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Cemetry Gator posted:In reply to someone asking about critical theories (I almost have my BA in English Lit so I have some knowledge) - deconstructionism sucks. That was me  quote:At least the ones I've read. Most of it is nonsense, like I have a hard time figuring out what they are exactly getting at. Granted, whenever I get a definition on deconstructionism, I'm always left profoundly confused as to what they are trying to argue (it has something to do with the inherent contradictions within the text, or something like that, I've never been 100% sure). - this is where I do my best to demonstrate deconstructionism, skip all this if you know this. I am at best a well-read layman, so YMMV. Also, deconstruction is vastly more complicated than my little attempt here, but at least it's something. - Well deconstruction, as far as I can tell, centres on a desire to dissolve the dualities that structuralism relies on in order to build deep structures (eg. a story is a HERO, undergoing A JOURNEY, is CHANGED and COMES HOME (wherein the the capitalised bits are core concepts within structuralism)). Deconstruction asks the questions like "If there is a HERO, then there must be a NOT-HERO in order for the HERO to exist, and if that is true, how exactly is the HERO different and can we collapse the dualism and say that the HERO is equal to the NON-HERO?" The way that this is done, and it is very clever, is what Derrida argues in "Structure, Sign, and Play within the Structuralist Discourse" (read here), this basically landed like a nuclear bomb on the structuralist discourse that had been dominant for ~40 years. Basically he argues that there is such no thing as definite meaning on which to base the structures that have been prevalent up to that point. Here's how he does it: If I ask you what "cat" means (and this is taking into account sign/signifier relationships that say that c-a-t is merely random markings that we have come to associate with a particular concept) then you will tell me something like: "Furry animal, has a tail, whiskers, chases mice etc." Next, I will then ask you, what does "mice" mean? You will then give me another set of explanations at which point I will ask you the same question, but ask you to define a different term. In doing this, I show that there is no such thing as absolute meaning (a Kantian 'ding an sich') but only a succession of meanings that endlessly defers to other meanings. The problem with such a discourse is, of course, that you can now say "well if there is no definite meaning, what is the point of literature/literary studies (or life) at all? If we can never figure out the meaning of something, why try? This is where Derrida answers with saying that just because you can't ever see outside your cave to the idea-world outside, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. What you should do is embrace this fundamental uncertainty that lives within language (that of endlessly deferred (and thus unfixed) meaning) and play with this uncertainty. The task of deconstruction is to show that these fixed categories within a structuralist discourse (like HOME, HERO, JOURNEY) actually do not have some intrinsic value but are part of an opposition (NOT-HOME, NOT-HERO, NOT-JOURNEY) that can be dissolved. Derrida doesn't say that all discourse about literature is futile, but that we merely should let go of some notion of an attainable, non-reducible, absolute truth within text. - Structuralism is the seatch for what derrida calls "a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign" (Derrida), whereas deconstruction accepts freeplay and allows for a manifold of interpretations that are allowed to fall outside the structure. The problem, of course, is that deconstructionists themselves have sometimes taken on some air of all-knowing smugness because they see other theories as subservient to their own. And that French philosophers of the 20th century are mostly unreadable cunts. If you want to read a really good piece on the whole thing read: 1. Dialogue and Deconstruction, the Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Ed. Michelfelder and Palmer. SUNY Press. (Here) then 2. Dialogue disrupted: Derrida, Gadamer and the Ethics of Discussion. Ed. Swartz and Cilliers (Here, but you need access to EBSCOhost) 1 will confuse the poo poo out of you. 2 will go a long way towards explaining it. All this requires some knowledge of literary theory. quote:The other one I'm not a huge fan of is the psychological study, but that's mostly because it appears to superimpose a lot onto the text. It can be an interesting read, but often times, they'll end up arguing something the text just has no evidence for. Psych is so heavily indebted to Freud that they sometimes just go nuts, I agree. Freud himself said that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." I don't think it's without merit, but it often allows people to go nuts with sexuality without much check on their opinions. Queer theory, as an offshoot of feminist, postcolonial, and psych theory, often does the same thing, I agree with you. The most fascinating and emergent theoretical framework for me is ecocriticism, which is a relatively new field that attempts to demonstrate the literature has so often been about the human experience, while forgetting nature and sense of place. It's politically motivated by the environmental crisis, but that just makes it interesting and active to me. edit: Wow, that's more wall-of-text than I meant. Junior G-man fucked around with this message at 16:16 on May 14, 2009 |
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May 14, 2009 16:09
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Chocolate Milk posted:I meant to ask about this when you posted earlier. I'm from a country which has seven universities, so our system is completely different. How do you measure/prove the financial need of a student? There are a few standardized federal forms that ask students and their families to report income, assets, etc. (e.g. the Free Application for Federal Student Aid/FAFSA), and these are attached to more-or-less standard metrics that determine what individuals and families can afford to pay.
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May 14, 2009 16:17
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Glowskull posted:yeah, how does it feel to not be accredited? Hi. How does it feel to make baseless assumptions and look like a fool? University of Phoenix is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, part of the North Central Association. Same region that accredits some other crappy schools, like Notre Dame, Northwestern and Ohio State. The business school is accredited by the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs, which also accredits schools like the State University of New York. It's not the AACSB, but that's because the AACSB puts most of its focus on research, and UPX doesn't focus on research, it focuses on teaching. Seriously, Glowskull, there's not really an excuse for that one. As to the graduation rate point from Brainworm, that's because the DOE calculates grad rates in a manner that is inconsistent with how the University operates. The DOE, more specifically the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, tracks graduation rates of four year students who come in with no prior credits. This demographic represents a little under 7% of UPX's student base. So, yes, only 16% of 7% of the University's students graduate. I transferred in with three credits, so even though I've done 117 credits there, I wouldn't be counted under the DOE's system when I graduate in September. In addition, I was part of a pilot program that was designed to reorient the program to encourage students with fewer than 12 credits to complete their degrees, so it's something the University is actively working on. Overall, however, the University tracks an internal graduation rate of about 59%. I apologize again, I'll stop here, because I don't want to turn this into a thread about University of Phoenix, but Glowskull's comment really needed a response since it was just so flat out wrong.
