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Fast Moving Turtle posted:How would you describe your teaching style, Brainworm? Being that you teach at a small liberal arts college, I assume you favor a conversational approach over a more lecture-based one, but more than that...? ucmallory posted:I feel like I'm a poor discussion leader, and while there are writing elements of Lit classes, all of mine have been mostly discussion-based. 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 try to make all my classes discussion based, or at least discussion oriented. And I try to keep the class quick moving and relaxed -- nothing kills conversation like stress. Also, I bring in a healthy dose of offbeat stuff. Mostly pamphlets, but I'm always ready to throw in e.g. Titus Andronicus. And if there's something awkward in the text, I try to mention it in an offhand way early on, so any nervous folks know it's OK to go there later on. So I've got a lot of class-to-class level tools. In general, the more those tools draw on student interest and autonomy (rather than imposing a structure from outside) the better they work. Agendas are great, though I probably overuse them -- they're my oldest and most reliable teaching invention. In an agenda system, you basically have some mechanism for (a) students generating questions (b) sequestering questions that aren't useful (c) moving the class through the questions in an orderly way A good way to do this is to get students into pairs or groups of three, and having each group come up with a discussion question and write it on the board. This will take longer than it seems like it should, which is fine. It warms the class up, gets them used to talking, and manufactures debates that'll get extended to the class as a whole. Once the questions are up, ask if any of them can be usefully grouped (maybe they talk about the same topic, character, or section of the text), so play secretary and tag any questions people think are related. Then ask which question (or question cluster) they want to start with, and let the group that came up with the question moderate the discussion (decide who speaks, when the question's been answered, when it needs to be reframed, or when it's settled into a few competing and unresolvable possibilities). Then move to the next question. This will only work if you start with it and keep your mouth shut. Let students ask you expertise-based questions if it seems useful, but give the best answer you can in about fifteen seconds, tops. You can also do this for small, advanced, or widely-able classes by having students email you discussion questions the day before and compiling them into a handout. Doubting and Believing is great for shaping discussion, too. Whenever you've got a thesis or an idea presented by either a text or a student, dedicate some amount of time to everyone thinking of everything they can to support it. Then dedicate the same amount of time to everyone coming up with everything they can to shoot it down. Then, use that discussion to accept, reject, or refine the idea as it was first proposed. This is a great way to jump start discussion, and a good D/B investment early in a class period will carry the whole thing. So, ucmallory, you could use this to move from microlecture to discussion. That is, use a microlecture to toss out ideas about how a text is normally read, then use D/B to jump start discussion on those points. Role Assignment works well if you've got a good rapport with your class. Basically, choose a few students at random and assign them discussion roles, like Doubter (argues against anything), Believer (argues for anything), and Synthesizer (argues for a compromise position between competing ideas). I generally attach having a role to an extra credit opportunity if the role is well-played, and make sure every student gets an fair crack at it. This, incidentally, can be coupled with any other discussion-friendly class activity. Can somebody tell me... is great if you've got a text with a crux. Just start discussion by acting confused. Can somebody tell me why Edgar disguises himself to duel with Edmund? I've read this play probably fifty times and I just don't get it. Assuming you do this well, it's magic. Students mostly assume that you're holding back on the answer (or a set of answers) to any problem they're discussing, so discussion gets a lot better if you can convince them you're not. Also, it models a good behavior -- that it's OK to admit confusion on a point and look to class discussion to guide you out of it. In general, students follow your lead. If you only talk when you've got answers, that's how students will engage the discussion. If you start the class with conversation, they'll discuss. If you start with lecture, they'll listen. If you throw out half-baked ideas, they'll be comfortable throwing out half baked ideas, too. If you tell someone you're not convinced by what they've said, they won't be timid about telling other students (or you) the same thing. In other words, you've got to model the behavior you expect from your students, and be aware that the first five minutes of class (like the classes in the early part of the semester) set precedents you're going to be married to.
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May 7, 2009 20:45
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Upright Sloth posted:I really, REALLY want to derail this into a Shakespeare discussion, but I'll restrain myself. Two more questions: A Shakespeare discussion would hardly be a derail. Ditto Milton, Marlowe, Aphra Behn, Ben Jonson, Amelia Lanier, John Wilmot, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Pix, Rawson, Defoe. It's all part of my job, so it seems fair game. quote:If someone came in and broke your "teaching bone" so you HAD to do something else for a living, what would it be? I'd try to coast on the writing and consulting, I think. One idea I got from my parents (and kept) was the that living on a single income stream, however large or secure, is a bad idea -- that is, you should diversify your incomes for the same basic reasons you diversify your investments. So when I was a grad student, I made more investing in real estate and local businesses than I did from my stipend. If I followed that path, I'd probably end up as one of those self-employed people who doesn't actually have a business. I don't see any clear reason, or have any clear incentive, to work for somebody else in a conventional sense. quote:FUNNY ANECDOTES. You know you've got em, we wanna hear em. (Guess that wasn't a question per se but I'm not rewriting it.) I'm sure everybody at a college has basically the same library of stories about the same library of students, so I'm not going to ride that train. Also, it's possible I've got students reading this thread. I don't want to show all my cards. The really interesting stuff involves administrators, staff, and parents. Me saying something idiotic, that's a common ingredient. So here's a list. Condoms Because my college has a religious mission, the administrators, staff and trustees are deeply divided between a sort of schizophrenic social conservatism and textbook academic progressiveness. So my first year here, I got put on an ad hoc committee to review our condom distribution policy. The immediate issue was that we'd received basically a truckload of donated condoms and needed to decide what, if anything, to do with them. The committee was four people (a trustee, a faculty member, an administrator, and a staff member), and basically split 3-1 between the common sense "let's make these as easily available as possible to prevent unwanted student pregnancies and venereal infection" (3) and the oddly Libertarian/social conservative "it's not our role to distribute these so we should stay out, and if we allowed them to be available on campus we'd be encouraging sensual naughtiness" (1, the trustee). This is a problem because the trustee, who I'll call Alice, is the holdout. While we're a more egalitarian college than most, trustees can still make things on this small a scale either happen or not. So really, our job's now to convince Alice to allow something. So it's about ten at night, and we're leaving our first meeting, when Alice asks us to hold up -- she has an orthopedic shoe and walks slowly and with the aid of a cane. She sits on one of many heavily-upholstered antique benches that line the hall, and for lack of anything smarter to do I say, "I wonder how many students have hosed on that." Immediately drawing attention to its collage of college-issue mystery stains. Next day, the bookstore had an unnervingly diverse selection of free condoms. Pirates Thanks to working a diversity of jobs in grad school, I have a CDL. So when our town's annual clean-up style volunteer effort got underway, I got assigned to drive a truck to collect trash that other volunteers were gathering and bagging around town. I was in the truck with a couple local volunteers. I do this kind of thing pretty often because town/gown relations are delicate, and getting out in the community helps keep things stable. This was weeks ago, during the whole Somali Pirate Hostage incident, so naturally that's what we were talking about. And we're picking up bizarre trash (a sofa, a few car bumpers) and generally getting along. One of the locals made a crack -- I honestly forget what -- about what a hellhole Somalia is. So I said "yeah. No gun control, no taxes, small government. If it weren't for all the black people it'd be a Republican paradise." Nobody said anything else for the next four hours. The next Monday I got called in to see the college president, who asked what happened during the cleanup since he been hearing some rumors. He spitsprayed coffee when I told him. Parents If you're now college age, your parents are loving bizarre. And they might hate you a little bit. A few times a semester we have a lunches for prospective and admitted students. They and their parents sit down with some senior students, some faculty, and some administrators and we field any questions they've got and generally make them more comfortable with the idea of college, and with the idea of our college in particular. So I'm the first at my table and watching everybody else move through the buffet-style lunch line, when a College Mom and daughter sit down. College Mom looks at me, looks at my nametag, and says: "Hi Brainworm. You know, my daughter and husband and I were just talking, and we've decided that you're exactly the kind of handsome young man we'd like Ali to bring home next Thanksgiving." Ali is embarrassed. I am mortified. So I say something about usually having to grade papers over the break, but I'm sure Ali will bring back someone at least as handsome as I am. Now Ali is mortified. Dad sits down and College Mom keeps going. "Dr. Brainworm, this is Ali's father. This nice young man is a professor here, honey." And without missing a beat, Dad turns to Ali and says, "Did you hear that, hon? You could be dating a professor!"
