idea that reflection reveals the truth of a situation in a way that simple experience (or adolescent judgment) doesn't. The kid in this poem loves his father but doesn't understand who his father is, or who he is in relationship to his father; the adult telling the story understands who his father is/was (at least better than the kid did), and the nature of their relationship. He consequently (I think) loves his father in a different, more complicated, and somewhat more powerful way than he did as a kid -- or is at least capable of doing so. The idea here, in other words, is that this poem neatly illustrates a specific and meaningful kind of human development, and one that matters tremendously if a person is going to have any kind of sound judgment or meaningful relationship to his or her own experience. Plus, if you've got a group who brings personal experience into reading, that framework (experience and understanding) makes those kinds of contributions more useful. quote:Thanks a bunch, and for this thread, I've been following it forever. Welcome! It's been a long day, so I don't even know what to write after that. [*] Whenever I think about that kind of discussion, I think about the ways "consciousness raising" is sometimes seen as a sort of self-sufficient and morally significant activity. "Well, we all agree genocide is wrong, that we'd like to see fewer birth defects and reduced numbers of explosions in densely-populated cities, and that it would be nice if everyone had access to as much food as they needed and probably more. Someone get those ideas on a flyer, then we'll post a few hundred to get the word out and move on to the next thing."
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Mar 19, 2013 20:19
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What was up with the double titles novels used to have? i.e. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Did the thinking go "if you don't like the title I chose, maybe you'll like this one instead"?
Contingency Plan fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Mar 19, 2013 |
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Mar 19, 2013 22:44
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I'm thinking about going to grad school for Film Studies. My father was a professor in science at a top uni. He always told me the sciences were different then the humanities. My prof friend told me he graduated in early 2009 and got two offers. He was lucky because after the market crash there was a nationwide hiring freeze. He's very charming, intelligent and handsome, so I figured his soft skills helped him out as much as his hard. What should I be doing to get a job as a Professor/Academic if I get my Ph.D in Film Studies? GiveUpNed fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Mar 26, 2013 |
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Mar 26, 2013 02:52
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GiveUpNed posted:I'm thinking about going to grad school for Film Studies.
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Mar 26, 2013 03:10
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Just stumbled onto this thread. I'm pretty STOKED cause I got a lotta questions but I don't want to overwhelm you with 'em so I'm gonna start off simple and keep going until you tell me to gently caress off. I gotta be a professor. I'm serious, I gotta be. I can't imagine doing anything else (aside from something in publishing, which is a distant backup choice). I'd rather teach than research but I'm looking forward to both. I'm majoring in English and I want to focus on medieval lit, specifically Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, which is so painfully niche I often get a look of pity when I tell it to professors. Without going into much detail, I just finished my associate's after being dicked around for almost ten years (I went to Virginia Tech from 02-04 and just finished two years of community college). My GPA in the past two years has stayed at 4.0, but I was a self-hating CS major at Tech and left there with a 1.37 or something similarly horrible. Meaning that the big, good state school nearby - University of Maryland in my case - didn't accept me when I applied solely on the grounds of my GPA (when asked if I could appeal they replied with "your gpa is too low try next semester"). Which I did, along with a bunch of other schools, so I'm still waiting for their rejection emails. I miss the day of actual rejection letters. I did, however, get into Columbia, which puts me in this awful situation. Columbia is nowhere near affordable, and if I can manage to get loans I'll probably end up around 100k in debt by the end (and that's just for my B.A.). However, if I can't get into UMD and am stuck going to a school with a poor English program, like University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), I worry that there's no way in hell I can get into a decent graduate program and the dream is dead and drowned in the same bathtub I'll use to wash my dishes. I don't mind racking up a huge debt if I can do what I really want, but if I can get to the same place without mortgaging my soul, that would be pretty righteous... HELP ME PLEASE
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Mar 27, 2013 10:50
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GiveUpNed posted:I'm thinking about going to grad school for Film Studies. My father was a professor in science at a top uni. He always told me the sciences were different then the humanities. This is a hard one. There's a lot of advice that's going to be specific to Film Studies, and I don't know the first thing about what it'd be. Humanities hiring is different from hiring in the hard sciences and social sciences, but hiring among disciplines within the Humanities is radically different. That said, there's a lot about hiring that I think applies across disciplines, and this may be as good a place as any to consolidate it. I also want to bring EQFiddleCastrol's question into this, because it's pretty important. So when you go on the job market, of course you should be coming from the best program you can, and you should be coming from the strongest possible position in that program. Of course you should be able to talk about your teaching and research clearly and in compelling ways. But the most important thing you can do is plan your future responsibly. For instance, there's a limit to how much student loan debt you can run up. I don't know what that limit is -- I can't give you a dollar amount or a pay-back time period. But the reality is that academic salaries in the Humanities are lower than in many other fields, that the attrition rate in most graduate programs is high, and that the market is hard to crack. Everyone knows this, but every time I go to e.g. a conference I see people betting their future happiness on totally delusional expectations. Take an aspiring professor, Alice. Her usual future-planning assumptions are based on averages and medians, which sounds completely rational but is actually fairly stupid. Say Alice enters some PhD program in English in 2013, she'll finish her PhD in 2021 (based on an average/median completion time of seven to eight years), start a full-time academic job between 2021 and 2024 (based on the median/average of three years between graduation and full-time tenure-track employment), and make the inflation-adjusted equivalent of, say, $55K a year (which is about average and median for an assistant professor in the Humanities). So when Alice thinks about e.g. student loan debt, the question she'll ask herself is "can I pay these loans and live comfortably if I start making $55K when I'm 32?" And if the answer is yes, well, full speed ahead. This is bad thinking, but it turns into a full-on clusterfuck when it's salted with a sense of one's own exceptionalism -- that is, when the answer's "I can if I land a tenure-track job my first year on the market after I finish my PhD a year ahead of schedule," and that somehow translates into an unqualified "yes!" Let's start here: even though each of Alice's assumptions is based on something like an average/median, the odds of one person finding the better half of all three are pretty low. For every Alice who finishes her program on time, spends fewer than three years on the job market, and lands a $55K salary, there are seven Bobs who finish late, spend more than three years on the market, or end up making less. So the question Alice ought to be asking herself is more like this: "How can I pay these loans and live comfortably if I decide graduate school/academia isn't for me, if I don't find a full-time academic job, if I have longer than a three-year gap between completing my PhD and finding an academic job, and/or if I land a job that pays less than average?" That's the real-world question. And if Alice can figure out an answer there, she's good to go. The corollary to this: If Alice doesn't answer these real-world questions, there's a chance than any kind of reversal (read: less-than-average