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May 14, 2009 19:42
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At the risk of a slight derail I'd like to talk about some of the points raised about the British educational system. Firstly, although you do have to specialise early a lot of science courses now offer a foundation year for those without the maths/science A-levels normally required. Outside of the sciences mature students (over the age of 21) can start the course with no A-levels at all. Secondly, although I cannot comment on the drop out rates compared to the States, I know lots of people who complete the first year of their course and then decide to change subject and start all over again the next year. The concept of multiple choice exams at university level is completely alien to me. I don't know if anyone would be kind enough to link me to what they feel is a good example of a typical multiple choice exam. Preferably physics since this is what I study.
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May 14, 2009 20:43
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FightingMongoose posted:At the risk of a slight derail I'd like to talk about some of the points raised about the British educational system. Firstly, although you do have to specialise early a lot of science courses now offer a foundation year for those without the maths/science A-levels normally required. Outside of the sciences mature students (over the age of 21) can start the course with no A-levels at all. Yeah, multiple choice exams at the college is a sign of lazy professors who either don't have the time to grade properly or don't give a gently caress. I have had some multiple choice exams when I went to college, and I found them all to be repulsive. Doubly so when you factor in the fact that I had to pay 40 grand a year for that poo poo.
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May 14, 2009 20:49
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Brainworm posted:
Rebutting this briefly before an on-topic contribution (and leaving out the second there for clarity): "There are a lot of people." That's the correct version. People isn't the subject in that sentence. People is the object of the preposition, so it can't be the subject. It's easier to see if you rearrange the sentence in the order that English sentences usually take: "A lot of people are there." Again, people is the object of a preposition, so it can't be the subject. The subject is lot, and it takes a plural verb because of the way it's being used here. I won't go any deeper than that, but I'll provide switcheroo examples, both of which are correct for a certain context: "A lot of pies is up for sale." (You're at an auction, where things are being sold as lots.) "A lot of pies are up for sale." (You're at a grocery store, where things are sold individually.) I think the confusion comes from starting the sentence with There. Easing into on-topic territory, I taught a section of remedial grammar at a community college. This rule is the one rule the students objected to. They'd say things like the following: "There's three pies on the table." "There's a bottle of beer and a pie on the table." Both of those are wrong. It should be "There are. . .", since there are (ha!) multiple subjects. (Multiple subjects are there.) Collective nouns swing both ways. "The team is on its home field." The team signed their contracts today." Go read the part about notional agreement here: http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/060.html (And note that it doesn't use the conditional at the beginning of that section. Interesting.) So, I'm an online adjunct (at a "normal" university rather than an one of the for-profit places). It works exceedingly well for comp and creative writing classes. All the ones I teach are really well designed. In fact, they're more rigorous than the already-pretty-rigorous ones I taught on campus. How would you approach a lit course if you had to teach it online?
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May 14, 2009 21:34
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Vladimir Putin posted:Yeah, multiple choice exams at the college is a sign of lazy professors who either don't have the time to grade properly or don't give a gently caress. I have had some multiple choice exams when I went to college, and I found them all to be repulsive. Doubly so when you factor in the fact that I had to pay 40 grand a year for that poo poo. Correction: your parents had to pay 40 grand a year for that poo poo. Or did you seriously put yourself 160k in debt for an education at an Ivy? In which case, you're an idiot.
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May 14, 2009 22:38
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FightingMongoose posted:The concept of multiple choice exams at university level is completely alien to me. I don't know if anyone would be kind enough to link me to what they feel is a good example of a typical multiple choice exam. Preferably physics since this is what I study. http://www.mediafire.com/?wtgzzikzdg2
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May 14, 2009 22:49
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Vordulak posted:Correction: your parents had to pay 40 grand a year for that poo poo. Or did you seriously put yourself 160k in debt for an education at an Ivy? In which case, you're an idiot. No, I didn't pay for it all. I got by with a combination of loans, a scholarship, and my parents. And if the market rate for a university is 160K for four years, the only universities that are actually worth it are the ivies and arguably the other top-tier schools. The real idiots are those who pay 160K for small colleges that nobody has ever heard of. They are paying Ivy rates without the networking, facilities, prestige, etc...of an Ivy.
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May 14, 2009 22:59
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Brainworm posted:The first problem is with major design. Basically, some programs grow their majors to the point where students don't have elective credits to burn outside their major or the Gen Ed. requirements, and (usually) departments with this major design push their majors to think of Gen Ed. courses as an obstacle rather than an equally valuable part of student education. I'm an engineer and I understand your point, but what can engineering departments and engineering students do? Engineering curriculums have to be fairly expansive to meet ABET requirements for accreditation. Most cirriculums include courses in communication skills and business fundamentals. Maybe these classes aren't the most effective solution, but at least they address the problem. From a student's perspective, even if you have spare elective credits why take the extra general education courses? From my experience lower division general education classes were hit or miss. An advanced technical elective could be more enjoyable and more relevant.