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May 7, 2009 23:15
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RussianBear posted:What are your thoughts on the future of liberal arts education? Many students graduate with massive amounts of student loan debt and no job prospects. For graduate programs you said the only stat that matters is job placement. Should this standard also apply to undergraduate programs as well? If not, what standard should we use? I'm not sure I can say anything really perceptive about Liberal Arts education as a whole, since LA comprises a spectrum of schools with radically different missions and educational priorities. What I can say for sure is that colleges and universities have done a lovely job balancing their educational and research missions. With rare exceptions, schools have compromised undergraduate instruction in order to devote more faculty time and institutional money to research, since rankings criteria inexplicably focus on research metrics to the near exclusion of direct or indirect measures of student success. I think data on graduate placement would be great. Of course jobs are part of that, but so are graduate programs and service positions. The other useful outcome measures I can think of revolve around the broader application of standardized testing. But non-outcome measures are also good indicators of educational quality. Attrition is important, as is average time to degree completion. And we could probably add average class size, with auxiliary stats that show how frequently course enrollments go above or below a certain number. And the average number of advisees per faculty member, so students know in advance how available their mentors are going to be.* If you look at any of those measures, Liberal Arts colleges are the place to be. quote:What is your school's financial situation? How do most students finance their education? One reason I came to this college was because of how we handle our financial aid. We are one of the few** colleges and universities in the US with a real need-blind admissions process. Simply put, we admit students regardless of their ability to pay, and promise to to meet the financial need of every student we admit. In practice, this means that our sticker price is about $45K a year. A third of our students pay nothing. Of the remaining two thirds, our average discount rate is close to 50%. The kicker is that our cost is about $65K per student per year. Even if you pay full tuition, you get $20K more in goods and services than you pay for, every year. We can do this because we've got a substantial endowment and haven't joined the facilities arms race. Costs there are obscene. For instance, since a lot of people here go to Kenyon, I'm sure you all know that your new athletics facility's sticker price was about $60 million. After the bonds used to finance it are paid off, that cost will be at least $130 million.*** Used as a scholarship endowment, that same money's worth about 100 full rides. As a staff endowment, that gets you about 70 additional faculty (or 40% smaller classes). quote:Finally, what do you think about the liberal arts school Waldorf College being sold to a for-profit online university? Do you think we will see more of this in the future? I haven't yet seen a for-profit university that wasn't either an outright scam or a short step from it, and they don't live long -- the usual practice is for the investors to rake in a couple years' worth of tuition, run the place on state loans, and shut down before accreditation problems catch up with them (like BCTI and CRI did). Or they run simpler scams, like Crown College and Florida Met. And online programs are doubly sketchy; one thing any college administrator will tell you is that online courses are way more expensive to offer than their conventional counterparts, partly because faculty need to invest incredible amounts of time reading (or listening to) the student responses that substitute for class discussion. This is why colleges flirted with this model but haven't embraced it -- common sense suggests it should be more efficient and therefore cheaper, but it isn't.**** The way to get around this problem is (of course) to let cost drive course design. Get some adjunct to prerecord a stack of lectures, and assess using computer administered and graded multiple choice exams -- in other words, use the single worst possible combination of educational and assessment techniques. I'd bet at least one useful finger this is exactly what you get with an online class from a for-profit. We're going to see a lot more of this, I'm sure. I'd bet another finger that this is where Antioch goes. * I excluded student/faculty ratios since "faculty" includes researchers who rarely have contact with students and (in the case of less scrupulous schools) part timers and adjuncts who teach but don't advise or mentor. ** Fewer than ten. Lots of schools claim to have need blind admissions, but they mean they don't consider finances when they admit students. They don't guarantee, or even try, to make their college affordable for every student they admit. *** Your internal projection is actually $160 million, but keep that quiet. **** Turns out a computer is a lousy substitute for a room.
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May 8, 2009 05:35
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Bolkovr posted:Have you ever had a student's parents call/email you and take you to task for giving their kid a bad grade? Strangely, no. Our parents are oddly civilized in that respect.
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May 8, 2009 05:37
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coffeetable posted:What's the one text you've read in your life that's altered/developed your world view more than any other? Honestly? Would you believe Dune? I read it as a kid when the David Lynch film came out -- I would have been like seven or eight. And it was the first book I'd read where the characters actually thought like real people. I'm not talking about the half-baked Ayn Rand flavored mysticism. I'm talking about the political intrigue. I could see the characters outthinking each other, anticipating what others would do, and I was hooked.* Up until that point, I'd only seen clever characters in movies, books, and TV shows solve problems in the lamest possible ways. The "smart" character would just say "wait a second! We can solve this problem with reverse tachyon techno magic!" or (worse yet) "wait! I know this is true and/or false because of my psychotic attention to detail and library of trivial knowledge." Or (Ender's Game syndrome) "wait! I can solve this problem because the rules of the world I live in are arbitrarily flexible." None of these ever squared with my experience of being clever, which was (is?) mostly anticipating how people or groups will react to what you do. Also, I'm going also vouch for Dune because it's actually just Hamlet with a different ending. Turns out everything good in that book came from Shakespeare. * And then disappointed. Once Paul and Jessica hit the desert, every character becomes mind-bogglingly stupid.
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May 8, 2009 15:14
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NUMBER 1 DBZ FAN!!! posted:Have you taught any graduate-level courses? I haven't, though I've gone in for individual classes as a special guest person, proctored qualifying exams, and worked with dissertations.
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May 8, 2009 15:21
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Defenestration posted: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? 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.
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May 8, 2009 15:38
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JKicker posted:I'm currently in an MFA program (fiction) and am working on an MA in English simultaneously. This means I'm teaching comp and occasionally spazzing out about the job market and researching PhD / IT options until my heart rate returns to normal. I have no false expectations about the number of unemployed MFA holders and realize that if I want to move beyond the community college/comp level, I'll probably need to do a PhD...so I'll have some questions for you the next time I visit higheredjobs. 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.
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May 8, 2009 15:44
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dancehall posted:How do you feel about Bloom's Taxonomy? I've always thought it was pretty useful for telling students what kind of questions to come up with. It's also great for designing assignment arcs. Generally, I build course assignments around short, weekly papers that investigate (or somehow add up to) a library of thought and research that students can use to write longer, article-style pieces. Bloom's is a great vocabulary thinking about how these kinds of cumulative assignments can be parted out. quote:As a former high school teacher I always considered it a big part of my job to prepare students for college. To that end, my number one goal was to teach them how to gracefully integrate quotations into their sentences. Also I'm developing an alternative approach to vocabulary that focuses less on your verbs and adjectives and more on words (usually adverbs) that help connect ideas in different ways (theretofore, whereby, etc). Is there anything else you wish high school teachers would push? I think your working with logical and transitional relationships is right on, but please, please, please don't give me students who write "theretofore." I don't know that I can give you a list of things to do or not do -- I'm not a high school teacher. But I can give you the problems I see that seem to come out of students' high school experience. Incoming students seem to look at lit. as a sort of puzzle that needs to be solved using a vocabulary of symbols, themes, foreshadowing, and a bunch of other things I never heard of until I started teaching college. That is, students seem to think that the important things about a text are a set of abstractions somehow hidden inside it. This is especially true in Shakespeare. Not to get too hostile, but it peeves me when a student's early experience with, say, Hamlet, is just thorough enough to stomp every last ounce of joy and interest out of reading it, and all for the sake of her being able to say "Hamlet is about death." Hamlet is about a young man whose supernaturally-ordained revenge is orchestrated through an intricate series of plots and counterplots in an environment characterized by constant mortal danger and political subtlety. It's a well-told detective story with loving incredible plot twists, not an existential statement. Last time I was in China, I saw an amateur Hamlet production that finally made me appreciate how well this play can work. The people in the audience were mostly rice-farming rubes who'd been brought into Shanghai to sweep the streets and empty the garbage, and they'd never heard of Shakespeare. But this Hamlet (in translation, but uncut) kept about 1200 people on the edge of their seats for almost five hours. Totally hushed. No intermission. Nobody even got up to go to the bathroom. There were gasps when the ghost finally spoke, when Hamlet realized Claudius might be his father, and all through Act III (when we discover that Claudius is actually guilty of the murder, when he sees through Hamlet's faking insanity, and when we discover that Hamlet's really gone insane). That's the Hamlet I want my students to be able to see -- the play that's so loving suspenseful it can be five hours long and rivet the audience for every minute. And I do it. I can get there. But it saddens me that their first exposure to the play doesn't generally convey what the play does or how it works, so they go in with the surprises already killed. The same's true of Romeo and Juliet. It's supposed to have a shocking ending. More to the point, students' relationships to what they read shouldn't be clinical. They can like Hamlet or not -- some people like crazy plot twists and some don't. But they should read texts for understanding, not as some farcical hunt for well-concealed abstractions. That is, they questions they should ask are, say, "what is this character thinking? What is he feeling? Why does he do this? Why does this play or this book reveal this piece of information at this particular time?"