situation) is going to force her hand. This is where that "sense of one's own exceptionalism" thinking I mentioned earlier turns into a full-on disaster. Just for instance, say Alice is your typical slightly-delusional go-getter. Maybe she's leaving a career to go to graduate school, already has kids or whatever other responsibilities, and has saved enough money to fund seven years of graduate-student living even though she plans on finishing in six (since that's what'll happen if she stays on schedule). Or maybe she has other goals, like wanting to be a young, professional, sexy, single-mom professor who's going to show the world that yes, she really can have it all. Her six-year plan is already way, way, way on the wrong side of the medians, but not so far that it sounds wholly unrealistic -- especially to Alice, and especially if she's always been the darling of her undergraduate English classes and therefore knows that she's smarter and harder working than every other darling from every other English class at every other college on every other planet. So let's deal her some considerable damage by assuming she's completely average, at least in the sense that she's a completely typical member of the highly intelligent, academically successful, and impossibly well-motivated subset of human beings who get a PhD. Fast-forward to year seven: Alice is behind schedule and at the end of whatever resources she's set aside for herself. So she might go on the market early -- that's only worth mentioning because not getting a job the first time out is going to be a blow to the ol' ego. The next year, Alice's finished with her dissertation but no longer has a Teaching Assistantship or whatever other support, and so needs to find a job, health care, etc., and go on the market as a strong candidate. She's going to read her "late" finish and failure to land a job the first time out as failures, even though neither expectation was realistic to begin with. And because she never planned on having to fill a year between job searches, she's got to improvise. And if this is her first real academic/personal failure, she's probably going to think that the entire situation is unfair -- after all, she's better than average. The world has some obligation to live up to that. In year nine, Alice is going to be in her second unplanned year of un- or under-employment, and she'll be going on the job market for what she'd think of as the third time. Since she's three years behind schedule, she might very well make this her last crack at the market before she decides to do something else. She's tired of putting her life on hold, has parents and friends writing her off as a complete loss, etc. This despite her experience being completely and entirely average. Maybe she'll join a temp agency or marry the first insurance adjustor who gets her pregnant in the back seat of a gypsy cab. Or maybe she'll just adopt ten cats and adjunct at five different community colleges while her ovaries shrivel like raisins and she starts wearing allegedly comfortable but impossibly ugly shoes, all the while dressing in increasingly gaudy and generously cut rayon gowns. The possibilities are endless. Anyway. That Alice has been forced to the point of financial, psychological, or whatever other crisis by completely normal and absolutely predicable conditions. She'll have given up (or close to it), have exhausted the goodwill of family and friends, or run out of the money and time she budgeted herself by year ten -- even though the worst you could say of her experience is that it's been completely and absolutely average in every conceivable respect, and ought to have been the situation she planned for on day one. There's a way to write student loans and other complexities into this, but I think the point's pretty clear. It's easy to plan when you assume you're as lucky or luckier than the next guy. But the whole point of planning is covering the foreseeable situations where you aren't. That planning, well-executed, gives you more and better options when things go wrong. In my mind, that's what makes the difference between catastrophe and long-term success in everything from job hunts to nuclear war.
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Apr 9, 2013 22:05
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I'M SORRY THIS TURNED INTO A LONG POST Believe me, I have no illusions about my own abilities or luck. I'm also not one to be discouraged by failure - that's been beaten out of me over a decade of unmitigated misery and repeated disappointment. The main reason I was considering Columbia at all is because I hadn't been accepted to anywhere else, and between an uncertain future and no future I'd take the gamble every time. Just yesterday I received my acceptance letter from UMD, though, so now I have an actual meaningful decision to make. The real question is whether a Bachelor's degree from Columbia is worth the excessive debt (assuming, of course, that I can get such a monstrous loan to begin with). I don't expect you to answer that; there are so many variables in that equation it makes my brain ache, and a good chunk of them are subjective. My question to you is whether, in your experience, a B.A. from an Ivy would be worth substantially more when searching for grad school/employment than one from a state school. I'll be asking a lot of professors from a few different schools, but since you're right here and approachable and we can have a bit of a back-and-forth I'd love to get your feedback. If I were planning (I have to emphasize the 'plan' in planning) to focus on a more mainstream slice of the Literary pie I wouldn't be so hesitant to make a decision, but I've spoken with a medievalist at UMD already (who coincidentally is the head of their undergrad English program) who told me that while he has some knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and would be willing to do a one-on-one class or something (I spoke to him almost a year ago so my memory is hazy), there's not much of a presence at that school, in that he is the only one who even dabbles. Would a potential graduate school care? Or is that the kind of thing that you go to graduate school for and they're not too concerned with specialization in your undergrad? tl;dr two main questions: is a 3.6 (for example) at Columbia substantially better than a 3.6 from Respected State College when applying to a M.A./Ph.D. program? does the presence of specialized faculty in your field at your undergrad institution matter a lick to grad schools?
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Apr 10, 2013 10:41
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EQFiddleCastrol posted:I did, however, get into Columbia, which puts me in this awful situation. Columbia is nowhere near affordable, and if I can manage to get loans I'll probably end up around 100k in debt by the end (and that's just for my B.A.). (Another [humanities, but not english] prof weighing in; forgive me, brainworm.) Please do not take on massive debt for an undergrad degree in the humanities. Think about it this way: You have at least six more years of graduate school after you finish the BA, which is many more years of lost income and a massively shifting job market. Make an informed decision, and begin with research. I'd suggest the following: Make a list of every currently available (AY 2012-13) medievalist job (you can find these on the academic job wiki), and make a list of who got those jobs and where their degrees are from (you can get this info from the department web sites in the fall). Do the same thing for the past three or four years. That might answer some questions. Also keep in mind that many of these jobs (at least from what I've seen in my university) are getting hundreds of applications. And you won't even be in the mix for 6+ years. So you should be thinking about what the humanities market will look like in 2020 or later. You should also research the nature of higher ed hiring. There are many administrative/economic pressures right now: to minimize labor costs, to increase classroom cap sizes, and to offer (the small number of) tenure track lines to fields with the most appeal to students. And this isn't even accounting for the weirdness of MOOCs or other forms of online education. As an assistant prof in english, you would probably be looking at a starting salary in the range of 45-60, depending on the school and the geographic region. That's not a great salary with which to pay back 100k+ in debt. And that's assuming you do land a prof gig. If you don't, massive undergrad debt could become a real problem. And you can't shed it with bankruptcy; it's staying with you. In short: Grad school is all about research. Start this as an undergrad by researching the job market and the profiles of people who are getting the job you want. But please please please don't take on triple-figure debt for a BA in English. If nothing else, wait another year, continue to build your professional profile, and again apply to undergraduate programs in the fall.