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May 15, 2009 00:05
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Kind of a weird question for the OP, but; can you tell if someone has not done the reading for a certain piece based on grading their essays? I wonder this because I got an English Lit major from a 1300 student liberal arts college a year ago and got about a B average without reading about 1/2 of the assigned works. I never got called out on this, including never being called out by fellow students, even when I did my senior seminar project on a book I never read one page of. This leads me to the next question of; what do you think is the most important thing to take out of getting an English major? Obviously the writing helps, but is it discussion skills? Applying literary analyzation to different fields (and everyday life)? BSing incredibly well, as I learned to do in my 4 years? I'm just wondering, as my own degree feels pretty worthless to me as of now, although I did enjoy discussing (almost) everything in class, which is why I stuck with the major.
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May 15, 2009 01:05
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I'm curious if you have a sense of how CompLit people are viewed in academia. I've heard tell that a lot of the other humanities kind of look down on them, which I think is strange given the shift towards interdisciplinarianism (is that a word?). I doubt your school has a CompLit department since it seems that only larger/older schools do, but I thought you know what the general atmosphere is.
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May 15, 2009 03:58
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Roll Fizzlebeef posted:Kind of a weird question for the OP, but; can you tell if someone has not done the reading for a certain piece based on grading their essays? I wonder this because I got an English Lit major from a 1300 student liberal arts college a year ago and got about a B average without reading about 1/2 of the assigned works. I never got called out on this, including never being called out by fellow students, even when I did my senior seminar project on a book I never read one page of.
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May 15, 2009 06:44
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Thanks for that, aneurysm. (Now there's an odd sentence to type.)
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May 15, 2009 09:46
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RussianBear posted:I'm an engineer and I understand your point, but what can engineering departments and engineering students do? Engineering curriculums have to be fairly expansive to meet ABET requirements for accreditation. Most cirriculums include courses in communication skills and business fundamentals. Maybe these classes aren't the most effective solution, but at least they address the problem. Really, I'm not sure about short-term solutions. In the long term, ABET needs to take a cue from ACS (Chemistry's analogue to ABET) and make some hard decisions about how undergraduate education is going to articulate with Master's-level engineering programs -- as I understand the situation, ABET takes a comparatively hands-off approach to graduate education. One of the consequences of this is that everything gets crammed into undergraduate programs at the expense of educational breadth.* Now if, as an engineering student, you'd take an advanced technical elective over a lower-level course in another field, that's your choice. My issue is with programs that burn elective credits inside the major and so don't effectively allow that choice. * Another consequence is that some engineering subfields are underserved by ABET's regulation -- the story I hear is that Civil Engineering has been complaining to ABET about this for years.
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May 15, 2009 15:40
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Roll Fizzlebeef posted:Kind of a weird question for the OP, but; can you tell if someone has not done the reading for a certain piece based on grading their essays? I wonder this because I got an English Lit major from a 1300 student liberal arts college a year ago and got about a B average without reading about 1/2 of the assigned works. I never got called out on this, including never being called out by fellow students, even when I did my senior seminar project on a book I never read one page of. Generally, yes. This has everything to do with balancing a couple priorities in assignment design; generally, you can either build an assignment so that it audits students' past work, or you can build it so it develops a new skill -- either something as tangible as archival research or something as abstract as synthesis or evaluation (in Bloom's sense). This means that grading has everything to do with why I built an assignment the way I did. If the assignment's about auditing students' reading, you can bet I'll rip up anyone who's showing gaps. But if the assignment's about archival research, synthesis, or evaluation, I'm only going to burn non-reading if it's severe or imbalanced enough to affect how any of those skills play out in the essay.* The corollary is that this means I need to balance both kinds of assignments in my syllabus, so non-readers get ripped up every once in a while and skill-development assignments retain their focus. One thing I've noticed as I've reviewed outside syllabi, though, is that the audit-the-reading kinds of assignments are the first to get dropped when things get busy. But your situation's just obscene. A second, short point: a college class isn't like a high-school class. It's meant to provide a forum or opportunity for learning and skill development, meaning that it's not a professor's first job to call out students who approach their education in bad faith (by, say, never doing the reading). In an ideal world, we could do both; in practice, we need to choose how we're going to spend class time, and most generally choose to spend it for the benefits of the students who've read rather than those who haven't. quote:This leads me to the next question of; what do you think is the most important thing to take out of getting an English major? Obviously the writing helps, but is it discussion skills? Applying literary analyzation to different fields (and everyday life)? BSing incredibly well, as I learned to do in my 4 years? I'm just wondering, as my own degree feels pretty worthless to me as of now, although I did enjoy discussing (almost) everything in class, which is why I stuck with the major. The easiest way to talk about this is to separate field knowledge and skill development. In terms of field knowledge, the really important thing is to come away with some understanding of continuities and changes in Anglophone Lit; this understanding should be backed by an array of particular textual knowledge -- that is, you should be able to confidently make statements like "John Wilmot was a typical libertine poet because..." or "Jonson, rather than Shakespeare, is more representative of Renaissance literary values because...," and so forth. Part of this field knowledge also involves the vocabularies we use to talk about how words work on the page, either in poetry or in prose. It also involves knowing something about how different time periods approach texts (for instance, my Renaissance Lit students frequently compare original printings of texts with their anthologized versions to build some insights into the editing processes conventionally used for early texts). There's certainly more, but I'm sure you get the idea. The skills part of the major is really the more important. Probably the most important skills a student brings out of the major involve familiarity with the written word -- that is, the practiced ability to assess how print information is organized within a text (by identifying conventional organizational structures) and, conversely, to organize written information in a useful and meaningful way. That gets us into writing, which I'd call the second most important skill students practice through the major. I'm not sure how things work for you, but as a rule my students write at least fifty pages of formal, revised prose per semester (plus some substantial amount of informal and unrevised responses, etc). You'd be amazed how dramatically this improves their ability to make complex matters clearer on the page from semester to semester. Skill number three comes out of discussion. And maybe I should call it "how to use discussion to settle some complex issue." By "settle," I don't mean "answer a question"; I mean "frame the issue in such a way that one either finds an explanation for it, sees that there are equally valid exclusive and competing explanations, or defines a list of unknowns that need resolution before the issue can be usefully approached." *One reason for this, though there are many, is that I use an internal process of assignment review to figure out what I'm doing well or poorly in the classroom and in terms of course design. Splitting assignment purposes makes this review incredibly difficult.