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May 8, 2009 16:39
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Upright Sloth posted:1) Tell us about the various editions of Shakespeare's plays. I know that a large body of collected documents exist and that his editors had a good deal of influence in shaping how we group the plays today, but I don't really know *what* documents exist, how they have been preserved, etc. I guess my question has to do with the physical transmission of the plays from then to now, and who decided which version is 'scripture'. This is actually remarkably simple. The first document you need to know about is the so-called "First Folio," a 1623 collection of Shakespeare's plays (well, 36 of the 38 now attributed to Shakespeare). This was published by two of Shakespeare's associates because (at least from their perspective) there were corrupt versions of Shakespeare's plays in circulation, and they wanted their colleague's work to be correctly remembered. Folios were expensive books, generally printed on high-quality paper, so lots of have survived -- I think over 200 of the original print run (something around 1000 if I remember correctly). And they're not fragile; high-quality prints from this period generally aren't, since they're on vellum or rag paper (neither of which have a high acid content).* Even without special treatment, they'll certainly outlast my Riverside. The other, earlier, printings are quartos -- smaller, less expensive books. There are lots of theories about how plays made it from the stage to the page (audience plants, memorial reconstruction, authorized publication), but the bottom line is that some of these quartos correspond closely to the folio text, and some don't. When they do correspond closely, editors will sometimes go to the quartos to fix what seem to be typesetting or lineation errors in the Folio text. When they don't correspond, the quarto text is generally ignored. It's when there's a middle ground that editors need to do some serious decision making, and they generally err on the side of including everything they can (like Hamlet's "how all occasions do inform against me...," which isn't in the folio text). Generally, this process of textual conflation isn't really complicated -- you just add in all the material you can and note where it came from so your readers know. The biggest exception is Lear, where the distance between the Q and F texts is massive. At least one anthology (the Norton) prints them as two separate plays, which seems logical enough -- I'm pretty sure the two texts present the same play at different stages of an extensive revision that was never really completed, so this can give readers a good picture of how a play changed during its performance history. Textual provenance is easier for the sonnets, which only have one source: a 1608 quarto that may or may not have been authorized and may or may not be complete. But there's only one source, so there's not much for an editor to do. Some have proposed alternate orderings for the sonnets, but there's really not much reason to do this unless you're squeamish about "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" being written to a man. In the sonnets, though, modernizing spelling and punctuation can really change how a poem works, especially when it presents what seem to be deliberate ambiguities. So if you're really interested, Stephen Booth's edition prints facsimiles of the original 1608 sonnets alongside modern spelling versions. quote:2) How would you stage /Enter Ariel, invisible/? What about /Exit, pursued by a bear/? What are your thoughts on WHY he would include these moments? Easy. Philip Henslowe was the owner of a rival theater to Shakespeare's, and he kept a diary that's an excellent source for much dramatic history, including the terms on which actors and playwrights were paid. In that sense, it's really less a diary than an annotated ledger. One of the stage properties he lists is a "cloak to go invisible in," suggesting a theatrical convention in which a cloak of a certain color or cut meant the actor wearing it was invisible to everyone on stage. For Winter's Tale, I'd just use a real bear. There's a popular 1598 play, Mucedorus, that was actually once attributed to Shakespeare. In it, there's a similar stage situation (a bear chases Amandine and her fiancee Segasto). It seems clear both from the text and third party reports that the bear was real. At least one period theater also doubled as a bear-baiting pit, so access to bears was presumably not a problem; there are also records of Jacobean court entertainments involving trained bears, so Elizabethans probably had the know-how to keep their actors from pulling a Tim Treadwell on opening night. quote:3) When I was taught "Much Ado About Nothing," we discussed the idea that the Benedick/Beatrice and Claudio/Hero couples represent Shakespeare's perception of two opposing styles of love. That is, B/B represent the English notion of a 'Merry War' between spouses that arises from a deep and real friendship (his preference), whereas C/H are the Petrachan, idealized notion of love. The latter, in this interpretation, is held up to mockery through the clod-like gullibility of Claudio (Margaret, "another Hero!") and the passive, utilitarian Hero. Agree/disagree? Agree, I think. Shakespeare does exactly the same kind of relationship parallel/opposition in Midsummer, so this reading of Much Ado seems consistent with what we know of Shakespeare's go-to techniques. quote:4) Would you go to a bearbaiting with me? I'm out of dogs. quote:5) How significant do you think are the occasional breaks from pure character drama? I'm thinking about Time in "The Winter's Tale," Chorus in "R&J," and whatever other ones I can't think of at the moment. What do you mean by significant? Most Shakespearean entertainments seem to rely on periodic and asymmetrical breaking of dramatic illusion, so I'm not sure that putting a non-character onstage is that far from what many of the rest of the plays do. For example, the actor playing Rosalind breaks character as the Epilogue in As You Like It, basically riding out a series of jokes about being a boy dressed as a woman. There's also an implicit break in Midsummer when Lysander and Hermia get lost in the woods, he hits on her, and she shoots him down. The scene can of course be played straight, but it's funny in a different way if you don't buy into the dramatic illusion. Then, you've got a clearly male actor getting carried away in playing against a cross-dressed boy (in short, Hermia's rejection of Lysander is also the boy actor saying "Dude! Get off me!"). *I've got a 14th century vulgate and a bunch of 16th and 17th century pamphlets at home, plus a Geneva Bible, etc. and while I keep them in a climate-controlled room, they've done fine without for the past few hundred years. Aside from a little browning around the edges of the Geneva, they're fine. The pages in the Vulgate, which are vellum, actually retain some elasticity.
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May 8, 2009 18:54
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Head Movement posted:This question pertains graduate admissions. I don't know necessarily what hand you have in it where you are, but I figure you probably still have a good bit of perspective on it. [...] I took a couple graduate level courses in the fall through their continuing education program to try and work on proving myself outside of the holes I'd put in my undergrad transcript. I was doing fine in these courses until the end of the semester when I choked putting together the papers at the end of the semester. This has been my perennial problem knuckling down and getting the big important things done. Well, I work at a college and so don't have anything to do with any graduate programs. But I'd suggest proving yourself through a manageable load of graduate coursework -- even if it's only one class a semester. If you can build good relationships that way, admission to at least that program shouldn't be a problem. But I'd see what you can do about that "knuckling down and getting big important things done" problem first. You won't be doing anyone much good if you get into a program and that washes you out. So maybe doing something where deadlines have more tangible stakes would help.
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May 8, 2009 19:07
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Kommienzuspadt posted:did you ever have a love/hate relationship with English/your field in particular, or have you always loved it so much that it never seemed like that much of a chore? I'm currently an undergrand poli sci major looking down the barrel of a senior thesis, and while I really love what I study, I also know that there are moments in the depths of februrary when suicide seems much more appealing than having to slug through JSTOR for the sixth day in a row. I've only had love/hate relationships with people in the field. Never with my work. Sometimes it's interesting and sometimes it's boring, but I never find myself loathing archival research or scattershot source reading. But I'm pretty laid back and pretty lazy, so when something gets boring I just work on something else. Barto posted:I am quite interested in verse, especially meter. I read poetry, and I can feel the rhythm of it, but as how to identify the stresses in words, and their various patterns and usages, this completely eludes me. I've tried reading a lot of sonnets and writing down random lines as a sort of practice, but I can't tell if I'm fooling myself or if I'm really putting it into iambic pentameter. Can you recommend some books on the topic? Or perhaps advice of some sort? Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook is a little uneven, but her section on sound is great. If you're really just confused by stressed and unstressed syllables, read the line aloud. Your jaw will drop more on a stressed syllable than an unstressed one, so you get: Help! This donkey is eating my hat! Which you can break into a trochee, a dactyl, a trochee, and an iamb (or a trochee, two dactyls, and a trailing stressed syllable).
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May 8, 2009 19:22
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billion dollar bitch posted:Is the word "expat" pronounced with an A like in "crate" or "cat"? I've gotten different things from different sources. We have some consensus. "Expat" rhymes with "cat," even though "expatriate" (the verb) rhymes with "that crate you ate." quote:Also, is it "There are a lot of people there" or "There is a lot of people"? Well this has caused a bit of confusion. In Standard American English, use the singular ("there is a crowd of people") when the noun ("crowd") is singular* -- in this example, "of people" is actually pressed into service as an adjective, since it describes what the crowd comprises. This holds true in the phrase you gave, but some confusion seems caused by "a lot," which is the adjective, not the noun, since it designates quantity (i.e. "there are a lot of people" = "there are seventy people," grammatically speaking). As a litmus test: You can cut adjectives from a sentence without drastically altering what the sentence means. You can't do the same with nouns. E.g.: (a) We ate a lot of peyote and I think I hosed a hedgehog. (b) We ate peyote and I think I hosed a hedgehog. (c) We ate a lot and I think I hosed a hedgehog. (a) and (b) both mean that, in the depths of my hallucinations, I mistook the hedgehog for something more sexually accommodating. (c) means something completely different, which means "peyote" is the noun and "a lot" is the modifier. So for your example, our choices are "There are people there" or "There are a lot there." Clearly, "people" is the noun (and so must agree with the verb), while "a lot" is an adjective and does not affect subject/verb agreement. * In some British English, there are collective singular nouns that agree like plurals, e.g. "the crowd are on their feet."
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May 8, 2009 19:49
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MsJoelBoxer posted:Are there any performances you think you absolutely must see in your lifetime? I'd like to see Patrick Stewart play Prospero. He was an OK Macbeth, but he seems made for parts built more solidly around a kind of wounded dignity. I think he'd make a great Lear -- as in the Lear that defines the part for succeeding generations. But we get King of Texas instead. My dream casting, in all seriousness, is Michael Cera as Hamlet. He could really nail it as an extraordinarily clever and deeply insecure Hamlet whose fragile, nervous energy could spin into full-blown insanity in barely-perceptible degrees. Plus, Cera is a Hamlet with definite vulnerabilities (not at all like his murdered badass father), and so sticks to the character as written. He's not Laertes -- that is, not a guy (like, say, Gibson or Olivier) who would hear the ghost's accusation and rage through Elsinore looking for a Claudius to kill.
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May 8, 2009 20:07
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halesuhtem posted:Since that's come up, if indirectly, I'd like to hear your thoughts on Ayn Rand. What do you think of her as a writer? Is there a general consensus about her? I always hear that she's terrible as a writer of fiction, but I've never heard any analysis by anyone other than people who hate her anyway. Well, she seems to have written a great deal of libertarian thesis fiction where she works out a diversity of rape fantasies.* As a writer, I don't think Rand's anything special -- thesis fiction isn't generally good storytelling, since that's really not the point of it. I do like that giant gold dollar sign that marks the entrance to John Galt's secret valley, though. It's like an episode of Cribs. * And every engineer I know wishes there were more Dagney Taggarts. We're talking about a woman who soaks her panties over groundbreaking alloys and diesel engines.
