to publish or not to publish?

So, I sent one of my papers to a journal–not a particularly famous one, although it used to be fairly prominent–and it’s a go! However, I am hesitating on if I really want to publish this paper, because I think that it’s not as good as it should be. First of all, when I turned it in, the prof gave it an A-; imagine the mini heart attack that gave me! Moreover, there just were not enough sources to make my argument as strong as I would like to make it.

So is it worth it to publish an article that you believe does not reflect your strengths as a scholar (even if someone else thinks it’s good enough)? I am also concerned about the ramifications this could have on my career if someone reads it and is like–”this girl is talking out of her ass.”

Still, a publication credit is so very important…I mean, would a hiring committee really read it? Maybe they will. Maybe I should withdraw the paper. Ack.

Giving a lecture: the post-mortem

Went well! Really! Went very well. I ran about 3 minutes short of the time, but all things considered it was a success.

The only glitch was that the phone on the stage of the lecture hall started ringing like halfway through my lecture. Strange, no? So I picked it up, and just said: this is a lecture hall. Do not call back. Then I hung up. The entire class erupted with laughter. I wish now that I had answered it and found out who it was–but the lecture must go on.

Little things I’ll keep in mind for next time:

• It’s helpful to summarize the preceding lecture briefly–in one or two sentences–before beginning in earnest
• Time really does speed up at the podium…slow slow slow
• Minor brain farts are an inevitability. Just recover, don’t freak out, and return to notes.
• Students are surprisingly generous and forgiving, and looking for opportunities during lecture to laugh or get engaged. Either that, or they are asleep. (I saw a few nappers). If they are asleep, then it’s pretty much impossible for you to do a bad job as a lecturer.
• Reading from a script really is OK, so long as you have moments where you either engage with students, or just speak more spontaneously. But TAs I spoke with afterwards said that it didn’t sound artificial or dry to have read thusly…so! Yes to fully written lectures.
• Slow down some more.

It was a good experience. I feel much more confident about my ability to be an academic…it’s an unexpected feeling. Lecturing is kind of fun.

Giving a lecture: the pre-op

I am giving  a lecture this week. This will be my first lecture; I have been thinking about it for weeks now, and fiddling daily with my outline. The professor for whom I am lecturing suggested that I create an outline with main points, and then elaborate/digress on them as needed; however, I don’t think this is the best strategy for a first-time lecturer.

I have a deep fear of barfing in front of the 200ish students that I will be lecturing to. I have written a point-driven outline, and now am in the process of adding meat to those bones–sentences, prose, bolding and underlining to help me survive the almost-inevitable brain fart. Basically, I will be reading aloud to them, which as a student I have always found interesting and useful, provided that the lecture was interesting, the lecturer confident, and the material relevant.

I don’t anticipate being a robot in doing this sort of reading; I sort of imagine this written-out lecture as a kind of a script, and it’s my job to make it lively and to make not SOUND like I’m reading off the page.

I also have powerpoint slides with photographs and quotes which I would like to discuss with the class–this will be more free form, more ad-libby. The slides will not have bullet point type summaries of my lecture. I generally think that this makes students copy down the powerpoint rather than listen to what is actually being said by the lecturer. As soon as they finish copying the slide, they sit back and their eyes glaze over.

I suppose that the read-aloud type lecturing is not ideal, but again, as a first time lecturer my goal is not to dazzle them with the intricate workings of my thought process, but to get through the material in an organized and clear fashion. I think the clever and imaginative digressions can come later in my career.

While searching for resources about lecturing, I came across this video. This is a lecture given by an MIT professor at Harvard (it looks to be the ’80s or early ’90s) about how to lecture. There were four major points–his “big four”–that I found especially useful:

1. Cycle: that is, repeat and re-emphasize your point. Apparently, about 20% of your audience is listening at any given time, so if you do this several times, you’re more likely to get it across.
2. Verbal punctuation: tell the audience where you have gone in the lecture, where you are going. Numbering of points: first, second, third, etc.  I’m not sure if this is included under the category of verbal punctuation, but pausing seems especially important as well (it seems like inexperienced lecturers tend to speed up on stage. It’s kind of like relativity).
3. Near miss: to discuss what is close, but incorrect (I think). This seems more applicable to teachers of science and math; it’s a little bit more difficult to so clearly identify what is “close but not it” in history, methinks.
4. Rhetorical questions: make them frequent and answerable.

Other pieces of advice he gave: begin with a promise, end with the delivering on that promise. No jokes at the beginning of a lecture. Don’t thank your audience. Watch your body language. Etc. Again, it seems geared towards teachers of more concrete subjects, but I think that much of this would be useful for lecturers in all fields. Plus, I think you get to see famed historian of British history, Mark Kishlansky! Cool!