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May 15, 2009 18:31
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Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify about not doing the reading; I read summaries (sparknotes/classic notes etc.), to get the general idea of what the story was about and go from there when we had discussions in class. This probably worked because we were never audited on our reading, we only wrote essays on our own ideas, which were discussed in class at length. Group discussions were also great in helping me refine ideas, especially when someone would bring up a particular part in a work that I had either forgotten or not read at all. As for the second question you answered, my writing improved dramatically throughout college and it is one of the things I value the most from my education. My school was on trimesters, so we typically wrote about 40 pages a term, although I had a Victorian Lit class where the sole grade was on one paper (25-30pp). And, finally, a new question I thought of; Do you grade males and females differently or, rather, read their essays differently? I ask this because the English Lit field at my school was overwhelmingly female and the topics of my papers tended to distance themselves from viewing a piece through some feminist-lens and/or quoting only feminist theorists (not to say every female did this). This especially applies to someone like yourself (liberal arts college professor) who should actually know his students, as the classes are small enough for productive discussions. Or, I guess, you might have preconstructed notions as to what so-and-so's topic/thesis will be.
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May 15, 2009 18:59
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z0331 posted:I'm curious if you have a sense of how CompLit people are viewed in academia. I've heard tell that a lot of the other humanities kind of look down on them, which I think is strange given the shift towards interdisciplinarianism (is that a word?). We've got lots of students who do Comparative Lit, at least by the standards of our smaller majors (some of which graduate one or two students a year). Anyway. We usually have three or four Comparative Lit. majors declare and graduate every year. Our majors generally have something close to native fluency in two foreign languages (they can read and write college-level texts without translation aids), and basic (translation) level knowledge of a third. I've never seen a stigma attached to Comparative Lit. There is a sort of concern at the administrative level about how Comparative Lit. works, since a student probably needs to come into the major with fluency in at least one foreign language and probably at least functional knowledge of a second. In principle, most colleges try to make every major available to every incoming student. Comparative Lit doesn't in practice pass this test, since lots of admitted students can't make up their language deficiencies before declaring the major. A second administrative concern is how Comparative Lit plays out at a graduate level. In practice, Comparative Lit PhDs end up as weak competitors for positions in foreign language departments, and ways to articulate graduate study against a CL Bachelor's are becoming increasingly restricted. But those are administrative concerns, not academic ones. I mean, our CL implementation is pretty rigorous, so I'm not sure anyone's going to question its educational value.
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May 15, 2009 21:52
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Roll Fizzlebeef posted:Do you grade males and females differently or, rather, read their essays differently? I ask this because the English Lit field at my school was overwhelmingly female and the topics of my papers tended to distance themselves from viewing a piece through some feminist-lens and/or quoting only feminist theorists (not to say every female did this). This especially applies to someone like yourself (liberal arts college professor) who should actually know his students, as the classes are small enough for productive discussions. Or, I guess, you might have preconstructed notions as to what so-and-so's topic/thesis will be. I grade every student differently, truth be told. I think I've already mentioned using grades as motivational tools rather than strictly evaluative ones, so that plays into it. But I'll also grade students against their earlier work. One thing that happens to majors is that they find some lens for text reading -- a particular tactic or a particular theory -- and use it for everything. That's great for churning out papers, but not so much for learning, so I'll use grades to lever students out of that rut whenever I can. This would include some of the female students you talk about. This gets gender-complicated for some other reasons. My department is overwhelmingly female, and (not to overly stereotype) in practice favors faculty/student relationships that smell a little like estrogen. So I get a lot of support from my department when I approach things differently; one common complaint on my evaluations is that I'm not "nurturing" enough (I'm quoting because that's the word from the evals.) -- one example that's always mentioned alongside this is my "I think you're wrong because XYZ, so convince me," which is (I think) polite but not really nurturing. Students have different tolerances for this kind of approach, and I'd be lying if I said those tolerances weren't gendered. But whether that's a matter of what my students actually do or how I interpret what they do is an open question. I think what this splatter of a response points to is that gender difference doesn't directly play out in evaluation, except in whatever effects it has on individual students.
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May 15, 2009 22:19
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You said you did consulting for ETS. Not being familiar with it, my understanding is that the writing portion of the GRE is currently pretty worthless, and lots of schools don't even count it. Does ETS seem to be aware of this? Any measures being taken at the moment? And, what I'm sure will be the most interesting part, what are your thoughts on the writing GRE and how would you change it?
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May 15, 2009 22:28
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Brainworm posted:I think what this splatter of a response points to is that gender difference doesn't directly play out in evaluation, except in whatever effects it has on individual students. Good enough for me. I was kind of rambling in my question anyway. The only thing I ever sensed from professors was the "you get a C/B because your paper is good but you are smarter than this. Apply yourself and you would get an A," which is true in my case, as I had 'too much fun' in college. Any students you have/have had that have this problem?