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May 8, 2009 20:20
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psydude posted:How much weight does the average/median GPA and class rank play into graduate school admissions? Not much. Major GPA is the measure most programs will use, and the measure for admission is usually "over the bar" style -- it's either good enough for admission or not, and at that point other application materials (e.g. admissions essays, writing samples) matter more.
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May 8, 2009 20:25
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Naet posted:Do you have a reference for that, Brain? My grammar book isn't with me at the moment so I can't really verify, but I've never seen "a lot" being recognized as an actual adjective. Lot (defined: a number of things or persons collectively) is a noun, which would make the verb "is" correct for the sentence in question. "There is a lot," is a poor sentence without context, but it is still grammatically correct. Crowd, lot, group, set, etc. are all equivalents in this regard. I hear your argument, but it's ignoring the collocative and idiomatic uses of "lot." Q: How much do you like him? A: I like him a lot. (very much) or Q: How much pain do you feel? A: A lot! (a great deal) or A: Lots! (ditto) or A: A little! (not much) Here, "a lot" is clearly used as a modifier (adverb/adjective) specifying an uncountable quantity, something structurally like, but opposite in meaning, from the idiomatic "a little." This is, in short, common idiomatic usage. But because it's idiomatic, it's not going to regularly appear in dictionaries for the same basic reasons you won't find most phrasal idioms like "blow a load." Meantime, on the noun side of the fence, there are differences between a "crowd," "murder," and a "bunch," even though they mean the same thing as "lot" in a general sense (a number of items collectively). There are, however, clearly appropriate and inappropriate contexts for each, defined chiefly by the nature of the items collected. I'd say "a crowd of people" but not "a crowd of pencils" (unless I was jumping into a metaphor). "Lot" seems an analogous situation. It's use as a noun meaning "a collection of things" is definitely in play when one uses "lots," as in "there are lots of senators around Caesar," meaning "there are several large groups around Caesar." The application as a singular in this sense seems to exclusively use "the" as the associated article rather than "a," as in "I'll kill the lot of them." In both these cases "lot" connotes well-defined boundaries, a sense pervasive in other uses of the term ("lot" as a parcel of land defined by the state, or as a group of items sold together at auction). With people, "lot" connotes similar boundaries -- the OED says "a number of persons or things of the same kind, associated in some way." So you might say "that lot of men in turbans" (as distinct from either turbaned women or unturbaned men) or, in context, "that lot" (when the relationship between the designated individuals is clear). So we have several distinct uses in play. 1) "The/that/this lot," suggesting a group of things with definite boundaries, i.e. with a contextually or explicitly clear connection or similarity. 2) The idiomatic modifier "a lot," (as in "a lot" or "a little") designating an uncountable quantity. 3) "Lots," as a plural of (1), designating several such discrete groupings, but also as a variant of (2). The important thing here is that the idiomatic usage of "lot" bounds the possible non-idiomatic usages. I wouldn't tell someone to close the above-aisle cargo hatch on a 747 by saying "shut up" or describe a schooner "blowing a load" across the Atlantic. At least not if I'm angling to be understood. This implies: There are a lot of people means "there exists a group of people (uncountable)" There is a lot of people means "there exists a group of people with some clearly defined relationship." This could be contextually clear -- I could point to a group of pirates and say "there's a lot," but acontextually I'd need to designate their relationship, e.g. "there's a lot of men wearing fedoras," meaning "there's (in that location) a group of men wearing fedoras, as distinct from another group of men not wearing fedoras." In practice, however, the idiomatic usage could even tread on this. "There's a lot of men in fedoras" could in practice mean "there are many men in fedoras" (idiomatic) or "[designate] a group of fedora wearing men [from either non-fedora wearing men or fedora-wearing non-men]" (non-idiomatic); the contraction "there's" often means "there are" in general usage because "there're" isn't in play: "there's about twelve bottles left in the cooler" or "there's still dozens of players on the bus." The point is that there's clearly an idiomatic usage in play when using "a lot" or "lots," as opposed to "the lot" or "that lot," which means a user has to differentiate non-idiomatic usage from idiomatic. It also seems clear that the vehicle for this differentiation is the attached article. I would say "that lot of men in fedoras" or "the lot of men in fedoras" if I wanted the phrase to be parsed non-idiomatically, and "a lot of men in fedoras" if I wanted an idiomatic parsing.
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May 8, 2009 21:56
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Naet posted:I had a professor that argued that even the Hamlet/Gertrude scene is ambiguous because the ghost could have just appeared to Hamlet. I think that's a bogus explanation considering multiple characters see the ghost at the beginning of the play, but hey. After reading your teaching techniques, I'm wondering if she just duped us into an argument by stating that... I've heard that ambiguity argument seriously advanced before, but Macbeth seems to preclude it (at least if we assume ghosts work consistently in the Shakespearean universe). Banquo's ghost (which nobody else sees) isn't there in the same sense that the blood on Lady Macbeth's hands isn't there, and in the same sense that Macbeth's floating dagger isn't there, either. Seeing things that aren't there is a Shakespearean signal that someone's losing their poo poo, even in plays with a supernatural component. I've never heard anyone suggest that the witches conjured up a vision of Banquo to freak out Macbeth (i.e. that the ghost is really there even though nobody else can see it), which seems as close an analogue as you'll get to the ghost electing to appear only to Hamlet.
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May 8, 2009 22:07
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vegaji posted:1. Is Old Hamlet's ghost a spirit or a goblin damned? I'm taking a class now concerning the mythology of the devil in literature, and the author of a book I'm reading claims, without any reservations, that the ghost is a demon. My Shakespeare teacher disagrees and, without any reservations, says that the ghost is the genuine spirit of Old Hamlet. Old Hamlet speaks from below the ground in Act I, he only wants Hamlet to take revenge, and so on, but I'm not sure. Your thoughts? I'm not certain, but I lean toward the Ghost being a real ghost rather than a devil. But I think there are interesting cases to be made both ways: Spirit * The ghost doesn't lie to Hamlet. We see evidence of Claudius's guilt in Act III, where he also confesses to the murder. Hamlet's thinking on the matter seems to be that if the ghost were a "goblin damned," it would lie about the murder to spur Hamlet's murder of Claudius, who Hamlet already seems to dislike. * The ghost specifically tells Hamlet not to harm Gertrude. You'd figure an evil spirit would go for the twofer. * The play is set in Denmark. This might not men much now, but to the 17th century English, Denmark was the place that coastal raiders and vikings came from (historically), so an ethic of revenge seems perfectly appropriate. The same kind of displacement happens in Kyd's earlier and incredibly popular Spanish Tragedy, which is set in Spain precisely because the English see the Spanish as practitioners of an old-world (read: Catholic) lex talionis flavor of justice -- the idea in both of these is that the foreign setting allows the English audience to endorse a revenge morality that (allegedly) has no place in a rightly-organized civilization. Goblin Damned The Ghost doesn't lie to Hamlet, but tells a him a truth that drives him to a murder he would not have otherwise committed. We also generally assume that, because of what the Ghost says, that Gertrude isn't directly implicated in her husband's murder. But Gertrude certainly has every reason to be -- she's been having a long-running affair with Claudius, after all. Also, if we put some weight behind Hamlet's fear that Claudius is really his father, the Ghost drives Hamlet to semi-unknowing patricide. To play Devil's advocate for a moment: Old Hamlet was an irresponsible king -- he wagers his kingdom on a single combat with Old Fortinbras and generally runs around killing people. Claudius, on the other hand, is a generally peaceful king. He solves the problem of Fortinbras's invasion diplomatically, and seems to genuinely love Gertrude in a way that Old Hamlet didn't. I mean, the guy was away all the time smiting Polacks and increasing the world's store of amputees. In short, Old Hamlet was driving Denmark and his marriage into the ground, so Gertrurde heroically turns to Claudius and says "you're the father of the prince, so act like it. I need a good marriage and the country needs a good king." So Claudius kills Old Hamlet and starts trying to connect with his son -- you know, "don't go back to Wittenberg. Let's go out back and toss the ol' pigskin." The Ghost steps in, (eventually) drives Hamlet crazy, gets Gertrude and Claudius killed, and makes sure Denmark ends up under the thumb of Fortinbras, and all by telling Hamlet the truth. So there's a case to be made for the Ghost being evil, but I just can't buy it with a reading. But you could absolutely stage it that way without doing real violence to the text. quote:2. What plays have the best and worst conclusions? I roll my eyes every time I read Macbeth because I think the fulfillment of the "woman born" prophecy as a huge cop-out, and plus the whole prophecy is never filled. When I read The Winter's Tale, I initially thought the ending was horrible with Hermione coming back to life, but the more I thought about it, the more I found it to be a wonderful ending with the ongoing themes of the play. I've railed on Lear, but it has the best ending -- Lear lapses back into insanity and dies thinking Cordelia's still breathing, which is a pretty tragic extension of tendency to manufacture self-serving delusions. So, in other words, he dies unredeemed, not really having learned from his earlier mistakes. At the same time, he recovers some dignity in rescuing Cordelia. I mean, look at Lear's character. He gives some of my favorite lines near the end of the play: Lear posted:I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion With that admission, Lear's character makes sense. Here's a heroic king who, in his youth, really deserved obedience and respect -- not so much for his position as his deeds. And this bred a personality in him that fit the respect he deserved. But now that he's aged, the virtues of his youth don't fit his station. His decisiveness has turned to stubbornness, and his confidence to a pathological sense of entitlement. His kingly penchant for useful violence (a virtue if you're heroic with it) gets beat down until it's an impotent rage that eats his sanity from the inside out. And this is what makes the end so tragic. Lear is able, for just a moment, to recapture the warlord-style greatness of his youth by killing one enemy soldier when it really matters. But it's not enough, Cordelia dies, and Lear is still so wrapped up in the illusion of his own greatness that he can't grieve for his only faithful daughter.* The worst ending is tough. I might go with Measure for Measure because the marriages at the end are unprecedented by the first four and nine-tenths acts, and not in a way that's interesting. quote:3. Have you seen Ian McKellen's King Lear? What did you think of it? I haven't, but it's in the queue for this Summer. quote:4. I'm probably going to apply for English MA programs soon. I have a pretty solid major GPA (3.75+), I will have worked at the university writing center for a couple of years, and I've already won a couple of departmental awards for some (non creative) writing I've done. Do you have any suggestions of things I can do to really help my chances for MA admissions? [...] Is there some place I can go to find particular strengths of programs around the country, for example a list of X number of schools with great programs in Shakespeare/English Romantic/Southern Literature/etc? I really have no clue of what programs are particularly strong and I'd like to start investigating grad schools soon. I wouldn't worry about your MA admission.** I'd check your languages, since you're going to want a firm grounding in at least two to make most good PhD programs -- in advising my students, that's the one thing that most often comes close to hanging up their applications. You could go to US News if you want field rankings, but https://phds.org is still the best tool I've found -- it lets you sort programs with incredible granularity using an avalanche of data. * Oddly enough, it wasn't until I understood this about Lear that Donald Trump's combover made sense to me. Its the same game played for lower stakes. ** Most terminal MA programs now basically serve high school teachers, so I'd really apply to PhD programs and quit after two years if an MA is all you want.
