I'm still an English professor. Shoot.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > I'm still an English professor. Shoot.

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Brainworm posted:

If you're looking to get a job, go to law school.

Also, if you want to be an academic, you can teach with either a JD or a law PhD. And law professors are in high demand and make serious, serious money.

Brainworm these are both terrible ideas to be spreading around given the current state of law. Especially the first.

Here's my question:
In your years of teaching, what fascinating truths have you learned about college students?

[I just finished my first year teaching comp, and I learned that freshmen at my school (small artsy fartsy niche) are Romantics with a capital R. They believe in purest natural "free expression" springing forth from them fully formed and beautiful if they can only cast aside pesky constraints like "society."]

# ¿ May 6, 2009 14:32

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:57

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Brainworm posted:

Hold up. I know the JD's not the lock on a high-paying career it used to be, but the job outlook for JDs is comparatively Edenic.

The NALP puts the job placement rate for law students north of 90%. Those are one year placement rates, incidentally. The three year placement rate for English PhDs into Assistant professorships is south of 50%. Further, the median starting salary for an Assistant Professor of English (the highest paying position you can get straight out of grad school) is $48K. The median starting salary for a JD who goes into private practice (55% of them, incidentally) is $108K.

Putting aside all the skeezy things schools do to make their NALP reports look good (counting McJobs as employment, etc), those are still 2007 numbers. Back then salary wars were the big industry news, and everything was looking pretty sweet. Now, over 11,000 lawyers have been fired since jan 08 (http://lawshucks.com/layoff-tracker/) and that's just DISCLOSED biglaw firings. 2L summer jobs, the traditional apprenticeship for those sweet positions, are slim to nonexistent. DA offices, being state government, are having hiring freezes. As for the median salary check the distribution graph in the OP of the law megathread. Median means nothing when there's a huge spike at $160k and a spike twice as large down in $45k. (I could argue this more in-depth, or annotated-ly, but you're not the person who needs convincing: you have a professor job!)

I will never argue that English PhDs have it easy, or that they have it easier than lawyers. But a lot of people are telling grads to throw down $100k in debt for law school based on patently false notions of the law profession as guaranteed $$$$ or at least guaranteed employment, and it's irresponsible advice to be spreading around.

Now let's go back to the fun stuff

Brainworm posted:

That there's a huge, huge developmental range. Especially emotionally. Some of them are about what you describe -- that everyone is naturally good and valuable and it's social constraints that must make them something else. The other side of that is a sort of deep relativism, where it's somehow wrong, or at least not useful, to make value judgments. That's a bit ahead of teaching at Lehigh, where the overwhelming majority of students were mired in a sort of superficial certainty about everything.

I was expecting superficial certainty, but instead I got hipsters. Relativism to some extent but mostly a severe and pervasive "ironic" detachment. It's not cool to care about stuff anymore. Do you think that cultural changes (vast opening of information channels, internet culture, lots of political jadedness etc) are making for fundamentally different kinds of college students than we've had in the past?

The best class I had all year was when I made them read Debate? Dissent? Discussion? Oh, Don't Go There!. They spent a whole hour heatedly discussing why it isn't true, or why Kakutani might think it was even if it isn't, and then had a brilliant aha moment at the end realizing that they'd just spent an hour "debating" and that was what "they" wanted all along.

Brainworm posted:

Bad exposition is the worst sin you can commit with words.

Agreed. Next is extended second-person narrative addressing the audience (as opposed to another in-story character)

ucmallory posted:

How do I establish a thought provoking discussion for students where they can come up with solid, plausible ideas without me flat out telling them the most common ideas on the text and why?

I too would love to hear more about this.

# ¿ May 7, 2009 05:00

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Brainworm posted:

I'm not sure this "ironic" detachment is anything new -- I'm a Gen Xer, and that's (allegedly) one of the defining characteristics of my age group. That and a resentment of authenticity.

Chuck Klosterman writes a great bit about this in Killing Yourself to Live, when he visits the site of the Great White concert fire that melted however many people. The people who were at that concert weren't there for the novelty; they were there because they wanted to directly (re)experience music that they had authentically enjoyed when they were younger and happier.