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May 15, 2009 23:20
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I think the other problem too with trying to call students out is that some colleges overload students. My university does 5 courses a semester, which may not seem like a lot, but since my English Lit major actually requires you to do work, what ends up happening is that you get burnt out quickly with all the work that you have to do and eventually stop caring about some courses. What started to happen to me was I would base the time and quality control of assignments based on my personal enjoyment of it and the importance to my grade. So an assignment that really meant nothing to me that I could fail and still walk out with an A obviously got very little thought. I imagine it is like this in most schools. Not to diverge too much, but one of the biggest issues with college is that it is a completely dysfunctional environment. On the one hand, the schools want to be taken seriously as academic institutions. On the other, you have to deal with substandard housing for students (my apartment on campus holds 4 people. It's clearly only meant for 2 by design, which makes living and studying there a tightrope walk sometimes), passive university responses to students who are obsess with getting drunk and partying (and don't give me the old "good times" line. What a lot of these kids do is borderline obnoxious, and is often destructive), and a university that has to balance the books before they can offer a good education. The other problem too is that our university system isn't designed to push students to their maximum potential, but rather to just push students out at the schools maximum ability. Which means, for people like me, if your professors don't notice the issues, they'll never call you out and push you further. I have a lot of classes where I plateau. My biggest problem is that I can slip on through and appear to excel. When my heart is into something, I can do really well. I'm mentally adept and able to understand and comprehend data quickly. In most classes, I get bored. The problem is I mask this plateauing by my positive qualities: my curiosity, my work-ethic, and my willingness to engage in conversation. Granted, that's not to say I don't care about my education. It's just that I can be bored by it. But with the right professor, I can push myself to new levels. For instance, I did well in one class when we did the novels until we got to the poetry, and then it all fell apart for me. First off, I hate reading poetry for classes, since I like to explore character's motivations and historical implications over symbolism and other such stuff. I noticed that the output on my work just wasn't up to snuff. Instead of getting great grades, I wasn't getting merely only good and okay. I went to the professor, and she didn't answer my initial question, which was some help on understanding the work. Instead, she answered a question I didn't even know that I wanted an answer to: and that is what was I doing that was holding ME back. She explained that I am 25% weakness and 75% strength (I imagine that this is normal for most people), and she said what was holding me back was that I relied on my weaknesses more than my strength. I had potential, and I was riding on my potential more than actualizing it, and she said I needed to strive to get at the work. Guess what, I went back to getting those great marks after taking what she said. But the problem is that in a lot of my classes, I've been able to ride in more by simply just naturally riding above the crop, while at the same time, stagnating and not reaching my potential. Frankly, all the poo poo I learned in the classroom is nowhere nearly as valuable as that one lesson. The problem is that I only a minority of the teachers I had cared about making sure I was doing the best I could.
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May 16, 2009 04:54
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PrinceofLowLight posted:You said you did consulting for ETS. Not being familiar with it, my understanding is that the writing portion of the GRE is currently pretty worthless, and lots of schools don't even count it. Yeah, ETS is aware of the problem with the essay part of the GRE, as well as the essay portions of the other standardized tests. The problems are specifically that the grading system is volatile (essay portions require renorming every year, which isn't strictly true of the other sections), and that the grades aren't granulated finely enough to be really useful. I mean, what does a "4" on the AP History exam mean, anyway? Is it an assessment of field knowledge, the clarity of one's writing, or the ability to organize semi-complex ideas in a half hour? That said, I think the essay portions are useful -- some valuable kinds of thinking just aren't going to be represented in a multiple choice exam. So the way I'd handle this is to move all the essay portions of every test to a 1-5 score (or something granulated just as roughly), but, in addition to the score, supply everyone receiving the test results with: a) The essay(s) the test-taker wrote, complete with the comments and rubric supplied by the graders. b) A reference packet containing sample essays written by other (anonymous) test takers in response to the same prompt (ideally, a couple "5" essays, a couple "3" essays, and a couple "1" essays). c) A second reference containing a statistical breakdown of how essay scores generally correlate with scores on other sections of the test (where applicable), and/or a statistical breakdown of which segments of test takers generally perform best (and worst) on the essay portion, at least where this differs from performance on the rest of the test. I'd also exclude the essay portion of the test from the overall score (so you'd get a 1500 overall with a 4 on the essay portion), to stress that institutions should read over the essays from students they're interested in, and interpret those essays in the contexts provided by both reference packets.
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May 16, 2009 20:16
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Your ideas on the writing portion of the GRE sound really good. I've been twice-burned by that part of it, having achieved scores in the 90th+ percentile on both the verbal and quant sections but not being able to break 4 on the AW, and it's very frustrating. I wish I could get some feedback myself on the comments that graders had on my esays, in order to improve, so I think that it would be great if schools could see those as well.
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May 16, 2009 23:23
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Ic waes gesequestered.  Have your dreams switched over? A professor friend mentioned recently that it's common for teachers to stop having the dream where you show up for a class you've forgotten about all term and to start having the one where they show up to lecture and have no idea what the class topic is. I've had that one once or twice, and it's kind of fun. At this point, I can bullshit on nearly anything for fifteen or twenty minutes. Not as distressing as the oh-crap-exams-are-coming-and-I've-failed dream. How did you pick up your auxiliary languages? Are you an autodidact (in that subject or elsewhere)? Have you thought about teaching a radically different course, just to learn something about the literature involved? It seemed a common tactic among my undergrad professors.
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May 19, 2009 12:45
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Hello OP. I have two questions: 1) You seem to have a formal understanding of pedagogy, especially as it pertains to course/curriculum design. Did you study education formally at some point (and is this encouraged for aspiring PhDs) or was it more of a learn-on-the-job type situation? 2) Maybe I'm asking the wrong guy in a Shakespeare/Milton scholar, but how much interaction have you had with film studies people, both in grad school and at your current job? In my undergrad, the English dept. covered both English lit and film studies, united through a strong critical theory focus. I'd like to study film but I enjoy writing about literature as well and would ideally like to find a grad program (and eventually a job) at which I'd be able to work with both media. Generally speaking, is this possible or is specialization necessary after a certain point?