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May 10, 2009 00:37
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Naet posted:What's your opinion on the Ophelia death scene in Hamlet? Did Gertrude actually see the whole scene? If so, why didn't she send help? That one never really made sense to me. Well, I think this breaks into two basic questions: what's the nature of Ophelia's madness and suicide -- that is, what would Gertrude understand about Ophelia's madness? Second, who's Gertrude? What's she like? The idea is that in order to understand Gertrude's actions, we've got to understand what she knows (or suspects) and what kind of person she is. The second's the easy prey, so I'll hit that first. Who's Gertrude? I don't know if you've ever seen Slings and Arrows,* but during the company's production of Hamlet, the director gives a summary of how Gertrude's generally been read: she's not exactly naive, but not exactly cunning, and as happy to be with the bad king as the good one. This is generally how Gertrude's been played, but I think it misses some of the most important elements of her character and (frankly) of the plot. No matter how you spin her character, Gertrude has some hard edges -- a point that's easy to miss when you see how much latitude she gives her son. Case in point: maybe she's been having a longstanding affair with Claudius. This takes more than naiveté, and it's more than simple opportunism. Cheating on a king's a dangerous game. Look at what happened to Anne Boleyn. It's also possible that Gertrude knows, or suspects, something about Old Hamlet's murder -- the Ghost says that Gertrude's going to be punished for her guilt, but the ghost talks around whatever Gertrude might be guilty of. But no matter what you think of the affair (Hamlet seems to think it likely), or of Gertrude's possible complicity in Old Hamlet's death (which the text allows but doesn't encourage), it's clear that she's capable of betrayal -- if not of Old Hamlet, then at least of old Hamlet's memory. And this is understandable. Old Hamlet was an almost godlike warrior, but we never see anything that suggests his virtues as a husband. And, of course, she seems as wrapped up in spying on Hamlet as Claudius and Polonius are, though her motives seem more personal than political. Point is, Gertrude's more than just a changing piece, and she's capable of making some pretty cold-blooded decisions. Ophelia's Madness Ophelia, like Gertrude, is often misunderstood. Bad productions use her as a sort of prop -- as a way of making Polonius think that Hamlet's mad for love, and as a vehicle for interrupting Hamlet's most famous soliloquy. But Ophelia has hidden depths. These show themselves most clearly during their conversation during the play-within-a-play. Here's how it starts: quote:GERTRUDE The important things here are probably obvious: 1) Everyone (most importantly Polonius) can overhear the conversation between Ophelia and Hamlet. 2) Hamlet's being aggressively, but elliptically, perverted: the "lay in your lap" bit's pretty clear, as are his "country" matters. Ophelia's not sure how to deal with this -- it's all "yes sir," "no sir." Her tone changes, though, once the play starts and Ophelia's dad can't hear them talking: quote:HAMLET Again, the ways their conversation has changed are probably obvious: 1) Hamlet's still full of innuendo. 2) Ophelia is much more comfortable with it, and with him. She starts off by teasing him about how he watches the play, which is a playfulness we haven't seen between her and Hamlet before. And instead of all the "yes sir" and "no sir" stuff we saw earlier (both different ways of saying "shut up"), she plays along with Hamlet's innuendo -- we don't know whether Hamlet's last bout of wordplay is "better" because it's affectionate or "worse" because it's perverted, but either way Ophelia seems to be at least halfway happy with it. 3) Ophelia's also quite clever. Hamlet's line about the "puppets dallying" could be paraphrased (translated) like this: I could understand how your love for me worked if I knew who was playing the puppet and who was pulling the strings. Remember, this play opened (well, after the ghost bit) with Polonius ordering Ophelia to stop talking to Hamlet, and the most recent interaction between Hamlet and Ophelia was him finding her reading in a hallway (perhaps a little too conveniently, tipping him off that Polonius might be listening in). Either way, Hamlet lets Ophelia know that he knows that somebody's been monkeying with their relationship from the outside. Ophelia's "you are keen" is a confirmation of that. This is important because it's the only time we see what Ophelia and Hamlet's relationship is like. And the most important part of that is that their relationship is a least a little conspiratorial. I mean, this is right after Hamlet's whole "get thee too a nunnery" bit, which at the time seems to have greatly upset Ophelia. But the first time they have a chance for a private conversation, she seems at least non-resentful about it if not downright friendly. If we wanted to follow this a bit further down the rabbit hole, we might wonder exactly how much, or to what degree, Ophelia's deceiving her father -- after all, it's Ophelia who first tells Polonius that Hamlet's gone insane, and gives him exactly the information he needs to conclude that it's for love. Likewise, a close rereading of III.i allows (if not outright suggests) that Ophelia's dialogue is playing a double purpose; exclamations like "Oh what a noble mind is here overthrown" can mean that: 1) Ophelia is lamenting 2) Ophelia is telling the eavesdropping Polonius and Claudius exactly what's going on, in case they can't hear or see everything (and possibly feeding them a sort of misinformation in the process) 3) Ophelia is telling Hamlet how to act (crazy), consequently implying that they're not alone. Anyway. The important thing here is that Ophelia's betraying her father's trust, either a little or a lot, at least by confirming Hamlet's suspicion that there's a certain puppeteer pulling the strings of her affection. And this is where we get to Ophelia's madness, which seems to come out of grief over her father's death. But it could also come out of a few other things, depending on how you read her relationship with Hamlet: 1) Ophelia's just basically told Hamlet that someone's messing with their relationship and, from her perspective, the very next thing Hamlet does is kill her father. So she's probably feeling a little guilty over that. I mean, she just told her insane boyfriend that they couldn't be together because her dad said so, and then boyfriend kills dad. 2) Ophelia may feel responsible for Hamlet's insanity in the first place. Polonius has made no secret of thinking that Hamlet's mad for love of Ophelia -- or, more specifically, mad because he's told Ophelia to stop seeing Hamlet. If Ophelia believes this, she's got to feel pretty awful too. Not only did she just inadvertently drive her insane boyfriend to kill her father, but she drove him insane in the first place. 3) Ophelia probably resents her father (for telling her not to see Hamlet, who she seems to genuinely love), and may or may not feel guilty about her continued relationship with Hamlet. At the very least, remember, she acts one way when she and Hamlet are in public (read: watched by her father) and another when their conversation can't be overheard, so she's disobeying Polonius at least a little and maybe a lot. Either way, Ophelia's got to think Hamlet's murder of Polonius is all her fault. And she might feel even more guilty because she resents her father and significantly disobeyed him to boot. So What Does This Have to Do with Gertrude and Ophelia? Let me toss out a few options, which mostly depends on what you think Gertrude knows or suspects. Ophelia's suicide could be Gertrude's revenge, sort of. If Gertrude buys Polonius's idea that Hamlet's mad for love, then she can't feel great about Ophelia -- O's the one who's, perhaps inadvertently, driven her son insane. If that's not bad enough, Gertrude pretty much has to think that Hamlet's insanity is the reason he murdered Polonius. And Gertrude's no idiot. She has to know that Hamlet's got to pay the price for Polonius's death, and so agrees to have Hamlet shipped to England. Again, she's no idiot. She's got to suspect that this is so Hamlet can be conveniently executed or at least exiled. So from Gertrude's perspective, Ophelia's at least partly to blame for Hamlet's insanity, and the reason she'll never see her son again. So Gertrude might be a little slow to jump in the river after Ophelia. Gertrude, for complex psychological reasons, thinks O's better off dead. I mean, Gertrude's got to understand how guilty Ophelia feels about Polonius's death and Hamlet's insanity, since she feels the same way. Earlier in the play, Gertrude think Hamlet's insanity might be due to her and Claudius's quick marriage, and (from her perspective) Hamlet still seems obsessed with it right before he stabs Polonius -- remember, when he confronts her (right before he sees the ghost), he's harping on how their marriage is lust-driven and incestuous. And her agreeing to have Polonius eavesdrop on their conversation is, indirectly, what got him killed. So if Gertrude feels responsible for Polonius's death, then she has to feel responsible for Ophelia's insanity. And now, because she went along with Hamlet's eavesdropping, Hamlet's going to get shipped off to England for either execution or exile. That's a lot to feel guilty about, setting aside for a moment the loss of her first husband. So when Gertrude sees Ophelia drowning, her knee-jerk reaction might be, "I get it. Life's poo poo, and you're better off." Or it could be "I get it. You and Hamlet were deeply in love -- so in love that you chose him over your father. And that love's been taken away from you, and you feel guilty about your father's death. I feel the same way, because I gave up everything for love, too. If I'd lost Claudius in the bargain, I'd be not-swimming with you." Or it could be "I know how guilty you feel, and I feel guilty too, so I'm not going to rescue you so you can feel as terrible as I do." Or it could be more like "that's a relief. I'm losing my son, and Polonius is dead, and Ophelia's insane, and this is all a result of my marriage, but at least this last visible reminder of all the problems I've caused is gone." * You might want to, because it's generally excellent.