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Apr 10, 2013 14:13
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EQFiddleCastrol posted:[...] Just yesterday I received my acceptance letter from UMD, though, so now I have an actual meaningful decision to make. There is no way in hell I'd take [Columbia + loan burden] over [UMD + lower loan burden]. Anyone who advises otherwise is probably trying to Game-of-Thrones you into what my grandparents called "the poorhouse." My thinking goes like this: Specialization's for Graduate School. No sane program of undergraduate education is going to produce graduates who specialize, even informally, in e.g. Renaissance Drama. You'd end up systematically choosing that focus over basic field competence, which might work for some technical careers but would be positively insane anywhere else. Rankings are (at best) Semi-relevant. I wouldn't make anything of the rankings difference between Columbia and UMD because the top students from both programs are likely to be equally (if differently) excellent. This wouldn't be the case if we were talking about Columbia and, say, Arizona State. And since we're talking graduate school, top-student quality's the appropriate yardstick -- what the bottom 90% of a program's graduates look like doesn't matter, because (to sound totally mercenary) they're not your competition. As long as the program has a critical mass of contenders (so to speak), and as long as you're among them, it's in practice as good a path to a great graduate program as any other. Put another way, no NFL team is going to recruit one player over another because he's from OSU instead of Michigan -- the sort of "aggregate" or "typical" quality that program rankings attempt to measure is irrelevant, since each program is sufficiently able to produce nationally competitive players. Debt is Bad. This is especially true as you get older, and doubly especially true if you're looking at a Ph.D. in the Humanities. The (I think) obvious bottom line? The combination of age, debt, and later-than-usual entry into a comparatively-low-paying career will close more doors for you than taking a B.A. from UMD over Columbia. And I'ma second vtlock: no matter how you slice it, massive student loan debt is fundamentally incompatible with a career as a humanities professor. Enough said. Forget Statistics. At least when they use precision to create an illusion of accuracy and significance. There's not enough information to tell whether an English major's 3.6 from Columbia is "better" than a 3.6 from UMD, even if Columbia is ranked #5 and UMD is ranked #35. Why? Even assuming that this ranking distance is indicative of program quality (rather than program difference), the quality of a program and its GPA-sensitive difficulty aren't necessarily related. Driving, say, an $80K Tata with a manual choke and a double clutch doesn't make me better able to drive a Toyota Camry or race go-karts. All it tells you is that, when it comes to driving, I'm a novelty-seeking masochist who's willing to pay for the privilege. What matters more is the quality or nature of the student. GPA and program rankings can say something about that, but not as much as a student's written work, what his or her letters say, and the extent to which people who know this student are or have been willing to invest in him or her. So. TL;DR: UMD. The slight advantages that a top-tier undergraduate degree confers over a slightly-less-top-tier degree are real, but likely only worth it if you're in or approaching a money-is-no-object situation. Maybe (a) your family's impossibly wealthy, or maybe (b) the top end of your intended career pays so much that the risk's worth taking. If you need to take out loans, you're not in (a), and career academics are not in (b).
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Apr 10, 2013 20:13
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vtlock posted:Good stuff Brainworm posted:More good stuff Thanks a lot, guys. This is really useful information and helps make the decision much easier. While I won't deny there's an allure to getting into and attending such a prestigious school (it really appeals to my inner narcissist) I think sabotaging the poo poo out of my future so I can say "herpy derpy I went to a good school" as I'm turning tricks on a street corner in good ol' NYC is probably not worth it. If it was my only choice, or it conferred some real actual benefit that would transform me from the filthy bum that I am to Captain Desirable, then I might consider it. If that's not the case though.... Here's another question for you that I've found difficult to get answers for, as most of the professors I talk to are older: what's the general feeling about going from B.A. to Ph.D versus B.A., M.A., Ph.D? I think you've probably answered this one already Brainworm but I can't remember what you had to say about it. Most of the people I talk to got their M.A. before their Ph.D (and in different places, because they were told that makes a difference though many of them aren't quite so sure), but an M.A. seems like an expensive educational extension when you could go straight from B.A. to Ph.D. I DUNNO I'M GONNA ASK A LOTTA Q'S
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Apr 10, 2013 20:45
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EQFiddleCastrol posted:Thanks a lot, guys. This is really useful information and helps make the decision much easier. While I won't deny there's an allure to getting into and attending such a prestigious school (it really appeals to my inner narcissist) I think sabotaging the poo poo out of my future so I can say "herpy derpy I went to a good school" as I'm turning tricks on a street corner in good ol' NYC is probably not worth it. If it was my only choice, or it conferred some real actual benefit that would transform me from the filthy bum that I am to Captain Desirable, then I might consider it. If that's not the case though.... Cost of living while you're studying is something to keep in mind too. I'm Australian and have never lived in the States, but I don't think I'm wrong in suggesting that living in or near Manhattan, or anywhere else in NYC for that matter, will be a lot more expensive than living somewhere near College Park. A colleague in my doctoral program spent six months on placement in DC recently, living in Maryland, and said that rents were ridiculously low (she's comparing with Sydney, which is one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world, but if anything that makes the comparison more relevant). Struggling to make ends meet while studying full-time can put a lot of downward pressure on your grades. Even if you end up working as much while at UMD as you would have at Columbia, you'll be able to live in relative comfort, and/or save some money on the side that could come in handy if you decide to go on to postgraduate study.
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Apr 11, 2013 01:40
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EQFiddleCastrol posted:Thanks a lot, guys. This is really useful information and helps make the decision much easier. While I won't deny there's an allure to getting into and attending such a prestigious school (it really appeals to my inner narcissist) I think sabotaging the poo poo out of my future so I can say "herpy derpy I went to a good school" as I'm turning tricks on a street corner in good ol' NYC is probably not worth it. If it was my only choice, or it conferred some real actual benefit that would transform me from the filthy bum that I am to Captain Desirable, then I might consider it. If that's not the case though.... If you're going to be turning tricks on an NYC street corner, the networking opportunities Columbia offers could come in handy.
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Apr 12, 2013 03:03
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EQFiddleCastrol posted:Thanks a lot, guys. This is really useful information and helps make the decision much easier. While I won't deny there's an allure to getting into and attending such a prestigious school (it really appeals to my inner narcissist) I think sabotaging the poo poo out of my future so I can say "herpy derpy I went to a good school" as I'm turning tricks on a street corner in good ol' NYC is probably not worth it. If it was my only choice, or it conferred some real actual benefit that would transform me from the filthy bum that I am to Captain Desirable, then I might consider it. If that's not the case though.... I've never seen much use for a terminal MA in English, aside from meeting the regulatory demands of public school teaching and a few other careers. The graduate programs I'm familiar with that offer a terminal MA cater almost exclusively to teachers, and exist for something that (to a cynical outsider) looks like a method for channeling funds for teacher training into university coffers without actually inconveniencing faculty and students with anything resembling education. What you'll see in standalone MA programs will vary, I'm sure. But there's a certain best-avoided type of thesisless MA program, comprised mostly of night courses and taught by adjunct faculty, that has "low-grade certification" written all over it. I'd feel dirty even giving a conference paper at a University that offered one of these. What I'm saying is that terminal MA degrees are a tool (ranging from a narrow certification to a borderline scam) used to bring outside, real cash into a graduate program -- they're what you call an "expensive educational extension," and they are that way by design. So most of the PhD programs you'll find will just award a MA degree during the PhD progress, and usually just for people who e.g. fail qualifying exams or never finish their dissertations. They'll also have better financial packages for people doing PhD work than MA work (e.g. TA positions), if for no other reason than an MA takes two years, tops -- there's little staffing sense in making an MA student a TA, since you get comparatively little return on their training.