Post-mortem to come later this week.

Bits n’ pieces

Welcome 2009! I had a reasonably refreshing break, although this one was plagued by concerns that I wasn’t doing enough to prepare for the new term. Eh, too late now. I did pay my bills, give and receive some lovely gifts, and spend time with family and boyfriend and friends…

Notes for the new quarter:

I will, once again, despite all my efforts, be on campus until 5 or 8 for four days out of the week. But! I have a locker at the gym, and can wile away some of those 4 hour blocks between commitments exercising, which is stress-relieving and productive.

God willing, I will have only 20 rather than 40 students this coming quarter.

I need to get started writing that lecture–my first lecture! Woohoo! And it’s on a topic I know almost nothing about.

Really should stop buying lunches/dinners on-campus, because it adds up and is probably unhealthy. Bean burritos and canned chili will be on the menu…beans really pull their weight in terms of cost and nutritional value.

Perhaps I could also bring some curry. I made a spicy Thai green curry with chicken this weekend, and I’m going to try using some firm white fish like pollack or cod the next go around. Put that on top of some brown rice, and–yum. I usually detest brown rice, but have really taken a liking to a 50/50 mixture of long grain white jasmine rice and long grain brown rice. At some point will transition to 100% brown (long grain) rice.

I need need need to go to Berkeley sometime in January, and perhaps February as well. It’s time to really get that damn prospectus started.

I have a terrible, bad attitude towards graduate school–this is not healthy and needs to be worked on. Every time I complain to my friends/parents about wanting to drop out, the response is usually: stick it out. It’s better than the real world. It’s not as bad as you think.

They’re probably right, and I am a big big whiner. With kind of low self-esteem about my capacity to achieve academically. A nice quote from David Foster Wallace (God rest him) comes to mind:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

That last sentence rings a bell–ouch. Paradoxically, it seems as if I need to lighten up my attitude towards grad school in order to survive it; obsessing over–worshipping–academic things is only making things worse.

This quarter will be better than the last.

An embarassment to the academy

I’ve been following along with MsBaby’s semi-scary interaction with her disgruntled student. This spurred me to thinking about how to best handle hostility in the classroom: one-on-one discussion? Respectful disagreement? Gentle encouragement to try a different course?

Here is how not to handle it: sue your students and your college for harassment.

Dartmouth lecturer (and ‘90) Priya Venkatesan emailed her students:

Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:56:35
From: Priya Venkatesan
Subject: WRIT.005.17.18-WI08: Possible lawsuit

Dear former class members of Science, Technology and Society:

I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal discrimination laws.

The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit. I am also writing a book detailing my eperiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluation and these will be reproduced in the book.

Have a nice day.

I couldn’t believe that she was serious. What really got me was that deliciously passive-aggressive “have a nice day.” Awesome.

This is why people hate the academy: they think we are a bunch of shriveled, neurotic, thin-skinned elitists. Exhibit A: Priya Venkatesan.

Apparently, the class applauded after a student attacked her views on post-modernism; she then cancelled class for the following week because it caused her “intellectual and emotional distress.” Give me a break. You’re a freaking teacher. Grow some ‘nads and handle it in a professional and thoughtful manner. What would she do if a student sued her for intellectual harassment (which is not covered by title VII, from what I can tell)?

Her academic interests suggest a generally pretentious outlook: applying literary theory to the laboratory. What? French narrative structure applied to biology…if I had to sit through that class, I would probably hate literary theory, too. Thank god I’m in history. Moreover, all of her writing had at least one grammatical error…it’s probably a very good thing that she’s no longer teaching writing.

For her sake, I hope she makes a lot of $ off her tell-all book (who does she think would buy it, anyway?); with this rash move, she’s pretty much doomed her teaching career. What university would want to hire her as a professor now?

I’m just shocked and appalled. I thought (hoped) that academics weren’t this petty.

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Rate My TA

To my great relief, my first TA evaluations came back with–dare I say it?–glowing reviews. Partly, I think, this occurred because I had terrific students. I heard horror stories about other sections and thanked my lucky stars that my students were generally sweet, accommodating, and engaged. Having students that are willing to give you a break makes teaching much easier.

I can already tell that this term’s students are not going to be as pleasant. I am already undergoing an email war with a student who thinks the assignments (not my decision, anyway) are unreasonable. There is also some sullen staring (and NAPPING!) in one of my sections. I may have to break out the cattle prod.

I also feel less comfortable with the material, which is fascinating but outside my field of study. Prep time has increased.
Overall I found the evaluation process quite interesting. Inevitably there are the one or two disgruntled students (one can tell exactly who they are). It’s amazing how positive evaluations correspond with the highest grades, which suggests to me that the main problems lie less with the TA/professor and more with the students’ motivation to work (or not).