I was a kid when Great White was big, but there's no way I could be part of that authentic enjoyment crowd. I'd have sat in the back marveling to some date about how fat everybody got, how the band should start playing the county fair circuit, how when I was a kid I still knew they sucked. And then burned to death, I guess.

Point is, I'm not sure the kind of detachment we're seeing is new. It can be irritating as gently caress, though.

What I can say for sure is that my incoming students distrust and resent institutional authority past the point where such attitudes are useful -- their knee-jerk response to a problem seems to be direct political confrontation, in combination with "consciousness raising" and poorly-orchestrated protest.

This isn't exactly a new thing, but parts of it seem new. And they've made me start thinking that we need a mandatory freshman seminar on political efficacy.

Chuck Klosterman. I don't know music so I haven't read any of his rock books but that episode sounds very Eco to me (Travels in Hyperreality to be specific). I like a guy that can tell me something new and fascinating about Saved by the Bell even 10 years after it's over.

As far as authenticity, maybe you (royal you) just can't enjoy things as they are because you're a college professor and an intellectual. Academics spend a lot of time getting taught to sublimate the original work into a lot of convoluted secondary meaning (on a simple level, like when you said people get taught "Hamlet is about death.")

How would such a class on political be efficacy be composed?
There's one lecturer in our department who does a lot of social justice work (this semester specifically with south america) but I don't think it's too jaded of me to think "you're a comp teacher. Your kids researching about this country is not going to solve its really nasty endemic violence." Policy and economic change is what will do that, so that's what you should be demanding. Never mind the whole bourgeois arrogance of thinking that "oh, if americans care about your problem it will totally be fixed. College freshmen on the case!"

Brainworm posted:

If you haven't finished that MA yet, go to your department and get their access code for the MLA job list. That's nicely designed, totally searchable, and has just about every job ad there is from folks looking for employees with graduate degrees in English and related fields.

jkicker where are you getting your mfa at? pm me if you'd rather not say

Brainworm posted:

My dream casting, in all seriousness, is Michael Cera as Hamlet.

# ¿ May 9, 2009 07:31

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Veritron posted:

did you skip over all the Shakespeare discussion or what?

NeverOddorEven posted:

You have to be loving kidding me.

christ do I need to post five :smug:

s under everything I don't mean in the absolute most literal sense? I even said (royal you)

# ¿ May 11, 2009 07:55

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Aturaten posted:

Have you noticed any trends in overall ability regarding gender? I've found a lot of women I know have trouble discarding the passive voice, and write in an overly wordy style. On the other hand, I've found many men I know have trouble with grammar rules, such as the placement of commas. Have you found that men are better writers, women, or is it split fairly equally?

What the hell kind of question is this?

# ¿ May 24, 2009 04:18

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Pedagogy question: A friend whose skills I respect very much, who also happens to be a graduate student teaching in the same program I am, has a unique and brutal technique for his freshman comp classes that I am dying to implement: The Wall of Shame.

Basically, after every "final" paper (this is a writing-intensive, revision-heavy program we're pushing here), he puts a few excerpts of the most egregious or illustrative errors up on the overhead (anonymously of course) and makes examples of them to the class to talk about. Of course, his students either love it or hate it, but according to his evaluations most come around to understanding that even if it's humiliating, they'll never make that mistake again.

So my question is, in your opinion is this too brutal to do to my freshmen? Is it as beneficial as it seems, or would I be undermining something important that would hurt our general learning goals? If not how would I have to present it for best results/least resistance?
(I'm of the opinion that since my arrogant rear end got humiliated weekly in tutorials, they can definitely learn from a little tough love.)

Additional concern: what if I'm running the type of class where students are very exposed to each others' work (not just through one on one peer reviews, but where everyone's drafts are accessible in an online portfolio system)? Would this make it impossible to keep Wall of Shame anonymous? Does it matter?

# ¿ Jun 3, 2009 05:53

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Doran Blackdawn posted:

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to be the next great writer in history. This century's James Joyce, if you will.