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Apr 12, 2013 15:27
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Footnote to the above: The situation is completely different in Canada, where PhD programs require a (generally one-year) MA to be completed before admission. I think the University of Toronto has a straight-to-PhD option, but that's probably just to compete with American schools.
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Apr 12, 2013 20:36
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To echo Food Court Druid, I was just accepted to a terminal MA English program in the Upper Midwest that has a 100% funded doctorate placement rate, a number of which end up at "prestigious" doctoral programs. The spot comes with a teaching assistantship that covers all tuition and fees, and pays out 12k a year. They don't even accept non-funded MA students. We only have to teach a single section a semester, no more than 20-some students. The school flew me out to a conference/MA showcase, which gave me a chance to talk to the year 1 and 2 grad students. Apparently, the most difficult part about teaching at the university is the teaching boot camp they run all the new grad students through before the semester starts, followed by mandatory teaching peer groups comprised of tenured faculty and grad students. Anyhow, I am ecstatic, and most certainly drinking the coolaide. I feel as long as you aren't paying for your education, why not get a MA degree? Even if I don't get accepted to a doctoral program, I get to do what I love for another 2 years on the universities' dime. e: I write English gud.  If I can get accepted, so can you!
tokenbrownguy fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 20:59
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Verr posted:To echo Food Court Druid, I was just accepted to a terminal MA English program in the Upper Midwest that has a 100% funded doctorate placement rate, a number of which end up at "prestigious" doctoral programs. The spot comes with a teaching assistantship that covers all tuition and fees, and pays out 12k a year. They don't even accept non-funded MA students. We only have to teach a single section a semester, no more than 20-some students. The school flew me out to a conference/MA showcase, which gave me a chance to talk to the year 1 and 2 grad students. Apparently, the most difficult part about teaching at the university is the teaching boot camp they run all the new grad students through before the semester starts, followed by mandatory teaching peer groups comprised of tenured faculty and grad students.[...] I love this -- it's exactly a list of things that a graduate program ought do for serious prospective students: talk futures up front, provide funding, keep workloads sane, train people to meet those workloads, etc. So congratulations. And, in all seriousness, hearing that there's a terminal MA program run this way just about made my afternoon.
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Apr 15, 2013 17:15
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Extra credit for the best joke about Boston, 4/18-4/19,* e.g.: Q: What do you call a Russian Muslim? A: I don't know, but keep him away from track practice. Three Chechens walk into a bar. BOOM! Q: How many Chechens does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three. Two to bomb a soft target and lead police on a violent, theatrical chase through a major metropolitan area that terrorizes thousands of people and results in injuries and deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians, and one to screw in the light bulb. Q: Did you hear about the Chechen premiere of Dark Knight Rises? A: It was in Boston. I'm doing this here because (a) I can't do it at work and (b) if I don't, I'm afraid my brain will explode. This happens a lot. And My intuition is that something about this happening a lot is somehow connected to signatures of my best teaching. Normally, I'd talk this out (i.e. have this joke making contest) with some colleagues, but none of the right ones are here. I'd also do that with Mrs. Brainworm, but right now she'd probably record it and play it back in divorce court. Normally, I'd also turn something that produced that kind of feeling into a student writing exercise, but in this case that's completely off the rails. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Apr 19, 2013 |
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Apr 19, 2013 13:46
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Brainworm posted:Extra credit for the best joke about Boston, 4/18-4/19,* e.g.: Someone told me once that if heaven were real, there'd be no humor because humor is by its nature laughing because of an unkind thought.
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Apr 19, 2013 15:30
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Glad I'm not the only one that happens to. With a name like Tsarnaev living in heavily-accented Boston, I've been looking for a Tsar Bomba joke all morning. Asbury fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Apr 19, 2013 |
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Apr 19, 2013 16:04
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EQFiddleCastrol posted:I gotta be a professor. I'm serious, I gotta be. I can't imagine doing anything else (aside from something in publishing, which is a distant backup choice). I'd rather teach than research but I'm looking forward to both. I'm majoring in English and I want to focus on medieval lit, specifically Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, which is so painfully niche I often get a look of pity when I tell it to professors. I had a lot of advantages you didn't. I'm not saying this to be an rear end in a top hat -- I just mean that my undergrad went well the first time, I had a great education (including grad classes as an undergrad) and a high GPA from a respected school, with multiple professors pressuring me to continue. Even though all that might have put me ahead of the average, a doctorate would still have been an awful decision. Luckily I knew enough older grad students in my field to know that in advance. If you're considering "I want to be an English professor" pretty much at all, my advice is no. When I see that you'll be more than 10 years behind to start, and you want to go into crazy debt just for undergrad, the answer is definitely no. I know it's hard to forget the fantasy of tweed jackets and ivy-covered stonework and unearthing ancient books in the library and passing on your love of the topic to small colloquiums of kids who really care. The reality is generally awful. My actual job, in publishing, isn't just not awful; it's actually pretty awesome. And it means that not only can I have an awesome place of my own in New York City (and multiple retirement accounts), I can also make friends into the same stuff, buy new books/materials on the topic, and contemplate things other than where to scavenge free pizza. In other words, I can actually nerd out better -- and with much less pressure -- than a lot of grad students are able to. Someone was recently telling me that your chances of getting a decent, tenured position are about the same as a kid's chances of getting into the NBA. In your case, let's add that you didn't touch a basketball until high school. Technically it might be possible; realistically, if that's your only plan, you're hosed. Please get in touch with communities of English nerds -- grad students and non- -- and hear stories from their lives. You're welcome to e-mail me for more: annewhateley, gmail.