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May 10, 2009 22:34
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Keshik posted:What do you recommend to anyone who hates the Bible but wants to gain a greater appreciation of literature? quote:Lots of other Bible stuff. I think I can see where this comes from -- without a reading motive rooted in faith, the Bible can be a tough slog. The New Testament isn't bad because it's (relatively) short, but the OT is a quagmire. My first bit of advice is to approach the Bible like I did. Don't read it cover-to-cover or front to back. Instead, get one of the billion print or online companions to the Bible that list what stories get told and where they appear. Most of the stories we're familiar with show up in at least a couple different places or at least in a couple different versions (Genesis has two versions of the creation story,* Noah and the Ark come up in a couple different places, and the resurrection is told and re-told in the first books of the NT), so reading story-by-story rather than book-by-book makes sense. The second bit is to choose stories you think are interesting. Like the one in 2 Kings where God sends bears to kill all the kids who mocked Elisha's baldness. Third, go King James. If you're a student of religion, fidelity of translation matters. But if you're reading the Bible as literature, the KJ is where you want to be. It's also eminently quotable. * They're back to back. The best way to tell them apart is to look at God. In one, he creates by doing something (e.g. rib surgery). In the other, he creates by speaking.
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May 11, 2009 16:02
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Spydey posted:How many languages do you speak? I speak Spanish, Mandarin and enough Japanese and Russian to get by when I travel. I can read Latin, (ancient) Greek, and Anglo-Saxon (a.k.a. Old English) but it's slow business. quote:I guess my question is, after I graduate would it be advisable to take a year or two off to go back to Japan to get my language skills down pat? Otherwise, was your advice more pointed toward getting a firm grounding in two languages other than English? I should clarify that. You'll want two languages other than English, and you really just need them at a foundational level (i.e. good enough to translate a page of text in a couple hours and with the aid of a dictionary). You can build on those languages during your grad work, but it's usually not built into the program (that is, you'll have to find the time and money to learn outside of your course schedule and funding package). Some programs used to want one ancient and one modern language, but I think that's been largely abandoned as English broadens its scope -- if you can read modern Spanish, you can read Colombus and Cortez easily enough, and there's not much call for fluency in Latin or Anglo-Saxon if you're specializing in 20th c. Asian Lit. As far as the year off in Japan goes, I'd take it if I could get it. But this idea that grad. school is some kind of necessarily hellish boot camp needs revision. You should enjoy grad school, at least if you want to be an academic. Being a professor pays more, but in lots of ways it's not terribly different from being a grad student.
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May 11, 2009 16:18
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Danny Cadaver posted:Also OP, I really like the thread, and wish I knew more about either Miltonic and Shakepearean scholarship to ask about. One question: To me personally, the violence and sexism in Samson Agonistes seemed really transgressive compared to the portrayal of marriage and ambivalence towards war depicted in Paradise Lost. Your thoughts? Well, transgressive how? I'll grant that marriage in Samson looks different from marriage in Paradise Lost, but in my mind what we really have are different flavors of transgression, not a matter of more or less. One thing that might help unpack this is Milton's view of masculinity, which shows up in lots of his pamphlets, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon in particular. These are both early Milton, and it's probably fair to say that both are in orbit around the same idea -- one Milton lays out in explicitly in Tetrachordon and implicitly in most of his other early works: quote:For nothing now-a-days is more degenerately forgotten, than the true dignity of Man, almost in every respect, but especially in this prime institution of Matrimony, wherin his native pre-eminence ought most to shine. For Milton the issue isn't really marriage. It's how men out to act and how others ought to act toward them. Marriage, in other words, is only one battleground in a war against men's dignity. In this sense, Samson and Adam show really different and probably non-transgressive methods of recovering that dignity: revenge and forgiveness. That's the point I'd use to at least start thinking through marriage in both texts. quote:Also, could you make any recommendations regarding books that came out in the last couple of years? I'll just assume these aren't books about Shakespeare and Milton. That said, I think Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park is a wonderful rewriting of Hamlet and a spectacular book in it's own right. and while I'm not a great fan of Dave Eggers as a writer, I think he makes a fantastic editor -- he's wonderful at sniffing out (or training others to sniff out) good short pieces especially.
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May 12, 2009 04:12
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Bachaao posted:Thanks for this advice. Is there a particular guide/companion that you think is superior to others? I don't know many of them, but the popular standard (and the one I used) seems to be Bowker's Complete Bible Handbook. j8910 posted:Hey, do you have good feedback on grademyprofessor? Does anyone honestly still use RMP? I've never put much stock in informal, anonymous evaluations -- I'd take my end-of-course evaluations over what comes up anywhere else, since RMP and like sites seem to attract strong and poorly thought out opinions.
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May 12, 2009 04:22
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velcro shoes posted:there are devices in place for you to challenge or respond to reviews. I've used it for most professors I've had, though I like to wait 6 months or so for.. historical perspective, let's say. I think it's a good way to get a general consensus on a professor before taking their class, but hopefully it's not used in any formal review capacity. I should have probably elaborated. Feedback is only useful in the context of other feedback. If you're running a class right, half the students will think it's too easy and the other half will think it's too hard. You'll see similar splits on every aspect of course design, because a class needs to accommodate different student abilities and learning styles. But this isn't generally something students think about when they respond, even though some aspect of it are completely obvious -- that is, most students don't write feedback as though the course were designed for an average student or for a plurality of average students. That's why I don't dig on RMP. quote:my first undergraduate year I went to a school that did narrative evaluations in place of letter grades, is that something you'd prefer to the system at your school? I had major problems with that system but I wonder how it looks from the other side. I'd prefer narrative evaluations, or at least the option of including narrative evaluations with grades. Grades, as a rule, are lousy evaluative tools. At least if your goal is to compare grades across different class sections or (God forbid) across colleges. They can give you a sort of approximate read on whether a student has succeeded, but the difference between students with a 3.5 and a 3.9 is difficult to practically apply, especially if the students are from different colleges* and have had different fields of study, (even with the same major).** This is one reason why graduate program GPA requirements are over-the-bar style. Point is, grades aren't great at the job they're allegedly designed for (comparing student success across disciplines and colleges). But the worse problem is that they're dreadfully uninformative. This is especially true for students without collegiate expertise to draw on -- think a first generation first year student at a state college, who doesn't get any face time with most of his professors or much in the way of institutional support. If he fails, he probably doesn't have a good idea of what he did wrong, since what governs his behavior is probably what he sees (or thinks he sees) everyone else doing. It's not like his family and friends can give him useful advice on how many hours of work it takes to pass a class or what college-level writing looks like. That's a where narrative evaluation could make the difference between someone dropping out confused and frustrated and someone rallying the next semester. * And it doesn't help that common sense leads people to terrible conclusions on this. A 2.7 freshman at a state college isn't impressive, but is generally stable and has a fair shot of adjusting upwards. A 2.7 freshman at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, etc. is a shiftless, baffling moron and almost certainly hopeless. ** People talk about the relative difficulties of different majors all the time, but different colleges take different approaches to general education, and some of these can be really rigorous.