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May 19, 2009 13:57
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Empty Sandwich posted:Ic waes gesequestered. This is an odd one. I've never had either flavor of academic-anxiety dream, and I'd like to think it has something to do with avoiding anxiety in general. There's probably some unfounded diagnosis and more than a little arrogance in that, but I also think it speaks to something about the best way (or my best way) of approaching work. In rule form, it looks something like: If you're working hard or feeling stressed, you're doing something wrong. That is, I've seen the people around me basically saying "I feel some kind of anxiety about my work, so how do I manage that anxiety in a way that lets me keep working?" And that seems like exactly the wrong question. The question should probably be something more like "I'm feel anxious, which means I'm doing something to make myself feel anxious, so what is it and how can I stop?" This is a tough question, not least because there's a sort of cultural rhetoric that equates stress and responsibility -- that is, you know you've succeeded when you have to give up the things you really want in order to do the things you know you must. I'm not sure how that way of thinking does anyone any good. quote:How did you pick up your auxiliary languages? Are you an autodidact (in that subject or elsewhere)? Excepting Anglo-Saxon, I picked up my languages by dating interesting women. This isn't a tactic I'd recommend. quote:Have you thought about teaching a radically different course, just to learn something about the literature involved? It seemed a common tactic among my undergrad professors. I do this all the time, mostly because my college and the larger academic organizations it's a part of make some modest grant money available for the retraining that comes with teaching outside one's area of expertise. So I'm looking at broadening my experiences with Film Studies and bringing in material on 17th century Asian Lit. These are still early in the planning stages right now, but I should be able to help roll out some course offerings in the next year or so.
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May 19, 2009 17:15
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silencekid posted:1) You seem to have a formal understanding of pedagogy, especially as it pertains to course/curriculum design. Did you study education formally at some point (and is this encouraged for aspiring PhDs) or was it more of a learn-on-the-job type situation? I think most grad programs that have TAships have some kind of cursory training, but most of what I picked up was from an officemate of mine who taught High School and already held an M.Ed. I've also published a few articles on pedagogy as a way of driving some field research. But apart from that, most of what I know about pedagogy in an academic sense has come from trying to solve specific classroom problems and meet the needs of specific students. What I can say for sure is that graduate programs seem generally built to train researchers rather than teachers, and this seems like it needs re-examination -- at least in fields that chiefly train academics. quote:2) Maybe I'm asking the wrong guy in a Shakespeare/Milton scholar, but how much interaction have you had with film studies people, both in grad school and at your current job? In my undergrad, the English dept. covered both English lit and film studies, united through a strong critical theory focus. I'd like to study film but I enjoy writing about literature as well and would ideally like to find a grad program (and eventually a job) at which I'd be able to work with both media. Generally speaking, is this possible or is specialization necessary after a certain point? In most grad programs you can choose major and minor areas of study. Generally, Film Studies people also choose 20th c. lit. of some flavor as a major or minor area, which makes some sense. But it also makes sense for Shakespeareans to have some Film Studies backgrounds -- something I only realized when I started teaching Shakespeare and needed to show a class how diverse the staging possibilities for a scene could be. So this is something I've been building on after the fact. Point is, you could absolutely balance these during our graduate study if you found a program strong in both fields. The real challenge would be finding a program that'd hire you to work with both -- in that case, you'd probably be limited to smaller colleges that prefer folks who cross-specialize.
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May 19, 2009 17:27
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What's your position on the current state of the canon?
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May 19, 2009 21:37
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Brazen Apothecary posted:What's your position on the current state of the canon? Canonicity's a different kind of problem with early texts. I'm sure you're aware of the canon reshaping that's really happened since the mid-80s in most subfields -- the best way to summarize it is the inclusion of a diversity of Anglophone authors correspondent with a shift to a theory-driven cultural studies approach to literature. This has been more complicated with early texts because the pool of surviving authors is less diverse than it was in even the 19th century. So with the exception of Phyllis Wheatley (writing in the late 18th century, which is really late in my period of expertise), there simply have not survived pieces by authors of color, for instance. Of course there are plenty of female authors (Isabella Whitney, Amelia/Emilia Lanyer/Lanier, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, and restoration heavy-hitters like Margaret "Mad Madge" Cavendish and Aphra Behn), and authors from persecuted groups (Hester Biddle's a good example). But the point is that the forces reshaping the canon for more modern texts have pushed the study of early texts in a slightly different direction, and one result of this has been a huge problem with textual availability. You can find Whitney and Lanier in frequently-out-of-print and indifferently-edited anthologies, but good luck with Biddle. So the only other place to go are pretty expensive databases like EEBO. And that's where the canon reshaping some in. You've got one group of colleges with access to everything through databases like EEBO or through affiliation with the Folger or the Huntington (plus the means to move students on site for archival research), and a group of colleges who are basically at the mercy of the publishers. So in one sense we're going to get a bifurcated canon if we haven't got one already, with one fork stressing archival research and a diversity of authors and media (like pamphlets, plays in quarto, ballads, etc.), and another moving with whatever's inexpensively anthologized. Another force acting on the canon is cultural legacy. I don't think Shakespeare's in any danger of slipping out of first place, if for no other reason that a college lit. department that didn't offer Shakespeare as a major author is still almost unthinkable -- in fact, Shakespeare is probably our single most popular lit. course, especially