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Apr 19, 2013 17:53
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i like nice words
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Anne Whateley posted:Really really rethink what you GOTTA be. [...] Thanks for this. It, and a conversation I just had with an advisee, reminded me of a piece of career advice that's seems so obvious I constantly forget to give it: job trumps field. What I mean is that students generally think of their careers in terms of fields, whether those are fields of expertise (as in "English Major") or professional fields (as in "professor"). And while that makes sense for a pile of reasons, it also risks making too much of field divisions. That happens pretty frequently when students see something they either like or dislike in a particular job: they attribute the like/dislike to the job's academic or professional field, and not to some other more appropriate quality (e.g. "every person in this office acts like a dickhole"). So when I hear someone say "I've GOTTA do x," my first response ought to be (and should have been) "why?" The endgame there ought to be helping someone figure out how his or her job will serve his or her interests. Just for instance, I enjoy investing in small businesses and real estate, scripting/programming and tinkering with what most people think of as lightweight engineering projects, writing, reading 17th c. pamphlets, and so on and so on. What I do for a living is less a function of which things I enjoy most and more a function of the conditions under which I'd like to work. From that perspective, the choice I made coming out of graduate school (Plan A: English Professor, Plan B: a jigsaw puzzle of buying and managing rental properties/consulting) made some sense -- both allowed me some of the things I'd want in any job no matter the field: flexible hours, more-or-less self-directed projects and work, and so on. And those matter because I'm (a) happily disobedient, no matter the context, and (b) happiest when I set meaningful challenges for myself. I'd change fields before I took a professorial job that compromised on those points. In other words, the point of career discernment isn't finding the right field. It's figuring out what's important to you, and what parts your professional life will play in your relationship with those important things.
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Apr 23, 2013 16:49
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Since you mentioned you're interested in programming, I'm curious what/if you think about the digital humanities. I've been considering applying to grad school for a while now (finishing undergrad next month) and I've been totally intrigued by the kind of research going on in english using topic modeling and other statistical techniques. My school has always been extremely close-reading focused (I suspect most undergrad english departments are) and I'm just floored by the methodological work guys like Franco Moretti or Matt Jockers are doing. Also, besides how exciting this research is to me at the moment, almost literally every time I've mentioned this stuff to professors their immediate reaction is optimism about the job opportunities that this sort of research might provide in the future. Certainly it appeals to me to learn more about programming and statistics so I have more transferable skills if academia doesn't work out. So what do you think? Are there any insights or questions about Shakespeare/Milton that computational analysis might clarify or 'answer'?
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Apr 24, 2013 00:40
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Are you surprised that every time I read this thread title, I interpret it as "Shoot, I'm still an English professor." as though you are a dejected child in the 1950s who had expected something else from your life? ...and was that deliberate?
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Apr 24, 2013 01:03
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Business posted:Since you mentioned you're interested in programming, I'm curious what/if you think about the digital humanities. [...] This is a place where I'd be careful, at least a bit, because there are two sad realities at work here. The first is a huge generalization: one sign of an immature field is that it's defined by the technology it uses rather than something more fit. That's another way of saying that in a field that has not yet reliably or completely proven its conventional value, people assign value to it by using a sort of technological identity. Litmus test: people used to call "cell phones," well, "cell phones" or "car phones" etc. because they occupied a different place, and had considerable disadvantages, when compared to landline phones, which were just "phones." The same goes for the way that, say, "computer" used to mean "desktop computer," now means "laptop," and in the future will likely mean "tablet." "Digital Humanities" doesn't mean "Humanities" for the same basic reasons that "computer" doesn't mean e.g. "tablet," "thin client," "smart phone," or "magic watch" because it describes a confederation of different ways of doing things that on one hand will probably wholly or partly become the new normal, but (on the other hand) have unclear application to the current and usual priorities of the field as a whole. That matters because, that being the situation, there's a difference between (a) the technological competence one will need to do Humanities jobs at some point in the future and (b) the claim that technological excellent in those areas is valid or valuable field expertise (in the same way that e.g. Composition or Medieval Literature are). Put another way, there's a difference between an accountant who can use Excel and one who calls using Excel his or her field of expertise. There was probably a point, not long ago, when accountants were calling software-based accounting the wave of the future. And, on one hand, they were completely correct. On the other hand, I suspect that any accountant who claimed some software set or something like "computer-aided accounting" as a field of expertise has had his lunch eaten by both technologically competent accountants (on one end) and dedicated programmers / "computer folks" (on the other). So. My thinking on this is that any technology is a tool, not a focus. You can and ought to be good or even excellent at using the best tools for whatever job it is you want to do, or to solve whatever problems you want to solve, and ought likewise be aware of the possibilities that newer or improved tools make available. At the same time, that competence or excellence isn't a disciplinary focus, any more than a focus on other technologies is -- good penmanship, or touch typing, for instance, are a technological expertise as well, and necessary for doing good work. But I would not say that excellence in either or both, no matter how pronounced, is a great basket for most of your eggs. The second reality? It's easy to point to new technology as a place to build a career, and I think the less people know about a given technology the more likely they are to do this. So sift your advice carefully. quote:So what do you think? Are there any insights or questions about Shakespeare/Milton that computational analysis might clarify or 'answer'? Well. I don't know about Shakespeare and Milton specifically, but I can think of plenty of scholarship and teaching uses. Just off the top of my head, there are applications in early textual study for some narrow focus OCR technology -- you can see how this would help a database like EEBO, for instance, and how it might make producing well-edited editions of any early text much less labor intensive. Likewise, there are some jobs that used to be backbreaking -- bibliographies, variorums, and the like -- that a combination of digital technologies would make easier, better, or possible. I forget the name of the fellow who was controversially fired from Southern Miss. about ten years ago (Hester? I honestly forget), but he spent / has spent the better part of thirty years producing a definitive Donne variorum which to my knowledge is still incomplete. And not because the guy's anything other than the one of the world's foremost Donne scholars. That kind of project, were it to make use of digitized collections of every known Donne edition, good OCR, and some smart webpage design, could probably be completed well by, say, one skilled person during a sabbatical. Maybe more important, not having to print the sonofabitch means that (a) it would be affordable and accessible and (b) similar projects might be undertaken for B-list authors. That alone would make all kinds of new scholarship possible, and to people without any great technological ingenuity. The other half of that kind of innovation is what it does for teaching. It would be easy enough to use that kind of technology to do new things -- maybe help students study the history of Shakespeare criticism by putting together a major-publication variorum for e.g. a sonnet, and look at the ways readings or annotations of the sonnet have changed over time. I sometimes already do the same kinds of things with criticism (say, ask students find criticism of the same sonnet from the 1920s, 50s, 80s, and the present day, and note differences in approach and focus), but even that assignment wasn't possible -- or wasn't possible in the same way -- when I was an undergraduate. The research overhead was just too high; actually finding the article without being able to do e.g. good keyword searches would have been hard enough (since an article from e.g. 1920 would have been an unlikely candidate for indexing) would have been a solid afternoon's work, plus whatever time it took to get to a library with the right holdings.