On a related note, I really enjoy MTV’s Professors Strike Back clips, wherein profs respond to reviews on ratemyprofessor.com. The professor in the bunny suit is the best, hands down.

writing is thinking

As I am neck-deep in grading finals, I am coming upon distressing problems in my students’ writing. I’m not interested in minor issues like apostrophes and articles, but in the overall problem of expression. Some of these kids have writing skills that are so bad that I can’t even guess what they were trying to argue.

If a student lacks the technical skills to write, they will never get more than a B-range grade (at BEST!) in any humanities or social science (or even some “hard” science) class. I grow weary of students who shrilly point out that this is a history course, not a literature course. Yet often they turn a deaf ear to my response that poor writing skills impair the formation of ideas and arguments. Also, I have the sneaking suspicion that poor writing skills relate to poor reading skills. By reading I don’t mean ABC stuff, but rather the ability to pick up on nuance in writing, such as irony, style, etc. If you can’t read historical documents and arguments, how can you understand history at all?

The difference between students at this huge public university and the tiny liberal arts college that I attended does not lie  in the quality of students. I have been impressed by their ability to articulate thoughts in discussion and in one-on-one conversations, yet some of those same students end up with F’s and C’s on their assignments. Not, I think, for want of doing the assigned reading or desire to do well, but because of their inability to write.

I know that the UCs have writing requirements, but I suspect that small liberal arts colleges tend to see writing as a much more essential skill. At D, one could not possibly survive without getting some semblance of writing competence beaten into one’s skull. (My friend from Wesleyan corroborates this; her small lib. arts school also insisted on writing, writing, writing.) Perhaps it’s the UCs’ vocational side that permits students to pass out of writing courses (thanks to AP credits, etc). I must say that AP scores are a poor substitute for a college level writing class.

I think that this institution offers motivated students substantial opportunities to improve their writing. However, not every student is motivated to work on their writing. Maybe more GE credits should be allocated to writing courses.

Most importantly,  I feel that the ability to express one’s thoughts and feelings on a basic level is essential to a person’s happiness. Therefore, some level of competency in writing is essential to  human happiness; in an age where texts have become enormously important (think internet!), it will not do to avoid the issue.

Writing is thinking. If we fail to teach students how to write, we fail to teach students how to think.

a quick breath

This term has flown, flown by. For once in my life I would like to try a semester system, as I think 10-week quarters are insanely brief. Still, I’ve learned quite a bit:

1. Students are, and will be, the soul of my intellectual career. I have been blessed with a wonderful group of freshmen who have energized my academic work. I leave our discussions feeling alive and happy, and sometimes, if I’m very lucky, useful. Feeling useful is not something that occurs much in the ivory tower. I’m a little embarrassed by how much they seem to trust me, and humbled by their effort. I can’t say that I was ever so diligent. Of course, I have my fair share of barely-conscious GE seekers, but nonetheless…I am impressed and humbled by my students.
2. Graduate school is not a refuge from the 9-5. These days, I am on campus often from 9-6 attending to my TA responsibilities and 2nd job, and then come home to read my own books from 8ish to midnight.
3. Procrastination devours. The old beast pursues me still.

One thing I realized over the refreshing Veteran’s Day weekend was that I need to connect with art. History can be a painful discipline, and the arts renew. So, Mr. P and I determined to read a poem together before bed each night, something I think I can keep up even when he’s not here.

Here’s yesterday’s poem, a Robinson Jeffers excerpt taken from one of my favorite (sadly defunct) blogs, the Scrivener:

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

-Robinson Jeffers, from Tamar

adorable ’shmen

I arrived at my first section today at about 15 minutes before class, about 3:45. I looked around expectently, but no students outside the classroom. I glanced into the classroom and saw a line of students’ backs. I assumed that this was the class preceding my own, and waited. And waited. And finally I decided to go into the classroom to ask the instructor if they were clearing out soon. But once I poked my head inside–no instructor! These were my students!

I was shocked to see them there 15 minutes early. So cute. They were so eager and fresh and enthusiastic. Amazing. They were almost all freshmen, and a few were transfers from junior colleges. For a lot of them this was their first college class EVER. They asked questions about the exam, about grading, expressed concern about their language abilities, and all declared that they wanted A’s. One (Chinese) student even wished me a happy moon festival.

Admittedly it was a little bit awkward, which was probably due to our common inexperience. However, it was truly heartwarming to see that much enthusiasm and concern about class. Many of them were like..”I love history!” They were just so very young.

Being that history and I are experiencing a rocky time in our relationship right now, I hope that history is kinder to them.  Still, their excitement and (seeming) dedication is inspiring, and revives me. Unexpected.

I just wanted to pat their heads and give them cookies. Squeee!