for non-majors. But there are other major authors whose stars are clearly fading, and not least because sexuality has become politically charged in a deeply conservative way. Nobody reads Barnfield, for instance, which is a shame -- his contemporaries ranked him equal with Shakespeare and Jonson, and for good reason, but his homoeroticism has kept him in a basement he seems unlikely to escape. Marlowe's another victim of this -- The Jew of Malta is a loving delightful play, but a fear of introducing antisemitic content keeps it out of classrooms,* just as the homoeroticism of Hero and Leander and Edward II keep those texts more frequently closeted than they probably deserve. But the biggest loss I can see is probably Milton. I'm not sure how this happened, but his reputation seems to rest entirely on Paradise Lost, which is (a) probably the worst misrepresentation of an author currently in play and (b) responsible for his waning popularity. For understandable reasons, PL doesn't speak to people like it used to. And it's godawful long. So the thinking seems to be that it doesn't belong in period surveys and that it's Milton's only piece worth reading, so Milton ends up dreadfully understudied. This is a shame for two reasons. "Lycidas" is probably enough to secure Milton's place as the greatest of all English poets. That poem casts a long loving shadow -- it was one of Ginsberg's favorites (he had it memorized), and Gins owes "Lycidas" the opening lines of "Howl" (if not the whole drat thing). That's one example. Point is, "Lycidas" shows up everywhere. The second reason is that Milton's political writing casts an even longer shadow -- it's easy to forget that the guy who wrote Paradise Lost was also a professional revolutionary and propagandist. So when the founding fathers were scribbling up their statements of purpose, they looked to the most timely and eloquent revolutionary they knew, John Milton. And not for little things. Freedom of the press, the right (and duty) of subjects to overthrow an unjust monarch, that's all Milton.** If he hadn't been such a gifted writer/propagandist, the American Revolution (and, for that matter, the US) would have looked entirely different. But because he's so tied to Paradise Lost, we risk losing the lot. * I should elaborate. Yes, the play is antisemitic, but that's a function of its wider, hilarious bigotry. For a 16th century Englishman, a jew killing nuns and corrupt friars is practically a wet dream. That's another way of saying that Barabas (the jew) is sort of like Godzilla -- not inherently good or inherently evil as much as a force for delightful and indiscriminate slaughter. ** Also, our modern notion of divorce.
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May 19, 2009 23:40
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That's so loving cool. You gave me exactly what I wanted to hear from you even though I was painfully vague. We were discussing the canon (again) a week or two ago in theory, and I was interested in your perspective on it based on your background. Is there a visible split in your colleagues, or do they tend one way or another? Do you have a department Bloom junkie? P.S. I want to be you when I grow up.
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May 20, 2009 00:37
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Brainworm posted:Easy. I don't stay detached, and my grading is not at all equitable. I can't believe no one's called you out on this. This is crap. You are crap for doing it. It's like stripping Ussein Bolt of his Olympic medal because he slowed down and beat his chest at the end and therefore didn't run as hard relatively as the other people in the race. You drat well better give someone an A for doing A-level work. If you must grade with some sort of bizarre "A for effort" system, you should make effort make up for quality, not the other way around. If I write something a little worse than someone but spent tons of time and used you for assistance, I should get more points than them because I get extra, not have them get fewer points. I can't believe no one's complained about this. That would be a completely legitimate complaint and you don't deserve to ever grade a paper ever again if you're just gonna pull that poo poo.
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May 20, 2009 08:04
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MoarFoarYoarTenbux posted:I can't believe no one's called you out on this. This is crap. You are crap for doing it. It's like stripping Ussein Bolt of his Olympic medal because he slowed down and beat his chest at the end and therefore didn't run as hard relatively as the other people in the race. You drat well better give someone an A for doing A-level work. If you must grade with some sort of bizarre "A for effort" system, you should make effort make up for quality, not the other way around. If I write something a little worse than someone but spent tons of time and used you for assistance, I should get more points than them because I get extra, not have them get fewer points. I can't believe no one's complained about this. That would be a completely legitimate complaint and you don't deserve to ever grade a paper ever again if you're just gonna pull that poo poo. Well this is a bit much, but given that, like it or not, the grades you give out will be used to evaluate your students by third parties, it does seems quite unfair to give them grades that aren't accurate evaluations just to "motivate" them.
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May 20, 2009 12:24
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Well this is a bit much, but given that, like it or not, the grades you give out will be used to evaluate your students by third parties, it does seems quite unfair to give them grades that aren't accurate evaluations just to "motivate" them. I think it's alright if it's just for individual assignments, but the final course grade reflects the true merits of a student's work?
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May 20, 2009 12:57
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MoarFoarYoarTenbux posted:I can't believe no one's called you out on this. This is crap. You are crap for doing it. It's like stripping Ussein Bolt of his Olympic medal because he slowed down and beat his chest at the end and therefore didn't run as hard relatively as the other people in the race. You drat well better give someone an A for doing A-level work. If you must grade with some sort of bizarre "A for effort" system, you should make effort make up for quality, not the other way around. If I write something a little worse than someone but spent tons of time and used you for assistance, I should get more points than them because I get extra, not have them get fewer points. I can't believe no one's complained about this. That would be a completely legitimate complaint and you don't deserve to ever grade a paper ever again if you're just gonna pull that poo poo. How you feel about this is contingent on whether you think it's a teacher's job to rank the class by ability or to push each student to fulfill their potential. I'm in the latter catagory and as such I think Brainworm's strategy is far superior to the norm.