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May 12, 2009 16:02
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Junior G-man posted:What's your opinion on the various styles or literary criticism and ways of reading? I'm currently pursuing a two-year research master program and I'm being drowned past the eyeballs with hermeneutics, semiotics, deconstruction an pretty much all the -isms. My take really depends on the theory. What we call "high theory" has been on a popularity wane since about the mid 90s, and it's easy to see why -- much of it is cultural theory, ways of describing the context in which a text happens, And while that's interesting, it's somewhat outside the scope of English, which is ultimately about texts rather than culture (the domain of History, Sociology, Anthro, and so on). That's another way of saying that much high theory is useful if you want to read good discussions of the cultures that surround a particular text, but somewhat less useful for reading and understanding a text as a text rather than a cultural artifact. In that sense, theory's a supplement to extensive field knowledge rather than a substitute for it. But e.g. Saussere and Derrida aren't really cultural theorists, and I think they give a useful vocabulary for a range of textual functions. There are all kinds of other, less-high, theories (and theorists) that work with texts over cultures, though. In my field this generally means the better New Historicists (Greenblatt, Hartman, Goldberg), along with Stanley Fish -- Surprised by Sin is probably the most useful and inventive criticism of Paradise Lost I've seen.
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May 13, 2009 14:35
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Bel_Canto posted:What's your take on the various approaches to general education? I've heard a lot of people weigh in on this, but very few of them have been people who deal with students firsthand. Well. Gen Ed systems across the country have two things in common: they're incredibly important and almost categorically broken. So let's start there. Why Gen Ed. Matters The reasons we have General Education are so that college graduates can talk to people with another disciplinary focus in a useful way, and so that graduates have some rough idea of how the world's knowledge is field divided. If I'm investigating the properties of a metal I've found at a dig site, for instance, I need to know whether to look for a materials scientist, a chemist, or an electrical engineer, and I need to know how to understand what they have to say about the metal, and what questions I might want to ask any of them about it. These kinds of broad-based consultations are really, really common in real life as well as academics, but this broad base of knowledge has more important, long-term uses. Think about your career path for a bit. If you're, say, an engineer, you're going to leave college and get a job designing housings for blender motors. And it's going to suck. So you can move from there to designing blender motors and then blenders, and then either into managing the blender design division or starting your own blender company. Point is, moving up this ladder means consulting with people outside your field increasingly extensively. If you don't have a knowledge base that lets you consult that way, you've got two choices: stay in your first job until retirement, or retrain on the fly. Both are bad. The second one sounds easy, but part-timing some courses while you've got a family and a full-time job is a bear. Ask anyone who does it. I could go on about why this broad knowledge base is really important for developing literate and numerate citizens, making whole persons, and blah blah blah. But if the "career training" and "job training" isn't convincing, I'm not sure arguments further off solid ground will be. How Gen Ed's Broken This is a long list, so I'm only going to hit the high points: Incoherence. Long story short, the dominant strategy for navigating Gen Ed requirements seems to be to take them early, generally before declaring a major. This helps students who are undecided, since they get a taste of different fields, but it also comes at the cost of coherent semester-to-semester schedules. For instance, it would make a lot of sense to stack Restoration and Enlightenment lit, Enlightenment Philosophy, and Early American History (or 18th/19th c. British or European History) together in a semester, just as it would make sense to stack, say, courses on Ornithology or Herpetology that focus on the same or similar regions. But this generally doesn't happen for lots of reasons. Even at colleges where there's a lot of chatter between departments about offering courses in some synchrony, advisors either don't push this or students schedule with higher priorities in mind. The result is a scattershot Gen. Ed. experience. Department Insularity. To make a sweeping generalization, this gets worse as you approach the hard and applied sciences. And it's really two problems. 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. Not to pick on engineers, but their departments are some of the worst offenders, which is bizarre considering the biggest complaints companies have about the engineers they hire: they can't (or don't) write well, and don't have functional vocabularies outside their discipline, (especially in business). The second problem is that departments don't differentiate between Gen Ed. courses and gateway courses to their majors (usually as an underhanded way of turning a Gen Ed. requirement into a soft requirement for the major). There's a huge difference between providing non-majors with an overview of the discipline as it stands and providing majors with skills whose primary purpose is to be built up in subsequent courses. My point is that a General Education system is ideal if it lends itself to semester-by-semester coherence and pushes departments toward course offerings consistent with the college's General Education mission. Most of the variations on Gen Ed. I've seen seem to fall well short of this mark.
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May 13, 2009 16:08
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Glowskull posted:How has Anglo-Saxon treated you? I am one of three students that have taken advanced-level courses in the language in my department. The professor who teaches it is retiring soon. I sometimes think it is a dying thing, but then again I saw it on the GRE II. It remains one of my specialties. Anglo-Saxon is dying as a field of study, but it's dying the same way Latin and Greek were maybe forty or fifty years ago -- what you're going to see is decreasing demand, but a more quickly decreasing supply. This in short means A-S scholars are going to have some pretty good job prospects, especially if they can market themselves as Medievalists with a rare secondary skill.
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May 13, 2009 16:12
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proudfoot posted:Grade inflation. If little Robby doesn't get a B, his parents might not donate to the Alumni fund anymore. This, but there's also other context. An Ivy League student will have had extensive training and preparation for how to succeed in college, and will have massive support from every direction if he or she has some kind of extra-academic problem. Also, an Ivy Leaguer will probably not need to balance work and school, will have health insurance, will have affordable and accessible tutoring in a breadth of subjects, will have access to (or an existing relationship with) whatever professionals he or she needs to manage learning disabilities or other mental health issues (or substance abuse problems), will not need to balance school against family (as in spouse and children), and so forth. So if we're explaining a low Ivy League GPA, this crosses off a lot of the issues that weigh on low-GPA (or otherwise academically at-risk) state college students. More simply put, all a student needs to do to succeed at an Ivy League college is work; there's tons of available expertise to tell that student what kind of work to do and when, not to mention oceans of soft support and insulation from real-world problems. So, as a rule, a student pulling a 2.7 at Harvard is pulling that 2.7 under the best possible conditions. Ergo, he's most likely a lazy idiot. A student pulling a 2.7 at a state college could also be a lazy idiot, but there's also a fair chance he or she's juggling other commitments or will improve with whatever kind of support.
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May 13, 2009 16:46
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lewi posted:What do you think of the British higher education system where Gen. Ed. courses don't exist, and students apply to uni for a particular subject and study it and only it for the next 3 or 4 years? I go back and forth on this. As someone who chose a field relatively late in life (I was 22 when I decided to go with English over Physics or Philosophy for a PhD), I'm wary of systems that commit students to a course of study (and a de facto set of careers) while they're still in their teens. This is one of those situations where what's good for the hive isn't necessarily good for the bee; the earlier you can get trained professionals into the workforce, the less you need to invest in them and the longer their working lives are. But as an individual, it's to my benefit to wait until I'm developmentally competent to make satisfying lifelong decisions. I'm not sure when that happens, but I'd bet at least one semivital organ it excludes most teenagers. That's one big issue. The second big one is how a culture expects college experiences to articulate with earlier education. Simply put, you can have a college system built on early specialization as long as you've got relatively consistent and relatively high quality primary and secondary education. I can't say much about Britain on this one, but I'll bet another semivital organ that it beats the US on both counts, even if we only consider the systems that generally produce college-bound students. Just for instance, British education's built around a national curriculum, while the US doesn't have consistent curricula even at the state level. It also begins at somewhat an earlier age -- most students in the US start school at age five or six, while British children start at age three.* The chief implication here is that British colleges have a relatively consistent applicant pool. In contrast, US colleges need to accommodate an appalling range of experiences. There are US districts that don't offer calculus, trigonometry, pre-calculus style algebra, or statistics (that is, high school math for college-bound students ends with algebra and geometry), while others matriculate to college with grounding in all of these (as they probably should). This is a tangible example, but the same diversity of standards is at work in pretty much every field, which in turn makes Gen Ed. in US colleges terribly necessary; I don't like that this is true, but much Gen Ed (especially at open admissions colleges) covers necessary matter wrongly omitted from high-school curricula (calc/stats, intro psychology, basic writing, and so on). * I'm talking publicly-funded education here. Some US parents elect to private nursery schools, but the majority do not.
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May 13, 2009 19:04
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ImTheWiener posted:What do you think about the role writing instruction plays in the English department? Writing is central to many disciplines, yet the English department is the one that ends up teaching most of it (Comp 1, etc.). I'm of the opinion that the English department should abandon its stranglehold on composition instruction in favor of having more specialized departmental writing instruction. Thoughts? Well, most places already have some combination of general and discipline-specific writing instruction. That usually looks like one or two semesters of first-year writing instruction (FY), followed by X number of classes in Gen Ed. and each major that carry a Writing-Intensive designation as part of a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative. Some flavor of FY+WAC has been the dominant (and preferred) model for about three decades. Colleges that put an honest effort behind FY+WAC generally don't have horrid writing programs. The horrid ones still have general-purpose first-year writing courses that don't see Gen Ed or in-major follow up -- FY by itself. That was a terrible system. Anyway. The reason English departments house FY is that they also house Rhetoric and Composition, a subfield dedicated to writing pedagogy. You want a consistent (read: non field-specific) FY run by Rhet/Comp people for a few reasons. The most compelling of these is assessment of individual student needs; Rhet/Comp folks are trained to spot different species of writing problems (that come out of, say ESL or LD issues) and work those problems out with students either individually or in consultation with subfield specialists. Obviously you want to start students down that road as early as you can. The second good reason has to do with first-year experience. A non-field specific writing course taught by someone with a Rhet/Comp background emphasizes writing and reading across disciplines, which is why so many FY sequences have an interdisciplinary component. That way, post-sequence students should be familiar with writing conventions used in different fields -- not just so they can write in those fields, but so that they can read and follow up on the scholarship different fields produce.* There are other smaller, practical reasons why FY courses aren't field-specific. Socializing first year students partly means getting them into courses representing different abilities and interests. Also, there's the (major) matter of departmental preference. Most PhDs in fields outside English don't have any training in writing instruction, and so end up reluctant to take on the task and, in many cases, are quite bad at it. WAC is difficult enough without suggesting that professors take on a second, first-year writing course that falls well outside their training and experience. Last, there's the matter of student flexibility. From an administrative standpoint, you really want to avoid having students soft or hard-commit to a major early on. Early commits of either variety usually change their minds -- this means you've got more students on a tight schedule for graduation, frustrated because course sequencing won't allow for this or the other thing. It also ultimately nets more close-to-graduation attrition and fifth-year seniors, which doesn't help anybody. * This trains them to see field writing conventions as implementations of principles that respond to field-specific needs, which in turn helps them think through practical writing skills. I'm not talking about grammar and style here as much real-world project writing, which generally either follows, tweaks, or develops a project-specific conventions based on project-specific needs.