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Apr 24, 2013 18:06
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Are you surprised that every time I read this thread title, I interpret it as "Shoot, I'm still an English professor." as though you are a dejected child in the 1950s who had expected something else from your life? I guess not (I've done the same thing myself), and it wasn't. If memory serves, back in '09 there were a couple other career-focused A/T threads that seemed to be working out well. One of them was something like "I'm a plumber. Fire away." The other was (I think) by an OTR trucker, and I can't even remember the title. Either way, I remember thinking that the pattern was clear: state career, solicit questions in bullet form. And even as I write that I'm not sure that's what the trucker thread title did. But that's what I did, because one thing both threads had in common -- down to the titles -- is that they showed that whoever started the thread had put some thought into what would be interesting to his or her readers, since he or she cared enough to innovate on the clear but boring "Ask me about being an x" title understandably typical of A/T threads. Put differently, being sustainably interesting means listening carefully enough that you can speak thoughtfully. Also, it helps to let people know that's what you're doing. And that's a lot of what makes a thread work, I think. You can be interesting by doing an interesting thing (say, being a birthday party princess or shooting porn). But people who do interesting things can be (a) boring when the tenor of their conversation is "I'd like to talk about what I do" rather than "I'd like to have an interesting conversation," and (b) insufferable when the don't know the difference.
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Apr 24, 2013 19:02
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I'm always amazed by how excessively gory and violent Titus Andronicus is. When it was first performed would it have been a new, shocking experience for theatre goers? How much of the blood and gore would have been shown, it's obvious a lot of it is happening on rather than off stage, would actors of been pulling false hands off, coughing up fake blood and munching on real pies or was it left entirely up to the audiences imagination?
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Apr 24, 2013 21:08
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Dr Scoofles posted:I'm always amazed by how excessively gory and violent Titus Andronicus is. When it was first performed would it have been a new, shocking experience for theatre goers? How much of the blood and gore would have been shown, it's obvious a lot of it is happening on rather than off stage, would actors of been pulling false hands off, coughing up fake blood and munching on real pies or was it left entirely up to the audiences imagination? There's a line of thinking that says this would all have been done as spectacularly as possible, maybe by making use of the byproducts from London slaughterhouses. That's about where I come down -- or at least closer to that than the old "bare stage and minimal props" line I learned about Shakespeare during High School and even as an undergraduate. And there was a lot of spectacle on the London stage. The notes in Marlowe's Faustus B-text, for instance, make it clear that the devils like beings appeared and disappeared using some kind of effect that involved fireworks. A few lesser known plays apparently included a firework-type special effect meant to represent a comet or similar. On the more spectacular side, we can't forget the the Globe burned down because Henry VII included cannons fired onstage. Marlowe's Jew of Malta also includes a late scene where an entire building is blown up, and that seems like a good candidate for similar onstage pyrotechnics. Point is, theater was capable of and made considerable use of straight-up spectacle. There's a second line of thinking that intersects with this. Starting in about the 1570s, different publishers started really getting into "true crime" pamphlets. Those pamphlets worked in about the same ways the low-budget procedural documentaries you'd see on Investigative Discovery worked now: they describe a spectacular or unusual or at least titillating crime (adulterous man/woman hires someone to murder spouse, parent slaughters children, kidnappers tear out victim's tongue, etc.), and then describe the process or procedure that leads to the criminal or accomplice's confession (maybe), arrest and trial (certainly), punishment (always), and subsequent moralizing (sometimes at length).* One conspicuous, but unsurprising, element of many such pamphlets is the amount of ink spilled on sex and violence (a lot) and the amount on he moral lessons that each pamphlet was putatively "about" (usually little). I could word count this in a few pamphlets, but it's easier to take my word for it. Anyway. Certain of these pamphlets were adapted for the stage. The most well-known play to come out of such an adaptation is probably Arden of Faversham, though many Shakespearean plays arguably had sources from other pamphlets and prose pieces (e.g. Othello). So there was some traffic between pamphlet publishers and the theater, at least in the sense that playwrights read pamphlets in general and these true-crime murder pamphlets in particular. So one neat thing about Titus Andronicus is that much of the violence you see looks like it's straight out of one true-crime pamphlet or another. Tamora, Demetrius, and Chiron, for instance, have a deal in common with Annis Dell and her son George in the 1606 Most Cruel and Bloody Murder Committed by an Innkeeper's wife. Of course 1606 makes this pamphlet too late to be a proper source for Titus, but these true crime pamphlets have stock characters as much as any other text (their putative basis in fact nonwithstanding), and they don;t survive with the same frequency that, say, Shakespeare's plays do. Regardless, I suspect that, in the same way these pamphlets covered this violence with a fig leaf of moral instruction, Shakespeare fig-leafed the same kind of violence by deliberately alluding to classical sources. After Lavinia's rape, for instance, Titus goes out of its way to tell the audience (and the censors) that this violence had a legitimate classical source (in Terus and Philomel) even as it explains that Lavinia's dismemberment isn't in the source at all. One reading of this is that Shakespeare innovated on the source. But what Shakespeare looks to have done, really, is combined the best elements of at least two different types of true crime pamphlets: the Evil Mother/Son combo (as seen in Most Cruel and Bloody Murder) and dismemberment, which shows up all over the place in these pamphlets, too. Witness this memorable title from 1624: quote:The crying Murther: Contayning the cruell and most horrible Butcher of Mr. Trat, Curate of old Cleave; who was first murther[ed] as he travailed upon the high way, then was brought home to his hou[se] and there was quartered and imbowled: his quarters and bowels being [af]terwards parboyled and salted up, in a most strange and fearful manner[...] Which accompanies this equally memorable woodcut:  So. By staging this kind of violence in a pretty spectacular way, Shakespeare was one-upping the murder pamphlets. He could take the same kind of crimes they described (and that people loved reading about) and really land them as theatrical spectacle. In doing that, I think he had to fig-leaf with classical sources in the same way the pamphlet writers had to fig-leaf with moral instruction. But regardless of whether and how you see Titus as having a proper source in the pamphlet literature, I think it points to the play making the violence as gory as possible -- the success of the true-crime pamphlet shows that people have an appetite for that (for one), shows that you can get away with it as long as you fig-leaf (for two), and has plenty of time and market-tested pieces of spectacular evil to mine for inspiration (for three). * The best book on this I've read is Lake and Questor's Antichrist's Lewd Hat.
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Apr 29, 2013 16:54
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OK. Feels a little odd to post this here, but I was just tenured. Which is good. This year's round of tenure/retention decisions was also conversation-worthy. We had about a dozen people up for review, and at least three (including one in my department) weren't renewed.* So I'm glad to talk about that process and what it looks like -- not just because I've now been through most of it, but because I paid more attention to it this year than I have in the past. And because I teach at a liberal arts college, so the system's different from the R1 "count the publications" model that (I think) comes to mind when most people think about tenure. * I.e. they were fired. Which is awkward, since they're working here through the next academic year.