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May 20, 2009 14:55
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Brainworm posted:This is an odd one. I've never had either flavor of academic-anxiety dream, and I'd like to think it has something to do with avoiding anxiety in general. There's probably some unfounded diagnosis and more than a little arrogance in that, but I also think it speaks to something about the best way (or my best way) of approaching work. In rule form, it looks something like: Makes good sense. I don't have nightmares, broadly speaking, and I don't have trouble sleeping. When the zombies come, I'm interested in the problem-solving aspects. I think there's a bit of lucidity there, but stress-avoidance makes sense. Americans feel as though they must hate, or at least complain about, their jobs. Maybe it's everybody in the Western world. I love the current one. But my version of the school dream involves a monkey-job I held for many years and have gotten (in the dream) roped into doing one more day of. Remember, kids: nothing is as boring as someone else's dreams. Brainworm posted:Excepting Anglo-Saxon, I picked up my languages by dating interesting women. This isn't a tactic I'd recommend. This would have been a good way to pick up Anglo-Saxon, now that you mention it. Tough to find a native speaker, though. . . .
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May 20, 2009 15:09
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Writing the best paper in class is also not always equivalent to writing an A paper.
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May 20, 2009 15:11
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MoarFoarYoarTenbux posted:It's like stripping Ussein Bolt of his Olympic medal because he slowed down and beat his chest at the end and therefore didn't run as hard relatively as the other people in the race. No, it's not at all like that. It's like Usain Bolt's coach tearing him a new one because he decided that an Olympic race was a competition instead of a chance to set a world record. Barto posted:I think it's alright if it's just for individual assignments, but the final course grade reflects the true merits of a student's work? In practice, this is about how it works out. If I'm going to dock someone who can do better, I tell her -- you know, "you did this, this, and this, and you're too good to be making these kinds of mistakes." And that's generally bolted onto a chance to rewrite. You've also got to remember that I grade a process, not a product. If you handed in a calc test with a bunch of right answers and no work shown, you'd rightly fail even if you were a rare genius who could unerringly intuit the area beneath any given curve, just as you'd fail if your prayers compelled the spirit of Christ himself hand-deliver you the answers. Answers (i.e. products) are nice, but they're not really the point. Most of the time, bad writing by good students has real process problems rather than clear product problems -- that is, you get a solid piece of writing where there's a clear research gap or little improvement between drafts -- rather than a process-immaculate piece that I somehow intuit isn't up to a student's native abilities. So when I say I'll hit the best paper in the class with a B or lower, that's generally where it comes from; the product might be nice, but the process could be hosed. Jeb Bush 2012 posted:[G]iven that, like it or not, the grades you give out will be used to evaluate your students by third parties, it does seems quite unfair to give them grades that aren't accurate evaluations just to "motivate" them. I also understand third-party evaluation grade anxiety, but that's less real than most students seem to think. Anyone who uses, say, GPA as a metric for anything knows how hosed it is as a comparative tool anyway -- a few posts back there was a pretty long discussion about how, depending on the college, GPA can measure entirely different things. That's why e.g. grad programs and other GPA-sensitive institutions set the bar low and flexibly.
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May 20, 2009 15:58
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Brazen Apothecary posted:Is there a visible split in your colleagues, or do they tend one way or another? Do you have a department Bloom junkie? I think we have a split, but not an acrimonious one. This comes out mostly when we do our hiring -- the Americanists think they're underrepresented, as do the Creative Writers. I don't think the Brit. Lit. folks have this complaint, but that's probably more temperament than commitment to a consistent departmental vision. But if every department has a Bloom junkie, I'm probably him. Bloom has a way of overstating his critical cases, but I think his central insight in Anxiety of Influence* is extraordinarily useful if not necessarily true; when teaching poetry, for instance, it makes a great deal of sense to focus on how poems are always responses to earlier poems. I'd go so far as to say that a reader of poetry who neglects those relationships misses the point entirely. That said, I'm not sure Bloom's semi-psychoanalytic vocabulary is a really useful tool for cataloging how those intertextual relationships work. It really neglects intentional responses -- think of the appropriations of images that characterize Modernist poetry or the deliberate genre choices a poet like, say, Edna St. Vincent Millay makes in her sonnets (I'm thinking of her work in Renaissance here). So there's that. * That literary traditions make most sense in context of the relationships that individual authors build with their predecessors, such that one can usefully read texts as responses to those relationships.
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May 20, 2009 19:03
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MoarFoarYoarTenbux posted:You drat well better give someone an A for doing A-level work. If they don't give him their best writing it isn't A-level work. Evaluating writing is subjective (whether it's a professor grading or you casually saying that a particular Op-Ed sucks). Brainworm sounds like he handles this well by expressing clear standards for his students and offering opportunities to rewrite, and I think that is more than fair. Plus, as someone who teaches writing a large university, I can promise you that people always get the grade they deserve in the end (just like Brainworm said). For example, I had a student this semester who was complaining because he got a B on a (pretty good) paper he obviously half-assed. It just wasn't as good as his previous stuff and had almost no revision from his rough draft, even though he knew the rough draft needed work. So he was complaining and his friend from class walked up and said, "Dude, he just wants you to turn in a better paper next time." His next two papers were excellent and he is reworking one of them for a local essay contest. He also got an A in the class. Brainworm posted:You've also got to remember that I grade a process, not a product. I can't stress this enough. It isn't about being able to churn out writing that seems good on the surface. It is about showing the professor (through drafts and revisions and final product) that you understand the process. Even with a crappy swing, you can still hit a stellar golf shot every now and then. But if someone pushes you to constantly improve your swing, you can hit that shot consistently (and with less effort). Brainworm posted:Most of the time, bad writing by good students has real process problems rather than clear product problems -- that is, you get a solid piece of writing where there's a clear research gap or little improvement between drafts -- rather than a process-immaculate piece that I somehow intuit isn't up to a student's native abilities. So when I say I'll hit the best paper in the class with a B or lower, that's generally where it comes from; the product might be nice, but the process could be hosed. This is pretty much it.
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May 20, 2009 19:50
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