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May 13, 2009 20:54
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Dame Like Mame posted:How do you feel about a J.D. calling him/herself "Dr. _______" in an academic position totally unrelated to law? Someone at my university does this, and it feels like an insult to Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s around here. This seems fine. A J.D. is a professional (as opposed to research) doctorate, like an M.D. or a D.D.S. The real question is why he doesn't go with the much smoother sounding "________, esquire" (unless he's not a member of the bar).
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May 13, 2009 20:58
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Christ Pseudoscientist posted:What are your thoughts on the quarter versus the semester system? The school I go to is on the quarter system and one of my teachers complained often that the state only does it for extra money. He felt that most classes could not be taught properly in ten weeks without shedding too much material. I personally like the quarter system because I feel that I am able to take more classes on a broader range of subjects but I can also see how I am missing out on going more in depth by losing six to eight weeks worth of extra instruction. The quarter system's increasingly rare, so I can see where your professor's complaint comes from -- he's thinking in semesters, so he wants to fit fifteen weeks of material into ten and doesn't like that he can't do it. That's more a matter of his training than an inherent advantage of a scheduling system. There are some virtues of quarters that you haven't noted, though I'm with you on the breadth it allows. From a teaching perspective, a load of, say, six courses a year means you're only teaching two courses simultaneously (instead of the three you'd have on semesters). This reduces your number of simultaneous students and lets you give each one more individual attention. Also, quarters lend themselves to Summer sessions that aren't second class. Colleges on the semester model favor a half-length-but-twice-as-many-meetings model for Summer education, which is basically unusable for advanced courses (where an amount of absolute time is required to, say, research final projects). But an extra quarter fits nicely into the Summer. The real institutional problem with quarters is administrative complexity, which puts a heavier yearly load on professorial duties like advising. That had a lot to do with why my college moved to semesters a while ago. At the same time, the number of simultaneous classes (and simultaneous students) makes quarters sound like a good deal to me.
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May 13, 2009 21:17
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j8910 posted:Hey, how much grading do you do by yourself? Do you have TAs? Like most colleges without graduate programs, we don't have TAs in a conventional sense. So I grade everything myself. And I'm not sure I'd trust a TA to do that job really well, especially for first-year students (who occasionally need diagnosis). We do have a program where senior students can work as course TAs, though. This is more for their benefit, since their duties are basically collaborating on course and assignment design, and building and teaching a few classes under supervision. It involves more work for the professor, not less. Probably obviously, these TAships are popular with aspiring teachers and those who want to build a sort of advanced independent study on top of the existing course.
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May 13, 2009 21:23
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Riven posted:I wanted to give you an inside view from someone who has attended a for-profit college, University of Phoenix, for the last four years; in the on-campus program for the first two years and the online program for the remaining time. I'm glad you're having a good experience with UPX, but you also need to realize that most students don't. The DOE puts UPX's graduation rate at 16%.* That probably means that, at the least, they're not doing the kind of student support work you'd see in the University of California system, where the graduation rate is upwards of 75%. That's not a categorical indictment, since there are lots of reasons students don't finish their degrees. But it's also a cause for concern. College is expensive, online or no, and it seems clear that a college therefore has some moral obligation to ensure that the students it admits have a reasonable chance of completing their degrees. I'm not sure where you draw the reasonable/unreasonable line (the national graduation rate is a depressing 55%) but I'm pretty sure 16% is on the wrong side of it. The other thing that concerns me about UPX is their relationships with investors and the DOE, both of which have been contentious -- I'm sure you heard about the whole deal with UPX misrepresenting the results of a DOE investigation to shareholders ($280 million judgment against UPX, appealed, struck down, regrouping, ongoing), but the real matter is UPX's relationship to the DOE, where their policy seems to involve paying fines instead of complying with DOE regulations.* Again, I'm glad you're having a good experience, because you're right: UPX is meeting a need for you that other colleges might not be able to. But that doesn't make them angels. And if you were to show me any college, for profit or no, with a one-in-six graduation rate and a record of DOE fines, I'd recommend real caution; even if you decide those are acceptable, they're certainly no good. * We're talking about admissions and financial aid fraud which, while they don't directly affect classroom experience, do have consequences for students.
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May 14, 2009 00:46
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Catenoid posted:How do you feel about the increasing cost of college, a decreasing amount of aid for most students? I'm attending a public school, but because my private loans are being discontinued next year, I very well might have to drop out. You work at a LAC, but are your students mostly isolated from these sort of economic problems? I won't compare quality of education, but how do other schools make any attempts to ensure that their students have a chance at completing their degree requirements? I don't like any US college and university financials, frankly. Navigating them means choosing the least terrible of lots of awful options. But the stories are different from college to college. In general, state colleges are seeing increasing student costs and decreasing aid because of cuts in state funding, while private colleges (like mine) are increasing tuition solely for the purpose of increasing financial aid -- that is, we increase the sticker price to decrease actual out-of-pocket costs for most of our students. We insulate most of our students by going need-blind, which I think I wrote about in an earlier post. Basically, we don't consider financial need when we admit students, and we guarantee that we'll meet the financial need of any student who decides to come. In practice, this means lots of tuition waivers, which also means that our most financially vulnerable students are insulated against rising costs. All they pay for are books and course supplies. This policy means we need to give up lots of things. Our athletics program is a joke,* and with the exception of our libraries and labs, we don't have much in-class tech -- the smart classroom projector/document camera setups you'd see all over the place at X State U. are only in one or two classrooms per building. Dorms are spartan. We've got a nice athletics facility (nowhere near what you'd find at most colleges) but only because it's revenue generating. There's no other gym in town, so we sell memberships. You get the idea. Point is, these and a bunch of other measures mean that we don't have students getting priced out of their education. Most other private schools deal with this issue by carefully considering students' ability to pay before admission, which sounds shady but makes some moral sense; it's dishonest to admit students if you know they can't afford to finish their degree. And in the current financial climate, it makes sense for state colleges to start doing the same thing. I'm not sure denying admission is the way to go, but giving students a clear financial picture of what the next four years look like seems a clear responsibility (e.g., if we assume X% tuition increases you'll need to take a couple overloads, because this line of loans will only last you seven semesters). quote:Again, I'm coming from a public university background, but how does LAC handle general education and remedial classes like HS algebra? How much of a resources sink is this? At most Liberal Arts colleges, everyone teaches general education courses pretty frequently, both because our Gen Eds are extensive and because breadth of education is part of our institutional mission. If I wanted to teach nothing but Shakespeare, I'd be at the wrong place. Remedial courses are a bit tougher. Because we're selective, we can, say, only admit students who've done well in calculus-level math, which cuts our remedial need pretty sharply. But when we do need to add a remedial class, we follow the path of most colleges and offer a set of remedial Summer classes for incoming Freshmen. We don't charge for them, they're only worth one or two credits, and admission is contingent on their successful completion (with one exception, I think we do all of these Pass/Fail). There's lately been talk of partnering with another local college to offer a more extensive set of remedial classes, so we'd have more admissions flexibility on that front. But in general, this kind of remedial offering isn't a huge resource sink. We're not pulling existing resources from other classes with this (so we don't have to add extra classrooms or hire extra staff to accommodate remedial students). But this model doesn't scale up well -- if we were twice the size we are now, we'd likely have to offer remedial courses in the Fall or Spring, which puts them in resource competition with regular offerings and so gets very expensive very quickly. quote:How do you feel about (public) community colleges and their roles in filling in for both of these? I think community colleges are a great idea, and I'd like to see the community college system expand even at the expense of state and private colleges. I've said this before, but colleges do a lousy job of balancing their teaching and research missions. Community colleges are an exception to this because they're entirely about teaching, which is really what postsecondary ed. seems to need. The problems with CCs are obvious, though. They have trouble attracting and keeping good faculty, and similar trouble attracting and retaining good students. But there's no current reason for this, at least not that I can see -- it's a sort of holdover from the days when just about anyone could afford to go to a state school and only the desperately poor or terribly inbred had to step a rung down the ladder. So a system of colleges designed exclusively for undergraduate education, that sought out and got the best teaching talent, and focused on attracting able and cost-conscious students could meet a need that's only likely to increase as state support for R1s shrinks. * The only team of ours that plays in a stadium is baseball, and that's only because our town's minor-league team plays about a quarter mile from campus. We get to use their field for games.
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May 14, 2009 03:53
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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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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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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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