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May 14, 2013 14:57
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Brainworm posted:OK. Feels a little odd to post this here, but I was just tenured. Which is good. First off, congratulations and thank you for this thread. What criteria is your tenure based upon? Did you do anything outside of regular Assistant Prof. duties to stand out? I also think you mentioned a second book a while back, any progress? What do you think of the tenure process detailed here? Also, did you read Prynne on George Herbert which was mentioned a while back, if so, what do you make out of it and Prynne? (George Herbert, Love III. A Discursive Commentary)
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May 14, 2013 15:09
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Brainworm posted:I was just tenured. Well done! Now to coast to retirement! (Or tell everyone what you really think!)
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May 14, 2013 15:26
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Was the firing as memorable as the guy you posted about at the start of the thread--the one who went through a Latin-spouting self-destruction? (Congratulations on tenure, btw!)
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May 14, 2013 18:31
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Boatswain posted:
Thanks (on the tenure) and welcome (on the thread). quote:
We have four criteria for tenure (and hiring and renewal). I'ma reword them a bit so I don't end up quoting from our handbook. Call them:
Teaching Excellence "Teaching Excellence" is our most important criterion, and the role it plays in tenure's interesting for a couple reasons. First, the bar's set at "excellence" rather than, say, "competence." Second, it's the only criterion where shortcomings can't be compensated for with exceptional performance someplace else. And that gets tricky. There's a short and interesting list of people we've hired and fired who then went on to be name scholars -- not because they weren't performing yet, but because the usual R1 recipe for tenure (field-leading scholarship and average teaching) is basically untenurable here. Scholarly Quality The second category, "Scholarly Quality," is a sort of catch-all for discipline-specific academic activity. At most places, that means conference presentations, articles, books, and grants. Here, it also includes things like writing textbooks or pieces for e.g. the Chronicle of Higher Ed., editing journals and collections, and (basically) anything else that needs academic expertise. When someone putting on a Shakespeare play calls and asks me about such-and-such a scene, for instance, that counts. Not for much, but for something. In practice, this really means that our review process admits scholarship on teaching and learning. We have a few people here whose entire body of scholarship is T/L -- you know, chemists who publish exclusively on the effectiveness of chemistry-specific teaching strategies. At most teaching colleges, this is B-list research at best. Institutional Fit and Community Contributions The last two categories basically include different kinds of service. "Community contributions" covers the conventional stuff: committee work, meeting with prospective students, running job searches, and so on. "Institutional Fit" sounds a little like "plays well with others," and it partly is. There's no line in someone's contract which says that he or she must e.g. notify advisers when a student's likely to fail a class, or take some time to talk over a research topic a student's really excited about. At the same time, it's essential that those things be done -- if for no other reason than that's part of what helps us attract and retain good students. quote:
A few things. Teaching Innovation A lot of academic processes have a traditional form that's just not very good. Grading student writing, for instance, still usually means hand-writing or typing a combination of marginal notes and a few terminal comments. You can add student conferences into that process, or use it in a drafting and revision sequence, but the bottom line is that if you look at fifty different writing-intensive courses you'll see the same half-dozen techniques at work. The student writes, the instructor responds (or peers do), and that ends in a grade. Lather, rinse, repeat until the course ends. So one of the things I've worked on the past few years is a process I call "narrative" grading. Basically, I start each semester by working with each student to set some specific writing goals, usually by looking at a piece of draft writing and asking which parts were easy to write and which were difficult, and what the student thinks worked well or badly, and tossing those answers up against where the student's going. Maybe he's a first-semester prospective English major and wants to write like a combination of Slavoj Zizek and Chuck Klosterman. Maybe he's a second-semester senior bound for med school, and so wants to be able to write as quickly and clearly as possible. Once we have those goals, some substantial part of the grade for each writing assignment is based on progress toward them. And the traditional combination of marginal and terminal comments isn't really suited to that. It's not comparative, for starters. You generally can't say something like: quote:...in the last essay I suggested you try X, Y, and Z to address the problems with organization and transitions that I thought made especially information-dense parts of your writing unclear, and I can see improvement when I compare part A of this essay with part B of the last one... So I changed my feedback instrument. Instead of writing comments on individual essays, I write a document that includes each student's goals and an overview on his or her progress toward each of them, plus the feedback for each piece of writing we've done during the semester. That way, feedback on later pieces of writing can easily reference feedback from earlier ones, and both the student and I have copies of all of it. At the end of the course, that makes it pretty easy for me to write a sort of summary that tells each student where he or she has improved, how this relates to the goals we've set, and what some good next steps might be, and for students to self-assess with some integrity. I've tried all kinds of tweaks on that -- sometimes the feedback document includes stuff from peer reviewers, and sometimes it includes pieces of what would otherwise be course material (e.g. a list of introduction templates). You get the idea. Thesis: Other People Exist Second, I try to be honest and straightforward. That means telling people things they don't want to hear, and doing it non-confrontationally -- that is, in a way that keeps disagreements from turning into pissing contests. This is a hard thing to do sometimes. On one hand I hear a lot of new faculty telling people they're afraid to do this, and so they stay quiet. On the other, I see a lot of new faculty decide to be somebody's yes man. On the third hand, I guess, there are folks who try to be everybody's yes man -- that is, who just tell everyone they meet whatever they think that person wants to hear. And on the fourth, there are self-appointed gadflies who think integrity means disagreeing with everyone on principle and never stopping until everyone knows why you're right. This is going to sound pretty rich coming from someone who was just tenured. But if I could give new faculty one piece of career advice, it's this: you need a brain and a spine. You have to be right and convincing, and being convincing doesn't mean demolishing people. It means persuading them. If I could give two pieces of advice, the second's this: as far as I can tell, neither the natural world, human institutions, or individual human beings are in the business of rewards and punishments. To the extent you think they are, you're missing something important. Just for instance, a raise is not a reward you get for doing good work. It might be a way to boost your morale, or it might be an incentive or a bribe. But your boss isn't going to say "he did a good job so lets give him some more money" anywhere other than your dreams, because other people don't exist for the sole purpose of living up to whatever your idea of fairness happens to be. Likewise, your girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife/mom/dad/sister/brother/friend isn't yelling at you to punish you for something you did. He or she is yelling out of fear, hurt, wounded dignity, or whatever else. So tenure, happiness, money, promotions, whatever: these things are not rewards. You might get them, in part, by doing something well. But at bottom these things operate according to their own peculiar logic, and a lot of that logic has nothing to do with you and whatever it is you do. Um. Anyway. Tenure's not a reward. At some places it's an incentive or a perquisite indistinguishable from a raise. At a lot of colleges, it's protection, so the functional logic of tenure is less like "has this person published good research?" than "is there value in protecting this person from being fired because of external pressures or internal political disputes?" A lot of the time, a college is going to answer both questions the same way. Obviously, you don't want to lose someone who publishes great but politically