Doran Blackdawn posted:

_{_{what are you talking about i dont want to be a writer}}

Becoming a better reader is a fine goal, and so is becoming a better writer, but I sense something dangerous here. So I'm going to do for you what a very famous writer did for one of my professors (and thus saved his career)

Repeat after me:
I AM NOT JAMES JOYCE
I AM NOT JAMES JOYCE
I AM NOT JAMES JOYCE

Brainworm: thanks for the advice on the wall of shame. I'll respond/probably ask more questions later in the summer when I'm fixing up my syllabus for real real

# ¿ Jun 21, 2009 17:47

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Brainworm posted:

Juniot Diaz is a textbook example of how a modern author can work the form.

Having just finished Oscar Wao I agree with this wholeheartedly. That was good writing but it only got a pulitzer because it was multicultural and had footnotes. I didn't even think Oscar was that great of a "nerd" character - maybe I've been spoiled by the forums

# ¿ Jul 2, 2009 03:44

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

If you want to be a professor and write criticism get a PhD
If you want to write fiction get an MFA

An English BA is training you to do the former on a very basic level. Unless you've been taking workshops, at a college with a great MFA program, you're not getting taught how to be a fiction writer. To me the difference between the two was night and day: I never wanted to be an academic.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2009 23:12

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

emys posted:

I don't know, Brainworm. You're being a bit hard on St. John's. (It's actually not a Catholic college by the way. The name's a bit of a misnomer.) It's hard to judge which 20th century intellectuals will have real staying power. Isn't it better to focus on the stuff we know people will still care about and think about in a hundred years?

I think we're pretty safe on Foucault and Levi-Strauss. :psyduck:

Seriously, I'm as much a classics fangirl as anyone else but c'mon, just because it was written after 1915 doesn't mean it's not important enough. Time is moving a lot faster now, and that list has very little anything that prepares you to think about a postmodern, postcolonial world

also have you ever seen Charmides post? he went to st. john's and that's what that kind of education produces.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2009 17:49

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Why does only the first paragraph of your blog entries show up in my google reader feed? V. annoying to have to click through...

# ¿ Aug 21, 2009 05:21

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

the balloon hoax posted:

Please explain 'The Death of the Author' to me in a way that doesn't make me want to spit on Barthes' grave and euthanize English scholars.

Why should Barthes have to make you feel good about reading him?

# ¿ Nov 9, 2009 02:26

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Brainworm posted:

If the reader is male

Drink if the first thing a character does is light a cigarette, manipulate drug paraphernalia, or do anything with a gun.

Drink if the story involves a teenage boy learning something from his relationship with a working-class male.

Drink whenever the main character interacts with a girlfriend or ex-girlfriend in a manner likely cathartic for the author.

If the reader is female

Drink if the story is about a woman's struggle to overcome physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.

Drink every time this young woman's father is mentioned.

Drink every time an object, situation, or phrase is repeated throughout the story to some effect.

Point is, at any collegiate reading, you'll hear about more about cigarettes, guns, blue-collar affectation, and post-molestation trauma than you would at a steering meeting for the Diocese of Brooklyn. And you'll hear it from otherwise good writers. It's like a phase everyone has to go through.

At the MFA level this changes to

* Drink if the story is about a marriage slowly falling apart
* Drink 2 if the marriage is falling apart because of a dead baby
* Drink if the major conflict of the story can be summed up as #firstworldproblems (bonus if said problems are making the main character act inexplicably "crazy" in an unwitting attempt to combat middle class malaise)

# ¿ Apr 17, 2010 16:56

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Applewhite posted:

Also you should post in ladythread if you want to learn about feminism. I'm sure they would be happy to meet you.

There's a ladythread? I would go to there.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2016 23:18

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:57

Defenestration: Aug 10, 2006; "It wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be-"
"Jesus, kid, what?"
"That something smelled delicious!"; Grimey Drawer

Stagger_Lee posted:

Brainworm, how many goons does it take to correct a woman who believes she might have been subjected to gendered hostility?

or you could read the gassed thread and see what happened yourself. It's only like 6 pages.

Woman thought that Editing was a tool of the patriarchy.

I suggested audience awareness because she showed none. I care about that sort of thing, and I find it disturbing that a humanities professor might have such contempt for the concept of critique.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2016 04:54

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > I'm still an English professor. Shoot.