unpopular research, just as you don't want to lose good researchers and teachers because some administrator had a bad day or because a committee delivered an unflattering but correct assessment of someone's pet program. At the same time, one of the reasons I think my tenure decision went well is that when it comes to committee work, department politics, and so on, I'm likely to constructively disagree with people. And -- apart from whatever else -- the college sees some value in what comes out of that disagreement. If I were a yes man, a gadfly, etc., I'd be tenured in spite of those things, not because of them. quote:I also think you mentioned a second book a while back, any progress? Not as much as I'd like. The one-two punch of an exploded/ing marriage and the college's strategic planning bruised a lot of things, and one of them was my research. So I've got about a half-dozen threads to pull for my next (third) book, and a Spring sabbatical that should help me get one out the door. quote:What do you think of the tenure process detailed here? Harvard can do what they want, and I'm sure this works for them. But I don't like it. The TL;DR here is that each department writes a tenure recommendation letter, and that plus each candidate's self evaluation goes to a committee who reviews each candidate for a few hours at a time and (it looks like) basically ratifies the department's recommendation. They can decide whether the position is worth keeping at the University for another thirty years, but that ought to be a hiring decision rather than a tenure one. Anyway. I'm saying "ratifies" because that gets to the basic problem I see with this system. If you're going to have what's basically a two-stage process, you've got two possible outcomes: the second stage either agrees with the first or it doesn't. If there's a real possibility that it won't, the second stage needs some claim to making a better decision than the first. And what I see in this process is a lot of theatrical integrity -- calling in "expert witnesses" to appear and answer questions in person (rather than, say, asking them to review the candidate's file and write a recommendation letter, or just using Skype). That makes the whole process conspicuously visible but not conspicuously functional, sort of like how TRD stickers on a Corolla don't help the cornering. That's fine if you want to invest your departmental decisions with some ceremony and authority. But it otherwise doesn't add much to the process. An ad-hoc panel of administrators Q&Aing with field experts isn't likely to discover any problem with the department's or dean's recommendation that isn't bafflingly obvious -- three hours just isn't enough time for that. That's consistent with the other part of this that's a little disturbing: a straight "yes" or "no" with no explanation attached to it. Ideally, those explanations aren't just for the candidate. They're material you use to train future reviewers, either because they set useful precedents or help reviewers learn what to look for in a tenure file. Of course you don't need to do that if the review's just a really big rubber stamp. quote:Also, did you read Prynne on George Herbert which was mentioned a while back, if so, what do you make out of it and Prynne? (George Herbert, Love III. A Discursive Commentary) I haven't yet. It's a hard book to get a hold of unless you want to actually buy it. Our library loan network's pretty big, and it's not anywhere in there, and I'm not yet at the point where I'd order it up for our library holdings.
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May 15, 2013 21:05
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(For context: I'm an English PhD student who has started to work in the "digital humanities") Congrats on tenure! Brainworm posted:
I really do think most of the scholars already involved with DH are the most uncomfortable with the term itself/the idea that there is value-added simply due to the inclusion of technology, though there is always institutional pressure to do, in a sense, a unified thing, which I believe many scholars feel. As I've been learning about the history of the (?field?) the most exciting thing has been discovering how ancient a practice humanities computing really is. For example, Roberto Busa produced the first machine-assisted concordance in 1952, not even using a general purpose computer. Similarly, computational stylistics has been a practice for ages (Coetzee's doctoral dissertation was a computational study of Beckett, and this was '68). The really distinguishing aspect of this phase seems to be the new techniques only now possible because of their computing/graphical requirements and, of course, the internet. This includes things like topic modeling, which requires immense amounts of processing power (as well as a large digital corpus of texts) and network analysis. Vitally, these approaches don't focus nearly as much as something like stylistics on actual textual processing, they are whole different beasts. A lot of words to say that I agree with you! Honestly though, I think most DH "people" are the most uneasy when people treat it as an autonomous focus. Brainworm posted:
http://digitaldonne.tamu.edu/ I honestly think the focus of DH is going to slide away from variorum/concordance building. These are, again, the oldest humanities computing tasks, and I feel that techniques like network analysis, topic modeling, and machine learning are the tenuous ways forward. Not to say that variorum/concordance tasks are bad or useless (interactive variorums don't exist for everything, and the concepts are still used in things like Ryan Cordell's work on regional Hawthorne variants. Plus they just tend to be cool) but I am personally hoping for more things like Moretti's network analysis of Hamlet. Nothing messianic, just, hopefully, a new way to look at things. Awesome thread, and again, congrats on tenure.
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May 15, 2013 23:19
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Brainworm posted:Thanks (on the tenure) and welcome (on the thread). Well it's too late for me to do undergrad at your school, but you think I could land some work there?  (Do you guys give out PhD's too? I'm sure you mentioned TA wrangling at some point...)But seriously, this is a pretty fun thread.
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May 16, 2013 00:22
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First off, congratulations on tenure! Second, finally figuring out where you are teaching was insightful! Third, congratulations again on tenure! Brainworm posted:... I thought this comment was relevant: comment on the article which seemed apropos posted:...when the process is over, the President takes no responsibility for the decision. None. There is no explanation ever given for why the decision is made. She does not inform the candidate, instead deferring the responsibility to the department chair, who is equally uninformed as to why the decision is made. The inhumanity is not in the long track towards tenure. The inhumanity is afterwards, when the President believes that the University no longer has any responsibility toward the candidate who has made it so far, worked so long for students and colleagues, and done nothing other than try to satisfy the requirements. Sorry that question was so poorly phrased. This article sort of gets in to what I'm trying to talk about : http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/plagiarism-is-not-a-big-moral-deal/ e: Oh, one quick question. I wish I could remember the name of this part of literary criticism, but its a movement which involves things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assemblage_(composition), and the reappropriation and reorganization of existing works. I think there's notable academics at Stanford and Columbia especially who do it. 2 questions: Do you know what I'm referring to? And what do you think about it? This article maybe is a better example: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/plagiarism-is-not-a-big-moral-deal/ Apologies for how miserably poorly the above was worded. semicolonsrock fucked around with this message at 22:17 on May 19, 2013 |
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May 18, 2013 23:27
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Hi, Brainworm. I've been reading your amazing thread for a while, and I've finally thought of a question to ask. I've really gotten into Shakespeare recently, and I'm planning to read most, if not all of his plays over the summer. What would you say is his: Best/Worst Comedy? Best/Worst History? Best/Worst Tragedy?
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May 23, 2013 00:58
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semicolonsrock posted:
Maybe you were thinking of Kenneth Goldsmith (https://chronicle.com/article/Uncreative-Writing/128908/)? Also, there's Jerome McGann's concept of "deformance" which is the 'performative deformation' of literary texts (manually or with computers) as an act of criticism. Rides Naked posted:(For context: I'm an English PhD student who has started to work in the "digital humanities") Business fucked around with this message at 00:30 on May 29, 2013 |
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May 29, 2013 00:06
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